Engineering Desire: Algorithmic Environments and the Promise of Wholeness

This book develops a Lacanian account of how data-driven technologies restructure desire and reshape subjectivity. Rather than treating algorithmic systems merely as tools of prediction or control, it argues that contemporary technological environments engage the subject at the level of its structural longing for wholeness. Why do technological promises remain so compelling? Artificial intelligence, digital platforms and algorithmic systems continue to attract extraordinary levels of attention, investment and hope. Their transformative promise persists despite visible shortcomings, recurring disappointments and mounting social and environmental concerns.Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Ciano Aydin offers a new way of understanding this enduring appeal. Shifting attention from behavior to desire and from power to receptivity, he reveals the existential dimensions of our investment in algorithmic environments. Using Tinder as a paradigmatic case, the book shows how these environments increasingly organize desire itself by offering recognition, orientation, certainty and the fantasy of wholeness.But algorithmic environments are not merely sites of illusion. The same systems that sustain fantasies of self-knowledge and completion can also lay bare the structure of desire itself. Engineering Desire offers a distinctive framework for understanding both the risks and possibilities of contemporary technological life, rethinking singular self-formation as a possibility within technological mediation.