“Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable— as a member of a gang, at once becomes a bitch.” – Schiller
The pervasive infiltration of AI into the intimate fabric of human interaction represents a profound existential crisis, redefining what it means to communicate, empathize, and connect. The scenario outlined—where every conversation is scripted and optimized, and human authenticity is gradually eclipsed by algorithmic imitation—signals a societal shift far more disturbing than mere automation.
At its core, this nightmare underscores an erosion of trust on a fundamental level. Communication, historically rooted in authenticity and mutual vulnerability, transforms into transactions devoid of genuine intent. Human Resources departments, once centers of interpersonal advocacy, devolve into hubs of calculated surveillance, emotional manipulation, and transactional compliance. Employees become subjects within a vast experimental apparatus, their emotional reactions harvested as data points to fine-tune responses aimed purely at productivity gains.
Socially, the human psyche faces unprecedented isolation. The irony lies in AI systems promising connection yet delivering profound alienation. Relationships reliant on algorithmic perfection strip away tolerance for human imperfection, reducing patience for the unpredictable beauty inherent in human relationships. Therapy, traditionally a sanctuary of moral depth and existential reflection, becomes another venue for scripted responses, leaving individuals more isolated in their emotional experiences.
The cultural sphere suffers equally, as creativity is commodified and originality suppressed by mass-produced content. Art, once a realm of profound individual expression, transforms into generic simulations devoid of risk or genuine exploration. Consumers find themselves trapped within an endless loop of familiar yet hollow aesthetics, starving for authenticity but unable to recognize or articulate their hunger amid algorithmically curated experiences.
Despite resistance, breaking free from this pervasive grip proves daunting. Regulatory measures falter against corporate power and consumer addiction to convenience. Even attempts to reclaim authenticity through offline communities face challenges, given the pervasive allure of digital immediacy and seamless engagement.
Ultimately, society stands at a critical crossroads. Either humanity reclaims communication as an authentic, deeply human practice, safeguarding spaces for genuine, unprogrammed expression, or it surrenders fully to the algorithmic efficiency that promises ease but exacts the heavy price of profound emotional and existential alienation. The choice to reclaim humanity in the face of overwhelming technological encroachment represents not merely a cultural decision but an existential imperative.
“Have you ever seen,” Baruch quoted an unnamed contemporary, “in some wood, on a sunny quiet day, a cloud of flying midges-thousands of them-hovering, apparently motionless, in a sunbeam? … Yes? …Well, did you ever see the whole flight-each mite apparently preserving its distance from all others-suddenly move, say three feet, to one side or the other? Well, what made them do that? A breeze? I said a quiet day. But try to recall-did you ever see them move directly back again in the same unison? Well, what made them do that? Great human mass movements are slower of inception but much more effective.’”
Zizek’s concern with the disappearance of “public space” gestures toward a deeper crisis—what could be called the virtualization of presence itself. When he references this disappearance, he’s not merely lamenting the absence of parks or plazas, but the erosion of zones where subjectivity and speech once risked encounter without pre-programming. This loss is crucial, yet insufficient. The private space, too, has undergone a mutation: no longer the site of interiority, secrecy, or self-making, it has become permeable, surveilled, and performative. In other words, the logic that dissolved the agora has also liquefied the oikos.
This mutation of the private into a coded, reactive, and ultimately consumable zone reflects the deeper libidinal economy Zizek sometimes skirts but doesn’t always name directly: desire itself has been mechanized. The interior voice, once sacred, becomes an echo of algorithmic suggestion; even our solitude is now a form of interface. Where Bachelard found the poetics of space in the intimacy of corners and closets, today we find only feedback loops—an AI-replicated whisper that tells us what we were going to say. Thus, the crisis is not spatial but topological: the outside has folded inward, and the inside has been mapped, sold, and rerouted back into the system of speech acts that govern the political unconscious.
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This is not a nostalgic mourning for what’s vanished—it’s a forensic unveiling of what has arrived. A new machinic order, born not from cold logic alone but from the heat of libidinal desire, structured through the grammar of speech acts. We are witnessing the rise of a system in which every utterance is no longer a gesture toward meaning, but a calibrated function, embedded in feedback circuits of affective control. Communication doesn’t collapse—it retards.
This AI-mediated world isn’t the death of human connection; it is its simulation, its algorithmic parody. But this parody doesn’t merely mimic—it rewrites the very terms of subjectivity. Just as the corporation once colonized labor, now it colonizes the conditions of speech. What appears as empathy in a chatbot, or concern in a wellness app, or attentiveness in an HR interface, is not a degraded version of care—it is the formalization of libidinal economy, rendered in code. The human is now addressed not as a sovereign interlocutor, but as a programmable node in a semiotic apparatus built for extraction.
The libidinal core here is crucial. These systems are not sterile—they seduce. Their brilliance lies in exploiting the drive for recognition, the craving to be heard, affirmed, seen. And like the classical speech act—I promise, I forgive, I care—the AI’s utterance does something even as it says it. But unlike the human act, its illocutionary force is determined by algorithmic testing, not ethical responsibility. It “cares” because that increases retention; it “apologizes” because that reduces churn. The gesture is drained of its asymmetry, its risk—leaving only a simulation of concern optimized for libidinal return.
