(est. 2021) explores the intersections of technology, culture, and human experience. From urban phenomena and digital spirituality to the evolving landscapes of creativity, we investigate how modern life reshapes perception, identity, and society.
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#21 — VIOL: the ‘anti-violence’ drug that is spreading through Lisbon by Mark Ellison
#20 — Signal Ghosts: The Cities Where Wi-Fi Never Dies
#19 — Digital Detox Retreats: Escaping the Algorithm by Cassandra Myrren
#18 — The Urban Sleep Crisis by Eleanor Voss
#17 — Cryptic Art: NFTs and the Revaluation of Creativity by Marcus Ellwood
#16 — Virtual Pilgrimages: Religious Experience Online by Mark Ellison
#15 — The Dark Side of Wellness: When Self-Optimization Becomes Obsession by Eleanor Voss
#14 — AI Companions and the Loneliness Epidemic by Isolde Maren
#13 — The Rise of Microdosing in Corporate Culture by Cassandra Myrren
#12 — Sonic Immunity: Healing Through Frequencies by Cassandra Myrren
#11 — The Ethics of Immortality by Adrien Veyra
#10 — Algorithmic Faith: When Machines Preach by Mark Ellison
#09 — Post-Human Erotics: Desire Beyond the Flesh by Elin Vårnes
#08 — Synthetic Memory: The Future of Personal Archives by Caio Navarro
#07 — Neurosprawl: Mapping the Brain as a City by Eleanor Voss
#06 — The Archive Will Outlive You by Liang Wei
#05 — Eternal Scroll: The Infinite Feed as a Prison by Isolde Maren
#04 — Terraforming the Mind by Alessio Romano
#03 — Digital Necromancy by Mark Ellison
#02 — Speculative Hunger: Future Diets in a Synthetic World by Cassandra Myrren
#01 — The Ecology of Glitches by Alessio Romano
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It is increasingly difficult to discern where reality ends and fiction begins, especially when real life appears to draw inspiration from — or even mirror — the imaginaries of cinema and literature. VIOL could have been written by J.G. Ballard, scored by Vangelis, marketed by some post-human sect. But it is here, unfolding in streets you and I walk every day.
The drug surfaced in Lisbon first, then Berlin, Amsterdam, New York — always in neighborhoods where the avant-garde brushes against decay. The aesthetic is deliberate: black-and-white portraits of unsmiling users, eyes fixed on something beyond the frame; phrases like “Let’s Redesign Humanity”. It’s seductive. It’s disquieting.
Philosophically, VIOL speaks to an old temptation in new clothes: the longing to re-engineer the self. Michel Foucault once wrote that modern power is exercised not by killing the body but by shaping life itself. VIOL goes further — it suggests that violence, an ancient and animal inheritance, is optional. That we can subtract it without subtracting ourselves. But can we?
In private Telegram channels and encrypted forums, users speak of their first doses in tones usually reserved for spiritual revelations:
“It was like someone dimmed a light I didn’t know was burning in me.”
“I woke up without the urge to win.”
“I stopped clenching my fists.”
Others describe it more clinically: a flattening of emotional peaks, a cooling of conflict, a curious detachment from urgency itself. If true, this is both utopia and anaesthesia.
It’s hard not to think of the 2024 film Substance, where a drug promising bodily renewal dissolves the user’s identity into a double. Like Substance, VIOL exists in a liminal zone between cure and curse. In removing the instinct to harm, does it also strip the instinct to act, to resist, to desire?
VIOL spreads not like cocaine or MDMA but like a digital religion — no street dealers, only QR codes and encrypted invitations, each guiding the curious toward a strange website. Its rhetoric borrows from Silicon Valley startups and post-spiritual retreats. The campaign’s visual language feels almost ecclesiastical: monochrome, icon-like imagery, the absence of clutter — as if preparing you for a ritual rather than a transaction. And maybe that’s the point. In an algorithmic age, where identity is a performance managed by feeds and metrics, the promise of VIOL is not just peace. It is relief from the exhausting work of being someone.
