Trans(humanism) is here to stay - we're going through a second mirror stage, and it's only getting more intense...

 

I: THE TECHNOLOGICAL CYBER-SUBJECT

 

            In light of the recent controversial Slavoj Zizek article – “Wokeness is here to stay” – that by pure coincidence was released at the same time as TikTok released its new hyper-realistic filter that makes you more beautiful on camera, I was led to ponder or whether the issue of trans-sexuality is part of a larger philosophical issue of trans-humanism that technological progress has caused people to stress about.

            One week ago, I released an article defending the technological determinist interpretation of Marx, that the main thing that will destroy capitalism “from the inside out”, leading us to move to a new economic system out of necessity will be technological progress. Marx thought the same, though of course he couldn’t have known how exactly that technology will look like. A socialist planned-economy can only be successfully run by an AI-algorithm, let humans do the job and we will see the horrors of Stalinism all over again.

            What needs to be added there is that each economic system changes the formation of the subject’s identity inside it as well. We have an identity, a sense of self, in order to differentiate ourselves from others, but these “small others” sit along the “big Other” of society as well, to use Lacan’s terminology. The big Other of society, as well as the response to the question of what this big Other wants from you, is dictated by the economic system you live in. Thus, your sense of self in relation to it will also be morphed by whatever economic system you are in. In simpler terms: “Who I am” is determined not only by differentiating myself from others in personal relationships at the “micro level” (family, work, school, etc.) but also by finding “my role in society” at “the macro level” (Who am I in this country? Who am I in this city? Who am I on this globe?).

            The subject inside the next, post-capitalist (or “socialist”, if you want) economic system will circle around the question of technology. The subject will not be a “robot”, but a cyborg. Capitalism is only a preparation for this next economic system that will circle around technology just like feudalism was a preparation for capitalism.

Inside feudalism, the subject’s identity was dictated by the Lacanian archetype of “the imaginary father” – a present, living authority-figure. Your freedom and sense of self were dictated in relation to the patriarch if you were a woman, the landlord if you were a serf, the king if you were a citizen, and so on. The authority figures were right next to you. Hence, in feudalism, citizens were a commodity to be bought and sold by others. Feudalism was a preparation for capitalism in which the subject’s identity is dictated by the Lacanian archetype of “object petit a” which is abstract, surplus-value – a form without content, a ghost or a silhouette. In capitalism, you are a commodity to be bought and sold by yourself, you must “market yourself”, and thus the seller and the sold product coincide. In post-capitalism/socialism, the subject’s identity will be tied to technology, which in Lacanese would correspond to the symbolic phallus, naturally the next term in the progression. Notice how each system prepares the subject for the next: in being a commodity sold by others, one learns how to sell oneself and thus prepares for capitalism. In selling yourself, one learns how to automate this task through the use of tools and thus learns the precondition for becoming the tool/tech later on.

Capitalism is the best system for fast and efficient technological progress (which as a consequence/downside consumes the Earth’s resources the fastest), and thus it’s the best system to develop tools for humans to use. The transition from one system to another is marked by a blurring of a line distinguishing two elements – from feudalism to capitalism, the line between “seller” and “sold product” was blurred or abolished. From capitalism to my vision of “techno-socialism”, the line between “tool/technology” and “user” will be blurred – the tools that we use to get our work done will be incorporated either into our body, or somehow into our identity. Capitalism prepares us for the next system – the more capitalism progresses in its last stages now, the more the human turns into a cyborg, in gradual steps. We are slowly preparing ourselves for what is about to come. In the process of technologizing the human, the barriers/borders that separate self (who I am) and other (who I am not) get blurred as well, splitting the population into two camps depending on whether they support this technological process or not. Let’s have a closer look at how this border looks like in the first place:

 

II: HUMANITY IS GOING THROUGH A SECOND MIRROR STAGE

 

Jacques Lacan came up with the mirror stage in order to explain the formation of human identity. Around the age of 6-18 months, the baby first recognizes their reflection in the mirror – now their reflection is no longer seen as an external object, but is recognized as “me”. The result is the formation of the abstract concept of the body. The body is not a physical collection of objects, it is an imaginary border around our body-parts that separates “self” from “other” and thus forms personal identity as stable and gives the subject the illusion of a “whole and complete” sense of self. Before the mirror stage, the subject feels the cracks in their identity by feeling like “a bunch of organs floating around without a body”. The subject feels divided into multiple body-parts (“part-objects” in psychoanalysis) – I am a liver with some limbs with a heart with a brain with a stomach with… “The body”, as we know it, is not physical but abstract, it gives the subject a sense of wholeness because it is the very idea that “a whole is more than the sum of its parts” but applied to identity. After the mirror stage, there is a surplus – other than each individual body part you now have “the body”.

