4

Three ways to want things after capitalism

We begin by taking up once more the text with which we closed the last chapter. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse starts with a remarkable account of the difficulty of writing about the past. Every thinker who has looked back to describe humans in the state of nature, prior to civilisation, Rousseau claims, has ended up attributing to the humans of the past behaviours and desires inferred from their own present moment of writing. Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld – the famous seventeenth-century cynics who Rousseau particularly criticises – thought they were demonstrating the inescapability of their own dark view of human nature by ‘proving’ man’s original and natural barbaric tendencies. Actually, Rousseau says, their claims were misleadingly self-confirming, since the wicked behaviour they assumed existed in the past was only that of their own contemporaries projected backwards. ‘All these philosophers … constantly talking of need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride have imported into the state of nature ideas they had taken from society’. Whatever their other achievements of historical reconstruction, accounts of the ‘state of nature’ written before Rousseau’s had – he claims – failed to historicise the human subject itself, which in its past forms is necessarily radically unknowable and impossible to recover: ‘they talk of savage man and they depict civilized man’.¹

In this analysis, Rousseau’s rivals had acted rather like the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Flintstones, which finds in prehistory the model modern family and suburban consumer tastes and habits of its own 1960s moment. For Rousseau, his rival philosophers were even ignoring the fact that – for all they knew – early man might actually have been radically good or virtuous. As such, what starts as an argument about the unknowability of the past quickly becomes one about the potentialities of the future. If it is plausible that today’s ‘bad desires’ are merely contextual and acquired – not permanent and original – that means that they might be overcome, and our earlier good ones recovered; a wager at the heart of Rousseau’s utopian political project elsewhere. Yet as Rousseau’s commentators have noted, this framing of the discussion places him in a small quandary. For how can Rousseau presume to even speculate about the virtues of the human subject in its pre-lapsarian state when – according to his own criticisms of other thinkers – that state is defined by its untraversable, unknowable difference from us?2 Rousseau claims to be eschewing the presumption of historical reconstruction and employing instead a self-consciously fictitious ‘hypothetical and conditional reasoning’.³ But how can such fictional speculation about the past be made from any other vantage point than that of the present, in all its ignorant modernity?⁴ Rousseau is necessarily backed into his own inverted version of Hobbes’s and La Rochefoucauld’s ‘Flintstones fallacy’: presuming to speak of the virtues of the people of the past from the perspective of what constitutes desirable behaviour in the present. And since Rousseau also uses these claims to make projections about the people of the future, there is evidently a ‘Jetsons fallacy’ (after The Flintstones’ sister show about a family-waged nuclear family set in a comfortably automated future). This fallacy would assume that the characters, identities, and desires of future people could be assessed according to those of the present, even if we assume everything else about life in the future to be different. E.P. Thompson remarked that the purpose of William Morris’s utopian writings was to ‘teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way’.⁵ But in the Jetsons fallacy, the desires of the present do not budge an inch.

In this chapter, we examine three variations on this problem in current ways of thinking about ‘post-work’. We begin by extending our critique of anti-work authors from Chapter 1 to consider the other side of the tendency towards moral prescriptiveness we identified there; a version of utopia that seeks not to create new desires, but simply to fulfil the ones we already have. Second, we show how Silicon Valley’s ‘actually existing’ post-capitalism is already based on an essentialising and static idea of what desire is. And finally, in a more positive development of the Jetsons fallacy, we speculate on what help anti-work discourse could find in the idea of organising a liberation project around our existing supposedly ‘bad desires’, which, contrary to Thompson’s famous words, fail to transform themselves after all.

The Jetsons fallacy in anti-work writing

In what we have seen is a founding contribution to the modern genre of ‘post-work’ utopianism, John Maynard Keynes articulates what might be seen as the real ethical content of all anti-work writing:

For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.⁶

This is quite a radical prospect. Keynes’s claim is nothing less than that to live without work (or with much less work) will be to come face to face with our desire for the first time. There will be no more appealing to duty and necessity (nor pleading exhaustion): we will have to do what we want to do. Yet to call the question of what it is we want to do man’s ‘permanent problem’ is to inadvertently leave open the scandalous possibility that, not only has the problem always been with us, but that – being permanent – it will never be resolved. As it happens, this precise claim was simultaneously being made by Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, published a year before Keynes’s essay in 1929. In virtually the sole reference to Soviet communism in his works, Freud remarks that whether or not the Soviets have the economics right, where they go wrong is in claiming that communism can ever result in everyone happily undertaking ‘whatever work is necessary’ and pursuing leisure the rest of the time in a state of peaceable harmony.7 Freud’s whole book grapples with the reason for this: the myriad ways in which desire precedes and exceeds its object and motive, and how easily it gets diverted, thwarted, harnessed, and bent into self-defeating shapes. This, for Freud, would be true in any human culture, whatever its choice of economic model and however much or little work there is to be done. Desire will remain the irresolvable ‘permanent problem’ of Keynes’s overdetermined phrase, even when most of the ostensible material barriers to its satisfaction are removed.

