By TALES AB'SÁBER*
In order to function, the world we live in needs to give away for free, socialize the culture of fetish, the only guaranteed communism.
1.
In 2023, the global adult entertainment and pornography industry was valued at $287,8 billion. Global sex business is estimated to grow by 8,6% by the end of last year alone. In 2034, the global machine of pleasure culture, programmed “pleasure,” management of desire as an image, passive contradiction between satisfaction and anguish, paralysis in oneself, self-management of orgasm without another with one’s own subjective image as another, is expected to reach a value of $706,2 billion.
This is without taking into account all its collateral and parallel worlds, of negative market, such as the pedophilia industry, which, in this case, are also central. In a few more years, if this world still exists, the entertainment industry as a sex industry will reach a trillion dollars. Values equivalent to those of the financing of wars, resumed on a large scale in the global “pacified world” of market life.
This expansion of the life of sex management through the strong light of the incident image on screens will be coupled with the development and new occupation of global networks by new Artificial Intelligence machines, with their algorithmic ordering, which is political, in a world of crisis of human intelligence that is not this one. Certainly, websites, whether negative or positive in the market, it does not matter, will have to produce hyper-real sex scenes according to the singular desire of the spectators, to see whoever they want in the midst of their own fantasy of sexuality lived in this way.
These numbers may still be small if we consider that on every cell phone on earth, belonging to every citizen of this type of culture, there are websites, platforms and entire networks dedicated to pornography, to pornography in its global industrial version, open and permanently available, at the reach of any psychic act, at the touch of a button. In fact, there is almost no hunger for pornography in the world.
In its winter 2016 issue, the American magazine of cultural criticism n + 1 published a short story about existence in the techno-pornographic subject-spectator mode. An essay that, disguised as literature, studied all types of configuration of practices for the life of this real available enjoyment. Life in the image of enjoyment – a generality that becomes a particular body – masturbation and dead time.
At some point, the writer, Tony Tulathimutte, speculated that, with the constant presence of pornographic images and their effects on everyone, like the existing culture itself, with its highly interested, certain and active audience – even if passive –, pornography would only need some form of criticism to be considered an art. He imagined completing the system of this form of culture, much broader than that of readers of any “literature”, or that of extinct film buffs, with what in fact already exists.
Festivals, networks and chats, information exchange, cataloging and evaluation – at the radical subjective level of the perverse polymorphic life of the sexual when faced directly, sexual thing that finds the image of this world, the pleasure of the industry, of an order closed in itself, but universal –, evidently all this already exists, is part of the business, together with the objects themselves, the images of excitement, and their consuming bodies.
2.
Also, in the year 2023 the number of electronic game players, games downloaded from the internet, must have reached 3,3 billion worldwide. 40% of the world's population, according to a report by the consultancy Newzoo. This true global celebration of childish intensities, individual and collective, of time dedicated to these simulated industrial worlds, between imaginative, constructive and fascist, is said to have moved 188 billion dollars last year – one hundred billion less than the lifetime of pornography on the networks.
Today, teenagers are international idols in gaming championships, most often in shooting, war and murder. When they are not World Fifa, with their electronic avatars of soccer star players, now video game stars, who must be purchased. Another small group of young people pay relatively high prices to watch the performances of the stars of the games themselves, in their matches projected on giant screens, in giant gyms.
The 2023 Game Brasil Survey estimates that 70% of the Brazilian population plays games on social media. Of the 14.000 respondents, 82% consider games to be one of the main, if not the main, form of entertainment. According to the Ministry of Culture, the sector represents 3,11% of the GDP and employs 7,5 million people… This at a time when the country's material industry, so to speak, accounts for around 10,5% of the overall GDP.
In fact, children who start to get interested in football can no longer understand how and why Pelé is better than Neymar. It takes some notion of history to understand this obviousness, which no longer applies. Because Neymar is a player avatar of games and advertising sites World Fifa on Youtube. And Pelé is another story.
More or less as Walter Benjamin said about cinema, in the war years of 1920 and 1930, the whole story will have to be retold, now redesigned, by this new universe of image subjects. The turbocharged neo-fascist propaganda website Brasil Paralelo let me tell you. He continues to be well leveraged in his total revisionism, sold as a permanent mass marketing strategy for the general power movement of the extreme right in Brazil. Players, who spend most of their lives playing in this system of virtual experiences and moving images – without depth or peace, as was still possible with the old images of cinema and its literary culture, even when war was being investigated – live in a state of great excitement, permanent doubt about the task and competition as a common culture, a world of perceptive shock and discharge.
And they no longer understand what does not appear as a mass of propaganda on these channels. A single Brazilian website for comments on games on social networks, Killing Giant Robots, has 310 thousand subscribers on Youtube and has had more than 67 million views. The simple an influencer Brazilian “Coelho no Japão”, which only discusses and presents Nintendo brand games and consoles, has 74 thousand followers on YouTube, plus 59 thousand on Twitter/X and 45 thousand on TikTok.
Compare these numbers, and the stability of the constant flow of money in this world, with a professor discussing Marx, Freud or Antonio Candido in a room with 60 students at a public university in Brazil, and we have an intuition of the real material scale of a spectacular tragedy to come. Or that has already happened.