Failure to successfully pass through the mirror stage at that age results in a psychotic structure. Schizophrenics are one example of a group which feel like “a bunch of organs without a body”. Here’s an empirical study. Not all people with a psychotic structure are psychotic in the clinical sense.

Two psychological categories result from the passing through the mirror stage: the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal. Each of them can be mathematically thought of as a vector either starting or ending in the mirror. The ideal-ego is the movement from the real body to the mirror-image. It is the subject who sees their reflection in the mirror as whole and perfect and idealizes it. This is the precursor for idealizing all further images internally in order to strive for something later in life. The ego-ideal is the movement from the mirror-image to the real body. It is the subject who feels like their mirror-image is viewing them as inferior. The mirror image is the first idealized object according to Lacan’s theory because it provides the subject with a coherent and “whole” alternative to the fragmented experience of their body-parts before passing through it. All later idealizations in life are unconscious re-experiences of the mirror stage. For example: the ideal-ego is found in the thought “Wow look at all these models on Instagram, I want to look like them” while the ego-ideal is found in the thought “Wow look at all these models on Instagram, I will never look like them”.

How do we fit Lacan’s theory of identity-formation into my technological determinist interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism? In regards to the mirror stage, two things can be changed by technology: the real body-parts and the mirror-image.

The real body-parts are changed mostly with the progression in medicine, but lately also in the collaboration between medicine and mechanical engineering or computer science. Surgery allowed people to slowly “add” more parts to their body – from metal rods in the early days to entire limbs nowadays and to 3D-printed organs in the near future. Vaccines also allowed the introduction of a foreign liquid into the body. In each of these cases, there was a force in the population who rebelled against modifications into the body, tending to be conservative in nature and supported by religion with the older population overrepresented in them. Dissecting dead bodies in order to study human anatomy was first outlawed and viewed as sinful, now vaccines are evil and the elite is conspiring to put microchips in your brain.

The sexual revolution came with its own technological advancements: better abortion methods and better birth-control. Medicine further advanced and the possibility for transsexualism is becoming clearer with the development of hormone-replacement therapy and sex-reassignment surgeries. The list will continue as technology progresses. The point is that the groups that tend to be against one tend to be against the others as well. Vaccines, abortion, birth control, surgery, trans-sexuality – all of these are part of capitalism’s progression into the cyborg subject. The body is modified by technology and around half of the population is scared by having to rethink the boundaries of the body. Conservatives are marked by a strong identification with the body-parts – you change the body; you change the sense of self. It is a mistake when each of these issues are taken separately because they all involve a common concern – how do we deal with the issue of transhumanism?

On the flipside, not only the real body but the mirror-image has developed as well. Lacan didn’t take into account how technology can change “mirrors themselves” and how throughout history this mirror stage may make children pass through that stage in different ways. The mirror-stage existed well enough before the invention of the first mirror – children could see their reflection in water or other reflective surfaces, but didn’t that change the way of identification itself? The water-reflection is way less “whole and perfect” and way more “fragmented and wobbly” than the actual mirror-image. In late-stage capitalism, the mirror now advances to the camera. People use their front-camera on their phones as a mirror in public. And you can add filters to this camera to enhance your appearance. Less than a week ago TikTok released a new hyper-realistic filter to make yourself prettier and the possibilities are both scary and exciting. Before we explore how this filter, as well as the possibility of future technologies, can change the way we view our identity (including sexual identity), let us take a look at how any mental illness is morphed through culture and the economic system.