Yet in a dilemma dating back at least to Rousseau, to write of the future requires that this problem is suppressed, at least on some level. Marx himself is explicitly suspicious of speculations about how we will live in the society communism was trying to bring about, but for two seemingly opposite reasons. First, revolutionary change that ‘abolishes the present state of things’ must begin with material ‘premises now in existence’, not far-off speculations; and second, the ‘predetermined yardsticks’ of bourgeois culture might narrow the horizons of the desirable in ways that preclude the possibilities of a revolutionary future.8 Being explicit about the future is dangerous because such speculations are both insufficiently grounded in present needs and too meanly contained by them. For the anarchist feminist Emma Goldman, the Russian Revolution itself fell short on the grounds of the second complaint, precisely because its possibilities were too limited by pre-revolutionary culture. Leaving ‘underlying ideas and values intact’, it could produce ‘only a superficial transformation’.⁹ That the Jetsons must not be assumed to be living with the same desires and motivations, just with better and more equitably distributed gadgets, has often been treated as fundamental to any project of radical economic and cultural change. But as Kate Soper points out in her work on socialist utopia and desire, the impossible dimension of such thinking is that without ‘some minimal continuity’ between existing ‘structures of needs’ and those of the new society, it is hard to see where ‘the emergence of the political will to revolution’ could have occurred ‘in the first place.’¹⁰ Those radicals who will only concede that a revolution has taken place once there is no trace to be found of old institutions and affects, are left, says Soper, ‘ask[ing] us to acknowledge that a certain form of society is an improvement on what it supplants while feigning ignorance of the kind of persons whose needs and desires it supposedly accommodates’.¹¹ On the other hand, any attempt to be concrete about the utopian future at all will end up promising to fulfil all sorts of desires from ‘this side’ of the end of work that may well have changed shape altogether by the time we are living in that society.

A fresh variation on this dilemma can be found in the simultaneously provocative, satirical, and perfectly sincere slogan, ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (FALC) and the version of the post-work utopia it invokes. In a short essay for Vice magazine in 2015, a few years before his manifesto of the same title, Aaron Bastani contrasts the future envisaged by the South African luxury goods magnate, Johann Rupert, with that proposed by the then-British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. Osborne had just seen his extreme spending cuts approved by the electorate in the 2015 election and was seeking to extend these measures into a future of ‘permanent austerity’. Rupert, by contrast, was worrying that the mass automation and unemployment predicted by many economists would represent an existential crisis for his own luxury brands sector, as fewer and fewer people could afford to buy its products. Taking Rupert at his word, Bastani suggested, offered a way of moving beyond Osborne’s austerity future, combining ‘full automation’ and the right to luxury consumption into ‘the political adventure of our lifetime’: one combining the familiar demand for liberation from work with ‘Cartier for everyone, Montblanc for the masses and Chloe for all’.12

The dream of a post-scarcity future has often been invoked from positions of very great scarcity. Key to the rhetorical drift of Keynes’s text is that it was written in a context where the arrival of such prosperity seemed very doubtful indeed, in the thick of the Great Depression. There is a subgenre of American folk songs about a post-work, post-scarcity world of ‘cigarette trees’, ‘a lake of stew and of whiskey, too’, in which ‘the hens lay soft-boiled eggs’, and ‘there ain’t no short-handled shovels’, where the song’s speaker himself is an impoverished hobo.13 And as we saw in Chapter 1, the anti-work visions of the Italian autonomist and ‘Wages for Housework’ movements were devised in the context of economic crisis and the collapse of the post-war economic consensus. The present wave of anti-work writing – with the FALC slogan its metonym – has followed this pattern, conceived in the context of the recession following the 2008 global financial crisis and popularised among precarious young graduates.¹⁴

If anything, the habitual disparity between present famine and demanded feast in anti-work writing is even more pronounced in this latest wave, because it comes in the context of impending climate catastrophe. FALC’S enthusiasts are careful to play up the green credentials of ‘post-scarcity’ technologies such as 3D printing, robot workers, and lab-grown food, and to stress their potential as a remedy to today’s inequitable and environmentally destructive global supply chains. But this does not quite do away with the sense of disjunction between, on the one hand, Bastani’s demand for ‘Cartier and Chloe for everyone’, and on the other, an environmentalist discourse demanding ‘de-growth’ and a UN report declaring under-developed Cuba the only environmentally sustainable country in the world.¹⁵

In this context, FALC can also be seen as a Verfremdungseffekt-like attempt to upend public associations of the left with Stakhanovite self-discipline, dour ascetic piety, and mistrust of popular pleasures. Part of its rhetorical effectiveness is that it is difficult to object to without looking a little humourless oneself. FALC also takes a Gordian Knot approach to the ‘theoretical incoherence’ Soper identifies in Marx’s refusal of concrete images of the future. In place of the feigned ignorance Soper describes Marxists imposing on themselves about which present needs and desires it is proper for socialism to satisfy, FALC meets us where our desire is in the here and now and promises to satisfy the lot. By brazenly proffering the bling of highly recognisable luxury brands, it also sidesteps the charge we made in Chapter 1, that anti-work writers want to liberate us from work, only to condemn us to their own sometimes rather worthy idea of a good time. But this commitment to luxury also requires a tactical projection into the future of desires that much radical thought has treated as specific to capitalism alone, and indeed has even sought to overcome.

To take a simple example: the hyper-realistic ‘bleeding vegan burger’ launched in 2018 would appear to be an exemplary proto-FALC product. As anyone who (like the present authors) became vegetarian in the 1990s will attest, traditional meat substitutes are reassuringly unconvincing. These new burgers, by contrast, seek as far as possible to recreate the texture of meat and even ‘bleed’ beetroot juice (says one online review, ‘as a decade-long vegetarian, I was totally unsettled by the texture and could never eat this burger again’). We might even interpret the new realist fake meat as a trial run for the normalisation of lab-grown (and so virtually methane and cruelty free) ‘real’ meat.16 It is becoming difficult to deny that veganism is an existential imperative: the planet simply cannot sustain animal farming on its current scale; and this, alongside greater visibility of factory farming’s palpable cruelty, has led to an increase in people adopting vegan diets. Yet this trend has also coincided with the rise in the West of meat-centred ‘paleo’ diets (taken to baroque extremes by the culture warrior Jordan Peterson, who claims to subsist entirely on beef), and even an increase in the meatiness of meat products in popular cuisine: the ubiquitous pulled pork, hipster burgers ludicrously stacked like postmodern sculptures, and fries heaped with bacon.