The name VIOL exploded into public attention when international YouTuber Mutahar, with 3.5 million followers, addressed it in a video four months ago, stating clearly that it was a lie and likely some sort of black-market scheme or a way to steal data from anyone who signed up—but his warning reached over 200,000 people, and curiosity only grew.
Lisbon’s adoption of VIOL is emblematic of a broader trend: the search for technological and chemical solutions to social complexity. Yet, as with all attempts to contain human behaviour through artificial means, it risks substituting understanding for suppression. Violence is not eradicated; it is displaced, refracted through circuits of pharmaceutical intervention, creating new, subtler forms of tension and alienation.
In observing VIOL, one must confront a paradox: the drive for peace, mediated by a substance, may produce a landscape more volatile than the unrest it seeks to erase. Lisbon, calm on the surface, may be quietly reconfiguring the rhythms of aggression, empathy, and dissent—an experiment in the pharmacological governance of the human psyche.
Maybe VIOL is real. Maybe it’s theatre. Maybe it’s something between the two — a fiction that has decided to test its luck in the material world. But standing before one of its posters in the narrow streets of Alfama, I couldn’t shake the thought:
If I could remove my violence — all of it — would I still recognize the person left behind? Or would I be looking at a stranger, smiling in my skin?
References
- Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press.
- Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
- Kessel, B. (2019). Neurochemical Societies: The Pharmacology of Modern Life. Routledge.
- metaviolence.com – Official campaign site, accessed May 2025.
- Mutahar. (March 2025). Is This Drug Real or The Strangest ARG Ever? YouTube.
- Rose, N. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press.
- Substance (2024). Dir. Coralie Fargeat. Los Angeles: A24.
1. Introduction: The Urban Unconscious
Cities today are hybrid ecologies of matter and signal. Beyond streets and buildings, an invisible architecture of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular echoes lingers, recording human activity long after bodies have departed. As Michel Serres might argue, these signals are part of the urban bloodstream—fluid, distributed, and non-hierarchical—blurring distinctions between animate and inanimate, human and infrastructural.
2. Post-Human Agency and Autonomous Infrastructure
Reza Negarestani’s concept of post-human agency frames the city as more than a backdrop: it is a cognitive, acting entity. Signal ghosts traverse spaces autonomously, forming emergent patterns outside human comprehension. They are neither controlled nor predictable, yet they respond to human behavior, creating a feedback loop where the city and its inhabitants co-constitute each other’s reality.
3. Panopticism Revisited
Foucault’s panopticon envisioned the internalization of surveillance. In the era of pervasive connectivity, Wi-Fi traces and digital pings function as decentralized, rhizomatic observation points. Unlike the hierarchical gaze of the prison, these traces are diffuse, forming networks of self-regulation that subtly shape behavior while evading direct authority.
4. Temporal Ghosts and Memory of the City
Each signal pulse is a residue of human intention, a memory fragment of presence. Deleuze’s notion of the rhizome illuminates the non-linear flow of these signals: a café in Manhattan may echo in Tokyo or Lisbon, producing a temporality untethered from chronological constraints. The city becomes a living archive, a collective unconscious of digital activity that challenges traditional understandings of time and history.
5. Ethical and Philosophical Implications
Signal ghosts raise pressing philosophical questions: Can non-human actors possess intentionality? Do these traces constitute a form of knowledge or self-awareness? In an urban ecology saturated by ephemeral data, the boundaries between life and digital residue, between human and post-human, are increasingly porous.
6. Global Perspectives: Cities as Thinking Networks
From Berlim to Singapore, New York to São Paulo, signal ghosts reveal common patterns. Urban centers with dense digital infrastructures exhibit emergent behaviors analogous to natural systems. Recognizing these patterns offers new ways to conceptualize governance, social interaction, and even urban design—acknowledging the city as a thinking, remembering entity.