3.
The same world of magical satisfaction, at the touch of a button, and subjective control through images, is at stake in the final universe of electronic casinos released in Brazil. This, not by chance, directly affects the entire world of the poorest. Rapidly, in two or three years, a public health epidemic, subjective dissolution and economic destruction spread throughout the country. In addition to the universal money laundering of mafias, illegal gambling and all types of large-scale robberies that can be operated through networks.
As bets They began to employ and pay for direct advertising from all types of influencers, from Galvão Bueno to the youngest makeup promoter on Instagram TikTok, with her hundreds of thousands of subscribers on her channel, to swallow with pleasure a society available to their basic level of manipulation. At the height of a fiscal crisis, Michel Temer's assault government released the massive electronic casino, just as Jair Bolsonaro's government released weapons and mass lies, on the same networks as the same games. The mafias are grateful for the true public interest.
The very policy of summoning insurgents from Bolsonaro, his generals and black kids, was conceived as a RPG - role-playing game –, ordered as a challenge on the networks, with phases, achievements and prizes, all pre-programmed. Just as Donald Trump's Q-anon also attempted the coup in the USA.
In 2024, 216 billion reais were transferred in things like jogo do tigrinho. The Ministry of Finance initially estimated that 150 billion would be spent on bets. It caused a moralistic scandal, given the fact that five million Bolsa Família beneficiaries, the poorest in the country, gambled 3 billion reais on social media... What can these people, in their fixed social positions, expect from this world, which is entirely like this, if not this? Sociologist Thaiz Pavez evoked an ethics of betting, to account for the impossible life, the crazy life, between hyper-exploited, undervalued, non-existent work, and the total subjectivation for consumption and exposure in the image market. The only way to do this is to gamble, any kind of bet, between crime and magic.
Finally, so as not to forget where we are now, we come to TikTok, the most sophisticated of the social networks based on the reception of images: the one in which every viewer is also a producer, a director, an actor, or a collective of short films, or self-advertising, made with their own phones, quick and happy products that can be shown anywhere in the world. In this real space of the global network, suggestively designed in China, the excitement of watching something that never stops is also simultaneous with the pleasure of showing off.
Panopticon of capitalist realism, in which the disciplined are the very agents of the total spectacle, which satisfies them well. In addition to history, everyday life is duplicated as a show and as a performance. For many, updated TikTok avatars of Pasolini's consumer fascist, life only makes sense if it is profoundly mediated in this way, by the technique of the image, both internal and global. In 2022, this social network had 1,7 billion users, and 98,6 million followers. producerssumers only in Brazil – recalling Décio Pignatari’s prophetic idea, about a world where he only saw the roots. Almost half of the population.
In an escalation of the global cold war by soft power of the control of the culture industry, the industry of direct subjectivation, the algorithmic industry, in April 2024 the US passed a law determining that the Chinese owner of the website, named ByteDance, transfer the network's operation there to an American group. Otherwise, it will simply be banned from operating. There, TikTok is frequented, used and abused by 170 million producers and consumers.
I don’t go on TikTok or Instagram. Social networks that work through direct images, which capture desire and life the most, like pornography. I try to remain somewhat free, yet alienated, from this world, from this flow of montage and enjoyment of a global dream, in which the consumer, looking only at himself and the general image, made particular, is more than the object of generalized calculation. He is responsible for the whole thing.
Talking to the girl who works from home, a normal Brazilian woman, who seems normal in this world to me, who hates Alexandre de Moraes and hopes that Lula dies, always goes to the neighborhood church and prays for God to give her work opportunities, illuminating her path – it is the evangelical church that allows her a political incarnation in time and space, in the body and in a possible community – she tells me, smiling: “I like TikTok, it has everything there.”
Monica travels, living online, while she is on the bus, and spends a few hours there every day, before going to bed, around 23 pm. At 5 am, she gets up to catch two buses and the subway, traveling an hour and a half or two, to get to the houses in the city center, where her bosses who have real access to the national income live, where she works long hours, earning 250 reais a day. Like her, millions of people rely on TikTok to live in these conditions.
4.
In the same vein as the beloved TikTok, which explores the human psychic needs at all levels, the game Roblox, downloaded directly from the internet, allows child players to develop parts and areas of the game itself while playing it. They are also paid for their work, in digital currency. In this case, playing, work and money gain a new fusion, invented in the device of this conquest of life, body and subjects, in a world and psyches that are dematerializing.
Children also advertise “courses”, which are actually scams, on the internet, so that other children can learn how to become influencers and rich. “Those who study are poor, rich entrepreneurs make money on the networks” is the motto repeated in all these image pyramids, childish at all levels. Children also advertise electronic roulette sites on the networks to children.
Public school teachers have noticed changes in the speech and oral language of children who have started to speak by eliding the last syllable of words, exactly as some do. influencers in networks, by speed of communication and by style mark. The language, grammar, ways of communicating and thinking of life in networks directly shape education and the self.