A traditional response of cultural criticism would be to interrogate why this desire for meat should arise in the present context of ecological crisis. We might consult Roland Barthes on the relation between rare steak and nationalism from Mythologies, the critique of ‘carno-phallogocentrism’ by Jacques Derrida and within écriture feminine, or Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat: in short a whole canon of criticism on the symbolic violence accrued by our history of handling meat. The ‘FALC’ burger, by contrast, short-circuits this cultural critique of our desire for delicious but destructive things, using technology to cut straight to the material dimension of actual cruelty and environmental destruction, but leaving the desire itself intact. It is no more interested in the network of behaviours, attitudes, and oppressions that come with wanting to eat meat than Bastani is in our contextually specific reasons for wanting Cartier, Montblanc, and Chloe. An uncharitable reader might therefore interpret FALC as the extreme endpoint of Slavoj Žižek’s account of neoliberalism’s predilection for ‘products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol […] warfare with no casualties (on our side of course)’: communism without the need to renounce capitalism’s selfish, violent, and sexist pleasures.17 The more generous alternative is to see FALC as recognising the necessity of a radical withholding of judgement. Recognising the fact of desire’s cultural-historical plasticity does not help us very much in predicting or predetermining conclusively which desires and which parts of desire are to be congenially met by the post-work utopia and which – like the vices of Rousseau’s contemporaries – will fall by the wayside.

A second recent anti-work text, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future (referred to in Chapter 1), also emphasises the need for the left to become the party of the plentiful future once more. While less unabashedly populist than Bastani, when Srnicek and Williams come to make their offer for what post-work life could be like, it is as if the very written genre itself forces them into the same problem of appearing to project the pre-existing desires of the present continuously into a future world:

In such a society, the labour that remains will no longer be imposed upon us by an external force – by an employer or by the imperatives of survival. Work will become driven by our own desires, instead of by demands from outside [emphasis added].

The ‘desire’ Srnicek and Williams are invoking is the desire for meaningful human activity, rather than Bastani’s luxury commodities. But a version of the same initial fallacy nonetheless applies. Bastani invokes the people of today as desiring fine watches and clothes, kept from them by invidious hierarchy that ought to be abolished (a move which requires him to side-line the question of whether those desires might be contingent on that hierarchy, as we have seen). More cautious as they are, Srnicek and Williams’s text nonetheless forces them to conjure a desire for meaningful activity, which also sounds a lot like it is simply there, pre-existing, unrealised only because of limits imposed by ‘external force’ and ‘demands from outside’. As psychoanalysis has taught us, we will never be simply ‘driven by our own desires’, because our desires are never simply our own. There is always a certain ‘outside’ imposing on them and giving them their articulation.

This is a trap that, earlier in the book, Srnicek and Williams have explicitly tried to avoid with a sketch for a concept they call ‘synthetic freedom’:

[Synthetic freedom] is constructed rather than natural, a collective historical achievement rather than the result of simply letting people be. Emancipation is thus not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul, but instead a matter of constructing and cultivating the right attachments.

In ‘synthetic freedom’, ‘we can experiment and build unconventional lives, choosing to foster our cultural, intellectual and physical sensibilities’, while at the same time remaining ‘open to whatever people might desire’, in ways we have not yet been able to anticipate. In this part of their text, the authors are clearly off the hook as far as dehistoricising desire is concerned. They acknowledge that whatever freedom there can be, it will not be based on the pre-existing will of the ‘detached’ individuated subject, but will be highly plastic and contextual. Yet this formulation contains its own theoretical danger.

We have seen that the FALC prospect is a neat way of avoiding the tendency to prescriptive moralism we identified in post-work writing in Chapter 1. But if Bastani manages to leap out of this moralism, only to land feet-first in an under-examined ‘liberationist’ notion of desire that downplays its historical specificity, then, accordingly, Srnicek and Williams’s attempts to bring nuance to the latter risks forcing them into the inverse manoeuvre. If there is no human essence that can determine the form the desires of the future are to take, then some kind of implicitly moralised ‘outside’ prescriptiveness turns out to be required after all (‘constructing and cultivating the right attachments’). Sure enough, by the book’s closing remarks, any unbuttoned ‘luxury’ in their version of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ has fallen by the wayside:

Such a project demands a subjective transformation in the process – it potentiates the conditions for a broader transformation from the selfish individuals formed by capitalism to communal and creative forms of social expression.¹⁸

It is as if the discourse of post-work writing is condemned to oscillate between wanting to erase present desires on the one hand (here moralised as ‘selfish’ as opposed to ‘communal and creative’), and to enthusiastically and uncritically satisfy them on the other. Later in this chapter, we attempt to show a way out of this problem. But first, what if there is already a self-described utopian approach to technology that claims to satisfy our desires without prescription in the here and now? What, that is, of the ‘Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism’ of today’s digital platforms?

What does Silicon Valley want?

