The rub of a satin sheet against skin anesthetized by constant stimulus doesn’t produce a single shiver. In a room saturated by the glow of three simultaneous screens, someone searches for the next level of transgression with the apathy of someone checking a utility bill. There is no sweat. No racing pulse. Only the hum of an air conditioner trying to hide the void of a freedom that no longer knows what to do with itself. The taboo—that necessary border that keeps desire from dissolving—has been carpet-bombed into a flat landscape. Visual freedom burns. It literally tires you out, and nobody admits it.
Sade would have watched this scene with infinite sadness. He, who required castles and laws for his rebellion to hold meaning, would find himself lost today in a world where scandal is just a cheap marketing strategy to sell subscriptions. When everything is permitted, pleasure becomes a formality. We have democratized perversion to such an extent that we have rendered it harmless. Transgression is no longer an act of sovereignty; it is a catalog obligation.
He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. But he keeps scrolling.
The Bureaucracy of the Orgasm: The Algorithm of Satiety
It is almost touching to observe how we struggle to find a new frontier to cross. The router blinks with a frigid blue light, reminding us that infinity is just a click away, and yet, we have never felt so limited. We notice something contracting in the collective marrow when we realize that excess is not the solution to desire, but its euthanasia.
The system does not sell liberation. It sells the repetition of the spasm.
Nothing more.
And it succeeds. Once the subject has seen everything, their capacity for wonder is reduced to rubble. The mechanics of this new apathy are of an icy precision: they allow us to consume everything while feeling absolutely nothing. Maybe it isn’t a mistake of modernity. Or maybe we were always beings who needed the “no” to enjoy the “yes.” It isn’t serious. But it isn’t innocent either.
And the problem is this: the limit was the only refuge
There is a shoe scuff on the parquet, a trace of a party that ended hours ago, that no one bothers to clean. Sade understood that true power resides in secrecy, but we have decided to live in a display case lit by stadium floodlights. There are no dark corners left in the imagination. When the taboo dies, desire becomes a biological function as exciting as digesting a vending machine sandwich.
Who has the courage to close their eyes today? Maturity in this era of total transparency consists of accepting that we are starving for prohibitions. We’ve been convinced that the lack of limits is the goal, but the skin becomes insensitive when contact is mandatory. In the end, the boredom of excess is not a lack of options; it is the realization that, without walls, there is nothing left to conquer. Or maybe it always was this way and only now are we cynical enough to admit it.
Inventory of a Flat Desire
We explore a map where sin has been replaced by user preference. The fetish of total visibility has handed us a catalog of experiences so vast that the tremor has become impossible. We are subjects seeking confirmation of our own potency in accumulation, forgetting that true intensity was always a matter of scarcity.
Maybe it isn’t a lack of desire.
Maybe desire has just become too intelligent to fall for the trap of the obvious.
And tomorrow we will return to that screen. We will look for something that gives us back the ability to blink with force, while the electric hum continues to fill the room. As if we didn’t know that, at the end of the day, the only taboo we have left is silence. Boredom is the heaviest lingerie we have decided to wear. And it weighs too much.