 

III: IT’S NOT JUST IN YOUR HEAD – ALL MENTAL DISTRESS IS “A TREND”

 

            The current economic system (now, capitalism) is the air we breathe. Certain physical illnesses can only develop and transmit inside environments with air, for example, certain viruses couldn’t develop inside the sea to be transmitted between fish. However, you wouldn’t say that “air” has caused a certain virus, for example. Air was a necessary but not sufficient condition for its development, hence why it couldn’t have developed inside water. The air you breathe morphs the way the virus develops and mutates, and it’s in the exact same way we need to view “mental disorders” too. The question of whether mental illness is a trend or not is both yes and no. Yes, because capitalism, as well as the stage we are in its progression, morphs the way in which it manifests. No, because certain factors remain constant throughout economic systems. A certain cause or “real issue” that can affect humans will manifest itself through one or more symptoms, the form of these symptoms being morphed by environmental conditions.

            Most of modern psychology is very reductive of what “environmental causes” implies. Mental illness is correctly thought to be caused by either biological causes (“nature”) or environmental causes (“nurture”), or both (usually). But when psychologists speak of environmental factors, they almost always only speak of them at “the micro level” – stress, work, family, personal relationships, loneliness, etc. They rarely speak of environmental factors at “the macro level” – the society and culture in which you grow up. Psychology focuses too much on one’s relationship to small others and too little on one’s relationship to the big Other.

            In my last article I showed that fear of abandonment is a product of capitalism: “The symptom of “fear of abandonment”, for instance, couldn’t have existed in feudalism since there was barely any abandonment in the first place, social relations were fixed, stable and long-term: the fear was the opposite, that you were stuck with the same spouse/landlord/serf/etc. for life. The presence of so many options of social relations inside capitalism, through the introduction of long-distance communication, makes the durability and stability of them way more fragile. (…)   Social relations are becoming way more fragile as well. The availability of so many options for friendship or romantic and sexual relationships through the internet accelerates the fear that you may be abandoned once your other has found someone who is better to replace you.”.

            The increase in depression rates and decrease in the rates of psychosomatic illness (“hysteria”) is also a by-product of our society. It’s what Byun-Chul Han calls the transition from “Foucault’s disciplinary society” to “The Burnout Society”:

 

“It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul. Depression also follows from impoverished attachment, which is a characteristic of the increasing fragmentation and atomization of life in society. The self, in the strong sense of the word, still represents an immunological category. However, depression eludes all immunological schemes. It erupts at the moment when the achievement-subject is no longer able to be able. First and foremost, depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability. The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”

(Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”, Chapter 2: Beyond Disciplinary Society)

 

            Back in Freud’s days a century ago, depression was not the most commonly studied illness, but it was hysteria – the presence of psychological concerns manifested in physical symptoms. The feeling of being censored may manifest as selective mutism, or maybe a chronic cough (“trying to get something out of your mouth”), the feeling of being unable to do something about an issue may manifest as a paralyzed limb (“having your hands tied”), back pain may be the physical symbolization of “carrying the world on your shoulders” and so on. Hysteria is a manifestation of a repressive society full of censorship – once you cannot express yourself in words or actions, being prohibited in a disciplinary society, your wishes to speak or do a certain thing may manifest themselves in the body. In the modern burnout society, the subject is free to express itself, the issue is quite the opposite: it is forced to do so – be yourself, follow your dreams, etc. We have moved in one century from the society of prohibition to the achievement-society in which we have high standards that we cannot achieve. Social media is one of the causes. We are told to express ourselves before there is anything to express. The result is not mass hysteria but mass depression.

            This goes to show how the biological risk-factors of any mental illness will take various shapes or forms depending on the environmental factors in the life of the person, environmental factors that are ultimately shaped by the society in which they are born. ADHD is another example of an increasing diagnosis and it is no surprise that early psychoanalysts didn’t even speak of this disorder – what do you expect out of a society in which everything is getting more fast-paced? We have moved from watching 30-minute Youtube videos to 30-second TikToks. Albums and songs are getting shorter. It takes less time to enter a romantic relationship just like it takes less time to exit one, and divorce rates are rising – everything is quick. There is no need for biological reductionism here because it is not just in your head. ADHD is absolutely a trend, but that doesn’t mean that people are “faking it” or that it is even possible to return to the past.