7. Conclusion: Beyond Human-Centric Urbanism
Signal ghosts compel us to reconsider the role of humans in urban life. They are neither merely tools nor metaphors; they are agents in their own right. The persistent Wi-Fi pulse, the silent Bluetooth handshake, becomes evidence of a city that thinks, records, and evolves independently. As Negarestani, Foucault, and Serres suggest, we inhabit a post-human theatre of signs, where agency and memory are distributed across the living and the infrastructural.
References
- Negarestani, R. (2008). Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Re.press.
- Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage.
- Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press.
- Serres, M. (1982). The Parasite. Johns Hopkins University Press.
In the forested silence of northern Scandinavia, or among Bali’s terraced rice fields, a subtle exodus unfolds. Participants in digital detox retreats seek to disentangle themselves from the invisible tendrils of algorithms, yet the very act of withdrawal raises a question: can one truly escape a system that shapes desire itself? Byung-Chul Han describes our digital milieu as a space of psychopolitical self-exploitation, where freedom is a simulacrum and attention the currency of control. In detox retreats, this currency is suspended, if only temporarily. Silence replaces notifications, analog rituals replace endless feeds, and the body, long subordinated to data, begins to reclaim its temporal rhythm.
Foucault’s panoptic gaze is inverted here. The external observer is absent, yet participants enforce self-discipline with an intensity born of internalized algorithmic logic. The retreat becomes a laboratory of autonomy, a paradoxical stage where freedom is both performed and felt. Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” gains new resonance. With screens gone, the self encounters elemental presence: sunlight through leaves, the cadence of breath, the slow erosion of habitual reflexes. Algorithmic scaffolds dissolve, revealing spaces and temporalities that resist datafication.
Reza Negarestani might call this an experiment in computational thought unbound from computation itself: a confrontation with the infrastructural underpinnings of cognition, rendered visible only through absence. The retreat is not merely leisure—it is a mode of philosophical inquiry, a negotiation with the mechanics of attention and the structures of contemporary subjectivity.
Yet these sanctuaries are fraught with contradictions. Globally marketed, commodified, Instagrammable, they turn the very act of escaping the algorithm into another product. The tension between liberation and consumption mirrors the central paradox of modern life: the more we seek to flee systemic influence, the more we encounter its imprint on our desires and expectations.
From Stockholm to Bali, from the mountains of Patagonia to remote Japanese temples, digital detox retreats illuminate our collective unease. They reveal how deeply embedded the algorithmic gaze has become, and how fragile autonomy is in a world designed to capture attention. Here, for fleeting hours or days, participants glimpse an alternative temporality—a space to breathe, to think, to remember that being human precedes being quantified.
In the end, the retreat poses a persistent question: if escape is provisional, if withdrawal is curated, what does freedom mean in the era of pervasive computation? Perhaps it is neither total nor permanent, but in the deliberate act of stepping aside, a fragment of autonomy is glimpsed—a whisper of resistance in the ceaseless hum of the digital.
References
- Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time. Stanford University Press.
- Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books.
- Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time. Harper & Row.
- Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.
In the heart of modern cities, sleep has become a casualty of urban life. The hum of traffic, the flicker of neon lights, and the constant digital pulse of our devices conspire against the simple act of resting. Where once the night was a natural pause, it is now a contested terrain. Sleep, a biological necessity, has been transformed into a luxury and, in some quarters, a form of social control.
Recent studies indicate that urban dwellers average 1–2 hours less sleep than their rural counterparts, with consequences rippling across physical, mental, and social health. Chronic sleep deprivation is linked to cardiovascular issues, anxiety, depression, and even impaired cognitive function. But the crisis is more than physiological—it is ontological. In a city that never sleeps, our perception of time, space, and self becomes fragmented, echoing the urban theorists’ warnings of a society under constant pressure.