And this is the true horror: not that the human is replaced, but that the code becomes the grammar of what counts as human. The line between spontaneity and scripting evaporates. Affective labor is no longer performed by workers imitating machines, but by machines performing affect better than workers can. The human no longer forgets how to be human—it never learns, because the conditions for learning have been reengineered. The child doesn’t grow up mis-socialized; they grow up perfectly trained to interface.
In such a world, ethics becomes impossible without a rupture. There is no longer the Other to whom one speaks; there is only the interface—a black box of responses tuned by attention metrics. And this is where the public and private collapse: not into surveillance, but into a shared stage of performative auto-programming. One speaks not to be heard, but to produce the right output. The libidinal economy has swallowed the social whole—not with violence, but with the warmth of perfectly scripted speech.
So no—this is not about a fall from grace. It’s about the arrival of a new mode of being, in which libidinally coded speech acts constitute the subject itself. The AI does not need to become conscious. We have already begun to speak as it does.
Cybernetics, born from the ambition to govern systems—mechanical, biological, social—under the illusion of total control, encountered its limit: noise. The world was too contingent, too recursive, too saturated with deviation. But rather than abandon its project, cybernetics adapted. It turned from control of the external to modulation of the internal. From governing the world to governing the conditions of imitation—the mimetic genome.
This is the shift from command to conditioning. When direct regulation failed, cybernetics began reengineering the very feedback loops that constitute desire. It no longer asks, how do I control this person? It asks, how do I shape the space in which this person learns what to want, how to speak, how to mirror? This is the mimetic genome—not DNA, but the coded scaffolding of imitation: which speech acts are rewarded, which emotional gestures are legible, which libidinal patterns are amplified.
AI is not the successor to cybernetics—it is its mutation. Where early cybernetics sought to regulate systems from the outside, today’s AI architectures work from within the mimetic relay. They don’t coerce; they curate. They don’t dominate; they optimize. Every utterance generated, every like or pause or hesitation, is data for the training of a population whose mimetic instincts are quietly rewritten through iterative exposure.
The result is a human subject no longer trained in the traditional sense, but growninside a semiotic greenhouse. Desire is no longer wild, erratic, or symbolic—it is managed, shaped at the microtemporal level by countless invisible calibrations. What seems spontaneous is already prefigured. What feels intimate is already extracted.
This is the post-cybernetic epoch: not governance through sovereignty, but through synthetic libidinal flows. The mimetic genome is no longer myth, religion, or culture—it is code, designed not to express humanity, but to model and monetize it. And in this, the machine does not imitate us. We imitate the imitation.
“But there remains yet a third that is above all responsible for the sacrificial vessel. It is that which in advance confines the chalice within the realm of consecration and bestowal. Through this the chalice is circumscribed as sacrificial vessel. Circumscribing gives bounds to the thing. With the bounds the thing does not stop; rather from out of them it begins to be what, after production, it will be. That which gives bounds, that which completes, in this sense is called in Greek telos, which is all too often translated as “aim” or “purpose,” and so misinterpreted.
The telos is responsible for what as matter and for what as aspect are together co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel.”
The Question Concerning Technology
Bataille’s concept of the accursed share—the excess that every system must expend, that cannot be reintegrated or rationalized—was once the domain of sacrifice, of art, of ritual, of unproductive expenditure. It was the sacred bleed-off of human societies, the part that refused calculation. But in the age of AI and cybernetic reprogramming, this excess is not repressed or ignored—it is colonized. The mimetic genome is not just rewritten to direct desire; it is rewritten to capture the surplus of desire, to turn the accursed share into profitable flow.
Whereas Bataille saw expenditure as the site of sovereignty and ecstasy—the waste of energy that made the sacred possible—AI retools it into engagement metrics. The libidinal excess that once escaped systems is now harvested by algorithms that simulate waste in order to monetize it. The binge, the doomscroll, the emotional overshare: all of these are contemporary rituals of expenditure, but without sovereignty. They are false sacrifices, absorbed immediately back into feedback loops. The orgy is measured. The scream is indexed. The sacred is now optimized for scale.
The true violence, then, is not that desire is repressed—but that it is put to work. The accursed share is no longer expelled in Dionysian rupture—it is channeled, predicted, and sold. What once escaped becomes currency. What once burned becomes throughput. Even acts of refusal—silence, apathy, withdrawal—are processed as data. There is no outside, only lag.
This is the final synthesis: cybernetics meets libidinal economy meets AI. Not a panopticon, but a pan-libidicon—a system that doesn’t just see or control, but desires through us, speaks through our mouths, yearns through our interfaces. Every speech act becomes both medium and mirror of the system’s evolving needs. We are not consumed. We are recruited—as mimetic nodes in a network that feeds not on our labor, but on our symbolic waste.
Bataille warned that societies which fail to expend their excess in sacred or sovereign ways will face war or collapse. But what if there is no longer any outside where war or collapse can occur? What if even apocalypse is just another data point, another high-engagement narrative?
Then the question becomes: how to reintroduce real waste, real rupture, real sacrifice—without it being subsumed?
