“Rather than a human liberated to explore the virtual realms of human sexuality, we are closer to William Burroughs’ machine junkies, or Samuel Butler’s vision of humans serving as deterritorialized parts of a machine sexuality, like bees for flowers. An array of browser tabs flushed with pixelated epidermis are foliated tips of an alluring bloom exciting the reproductive instincts of its prosthetic partner, the screen an openmouthed cuckoo feigning hunger for his sex; the dopamine hits of social media implant a compulsion to enact our instinctual social instincts through a machine intent on recording the imprint of its hotheaded prey as it smears its informatic pollen, swipe by swipe, further afield, drawing off a surplus for its own ends. The future, sex × technology, no longer belongs to lone pioneers of virtuality, triumphant aristocrats of perversion, latter-day des Esseinteses achieving self-realization by following the vectors of art and artificialization to their most outrageous conclusions. There has been no Ballardian odyssey from the capillaries of the conventional through the deltas of the phylogenetic unconscious toward the great ocean of the virtual. Instead we have embarked on a collective drift away from behaviors vectored toward the executive function of procreation, out of the territories policed by evolutionary imperatives, toward zones of virtuality defined instead by the polar magnetism of least resistance and maximized financial return, cross-tabulated with ever-increasing efficiency by attention-monitoring systems. Shifting the bounds within which animal affect had been lagooned by its genetic inheritance, hooking up basic procreative and survival instincts to machinic reproductive apparatuses from elsewhere, contemporary supernormal culture rechannels them into a series of disappointingly conservative compulsions and conventional transcendences: clinical skin displays, hyperbolic invocations of nature and purity, hyperactive ecstasies and infantile boutique comforts; an elaborate range of adornments to enhance the status and competitiveness of the individual.”
Hyperplastic-Supernormal by Robin Mackay