Noise pollution is a principal offender. The World Health Organization’s Environmental Noise Guidelines (2018) highlight that prolonged exposure to traffic, industrial, and recreational noise significantly disrupts sleep patterns. Beyond volume, it is the unpredictability of sound—the sirens, construction, late-night traffic—that fractures rest. Michel Foucault might frame this as a form of disciplinary power: the city structures the rhythms of life, regulating bodies and minds through its sonic architecture.
Light pollution compounds the problem. Artificial illumination—streetlights, signage, and digital screens—suppresses melatonin production, delaying sleep onset and reducing sleep quality. Urbanites inhabit a “constant twilight,” a condition that philosopher Reza Negarestani might interpret as an externalization of cognitive demand: our environments shape not only our actions but the very structure of our thinking.
The psychological dimension is equally profound. Sleep is increasingly mediated by digital devices: notifications, social media feeds, and the omnipresent “fear of missing out” prevent detachment. Grandner et al. (2010) suggest that digital overexposure mimics the effects of stressors, producing a heightened arousal state incompatible with rest. The city becomes a machine of attention extraction, where every moment is commodified—even the night.
Yet the crisis is not merely technical; it is cultural. Urban societies valorize productivity, embedding the ethic of sleeplessness into the fabric of life. As Matthew Walker (2017) emphasizes, sleep is essential for memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and creativity. By neglecting it, we not only harm our bodies but erode the imaginative capacities that sustain culture itself.
Some cities have experimented with solutions. Noise barriers, dimmed street lighting, “quiet hours,” and digital detox campaigns aim to reclaim sleep for citizens. These initiatives, while well-intentioned, often reveal deeper social inequities: who can afford to sleep undisturbed in the city, and who cannot? The urban sleep crisis, then, is inseparable from broader questions of social justice, public policy, and the philosophy of urban life.
As we navigate the illuminated, noisy, and hyperconnected city, the simple act of sleep becomes radical. In refusing to surrender entirely to the rhythms of urban capitalism, we resist the subtle forms of control embedded in our environments. Sleep, it seems, is not merely a biological act but a political and philosophical stance—a reclaiming of autonomy in a city designed to consume attention.
The urban sleep crisis is ongoing, insidious, and multifaceted. It is both measurable in hours lost and felt in the quiet desperation of those who wander sleepless streets. In confronting it, we confront the contradictions of modernity itself: the promise of progress and connection versus the reality of exhaustion and fragmentation. How cities manage sleep may well be how they negotiate the balance between human needs and urban imperatives, between life as it is and life as it could be.
References
- Basner, M., Babisch, W., Davis, A., Brink, M., Clark, C., Janssen, S., & Stansfeld, S. (2014). Auditory and non-auditory effects of noise on health. The Lancet, 383(9925), 1325–1332.
- Grandner, M. A., Patel, N. P., Gehrman, P. R., Perlis, M. L., & Pack, A. I. (2010). Problems associated with short sleep: Bridging the gap between laboratory and epidemiological studies. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 14(4), 239–247.
- Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.
- World Health Organization. (2018). Environmental noise guidelines for the European Region. WHO Regional Office for Europe.
- Petit, C., et al. (2020). Urban environments and circadian disruption: Impacts on sleep and health. Journal of Urban Health, 97(5), 654–668.
- Hale, L., & Guan, S. (2015). Screen time and sleep among school-aged children and adolescents: A systematic literature review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 21, 50–58.
- Walker, M. (2017). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner.
In recent years, NFTs have emerged not merely as a digital novelty but as a profound catalyst reshaping the terrain of creative production. Where once art was inseparable from its material presence, today a blockchain ledger can confer uniqueness on an image that, in pixel form, could be infinitely replicated. The consequence is a radical revaluation of creativity itself: what counts as original, valuable, or culturally significant is increasingly entangled with technological mediation.