            The reason I gave all these examples is to show how the psychological experiences of an individual can split the population into two “camps” depending on whether the individual freezes the present or freezes the past, both two grave mistakes. The conservative-reactionary response to psychological distress is to invent a mythical past and then invoke a “return to normality”. In the conservative-reactionary paradigm, mental illness does not exist or is not a serious concern, it is ”a trend”, an “invention of the current times”. Inside the most Republican or Republican circles, the “alpha male” tells you that “back in our days, we did not whine that we are depressed, we got our jobs done”, with an emphasis on the “back in our days”.

            The liberal-progressive reaction is the opposite: they “freeze the present” and act like the current conditions were always there in the same place – you see the opposite mistake in your typical “woke” PMC Democrat voter: biological reductionism, the myth of the chemical imbalance, a fetishism for science and citing studies without interpreting them properly, and so on.

            Both of these reactions are partially wrong but also get half of the story right. The reactionary response is right in that the psychological distress in our times is “a trend” because the current evolution of our society morphs and shapes the way in which mental syndromes manifest – just like depression and ADHD are “a trend” of late-stage capitalism, so was hysteria “a trend” of the early 1900’s and so is fear of abandonment “a trend” of capitalism at large because it couldn’t have existed inside feudalism. Their solution is poor because it invokes a return to a pre-mythical past. The conservative paradigm ignores both the present and the future and universalizes the past.

            The liberal “socially progressive” mistake is to be “up to date” with the current developments of an economic system and to take them for granted as universal. The liberal argument is that what is a trend now has always been there in the past and will always be there in the future. The paradox of progressivism is that society is in constant change and yet it is not at the same time. The social-progressive will always bring up how a current trend (ex: depression, gender dysphoria, etc.) has always existed in repressed form and only now it has surfaced because now it is normalized and back in the past it was just as common but people didn’t talk about it. They also ignore the future and fail to ever make any prediction about how the current conditions might be morphed in the advances of technology from now on. Hence this liberal, PMC ideology is only faux-progressivism since the only dimension of time it takes into account is the present. For the “woke” faux-progressive, the present has always been like this and will always be like this, and hence, they unconsciously believe that society is not in constant motion. The faux-progressive is always distracted by “the current thing”, the current politicized topic, and when some shiny new fancy thing will be a “hot topic” to debate, they will forget about the previous topic.

            From the historical materialist (“Marxist”) viewpoint, both of these stances should be viewed as two sides of the coin of ideology. The critique of ideology was started by Marx (and further developed by Zizek) in his assessment that capital drives ideas and political beliefs as well – and hence, mainstream political ideologies are mainstream only because they sell, they are a commodity to be bought and sold and whichever political divide can generate the most capital will be the one who is promoted. According to historical materialism, the ideas that people have are generated by the material conditions they live in more than the other way around.

            A proper critique of ideology puts things into historical context. There is no critique of ideology without comparing the present with the past and ideally also making predictions for the near-future. To quickly quote Wikipedia: “Engels expressed irritation with dilettante academics who sought to knock up their skimpy historical knowledge as quickly as possible into some grand theoretical system that would explain “everything” about history. He opined that historical materialism and the theory of modes of production were being used as an excuse for not studying history.”

            After introducing all these theoretical elements, we can finally return to the question of sexual identity that I teased with in the beginning of the article. Is gender dysphoria a trend? The conservative-reactionary answer is the same answer as with all mental illnesses: there was no such thing in the past, all these mental illnesses are part of an ideology that is “contaminating” the youth like a virus and it must be eliminated for the good of society in order for us to return to some mythical past that actually never existed. The archetypical reactionary views depression as an idea in your mind that is turning young people “weak” and “whiny” and thus the normalization of depression is a virus that must be removed in order to return to “the days of glory” in the past. Just like that it views gender ideology as “a trend” that never existed in the past and that is harming children, and if people stopped talking about it, or started talking about the opposite, it would disappear. The reactionary paradigm views ideas they disagree with as viruses that appear randomly, without cause, just like mutations in a gene when speaking of biology. The reactionary answer is to remove those viruses as quickly as possible in order to “return to normality”. According to the reactionary, dangerous ideologies pop out of nowhere and must be either ignored or fought against, because they are a “virus” that contaminates the “normal state of the universe”. Nazism viewed Jews in that same way.