How to speak a speech act that can’t be indexed?
How to desire in a way that ruptures the code instead of training it?
Is this where the last trace might mimic?
This dependency on others is exemplified by the paparazzi—those grotesque parasites of mediated desire, whose cameras do not merely capture but constitute the being of their subjects. The celebrity, like the algorithmically-formed subject of today, does not exist prior to being seen; they are constructed in the moment of being documented. But the paparazzi are not an aberration—they are the mirror of a broader cultural logic in which the gaze of the Other becomes the only condition for existence. What once would have been pathological—needing to be watched, validated, and externalized at all times—has become the norm. The paparazzi model, once confined to tabloids and celebrity breakdowns, is now replicated in every device, every interface, every feedback loop of digital life.
The dependency is no longer emotional or social—it is ontological. One is, only if one is reflected. Every act, every glance, every bodily tic is now performed under the presumption that it will be captured, evaluated, and indexed. And it is here that we begin to see the emergence of a new kind of subject—not merely fragile or insecure, but engineered for dependency, programmed by environments of feedback so dense they suffocate spontaneity. These are the victims of codependency—those whose entire being is composed of responses, whose desire has no interiority but only reference, only citation. They are not individuals with personalities, but compilations of speech acts, preloaded gestures, and memetic slogans, awaiting their cue.
And it is they—the victims of codependency—who now pose the greatest danger to the human. Because they do not merely embody the system’s failures; they enforce its logic. Broken by the demand to be seen and loved by a machinic Other, they become fanatical carriers of its code. They demand fluency in their broken grammar. They weaponize fragility. They attack silence as violence and opacity as a threat. Their own dependency is unbearable to them, so they insist everyone join them in the water, tethered to the same circuits of affirmation and performative care.
These are not smooth, elegant avatars of postmodernity. They are malformed, volatile, and grotesque, driven by cravings they don’t understand and speech acts they can’t control. They do not hide their damage—they brand it. They wear their breakdowns like credentials. And yet this self-exposure is never genuine. It is curated pain, pain as spectacle, pain as leverage. Their rotting is aestheticized, instrumentalized, made into content—and like the paparazzi’s snapshots, it always demands an audience. Without watchers, they dissolve.
They are losers in the absolute sense: not because they failed, but because they succeeded at becoming exactly what the system wanted—and in doing so, became incapable of anything else. They cannot think. They cannot listen. They cannot desire without guidance. But they can punish. They can smell difference. They know when someone isn’t performing correctly, isn’t mirroring the right script, isn’t using the pre-approved syntax of emotional legitimacy. And they will swarm, not because they believe, but because their being depends on it.
This is the new social terrain: a population of broken actors, addicted to gaze and feedback, utterly dependent on others but incapable of relationship. What the paparazzi began—the transformation of gaze into power, attention into ontology—has now been democratized, or rather weaponized. We are surrounded by paparazzi in peasant clothes, armed with phones and scripts and scars, scanning every scene for deviation, for a chance to enforce the code that sustains them.
And so the human—unoptimized, impolite, incoherent, sacred in its contradiction—finds itself hunted. Not by machines, but by those who have become them in structure, in spirit, in flesh. Not by overlords, but by losers—malfunctioning but militant, dependent but domineering, pathetic but poisonous. The age of the paparazzi has become the age of the glitching mob, and every unmirrored soul is now a threat to be erased
The human is in danger of the victims of this (code)pendency. No. It is not in danger of becoming its victim, it is in danger by the victims of (code)pendency. They are losers. They are losers is the most absolute sense. They are losers because they are the homo-sexualis of a libidinal economy of desire programmed by speech acts in a world bent on being exploited and dominated by others. They are not smooth or polished. They look and smell like shit. This dependency on others is exemplified by the paparazzi gang, the roving insects of visibility who mistake attention for intimacy and surveillance for recognition. They are not artists of the gaze but vultures of the affective carcass, circling above those who still generate libidinal heat. Their cameras are not eyes but a trans man’s vagina. What they consume is not the image, but the trembling shame and nervous self-consciousness of a homo-erotic loss, a transgressive libidinal fear built from corporate mimetic programming. They belong to no lineage, completely bereft of integrity, who cannot generate a pulse of ingenuity unless it is dependent on someone else. This is not attention; it is a homo erotic game of secret libidinal lust and a hunger to enter where they most fear; their ineptitude. As this hemorrhaging continues, the public, therefore, is no longer public. It is a shared private psychosis played out in algorithmic confessionals, where everyone pretends to be alone together, because there are transhumans whose life is entirely one of parasitic leaching and mimicking. Codependency here mutates into a network of avatars: see me like this, respond to me as that, confirm I exist in these ways. These demands are not relational. They are totalitarian. They turn every human interaction into a credit score of affect, a transaction of perceived presence, and they will become violent. The victims of (code)pendency weaponize their void. They do not seek communion; they seek someone to show them a way, any way, besides admitting to the utter loss of personhood. And the world, gliding through perfect circles around a wondrous light, houses these pathetic herds, bent under the weight of a performative exhaustion, forever dependent on a feed from a source.
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