Advertising sells illuminated absence, incentivising us to pursue idealised selves that remain permanently, profitably out of reach.
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the gap is the product
Tag: desire
Transnational corporate power does not merely strip-mine the material world. That would be amateur hour. It also strip-mines the symbolic order: trust, language, law, legitimacy, attention, aspiration, fear, guilt, hope, all the warm little mammals by which civilisation convinces itself it is not just a spreadsheet wearing perfume. The corporation no longer sells products in […]
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The Human Condition
Psychoanalysis begins with a joke that only works because it fails: the patient arrives burdened with paranoia, anxiety, and unhappiness, and the doctor replies that this is simply the human condition. (Cure denied.) The moment this is understood, the structure collapses. The consulting room becomes a mirror, not a remedy, and what it reflects is […]
Desire does not move in straight lines. It curves. It sustains itself through distance, delay, and asymmetry, forming a logical orbit rather than a trajectory toward fulfilment. What appears in lived experience as longing or pursuit is not a failure of arrival but the mechanism by which relational systems remain open rather than collapse into […]
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Apollo and Daphne
Symmetry, anti-symmetry, and the orbit of desire If art has any enduring value, it lies in the way it makes structure visible. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne does not just illustrate a myth. It renders a relational geometry: two frames locked in a shared field, unable to close without erasing themselves. The sculpture holds a single […]
The cam-streaming economy is not a peripheral adult subculture. It is a mature cybernetic marketplace where intimacy, affirmation, and erotic presence are priced, tokenised, and algorithmically regulated. Such platforms function as marketplaces for behaviours—attention, reciprocation, fantasy—rather than static objects. Thousands of performers broadcast continuously, producing a gradient of interaction from casual chat to explicit performance, […]
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Love Letter to an Unknown Other
An obsession with material beauty is in many ways the natural consequence of an embodied psychological experience implicitly oriented by evolutionary momentum towards the possibility of self-reproduction. In this sense we should not be surprised that the most prevalent symbolic and overt (or corollary hidden, unconscious) forces in this all too human world are intrinsically […]
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An Unbalanced “I”
We all live in half-mirrored labyrinths through which we view this world as a kaleidoscopic, reflective collage of our own dreams, hopes and desires. It is a necessary function of individuality (or ego) to be structured this way – as though “from an inside looking out” – but the difference and differentiation between inner and […]
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Love and other distant horizons…
It never ceases to haunt me that the only love I have ever been able to truly understand has been that in which all aspiration must forever fall short of its goal as though seeking to obtain some infinitely distant horizon that recedes further away with every self-directed step of instinct or reflex taken towards […]
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Turning a profit from loneliness…
Turning a profit from loneliness through the promise and perfect fantasy of attention, loving gratitude and intimacy from beautiful people is the essence of all entertainment, all media and – if we’re to be particularly honest about the underlying psychological symmetries – of all business, all politics and all ideology.
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Femme Fatale
The “femme fatale”, a dangerous, panther-like beauty in which all of man’s desires and fears are realised in one gorgeous, dark and explosive bundle of alluring seduction and imminent volcano-like fury. This is the fantasy of woman upon which an unwitting, gullible and endlessly-amorous male identity anchors itself – in language, image, technology, culture and […]
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Thin Masks of Self-Deception
A different perspective: we are not the actors here – the performers, the customers, the managers or the investors and participants in a system of business and profit extraction or desire and thinly-masked self-gratification. We are the transmission medium for patterns of socioeconomy, communication and identity – the shimmering, rippling, effervescent and sparkling complexity which […]
Daedelus Kite 