            The reactionary invokes a return to the oceanic feeling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_feeling

            The democrat party in America showed their reactionary side after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 in which they treated the rise of “Trumpism” in the same way that Trumpism treats the rise of “gender ideology”. Very rarely you saw in the democrat party people who treated the rise of the alt-right as a symptom of the material conditions that people live in (and those who did, like Sanders, Tulsi or Yang, were treated as outsiders). The “orange man bad” democrat viewed the rise of Trump, “white supremacy” and so on as viruses that contaminated the “normal” functioning of politics. The democrat party turned reactionary when they invoked the return to a pre-mythical past where politics was “normal”. The reactionary invents a “normal” past that never existed and invokes the return to normality. For the reactionary democrat, every election is the most important election in the history of America and any Republican is worse than Hitler and a threat to democracy itself. They lied to themselves that getting Trump out of office is the most important task and that it will suddenly return us to the oceanic feeling of the “normal politics”.

            The centre-left liberal “social-progressive” has still not fallen into this reactionary paradigm and they will diminish the importance of the past, instead being stuck to every new object as if it was the only object that ever existed. Thus, they universalize the present, “freezing time” as I previously explained – and that’s why they make a mistake in diminishing the importance of current trends in the morphing of our sexual identities. All of our identities are products of our material conditions we live in, including sexual identity. Hence why conservatives are partially correct when they say that transgenderism is a trend. A feeling of gender dysphoria may have always existed in certain people but their possibilities of expressing it were more limited. Technological progress gives the subject more freedom into altering their body, or other aspects of their personal identity (selfies, social media profile or other things that represent “you”) and thus the very way we think of our sense of self changes. If hormone-replacement therapy is viewed as a second puberty for trans-sexual people then humanity as a whole is not going through a second puberty, but a second mirror stage. The mistake is viewing technology as simply a tool subservient to our desires. The relationship is double in the sense that just like technology can fulfill our desires, it can also change our desires.

            The increase in possibilities of fulfilling one’s desires make the subject raise the threshold for what constitutes proper satisfaction and thus you always want more and more and you are never satisfied. What we want to do in life is shaped by what we are allowed to do in life. Thus, the very invention of sex-reassignment surgeries and hormone-therapy morphed and shaped the way in which gender dysphoria manifested itself. The specific ways in which LGBT culture, pronouns and identification works is the “trend” part of gender dysphoria. The conservative critique of gender ideology is problematic because it does not view it as a symptom of the material conditions we live in, instead viewing it as an ideological problem in of itself, as the cause. The liberal-progressive mistake is in essentializing current developments in gender ideology as universal – “it has always been like this, it will always be like this and you are not allowed to question it”.

But the array of gender identities, the bathroom debate and so on were inevitable to happen inside capitalism. With enough work we could have predicted this a few decades ago if we were to realize that late-stage capitalism works on higher and higher levels of abstraction on any level. For example, on the level of money, we moved from cash to money in the bank, to the removal of the golden standard (now one dollar was not equated with a certain amount of gold), to cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and to NFTs. Each development is more abstract than the other, the connection to reality is lost more and more and each development has a stronger and clearer dependency on “the subject supposed to lose” (ex: it is clear how NFTs only have value because of “the fool”, the last person who will remain with the NFT not having anyone to buy it, and thus the entire value of NFTs is dependent on an idiot who will not be able to sell it back to anyone else – with crypto this relationship is less obvious, with money in the bank it’s even less obvious). Not only that, but with each development in currency, the cost to the climate is bigger: crypto-mining damages the climate more than banks, NFTs more than crypto. So could have the politicization of gender dysphoria have been predicted, to quote my previous article:

 

It’s the same case when “sex” does not refer to “intercourse” but “man and woman”. Feminism inside early capitalism, dominated by simple/classic objectification, was concerned with the rights of individual women, about “individual objects of the woman class”, so to speak, to continue the analogy with programming. In late-stage capitalism, we worry not about individual, specific women, but the very definition of the word “woman” itself – so it is like a programmer who is changing the very definition of the classes themselves, not with the particular instances/objects of the class.

