Conflict is not an aberration of modernity; it is the essential product of our systems. Technologies, markets, and institutions do not simply stumble into conflict—they generate and depend upon it. This is not a metaphor, but a structural fact: complex systems reproduce the conditions that reproduce them. Conflict is not a regrettable waste product but the very signal that sustains circulation. As Heraclitus observed, “war is father of all” (Heraclitus, 1931), and the resonance of that insight can be traced through Hobbes’s fear (Hobbes, 1651), Marx’s exploitation (Marx, 1867), and Foucault’s disciplines (Foucault, 1977). But contemporary infrastructures automate and accelerate what earlier societies had to maintain with armies or priests. Platforms are optimized for engagement, engagement is stoked by outrage, outrage is cheap to generate and endlessly recombinable. The cycle closes not in error but in design.
The tesseract is not a cube with decorated faces—it is the higher-order folding of recursion itself. In one dimension, dissatisfaction appears as an emotional itch; in two, as competition; in three, as institutional adversarialism. In four, these collapse into each other, becoming indistinguishable. What looks like political antagonism can be monetized as media spectacle, which in turn structures economic asymmetry, which then feeds back into psychological unease. Each dimension folds through the others, so that no part can be isolated. The geometry of this recursion is not incidental—it is the architecture of amplification. Conflict becomes the carrier wave; unhappiness the renewable fuel.
Why does the machine prefer conflict? Because improvement, the premise of technology, is by definition never finished. A closed project betrays its logic. Endless projects require endless energy. That energy is dissatisfaction, carefully provoked and perpetually unresolved. Systems amplify felt insufficiency, promise its repair, monetize the pursuit, and defer closure. The dissatisfaction is not a side-effect, it is the medium. A world without it would starve the machine. Peace is not profitable (Zuboff, 2019).
Attempts to escape founder on the same recursion. The very act of opting out is captured as signal: resistance becomes engagement, critique becomes content, departure becomes deviance. Ellul (1964) described the autonomy of technique; Winner (1986) called it somnambulism; Virilio (1977) showed how speed generates its own accidents. In practice, this means no external vantage point is allowed. “Outside” is absorbed into the interior of the system. Even the dream of an exit becomes part of the fuel.
What, then, of sustainability? Systems that monetize conflict eat their own substrate. Trust, attention, civic patience—once consumed, they do not replenish on demand. Short-term yields rise, but long-term carrying capacity collapses. This is not a moral argument but systems accounting. A machine that burns its conditions of survival cannot last. That is why the refusal to admit the objective function is so dangerous. Corporations, governments, universities—none can afford to say it aloud: the system thrives when we do not. To admit it would undermine their legitimacy. So denial persists, and the spiral tightens.
The first step is brutal honesty. Technology as presently optimized is not designed to solve human problems but to reproduce them. Conflict is its tesseract—recursive, multidimensional, binding and blinding at once. Naming this does not guarantee liberation, but it provides the only chance of engagement that is not somnambulist. To deny it is to deepen the trance. To admit it is to risk something else: not escape, but orientation. Only then can we begin to redirect the recursion away from destruction and toward a form of life less dependent on unhappiness as its core fuel.
References
Ellul, J. (1964) The Technological Society. New York: Knopf.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon.
Heraclitus (1931) On the Universe (Loeb Classical Library LCL150), fr. 53. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan. London: Andrew Crooke.
Marx, K. (1867) Capital: Volume I. Hamburg: Otto Meissner Verlag.
Virilio, P. (1977) Speed and Politics. New York: Semiotext(e).
Winner, L. (1986) The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile.
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