One of the surprising things about Corey Pein’s memoir of life among the overworked reserve army of struggling tech workers in San Francisco is the way that aspects of this neoliberal dystopia come to resemble a certain utopian ‘post-capitalism’ in themselves. At the top of the pile, programmers at high-end companies live a ‘post-scarcity’ existence every bit as luxuriant as those imagined by Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Accommodation, laundry, gyms, bikes, cafeterias, and booze are free (‘at GitHub, they have a bar on every floor and a secret room with rare whiskies’), and steak dinners appear at employees’ desks. Outside this charmed circle, struggling wannabes organise their social lives around the free bars of app launch after app launch – ‘I don’t know why I ever paid for alcohol!’ – to which they are automatically directed by the Eventbrite app.

‘It was much easier to launch a tech start-up if you could afford to always have food delivered and never had to deal with mundane chores such as doing laundry, washing dishes, or buying groceries’, Pein reflects. Hence the techie joke: ‘tech culture is focused on one question: what is my mother no longer doing for me?’¹⁹ The apps and products these people create claim to identify and assist with problems ‘we all’ need solving. Their success appears to be based on honing in ever more closely on giving us everything that we have always wanted. But actually, it would be more accurate to say that what they do is universalise norms, desires, business practices, and prejudices (as well as workaholism and kinds of deskilling) that are particular to San Francisco’s own weird outpost of late capitalism. This is ‘literally’ true of the way platform capitalism has provided an ideological figleaf and a model for increasingly insecure employment practices in the West since the financial crash.²⁰ But it is also true in a more figurative sense. Google buys its skilled employees twenty-dollar steaks in exchange for them working late, ‘but with the extra time they’ve stayed at work, they’ve provided an extra two hundred dollars in value to their employer’.²¹ Driven back to work in the morning in Wi-Fi equipped busses, these tech workers have everything given to them, on the condition that they leave ‘work’ as little as possible. What is this but an uncannily compressed version of the very bargain platform capitalism strikes with its customers, who get everything for free in exchange for leaving the platform as little as possible?

Our second ‘way to want things after capitalism’ concerns the role of desire in the quasi-‘post-capitalist’22 contracts the big digital platforms enter into with their users, which permit us access to this miraculous technology in exchange not for money, but for data. In one basic sense, what such platforms want is to know what we want. The aggregated data they collect and set their algorithms to navigate is always the record of a certain desire: an accumulated account of what has made people inferred to be like us click on what they’ve clicked on and do what they’ve done. Google’s original monetisation of this technique by tying it to targeted advertising has revolutionised our entire infrastructure of culture, enabling users (and even other businesses, websites, and platforms) access to cutting-edge operating systems, communication technologies, maps, streamed entertainment, and more for the negligible cost of consenting to have these technologies constantly update their true owners on ‘everything we do’.²³ ‘The argument that data brokers use to defend such massive data collection’, notes Nolen Gertz, ‘is that they are trying to learn about us in order to help us, in order to provide us with better Google search queries, better Amazon recommendations, better Facebook news feeds’.²⁴ Yet they do so by adopting what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as the power to ‘infer and deduce the thoughts, feelings, intentions, and interests of individuals and groups with an automated architecture that operates as a one-way mirror irrespective of a person’s awareness, knowledge and consent’.²⁵ This is nothing short of a revolution in the archiving of desire, and of the use of technology to try to satisfy it.

Zuboff’s phrase ‘surveillance capitalism’ accurately captures much of the agenda of this activity. But it also obscures the sense in which the platforms are not usually simply ‘surveyors’, watching us go about our business as if they were not there. Some ‘always-on’ systems such as Amazon’s Echo do indeed ‘survey’ us in this passive and continuous way, while Google is travelling in that direction in its increasing harvesting of data when we are not using its sites or even logged into our devices. But digital companies in general are also highly motivated to change our behaviour. Not only in Pein’s sense of making us dependent on their apps for tasks we used to perform for ourselves, but more generally in the way these companies are incentivised to find ways to get us to be on platforms for as much time as possible.26 It is no wonder, then, that the arch capitalists at the top of these companies are among the most enthusiastic defenders of the idea of Universal Basic Income, if it means its recipients can spend more time at home on their devices.

As data-driven models expand into further areas of everyday life and governance, the legal, economic, ethical, and pragmatic ways in which these models are criticised balloon with them.27 Our own point in this section is in some ways comparatively simple; or, at least, is focused on the complexity of the part of their operation that the architects of these platforms seem to have regarded as simple. The basic promise and the basis of the bargain made with these platforms is that their algorithms automatically give us what we want. But this idea of ‘what we want’ suffers by being based on a pre-Freudian theory of desire. Platform capitalism’s algorithms assume that we want what we want. Which is to say that it neglects the ways in which we can want things that may be absolutely intolerable to us.²⁸ You sit down to some concrete task only to get nowhere because of the constant interruption of Facebook notifications. You spend whole evenings in envy of some rival on Instagram. You resolve on an early night only to find yourself still online in the early hours. Anyone recognising these behaviours can attest that there is something within our desire that is perfectly willing to derive satisfaction from low-level destructiveness, from which we derive no conscious happiness and which we’d be embarrassed to share with others.