(Source: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-internet-and-social-life-under.html)

 

Also, in capitalism, changes to identity are politicized only if they are caused by technological progress. For example, the issue of intersex people is not a political issue, most people don’t have an opinion about it or even know what intersex is. On transgender issues: everyone has an opinion, it is controversial, friendships are broken if you don’t agree with them, etc.

Not only could the politicization of transgender identities have been predicted, but I also want to provide a proper argument as to how the manifestation of sexual identity is temporary by making a forecast about the future. Let us return back to the TikTok filter that was added a few days ago – what stops capitalism from advancing technology enough such that we will be able to wear glasses or contact lenses that “filter” everyone’s faces that I see in real life? Instead of the filter being applied by your phone, what if I put the glasses on and now I can make anyone look however I want? I give it less than 15 years considering how realistic TikTok’s current filter is. With that being said – what does this imply about sexual identity itself? Will we end up in the stage of capitalism in which the changes to identity will not be changes to the body but changes to the mirror-image? That would be the next stage of the “second mirror stage” that capitalism makes us pass through. By making studies upon studies regarding transgender studies and puberty blockers, progressives are missing the point since they will very soon become obsolete. This view of science is problematic since it essentializes gender dysphoria as some sort of “illness with biological causes” that is taken in isolation from the society in which it lives. It is almost impossible to study on the long-term since it is a condition that affects personal identity, but personal identity (your “sense of self”) only makes sense in contrast with the society that it differentiates you from. You change others, you change your sense of self as well – man only exists in relation to others. When we will get to that stage of technological progress in which I can put the glasses on, look in the mirror, and the glasses will change the way I view my body, the entire way in which gender dysphoria manifests will change. It is a condition that is impossible to study on the long-term due to how fast technology progresses. What if I’ll put the glasses on, look in the mirror and view myself as a woman instead of a man? Both social-progressives and social-conservatives are making huge mistakes by attempting to “freeze time” in their own particular way – everything is a trend, but not in the way conservatives imagine.

To summarize/conclude my chaotic discourse: there is nothing essential or universal about the way in which sexual identity manifests now. It is simply one stage in the development of capitalism. Technological advancement alters the way in which we view our entire sense of self, our entire identity, including sexual identities. Liberals are wrong when they freeze the present and talk about transgenderism as if it always manifested itself like this. Conservatives are wrong (among other things) in viewing gender ideology as “appearing out of nowhere” instead of as a product of material conditions. The issue of “trans” is part of the larger issue of transhumanism. The issue of sex-reassignment, transgender bathrooms and so on must not be isolated from the debates surrounding vaccines, abortion, microchips or other changes to the body or to its representations. They are all part of the larger development in capitalism in which technological progress alters our sense of self through modifications to the body or to modifications to the body’s representations (pictures, selfies, social media, camera filters, and up next: virtual reality, 3D holograms, robots that look identical to you and will mimic your movements, cloning, and who knows what will come next). This issue must be raised to the larger philosophical issue regarding what is the body and where is the boundary between “self” and “others” and it can only be properly debated once it is put in the right historical context, taking into account both the past and the future predictions.

 

IV: HYPERREALITY AND THE FUTURE OF CYBERSEX

 

            Jean Baudrillard came up with the term hyperreality in his book Simulacra and Simulation to refer to a representation that has become reality in-of-itself. The hyperreality is the order of simulacra, and simulacra are not simulations of reality but a simulation with no original, or with an original that has been lost or has become “insignificant” somehow. In the beginning of the book, he gives the example of the fable in which the map of a country has become so big and so detailed that it’s as big as the country, and identical to itself. Hyperreality is the future of late-stage capitalism as well since it is technology that allows us to turn out fantasies into “a new reality”. No longer are the days in which fantasy is a separate, imaginary realm distinguished from reality. The line between fantasy and reality gets blurred, simulation replaces reality and technology creates, thus, a new virtual reality that can be more easily modified by the coordinates of our fantasy. By virtual reality I am not only referring to the recently-developed “VR headset”, although that is also a big part of how the future will look like (the “metaverse” and so on), but you can even think of social media or video games as examples of hyperreality. They are virtual worlds in which our fantasies are projected – on social media, I can create a new persona. In a video game, I can customize my character to look more similar to how I wanted to look in real life. The more capitalism advances, the more technology progresses, and thus simulation gets more and more “realistic”. The end of capitalism will be that precise point in time in which simulation will be absolutely indistinguishable from reality – we will have created a virtual reality that can mimic the five senses well enough that you may as well just call it reality. That will be the beginning of post-capitalism, or socialism. I give it less than 100 years. We will also not speak of one hyperreality but of multiple ones, choosing the one you like the most.

