Donatien Alphonse François de Sade understood that desire is a hunt. It requires darkness, uncertainty, and, above all, the possibility of not finding what one is looking for. Today, however, we live in the era of predictive gratification. Before you even feel the first symptom of a doubt, an algorithm has already served the answer, the product, and the corresponding fetish on a silver platter of pixels. Technology has not liberated our desire; it has made it obsolete by eliminating the distance between lack and satisfaction. We have shifted from being explorers of the forbidden to being consumers of the inevitable.
Mystery has been replaced by loading time.
I smell burnt plastic—that trail left by cables when the cooling fan can’t keep up. It’s an industrial fragrance that sticks to the palate. I wonder if anyone else feels like their own imagination has become an unnecessary residue in a world that has already imagined everything for us. I don’t know. Perhaps the mind is just an engine that runs too hot trying to process a reality that already comes pre-chewed.
The Dictatorship of Recommendation: The End of Drift
Curiosity used to be a system error, a deviation that led us to places where we weren’t supposed to be. Now, recommendation systems have perfected the art of keeping us in a loop of the familiar. If Sade were alive today, his “catalog” of perversions would be a TikTok feed perfectly optimized for his psychological profile, removing the danger of surprise. The algorithm doesn’t want you to discover anything new; it wants you to desire more of the same until your capacity for wonder atrophies from lack of use.
Sometimes, the truth is a stain that won’t come out. Like the ring left by a hot cup of coffee on an expensive desk.
I just bit my lip by accident. A small biological error, a metallic taste that brings me back to reality while the cursor blinks with an almost insulting insistence.
Mental Health as Office Furniture
It is ironic that they sell us mental health as if it were a kind of modern decoration—an indoor plant that needs watering with mindfulness apps—while the system empties us of all will. Sade knew that true health is the capacity to exercise sovereignty over one’s own chaos. Today, that sovereignty is a nuisance to market efficiency. They prefer us anesthetized by predictability, turned into a series of data points that never stray from the margin.
I wonder if you, on the other side of the screen, don’t feel like your curiosity is a muscle growing soft from lack of resistance. Or maybe your eyes are just dry. The line is very thin between digital comfort and brain death by excess of convenience.
Order is the graveyard of creativity. Sade preferred the disorder of the cell to the peace of submission; we have chosen the peace of an intuitive interface that saves us the effort of thinking about what we actually want.
The Rebellion of Boredom
There is a strange relief in the idea that we can still be bored. Boredom is the last refuge of real desire, the vacuum where something new can begin to germinate. Sade died asking for his grave to be erased, a final act of resistance against posterity and labeling. Today, subversion consists in searching for what has no label, in forcing the system to return a “no results found.”
Freedom is the right to be lost.