How else are we to interpret the familiar warning, ‘don’t Google your symptoms’?29 Anybody who does so will be swiftly led to the auto-diagnosis of the most virulent and disabling diseases. Why has the algorithm learned to take us there? Why will we happily spend hours reading up on awful conditions we in all likelihood do not have? In such behaviour there is a self-confirming narcissism that takes satisfaction in ‘knowing’ the worst: and as far as Google is concerned, it is all the better, because these hours of winding ourselves up are also hours we spend willingly giving it our intimate data. Or, to take one of Gertz’s examples, why are so few ‘matches’ on the dating app Tinder followed up by a message from either of the matched users? ‘Such behavior suggests that users of Tinder are barely even engaged in casual flings. Instead it would appear that users of Tinder are pursuing pursuing’:³⁰ their pleasure tied far more to the thrill of the automated alert of the match than to any subsequent human interaction (even one mediated through the messaging function within the app). This is not, of course, to claim that such embarrassing behaviour started with or is caused by platform capitalism. The point is rather that tying so much of our cultural infrastructure to a technology predicated on delivering – apparently without mediation or judgement – on our desire, comes to look rather irresponsible when we remember that there are plenty of parts of our desire that do not need encouraging.

Platform capitalism is not the first economic system claiming to deliver maximum amounts of pleasure. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar 7, 1959–1960), Jacques Lacan suggests that Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian maxim ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ crucially marks modernity’s move from ideas of divine virtue to human pleasure as the ultimate social goal. Utilitarianism defined human pleasure as a self-evident and measurable good, and then demanded that everybody act in accordance with its decreed methods for achieving it. There is thus a certain standardising tyranny in this version of pleasure for the many. Lacan sees it at work in nineteenth-century industrialisation but also in the emerging social democracies of the time of his 1950s seminar. As imperial industrialised nations claimed to spread their benefits to their workers and to their colonies, so utility became an ‘enchanting power’ that hid its violence under the mantle of universal human pleasure.31

Today’s tech innovators might happily agree that there was a violence in assuming like Bentham that ‘we all want the same good’, and even claim – in textbook neoliberal fashion – to have delivered us from utilitarianism’s wrongly standardising idea of pleasure. After all, in platform capitalism, every individual user is offered options based on their own, singular behavioural histories. But to subscribe to this opposition would be an error. As Joan Copjec puts it in her reading of Lacan’s seminar, utilitarianism’s problem was never just that it assumed that everybody’s pleasure was identical; rather it was that it could not ‘conceive of a subject that would impede its own will’;32 and this is a conceptual shortcoming that platform capitalism has done nothing to overcome. That we habitually impede our own will is the most fundamental of Freudian discoveries. Human drives do not just appear in instinctual purity, but are, as Freud puts it, ‘extraordinarily plastic’.³³ If, as was suggested in the previous section, this is true culturally and collectively between different epochs, then it is also true at the level of the individual subject, who endures ongoing internal struggles, her desires changing places, this one satisfied in compensation for that other, disappointed one. To design a system that automatically ‘gives me what I want’ shows a grave misunderstanding of what desire is.

Lacan’s distinction between two different kinds of enjoyment in Seminar 7 is helpful here. On the one hand, there is the pleasure principle, which as Freud had already elaborated, does not mean the pursuit of some unbridled pleasure but rather the avoidance of excessive stimulation and ‘unpleasure’. Its command, according to Lacan, is actually to ‘enjoy as little as possible’ – that is, just as much as is required to keep going, to get out of bed in the morning, to preserve our psychic status quo.³⁴ On the other hand, there is what Lacan calls jouissance, the kind of pleasure that goes beyond the pleasure principle, which he defines as a sort of stimulation that we are compelled to pursue but that is too intense to bring pleasure but rather brings pain (the pain of exceeding external frames of reference, of the norms we ourselves have internalised as the limits of the possible, or what Lacan calls the ‘symbolic order’).

But there is another way of looking at jouissance – not necessarily as our own destruction, but perhaps as the destruction of our status quo, psychologically as well as politically. Jouissance of this kind could even be regarded as a relatively ordinary, everyday occurrence. For Barthes, we find it in encounters with certain challenging forms of art, those which leave behind the ‘mere’ pleasure principle-like plaisir of having our expectations confirmed, and instead explode familiar codes into surprising and blissful forms of jouissance.35 Alenka Zupančič, meanwhile, identifies jouissance with the pleasurable surprise elicited when we expect one thing and get another: a logic she defines as fundamental to the experience of falling in love:

the funny side of a love encounter lies precisely in the fact that the other (that we encounter) is an answer to none of our prayers and dreams, but, rather, the bearer of an unexpected surplus element that we might only get the chance to dream about in what follows.³⁶

Certainly no one could rule out a momentary encounter with the spark of this ‘unexpected surplus’ emerging in interactions online, as it might anywhere. Dystopian accounts of algorithms controlling all our actions by reducing us to instantaneously placated zombies will not survive the innumerable occasions where what the algorithm offers up is anything but the answer to our ‘prayers and dreams’. To take only the most banal examples, we are all familiar with comic instances of ‘malgorithms’, where the algorithm displays adverts wildly mismatched to the content we are viewing as a result of some superficial connection; or with the ‘autocorrect fails’ of our smart keyboards, which propose to insert idioms we happily use in one context, into ones where they are totally inappropriate. Our claim instead is that in defining and presuming to cater to ‘what we want’ in the way it does, platform capitalism’s model of algorithm-navigated aggregated data tendentially gives priority to and even exaggerates the repetitive, conservative tendencies of the pleasure principle: even behaving as if ‘what we want’ could be limited to this one side of desire.37