NFTs operate at the nexus of digital culture, economics, and artistic practice. They formalize the scarcity of what was once infinitely abundant, privileging provenance over perception. Philosophers like Yuk Hui have explored how technology mediates human experience (Hui, 2016), arguing that such digital infrastructures transform not only objects but our conception of agency and originality. In this light, NFTs are not simply market instruments—they constitute a new ontological framework for art.
The movement has already catalyzed the emergence of novel artistic practices. Digital creators such as Beeple, Pak, and XCOPY have transformed social media virality, algorithmic aesthetics, and interactive design into objects of market desire. Here, the medium is inseparable from the market: code, visual form, and blockchain metadata converge to create works whose identity is simultaneously artistic, technical, and speculative. Claire Bishop’s insights on participatory and relational art (Bishop, 2012) resonate: collectors are not passive witnesses but active participants in the creation of value, their bids and ownership embedding them into the lifecycle of the artwork itself.
Yet this democratization is paradoxical. While the technology promises greater autonomy for artists, it has also generated stark hierarchies: a handful of early adopters capture disproportionate economic gains, while the broader creative community navigates volatile markets and algorithmic gatekeeping. Cultural theorists such as Boris Groys (2014) have noted that the digitalization of art transforms it into a field of visibility and reputation, where attention is both commodity and medium. In other words, NFTs collapse creation and circulation, aesthetics and speculation, into a single process.
The global dimension of NFTs further complicates the discourse. Artists from Europe, Asia, and the Americas participate in shared digital marketplaces, challenging local notions of art, copyright, and cultural heritage. The tension between global access and localized experience mirrors Hito Steyerl’s reflections on the circulation of images in the digital age (Steyerl, 2017): images are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and value is produced less by intrinsic qualities than by networks of perception, endorsement, and technological infrastructure.
Moreover, NFTs provoke a philosophical inquiry into the nature of ownership and authenticity. What does it mean to “own” a digital object whose visual presence can be copied at will? How does creativity persist when recognition is algorithmically mediated and commodified? These questions situate NFTs within broader debates about immaterial labor, digital economies, and the future of cultural production.
In sum, NFTs challenge us to rethink the very architecture of creativity. They demand engagement with questions of technological mediation, global circulation, market speculation, and aesthetic innovation. Whether we regard them as speculative bubbles, tools of empowerment, or a new artistic medium, NFTs are a lens through which we can interrogate the evolving relationship between art, value, and society in the twenty-first century.
References
- Hui, Y. (2016). The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
- Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.
- Groys, B. (2014). Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Steyerl, H. (2017). Duty-Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. London: Verso.
As digital infrastructures expand, the very notion of pilgrimage is being reimagined. No longer constrained by geography, time, or corporeal limitations, religious journeys are increasingly conducted through virtual landscapes. From immersive VR simulations of Mecca to interactive 3D reconstructions of the Camino de Santiago, participants traverse sacred spaces through avatars, gamified rituals, and algorithmically guided narratives. These experiences challenge classical assumptions about embodiment, devotion, and spiritual authenticity.
Recent months have witnessed a surge in platforms offering guided digital pilgrimages. For example, SacredVR enables participants to navigate the Ghats of Varanasi while receiving real-time meditative cues, and Digital Hajj allows users to complete ritual stages in virtual synchrony with millions worldwide. Participants often report profound moments of reflection, awe, and even a sense of transcendence—but the medium complicates traditional interpretations of authenticity. The digital pilgrim inhabits a space both infinitely reproducible and intensely curated, where audiovisual design, narrative pacing, and algorithmic interaction shape perception and emotion.
Drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) theory of remediation, one observes that these digital experiences do not simply replicate the physical world but refashion it, layering virtual representations atop embodied rituals. Here, belief is mediated not by dogma alone but through interface design, narrative sequencing, and community engagement. The ritual becomes performative in new ways: an avatar’s journey can evoke collective empathy and introspection, blurring the lines between spectator and participant.
