🤖💋DREAM LOVERS😻🎮
I did this interview about my new Pluto Press book Dream Lovers - which came out this month. It is about sexbots, smart condoms, VR pornography, AI and VR partners, etc. But it is mostly about how psychoanalysis is needed to understand the way desire is changed by contemporary technology and its inherent connections with capitalism. I don't know if people are interested in psychoanalysis in this way here? To me, its as important as a tool to understand capitalism and oppose it as it is as a clinical method.
Posted Jun 2, 2022, 8:34 AM UTC
38
I read your PlayStation Dreamworld last year and it inspired my graduate dissertation where I basically dug deeper into the idea of Pokémon GO as an ideological phantasy which animates our desire, and other stuff on how Pokemon Go relates to ecological grief, capital so on. I also follow 1968 Press and I'm excited to see where that is headed, so I'm curious why you decided to publish with Pluto instead of 1968?
In any case, I'm excited to read Dream Lovers as the area around virtual reality, videogames, and desire is what I find most exciting, and I'd love to contribute in that field somehow.
Thanks so much for this! I would be interested to hear about Pokémon GO and ecological grief? I often still find myself talking about Pokémon GO now - it does seem to embody something!
I guess I just prefer not to publish myself, and I really like this tech series in Pluto which is edited by Jodi Dean. Its called Digital Barricades. 1968 has some really amazing stuff out soon!
I'd be more than happy to send you a brief outline of the ideas and sources. The segment on ecological grief is heavily based on psychoanalytic theories of grief, especially those of Freud, Karl Abraham and Darian Leader, but Lacan is always haunting the background of the text. Starting from John Berger's observation that animals are disappearing from our lives, I posit Pokémon Go in a long history of preserving animals through the moving image, a practice which dates back to the zoopraxiscope by Edward Muybridge. In short, humans have basically compiled a "spectral archive" to compensate for the loss of animals within modernity (Lippit).
So, faced with this loss of animals, and there subsequent substitution in the moving image, my thesis is that Pokémon Go somehow obstructs the ability to grieve wildlife, because virtual animals such as Pokemon do not let us "lose" the object, we are thus unable to mourn it. Darian Leader writes about a patient who, after losing his father, begins hoarding objects: magazines, rubbish, etc. But most notably, he develops severe and chronic constipation. Unable to accept the loss of his father, the patient made sure to retain all of his objects, including excrement. Loss, argues Leader, becomes an impossibility. So, it is my thesis that Pokémon Go, as an ideological phantasy, subjects the player to a form of "subjective constipation", we become subjugated to a logic of ceaseless introjection (catching those Pokémon), and hoarding (pokemon go is a purely cumulative game, we don't really lose any pokemon, we just transfer them into candies which accumulate).
Of course this is merely a brief outline, and I'd be very happy to share further, or a part of the text itself where I elaborate the theory further and back up my claims a bit better.
Wow this is really fascinating. Great to read about it. Leader is amazing, of course. Thanks for this.
also this would apply to how much games turn nature into object in a wider sense - such as farming simulators etc. But also the increasing role of food and ingredients in games - almost all games now involve at least a mini game where you can collect ingredients, cook and eat. Its interesting that this should be increasingly popular as this kind of practice becomes less and less common.
Yes bro I'd love to hear more about your dis