To put it simply, a decision-making system premised upon inferring and incentivising future behaviour on the basis of a huge record of what has gone before is congenial to the repetitive logic of the pleasure principle because it has little basis (whatever its evangelists claim) for reckoning with the possibility that things will be different next time.³⁸ Scholars such as Safiya Umoja Noble are right to warn that algorithmic decision-making as currently organised is regressive, in the sense that it often replicates prejudices and disadvantages experienced by minority groups ‘offline’.³⁹ But the model is also regressive in this more generalised sense: of assuming that ‘what we want’ can be anticipated on the basis of what we and others with similar data profiles to us have wanted before, in a process we could refer to as pathologically normalising. At the same time, there is a further twist required, because repetition is never simply replication, if for no other reason than because the repeated action is appearing in a context where the earlier iteration already exists. This means that every repetition produces a kind of remainder or residue, which itself gets added to the sum of what is being repeated in the next iteration. This might go some way to explaining why pleasure principle-led behaviours often end up taking such weird compulsive forms: either individually (nobody thinks they ‘want’ to spend all evening refreshing dating apps or message board pages, any more than they think they want to bite their nails) or collectively, at the level of what data ‘learns’ to produce for us (the ‘bad virality’ of extreme, disturbing, or just bizarre content online).⁴⁰

But are not our complaints in this chapter about the repetitive, normalising impetus of new technology just the same as any number of performances of Romantic and technophobic Kulturkritik – defending spontaneous ‘life’ against deathly techne – of the past couple of centuries?41 Or, worse, when we suggest that current digital technology’s relentless offer of ‘what we want’ is problematic, are we not retreating into misanthropic territory, some ‘heart of darkness’ in human desire, one that only a deluded modern Prometheus would dare to activate? A simple historical comparison to our own argument would be the mid-Victorian anxiety over another allegedly too absorptive, too instantly gratifying, too repetitive technology: the popular novel. As the historian of reading Leah Price has pointed out, the nineteenth century was ambivalent about the practice of isolated novel-reading, celebrating it in some contexts, attacking it in others, in particular when it was performed by young women. As numerous fictions, conduct books, and satirical cartoons suggest, many Victorians regarded the compulsive reading of fiction as a cause of slovenliness among their servants, and (as in the great fictional example of Emma Bovary) as a source of neglect of conjugal expectations among their wives.⁴² What is the difference between these – to modern eyes, quaint – fears and our critique of the too repetitive, too absorptive tendencies of digital platforms?

The fundamental difference is that whereas the old object of criticism was a form of desiring technology that certain groups by choice spent their time using (as has been true of any number of subsequent moral panics, over rock n roll, over ‘video nasties’, over computer games, even over some specifically digital subcultural activities like sexting or cyberbullying), platform capitalism is qualitatively different, because it concerns a technological dynamic we increasingly have no choice but to be part of. Algorithmically directed digital interactions are not merely one type of everyday behaviour among others. They are the model by which our most passive subliminal desires get amplified, put to work and fed back to us: and their structure and their assumptions about desire are getting rolled out in sector after sector in the lifework regime. As for the ‘heart of darkness’, the thing to grasp is that desire is not, in our assessment, some coiled spring ‘released’ and given form by technology. The point is that, since we are subjects whose desire is both changeable and sometimes motivated – in Copjec’s words – to ‘impede its own will’, a technology that naively and automatically offers us ‘what we want’ will inevitably run into damaging contradictions. Suffice it to say, a fully automated society with robots directed by algorithmically navigated data would need to update its theory of desire before it started offering to rebuild the world in the image of what it infers about ‘what we want’.

Repurpose your desire

We might take the idea of compulsory desiring technologies further to suggest that, if digital capitalism strives to blur the boundary between work and non-work, it also strives to blur that between wanting and needing, desire and necessity. Who can say whether the self-employed creative, compulsively refreshing their Twitter notifications every ten seconds, is addicted to affirmation or dutifully managing ‘their brand’? Or whether there really is a difference? In Chapter 3, we discussed how we are increasingly required to perform our desirability and the desirability of our lives as part of our work, and in the previous section of this chapter, we have seen how the online record of our own former desires are sold back to us in an algorithmically narrowing appeal to the pleasure principle. Digital capitalism harnesses what we want in ever more intricate and yet automated ways; perhaps this is part of the reason why desire has, at the same time, become a newly politicised topic of debate.

Two examples of cultural criticism from 2018 set the scene. In ‘On Liking Women’, Andrea Long Chu makes the provocative case that the gender experience of trans women like herself rests not on identity, but on desire; ‘a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants’. As is the way of all desire, Chu argues, the desire at the heart of trans experience is unruly: not only is it painful and threatens to remain only partially fulfilled – ‘your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back’ – but it is also likely to come into conflict with hard-and-fast political ideals. Chu points to the failure of the project of 1970s political lesbianism to excise desire for men as a matter of political principle, as well as to the conventional complaint some trans-exclusionary radical feminists make about trans women today: that they pursue just those bodily and stylistic signifiers of patriarchal femininity that feminism wanted to see abolished alongside the patriarchy itself. Instead of rejecting this complaint as simplistic, Chu insists, with knowing provocation, on the right to desire just those signifiers regardless of patriarchal implications. Making the point that desire generally arrives unbidden, her conclusion is that ‘nothing good comes of forcing [it] to conform to political principle’.43

