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. 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. By presenting preferences as coherent and knowable, they cultivate the illusion that the divided subject can finally become complete. Focusing on platforms such as Tinder, the book shows how algorithmic mediation transforms intimacy, recognition, and selfhood, bringing both risks and possibilities. Data-driven systems can obscure the constitutive lack at the heart of subjectivity while also opening spaces to confront it. Against views that frame desire as the pursuit of objects, the author advances a Lacanian perspective in which desire is structured by absence itself and explores how technological design might sustain more singular forms of subject formation. Bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into dialogue with contemporary philosophy of technology, Engineering Desire develops a theory of data-driven technologies as lived environments that organize and transform the conditions of desire. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in philosophy of technology, media and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and sociology.