            In explaining how fantasy works in psychoanalysis, Slavoj Zizek gives, in one of his Youtube lectures (don’t remember which) the example of Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go is not a video-game that creates a virtual reality separate from real-life, but it augments reality. You walk around in real life catching Pokemon, but you view reality through your phone screen, and your phone camera captures the real world but “augments” it by adding a bunch of Pokemon. That is how fantasy works in psychoanalysis – it is not an imagination separate from reality, but it is the filter through which you view reality. To add one of my examples: notice how most people view concerts nowadays through the screen of their phones. The excuse is that they are “recording the concert”, but what about a deeper psychoanalytic interpretation – what if the recording was just an excuse to view reality through a filter, as if late-stage capitalism has made reality itself with its special effects so stimulating that you must have a filter to view it through. Reality is too “violent”, too “intense”, too “much”, and we use the phone filter as a protective filter to “soften” it a bit. It is not only that spending so much time on the internet has made us hyper-sensitive to reality, but also that reality itself is becoming more and more intense as well in the big cities: traffic, pollution, a lot of lights and advertisements, there are so many stimuli that your brain receives by just walking down the street that we can’t help but just stare into our phones because of how intense reality can get.

            On the matter of relations between people, I am reminded here of the (in)famous Zizek quote from Abercrombie’s 2003 Back To School Catalogue: "The only successful sexual relationship occurs when the fantasies of the two partners overlap. If the man fantasizes that making love is like riding a bike and the woman wants to be penetrated by a stud, then what truly goes on while they make love is that a horse is riding a bike...with a fantasy like that, who needs a personality?"

            Towards the end of an economic system, we start to “honestly” do the symptom that we’ve been repressing in the beginning. The fantasy inherent to love relationships will be embedded into digital hyperreality. One such move will be with the rise of AI that will change the way we view texting, to quote one of my previous articles:

 

“What if ChatGPT, or a similar bot, can make an impression of such a realistic social interaction that you could never trust any written interaction with strangers unless you see their webcam? We know that it is already possible, but only for short-term social interaction, but what if these bots evolve enough that they will be able to hold online friendships for months or years upon end, remembering all the details of the past conversations?

This is why I make a prediction that in 5-10 years, it will become impossible to hit on people by chatting them up on Tinder, Facebook, Instagram or any social media that functions by text. The fear is not that the person you are talking to is a bot – the fear will be that they will be a human using a bot. Imagine this: I see a hot girl on Instagram, I input into ChatGPT a few personal details about myself and about herself, and then I tell ChatGPT to go seduce her. Then I, the real human, will simply see the conversation unfold under my eyes while ChatGPT does all the work.

But what if she does the same? What if she’s also a human using a bot? She will see me and also use ChatGPT to respond to my conversation in the same way.

I will be behind my screen, watching the conversation unfold, and thinking: “Hah, she actually fell for it! She’s actually texting me while I’m letting the AI do all the work!”. And she will be behind her own screen, watching the conversation unfold and thinking: “Hah, he actually fell for it? He’s actually texting me while I’m letting the AI do all the work!”.

But, behind this illusion, what if we both fall in love, and I actually fall in love with the way “she” texts me, not knowing that it’s a robot talking to “me”, and she falls in love with the way “I” text her, not knowing that it’s a robot talking to “her”? And we both fall in love with “each other” without ever exchanging a word, when it’s just two robots doing all the talking? The future is now. And the more terrifying question is – how much of this hypothetical scenario is simply the more upfront and “extreme” version of what we were already doing anyway in real life?”