While she does not explicitly discuss it, Chu’s intervention points to what a Lacanian understanding of the subject brings to the rhetorical battles around gender identity: if the work of desire makes us who we are, biology at birth cannot claim to be the ultimate determining factor. It is worth noting here that, as Chu herself suggests, the deployment of ‘gender abolition’ in contemporary hostilities against trans people (the absurd claim that the embrace of high femme style by the statistically insignificant number of trans women hinders the abolition of the patriarchy) tends to be merely ‘a shell corporation for garden-variety moral disgust’. We might add that this disgust is ultimately founded in the paranoid defence of transcendental, quasi-racialised womanhood supposedly residing in biology; it would seem that for some quarters of feminism today, Simone de Beauvoir had it the wrong way round: ‘one does not become, but rather is born a woman’.44 But Chu’s Antigone-like insistence on ‘the force of desire’ disarms biologism alongside the disingenuous variety of gender abolitionism. Like Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Chu makes the definitive human experience not the satisfaction of needs, or unchangeable identity, but desire, necessarily painful and never totally fulfilled. In our identitarian culture, this has been inevitably controversial, but Chu elegantly shows that the case is defensible from the point of view of trans rights. As she points out elsewhere, ‘as long as transgender medicine retains the alleviation of pain as its benchmark of success, it will reserve for itself, with a dictator’s benevolence, the right to withhold care from those who want it’. This is once more modernity’s standardising violence that, as we have seen in the previous section, Lacan identifies as lurking under the mantle of utilitarian pleasure for all. Against an idea of gender based on contented identity alone, which hazards that a person’s continued suffering disqualifies their desire as inauthentic, Chu proposes the radical alternative of one that respects desire, and where ‘the negative passions – grief, self-loathing, shame, regret – are as much a human right as universal health care, or food’.⁴⁵

Partially in response to Chu, in an article titled ‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’ Amia Srinivasan pursues digital culture’s sexual politics from campus shooters’ online manifestos to the example of dating apps and sites. She points out how apparently innocuous ‘personal preference’ categories police romantic and sexual encounters to algorithmically reproduce the mechanisms of domination and exclusion inherent in misogyny, racism, ableism, and transphobia: ‘personal preferences – NO DICKS, NO FEMS, NO FATS, NO BLACKS, NO ARABS, NO RICE, NO SPICE, MASC-FOR-MASC – are never just personal’. In the face of how digital culture cuts desire down to size, Srinivasan concludes that while there can never be an obligation to desire anyone in particular, there may be a ‘duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires’. The evidence for how individual desires are channelled and warped by pernicious but profitable hierarchical categories online indicates a problem Chu is less interested in: that while some desires establish themselves intransigently, others prove elastic – that while moralist preaching will not and ought not transform a singular desire fundamental to maintaining a sense of self (you cannot train yourself not to be trans), there are other desires, as we discussed in the previous section, that platform capitalism is perfectly capable of manoeuvring into increasingly limiting directions.46

The two contrasting positions can be productively mapped onto post-work writers’ troubles with getting to the other side of capitalism: as we discussed above, to even want a different world we have to hold onto some fixed desires we trust will reach into the future, but at the same time, to hold open the horizon of radical change also requires the possibility of substantially changed desires.47 Where post-work writers oscillate between promising to fulfil today’s material desires and prescribing new ones, contemporary culture oscillates comparably between its attitudes to personal desire. While in both cases, the glimpsed horizon is a better world, the risk, equally, is moralism. As we will argue in this section, it is this second case of personal desire versus moralism, that points to another way to approach post-work utopianisms’ problem with how to want things after capitalism. To return to the idea of transfiguring our personal desires: Srinivasan’s example, taken from Lindy West’s body positivity campaigning, of looking at photographs of people we find unattractive in an attempt to retrain and correct our personal desires and self image, does not seem a likely recipe for resolving the problem of the perpetuation and intensification of pre-existing social marginalisation in the form of ‘sexual preference’ categories online. Quite beside the fact that, even if it were possible, it is difficult to picture who might thank anyone for having actively re-targeted their desire at them (and plenty of marginalised groups already suffer from being reductively fetishised on the basis of the features of their marginality on dating sites), no personal desire-retraining can change the material and structural cultural basis of the oppression of marginalised groups. But material change can. And, as is particularly apparent in this case, material change is cultural change. To win the struggle for cooperative or public non-profit platforms, as is increasingly demanded by the digital left,⁴⁸ would be the first step: towards writing better code for our social lives online that, instead of keeping us there at the cost of addictive affective manipulation and reliably simplified pleasures, leaves more room for chance, for breaks, for the kind of surprise encounters currently edited out of our search results as well as our sexual preferences. Of course these new platforms could only show their full potential in a world where there is sufficient time outside work to pursue their pleasures, but their possibility demonstrates the point; if we do not want digital capitalism to put our desires to work, structural change, not individual retraining, is required.

On the level of the culture, rather than the individual, we might take Srinivasan’s description of a ‘duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires’ as a description of the changed mood of the 2010s in the globalised West. Molly Fischer describes how in American popular culture, ‘a self-conscious moral duty in matters of identity, of inclusion and representation – had come to dominate discussions among creators, critics, and consumers alike’.49 This ‘Great Awokening’ has meant, in the best cases, room for voices of under- and misrepresented groups to break new ground and develop new kinds of articulate everyday cultural criticism: in the worst, tokenistic inclusivity in unchanged formats, and a spiteful puritanism.⁵⁰ In the wider cultural debate, some of those unused to self-criticism have ‘checked their privilege’ graciously enough, others have made the most of what moralism always provides: a template for self-satisfied to-the-letter correctness that denies context and is wielded as a weapon to preserve the status quo.⁵¹ However real and remarkable this new focus on cultural politics in all areas of life is, it also contains a warning about reducing political struggle to a cultural re-education that soon dwindles to the level of aesthetics. As presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the crowd at a rally in early 2016: ‘If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism?’⁵² The assumption that economic reform is separable, or even an undesirable distraction, from combating racism and sexism sums up a version of 2010s culture in which an aesthetics of equality is substituted for the struggle for it.

