CAPTURE/DESIRE
Digital commodity relations—content relations—as well as the unprecedented level of modular control that platforms have over the population, has allowed for financial capital to completely kettle the population into the confines of its constructed reality and punitive systems of control; when anything is possible within the limits of integrated circuitry, extraction and alienation can be constantly tuned and means-tested to maximize growth—the accumulation of capital through content. Take the computerization of the stock market, for example, which sped up trading and increased returns exponentially; we are faced with a world where tools like AI and in-depth analytics can give advertisers a new vector for analyzing and manipulating social and object relations with unprecedented speed and precision.
Modern advertising has managed to totally capture the real world and present itself as the basis of reality itself, as described in Jameson’s Postmodern Condition. An emphasis on “experience”, as well as the digital commodity’s ability to enmesh itself into the subject, is building upon the commodities’ total colonization of the human experience by hyper-optimizing Jameson’s pastiche.
Immanent surface with realities unfolding—containerized subjectivity, the screen as the staging area for constructed subjectivity, and the network as the diffused field where subjectivity is debased. Mobile terminals act as a performative instrument which one is wired to—simulating experience through an uninterrupted interface which adapts to the given task at hand. Metastability and mobility let private operators devise a strategy of desire designed to dialectically capture and process reality into image objects, referent text, and so on.
Compacting these signifiers and processes into the infinitesimal memory of the screen satiates humans’ tendency to contain, summarize, and miniaturize—when a manufactured desire is presented to a user, it presents as a pathway to self-actualization, when in reality, it’s simply another way for capital to mesh itself to the subject through a conjuctive synthesis of the user’s desire, based on previously consumed flattened signifiers. This is how trend cycles emerge—they build off the plethora of floating signifiers available, and create a new pastiche or mode of signification which can be then capitalized off of by means of engagement and content creation.
Digital representation flattens signifiers and strips them of context, lessening the depth of social metadata that gesture and emotional resonance can provide. The fantasies we create for ourselves haunt each other as representations floating in the confines of the panel of immanence, which calls into question the fidelity of our relations when these representations are then translated back into the real world.
Spectral relations and representations make up the social fabric of the internet era—fantasy and desire compressed into infinitely expandable cells, trapped in a feedback loop of hyperstitional ecstasy of the screen.