Manufactured desires create ever-deepening dissatisfaction even when satisfied
Evidence
It is one thing for our dreams to go unfulfilled. It is quite another to sense that our unfulfilled dreams, our frustrated desires, have been manufactured by others. The more our mass-produced cravings are satisfied, the less satiated we feel. The greater the capacity of the technostructure to stir the passions, the greater the void within when they were served. To fill this void, young people felt in their bones the need to break with the established order, to rebel without a well-defined cause, to proclaim their moral outrage at the technostructure’s ways. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 210
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A dense, non-obvious mechanism: the void within is deepened by satisfaction, not by frustration — resists an easy summary.
- XREF: Connects to the platform-capitalism thesis: platforms manufacture desire and thus deepen the same psychic void. — connects to: Ad-driven desires are false needs producing euphoria in unhappiness — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 114; Moralistic self-denial weakens and coarsens the capacity for immediate pleasure — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 738; Loss aversion makes displeasure from losing exceed pleasure from winning equally — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2445 (+18 more)
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 210
Broader Connections
- Ad-driven desires are false needs producing euphoria in unhappiness
#corroborates(1.00) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 114 - Loss aversion makes displeasure from losing exceed pleasure from winning equally
#complicates(1.00) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2445 - Interest as pleasure-pain desire causes all thought and naming
#complicates(1.00) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 482 - Pleasure follows from desire rather than desire being caused by pleasure
#complicates(1.00) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2231 - Both aesthetic mood and money-possession liberate the self from resistant reality
#complicates(1.00) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 451 - Pleasure historically mediated by apparatus collapses into a single technical object
#complicates(1.00) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 376 - Modern individualism structurally erodes the capacity for gratitude
#expands(1.00) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 496 - Desire radically alters both the body’s lived being and the correlated world
#complicates(1.00) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 980 - Racist desire yields covert pleasure as a secondary gain
#complicates(1.00) - Online trading culture deferred consumption and enjoyment to an indefinite future
#expands(1.00) - Capitalist need-satisfaction depends on suppressing needs
#corroborates(1.00) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 383 - Pleasure in standardized charms turns to disgust at their sameness
#exemplifies(1.00) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 98 - Desire is doomed to failure because coitus and pleasure are not its essential goal
#complicates(1.00) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 987 - The mere feeling of being observed shifts behavior from selfish to reciprocal norms
#complicates(1.00) - Moralistic self-denial weakens and coarsens the capacity for immediate pleasure
#complicates(0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 738