 

            The issue that many sci-fi films miss is that the transition to the next economic system will not only be marked by robots becoming more and more “human-like” and then asking for their rights (ex: “Detroit: Become Human” or “Steins; Gate 0”), they forget that this is counter-acted by humans themselves becoming more and more “robot-like”. If robots are becoming more and more humanoid then humans themselves are turning into cyborgs. It is not just changes to our body (birth control, vaccines, medicine, cosmetic surgery, sex-reassignment surgery, etc.) that infuse the human with technology, but changes to the human’s representation of their identity as well, like I previously said. The quote above is an example of this: the problem will not be that an AI on Tinder will pretend to be a real girl (this is already happening), the problem will also be that real men and women will use AI to enhance their “speech skills”. If the issue of Tinder bots is the issue of "AI becoming human-like" then the issue I quoted above will be the issue of "humans becoming cyborgs".

            This naturally leads onto the problem of sexual intercourse and whether there will ever be such a thing as long-distance sex. The answer is yes – there are already developments towards virtually interconnected sex toys with reciprocal motions. From this to virtually interconnected sex robots is not a long path. The idea will look like this: two people in a relationship with each other, A and B, will be able to create sex dolls that look identical to themselves and that they will be able to remote control by the sex dolls mimicking the real person’s movements. A will have a robot-clone of A and B will have a robot-clone of B. A and B may move to different countries, so A will keep B’s clone and B will keep A’s clone. They will connect to each other remotely, so B’s clone will move exactly like B in real life and A’s clone will move exactly like A in real life. This is how long-distance sex can work: while A is fucking B’s clone, B will be fucked by A’s clone with the exact same motions that A is doing in real life to the clone of B.

            But this is not all! What if we can customize the motions according to our liking? In that case, the robots will provide invertible functions that can morph the real-life movement of A into a slightly different movement of A’s clone, and the same with B. So if B doesn’t like that A fucks them too soft, B can instruct the clone of A to “multiply by 2” the force that A uses in real life. A thrust of a certain force in A’s real-life fucking of B’s clone will be translated into a thrust of double the force in A’s clone that is fucking real-life B. Or other similar settings. And of course, if you don’t like how your partner looks in real life, you would also be allowed to customize the appearance of their robot-clone that you are actually touching.

            This is important to the issue of sexual identity since psychoanalysis teaches us that sexual identity is about sex. Modern Lacanians such as Alenka Zupancic or Joan Copjec have criticized the notion of “gender”, but not along conservative grounds – but because it de-sexualizes sex. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, “sex” or “sexuality” does not refer inherently to either an activity nor to a social categorization. Sex is a function of language. Sex is not repressed, but it comes as a by-product of repressing something non-sexual. Language itself is incomplete and inconsistent, and that inconsistency inside language itself is what we call “sex”. Sex is then like a substance that can “contaminate” anything and turn it sexual. If an activity is sexualized, we call it “having sex”. If a social division is sexualized, we call it “being” a certain sex (man or woman). If a joke is sexualized, we call it a dirty or sexual joke. If a body part is sexualized, we call it a sexual organ. Joan Copjec noted how in psychoanalysis, sexuality is neither cultural nor biological, but comes precisely at the clash between both, as a result of the tension between the two. The cultural sexuality (sex for pleasure) is composed of the sexual drives, the natural sexuality (reproduction) is composed of the sexual instincts, and it is precisely the tension and conflict between the two that makes something “sexy” or “dirty”.

            Alenka Zupancic ironized the idea of gender as “sex without sex”, just like capitalism takes the substance out of each product: beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, soda without sugar and so on. To this list we add gender: sex without sex. The point of psychoanalysis is that being or having sex are two questions that are ultimately related, hence why we use the same word for both. You can not answer the ontological question of sex (What sex am I – am I a man or a woman?) without answering functional questions about sex (How do I have sex? How do I want to have sex?). Instead of gender identity, it makes more sense to speak of sexual identity. Sexual orientation is the question of who you want to fuck, so sexual identity is the question of how do you want to be when fucking.

            Again we come to the question of trans-sexuality as inherently related to the question of trans-humanism. Cybersex will change sexual identity, the question is – how?