The Internet Is Smoothing Sex Into Oblivion

Imagine a chair. Sixty years ago, when life, information, commodities, and capital all moved more slowly, the object our grandparents might have imagined was heavy, wooden and built to last for generations. Today, you’re probably picturing the smooth, fluid lines of a tastefully modern Ikea creation. An object only built to last until the next move-out, which is bound to arrive shortly. The Ikea chair, like most consumer objects and devices today, is made for the fluid lifestyle of the modern person. Its planned obsolescence is not an annoyance to the contemporary consumer but a boon. Why be burdened with an object that threatens to haunt you with its presence for a lifetime?

This example is illustrative of the technological condition of late capitalism, which is affecting our human relationships in staggering ways. Recently, The Guardian reported that many young Japanese people have decided to stop having sex. The article explains the economic and cultural conditions that have lead to this scenario: The future is not certain for many young people, as precarity has come to supersede stability as the de facto mode of the contemporary labor market. It’s tough to settle down when your employment prospects are summed up by, “Maybe Starbucks is hiring?” (they’re not). Long-term relationships are only a potential hindrance to mobility, like the sturdy chairs of the past.

The article also briefly notes the increasing use of online communication technologies as potentially contributing to this mass loss of libido. To get the whole picture we need to take these points together: our current technologies as outcroppings of economic logic, and our sexual behavior as a response to it. Economy becomes pathology, and technology belies a technological condition—the mass mental state it creates. Sex, in this case, focuses our attention around our technological condition and the influence of capitalist logic in human relationships. These days, we like our sex about as smooth as a credit card transaction.

We can see the logic of smoothness play out in the physical world. The design aesthetic of Ikea furniture, Macbooks, iPhones, tablets, and external hard drives speaks to the privileged status of fluidity and mobility as guiding values today. Smooth, uniform to the point of appearing monolithic, and exuding the sense of something we might be tempted to call “organic” but is entirely artificial—these objects represent a technological ideal of smoothness and fluidity made manifest in product design.

Movement without slowing, communication without interruption, data flowing at the speed of light, High Frequency Trading algorithms administrating the world financial market in a system so fast and seemingly perfect as to take leave of any recognizably human rationality or concern—this is the ideal of technological perfection with speed, smoothness, and fluidity at its core.

Human relationships, the human body, even sex, are all subject to it. Franco “Bifo” Berardi put it best in Precarious Rhapsody:

Reducers of complexity such as money, information, stereotypes or digital network interfaces have simplified the relationship with the other, but when the other appears in flesh and blood, we cannot tolerate its presence, because it hurts our (in)sensibility. The video-electronic generation does not tolerate armpit or pubic hair. One needs perfect compatibility in order to interface corporeal surfaces in connection. Smooth generation.

To put it simply: sex is simply much too much. It’s too messy, too disruptive, and the emotions it elicits threaten to hamper our constant mobility. Technologically mediated connection is smooth, and real people are anything but. When someone—a real, physical, thinking, and feeling someone—confronts us in all their human imperfection, we can’t process it. System failure. Does not compute. Let’s hit the bar, I’ve got bottles.

We don’t want mere sex anymore. We want smooth sex. We want an interface, not a connection. We want data transfer, not an exchange of emotion and fluids. Bumps, lumps, and imperfections of all kinds make us uneasy as we crave the smooth, shiny ideal of the technological aesthetic. The thought of a prolonged emotional relationship gives rise to a queasy feeling as we think, with horror, of being tied down.

We no longer find objects which suggest permanence in their sturdy construction and clunky appearance appealing. Our modern comfort is found in completed tasks, closed tabs, used-up products, and ultimately in the promise of quick, planned obsolescence. This is as true for relationships as it is for consumer goods. Our highest values are smoothness and liquidity. It’s cynical and maybe even nihilistic, but it’s not all our fault.

How could we have lived in a world of constant stimulus, anxiety, and a continual panic-mode engendered by instant communications and information flowing at hyper-speed—faster than the human brain can conceive of or process—without experiencing the inevitable side effects? Capitalism is a mode of thought, not just an economic system, and every moment we spend plugged in to the technologies of its communication we are becoming more attuned to its values.

Our technologies of communication influence us as much as we use them. On Twitter, we are sold the familiar narrative of togetherness and communication. And yet, we intuit the truth of the matter: tweets are the base unit of transaction in the Twitter economy which deals in retweets and favourites as social capital. Facebook is chiefly an exercise in self-branding and promotion, though the pretense of representing “our real selves” must be maintained. Note: remember to delete those bar photos you were tagged in over the weekend. Hook-up apps like Tinder allow us to swipe through potential matches at high speed. The digitized visages of potential mates are flattened into the barest semblance of a person as they speed by, barely registering.

One is reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s description of speed in the New Mexico desert in America. “[Speed] is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and and obliterates that cause by outstripping it.” Have you ever stuck your head out a car window Marmaduke-style? Then you know what Baudrillard is talking about.

At high speed, everything becomes blurred, and ultimately everything looks the same. Everything comes at us as what Baudrillard called an “affectless succession” of images. Affectlessness: it’s a symptom of speed. Relationships—real, full, emotional ones—can hardly form in this mental landscape.

It’s no wonder that sex is being made as transient and fluid as possible, or being done away with altogether like the young people in Japan living with frightening degrees of precarity. It’s no wonder that we desire technological perfection over human messiness—and that robots themselves are increasingly becoming the object of our sexual desire. We’re simply not mentally equipped to cope with the speed of the treadmill we’re forced to run on, and machines are. In response, we are attempting to become more machine-like. We are subjecting every aspect of life, including sex and relationships, to the rule of speed, fluidity, and efficiency.

We need to slow down. The problem is that speed, transience, and fluidity are part and parcel of capitalism. The automation of factories was one of the first instances of this trend, and we have seen it accelerated to staggering degrees with the advent of online communication technologies and virtual finance capital. Slowness is intolerable. Disjuncture must be smoothed. Time—your time—is money, as they say. To slow down is to act against capital.

We need a large scale mental shift from capitalist pathologies of anxious transience and chronic isolation. This begins with a mental break from the daily grind of constant communication, constant social leveraging, and constant exchange. I don’t mean planned “digital detox” times so we can reinsert ourselves into the flow of capital and commodities with more vigor later. To be sure, it’s telling that digital detox camps like Camp Grounded are popular with the business crowd.

What I mean is a real break, an escape, from an entire way of thinking. I’ve heard this approach called “radical unproductivity,” and I think it’s exactly right. We need to take our time back, for ourselves and on our own terms, outside of the logic of speed and pervasive capitalist valorization. We need to use our time to form real bonds and foster relationships, to be creative and human. We need to become re-acclimated to the world of asymmetry and of bumpiness and lumpiness—the world of people.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas proposed that morality begins in contact with the other; encountering a real person in their fullness as a person, acknowledging them, and standing with them. Emotion is key. We need to learn how to take care of each other, and to do that we need to escape the mental trappings of electric, automated capital. We need time. We desperately need to rediscover the meaning of “I love you,” and find what it means to really live. Hey, we might even have better sex.