Attempts to absorb deep structural inequality by cultural change alone, and a cultural change relying at times on simplistic moral dogma have not been very promising so far. These attempts suffer from what Wendy Brown has called ‘wounded attachments’: the fact that the gains imagined in a struggle against inequalities of gender, race, and sexuality are constrained by what is desirable within liberal capitalist culture – to the increasing exclusion of class from the debate, and with it the possibility of a much more ambitious challenge to structures of domination and exploitation.53 Elsewhere, in the theoretical renaissance on the feminist left, the question of how personal desire meets capitalism and technology is addressed differently: the collective Laboria Cuboniks, in their manifesto Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, outline a queer- and trans-inclusive communist feminism that takes its cues from Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism by beginning with our bodies’ inextricable relationship to technology. As a ‘technomaterialism’, it aims to resist capitalist technoscience not by refusing its tainted means but by ‘repurposing’ them. The gesture is disarmingly simple: we know that this biotechnoculture has been bad for us, and that we are in many ways its products; therefore, ‘absolute caution’, as the manifesto puts it, is impossible, but resistance can begin with taking possession.⁵⁴ The aim, shared with other authors on the technologically oriented left already discussed in this book, is to directly challenge the ownership and control of the technological and scientific infrastructures of everyday life, and so combat no-alternative neoliberalism where it puts us to work in the most pervasive and yet often invisible ways.

It is this unfazedness by the extent to which we begin as bodies under and subjects of technologised capitalism, coupled with the belief that change is possible, that makes room for a different attitude to personal desire. Helen Hester, for example, a member of Laboria Cuboniks, takes the fact that women’s bodies are routinely hybridised by technology (most prominently pharmacologically: by chemical contraception and other forms of hormonal regulation) as the basis for an activist gender abolitionism that, by embracing experimentation, is equivalent with a multiplication of possibility: ‘xenofeminism is not a call for gender austerity, but for gender post-scarcity!’55 Where the call is to ‘let a hundred sexes bloom’, there can be no room for the trans-exclusionary radical feminist complaint of the perpetuation of patriarchal gender ideals by trans people, or for that matter, any other ideological complaints about individual body modification. The overall goal to overcome gender as a system of domination is translated into an offer of creative bodily autonomy. ‘Fully automated luxury communist gender proliferation’, then, to adapt Bastani’s phrase: with the same utopian charm of demanding everything for everyone. Here, the demand for women’s rights also means the right for everyone to be a woman, or not, or anything else. What for Lacan is the ultimate ethics of psychoanalysis, ‘not giving ground relative to your desire’, here simply becomes an offer of autonomy as part of communist solidarity.⁵⁶

Some new articulations of feminist socialist utopia, then, can accommodate what Chu calls ‘the right to desire what is bad for you’.57 Another way of putting this might be that, in this new feminism, there is a different confidence that meeting and supporting the individual where they are with their desires and needs in the present will not stand in the way of the struggle with technocapitalism. On the contrary, it can become its basis: take Sophie Lewis’s work on surrogacy, for instance. She offers the slogan ‘full surrogacy now’ as ‘an expression of solidarity with the evolving desires of gestational workers, from the point of view of a struggle against work’.⁵⁸ In her book, she advocates for the rights of commercial surrogates to have their highly controversial work better recognised as such, and to be better protected in the present; in the medium term, she makes the case for redefining their roles, for example to include continued contact to the children they have born where this is wanted; and in the long term, all this is considered with a view to a utopian future where surrogacy is not a commercial service but part of and model for kinship structures no longer fixated on reproduction but on mutual care beyond the family.

What, then, about what we have outlined as anti-work writing’s characteristic problem, that when it proposes what we might do when we have successfully abolished capitalist labour, often ends up becoming prescriptive about the good life that could replace it? The simplest answer is political; if genuine democracy must be based on sharing resources, because only then can it be ensured that everyone gets fully and fairly included in decision-making, then achieving this will be enough, and the only question will be the one Peter Frase outlines in Four Futures: whether available resources and conditions will make it ‘communism: equality and abundance’ or ‘socialism: equality and scarcity’.59 This harbours a truth that often gets concealed when left politics are offered to voters: that ultimately, there is no getting to this better way of organising our politics, economy, and culture without a leap of faith. If people get to live in a way that frees them from wage-slavery and gives them genuine decision-making powers, who knows what decisions they will make about the shape of their cultures and who knows what they will do with their time. Post-capitalism’s leap of faith must be that if systemic exploitation and alienation is replaced with a system that aims to give everyone access to what they need and freedom to do their own thing, it will turn out well. We will not end up with a war of all against all, but with something better than the world has seen so far. As far as desire is concerned, any vision of the future must of course address itself to what we most want right now – all the future is, until it happens, is present desire. But if visions of the future want to do justice to ideas of radical socialist democracy they would do well to be more confidently honest about the necessary gamble involved – that we do not know, and likely cannot imagine yet, many aspects of a future we nonetheless want to build – and accordingly to commit to the provisional, and to include as much room as possible for difference and idiosyncrasy in the prosthetic desires required to get us over the hurdle.