As we know, at least since Marx, material quantity and productivity is quality. World quantity is world quality: “the increase in the means of exchange and the volume of commodities developed the revolutionary elements within the disintegrating society.”[I] We do not need to recover the archaeological history of the life of pornography in the West, or in the East – from Roman erotic elegies to medieval demonic madness, to the emancipatory libertine de-repression of the Age of Enlightenment, to the growing and exponential impact of reproducible images, since they emerged in the 19th century with photography until the final speculations of Michel Foucault or Jean Baudrillard on the sexual and the generalized seduction of the image… – to know that something truly immense is happening.
The basis of the globalization of markets is the managed techno-fund of universal access to culture as a continuous and massive flow of images. As with the consumption of things, consuming images, and being consumed by them, is to be a subject. In the global market, homogeneous as an abstract principle of the universal realization of the commodity form, no one can even live without a cell phone, which has its cultural industry attached to it. , designed to each person's taste, and defining this person. There is a background magma, the psychic stasis of the final time of the global crisis of capital, in the permanent false erotic flow of information without reference, specular pleasure and minute excitement.
“Amidst the crises of neoliberalism, the human desire to rebuild public debate and common sense can mask the profound erosion of the historical foundations of the public sphere and the common. The increasing commodification of social life, the end of state regulation or subsidies for journalistic activity, the replacement of knowledge production by the pursuit of profit, of society by the network, of democracy by markets, of citizens by consumers – the same trends that drive radicalization within contemporary platforms are also examples of the good functioning of these platforms.”[ii]
5.
If today’s capitalism has generated the crisis of employment and of the old value of work, as a constant tension of fragmentation and universal social schizoidity, it also integrates the force of desire into its generalized machine of flow, of images, of excitement in very rapid rotation. In order to function, the world we live in needs to give away for free, to socialize the culture of fetishism, the only guaranteed communism. “Culture is a paradoxical commodity…, because it is exchanged so much that it no longer has any exchange value,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about our world for the first time.
The unique semiological-political structure of the process is that the image I see now is the time limit for its own overcoming by the next one that will come, the one that should redeem the total loss of experience. But this second one is already dead, by the next one that will come, and this one, by the next one and so on indefinitely. The empty time image – the silly image – of constant and rapid enjoyment, continuous photography, is the very visible secret of the business. The general process is the sequential emptying of meaning, in a management of emptied time and the economy of excitement in the present.
Pop is representation converted into excitement. Anything that shines in the empty mass of the global culture of fast images, and attracts some value, a minimum of attention, from the algorithmic elections and the money that is reproduced in the gaze. The culture of global hyper-masses is not exactly a culture. It is more precisely a universal roulette wheel of the prize in the image. A kaleidoscope without beginning or end, technically oriented towards contingent consumption. Any kind of satisfaction.
Peaks of excitement in the infinity of the world in the flow of images no longer speak to any memory or consciousness, transferred to this technical form of living. Memory is what connects an image commodity to the corresponding material commodity, which needs to be realized, circulated worldwide. There is no literary culture at the bottom of the world machine. Superego, or even ego, are categories that do not apply to this way of being in things. The same flow of universal common propaganda is the flow of pornography, of fascism reorganized as a lifestyle, or of global pedophilia networks.
We could think of an algorithmic sub-ego, imagined in the general enjoyment of the global pulse of the market. An ego mapped and invaded directly in the short-term image pulse, like breathing. Perhaps this culture is generating another unconscious, not optical, as Benjamin speculated – because the image manages everything, but says nothing – but globally associated and random, of which we do not know in any way the result.
If there is a result, there is unconsciousness. “From a certain degree of deprivation, the very idea of the man in a situation loses its substance and it becomes impossible to speak about it in a plausible way (…). In turn, the unity of time also has no strength, because, as things are barely articulated, as the action does not have that minimum consistency necessary for the unity of time to function, it is dismantled. Things occur in a short time that lacks the attributes of time.”[iii]
We only know that the action of global consumption, of the need for goods to circulate on a global scale, in invented, exhausting time, and with the days numbered, passes through this general unconscious. An unconscious fused with the enjoyment of the permanent production of the micro show, the scene of every second. Universal breathing of the world as a commodity, and its simultaneous destruction of the historical reference, already evident in the new fascist politics, a tabula rasa long ago aimed at the very environmental anchoring of life.
We are not in the era of cinema in which the distant became close and the whole story was retold to us, according to Walter Benjamin. We are in the time of the infinite succession of images produced and consumed everywhere precisely now. A time in which there is no distance, only presence. And history does not exist. It is necessary for production that it does not exist.
*Tales Ab´Sáber He is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Unifesp. He is the author of, among other books, The Anthropophagic Soldier (Hedra). [https://amzn.to/4ay2e2g]
Notes
[I] Marx and Engels, communist manifesto.
[ii] Moira Weigel, “The Adorno Algorithm,” magazine handsaw, IMS, no. 48, November 2024, p. 135.
[iii] Roberto Schwarz, “The blocked world, Beckett’s aesthetic feat and its decipherment by Adorno”, Piauí magazine, no. 219, December 2024, p. 86.
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