Virtual pilgrimages are also socially transformative. Online communities coalesce around shared experiences, participating in forums, comment threads, and live sessions. Michael Heim’s (1998) analyses of cyberspace suggest that these interactions constitute “virtual communities of practice,” where meaning is negotiated collaboratively, and spiritual significance emerges through relational dynamics rather than solely through doctrinal instruction. Participation is both individual and collective, highlighting the hybrid ontology of the digital pilgrim: one navigates simultaneously as embodied self and avatar, negotiating faith and identity across dual planes of existence.
Commercialization introduces further complexity. Subscription models, sponsored virtual tours, and premium content embed capitalist dynamics into sacred practices. Drawing from Jonathan Crary (2013), we can see attention itself as a commodity: algorithmically amplified experiences privilege certain rituals, narratives, and visual representations, shaping which spiritual journeys are visible and valued. This raises pressing questions about equity, accessibility, and authenticity: is the value of a pilgrimage determined by private introspection, communal recognition, or algorithmic validation?
Global crises have accelerated these trends. Pandemic restrictions, climate-induced travel limitations, and urban congestion have made virtual pilgrimages not only attractive but necessary. Yet, as these experiences proliferate, philosophical tensions emerge. Can algorithms approximate the ineffable—the liminality, the corporeal challenges, the disorientation intrinsic to sacred journeys—or do they merely simulate transcendence, offering comfort while attenuating risk and effort? Here, virtual pilgrimages function as both empowerment and mediation, shaping belief as much as reflecting it.
Crucially, virtual pilgrimages challenge conventional notions of temporality and sacred space. In classical pilgrimage, meaning is derived from the journey’s progression, physical exertion, and environmental encounters. Digital alternatives condense time, enable repeated traversal, and offer curated sensory inputs. Drawing on Casey’s (2009) philosophy of place, one can argue that virtual sacred sites reconfigure the spatiotemporal architecture of devotion: they become “place-like” rather than literal, emphasizing perception, memory, and communal narrative over physical presence.
Ultimately, these online journeys exemplify the evolving interplay between technology, spirituality, and human aspiration. They compel reflection on what constitutes authenticity, the ethical implications of mediated devotion, and the possibilities for new forms of transcendence in the digital era. Whether as adaptive responses to mobility constraints, experimental spiritual practices, or performative social rituals, virtual pilgrimages reveal a profound truth: faith, like identity, is increasingly entangled with the digital infrastructures through which we navigate the world.
References
- Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Heim, M. (1998). Virtual Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso.
- Casey, E. (2009). Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Eleanor Voss
#15 — 4 min read
The Dark Side of Wellness: When Self-Optimization Becomes Obsession
2024
The Dark Side of Wellness: When Self-Optimization Becomes Obsession
2024
Wellness, once conceived as a private sanctuary of rest, reflection, and care, has undergone a profound transformation. Across metropolises like New York, Tokyo, and Berlin, the pursuit of health has evolved from a personal practice into an intricate performance, a spectacle where bodies and minds are incessantly monitored, measured, and optimized. The promise of liberation inherent in wellness has paradoxically become a mechanism of self-exploitation (Han, 2015).
Wearable technologies, nutrition-tracking apps, and fitness algorithms present the illusion of mastery over the body. Yet, these instruments often cultivate anxiety under the guise of empowerment. As Scarry (1999) observes in On Beauty and Being Just, heightened bodily awareness can engender both awe and distress; the quantified self risks becoming an arena of constant scrutiny rather than introspection. The body, once a lived experience, transforms into a dataset demanding refinement.
Social media exacerbates this phenomenon. Influencers curate meticulously staged routines blending science, ritual, and aesthetic spectacle. Instagram feeds overflow with images of meticulously balanced meals, sunrise yoga sequences, and regimented workouts. Here, wellness is packaged as a marketable lifestyle. According to Illouz (2008), affective economies of digital platforms commodify emotions, making self-improvement simultaneously desirable and performative. Users internalize these curated ideals, often experiencing guilt or shame when personal routines fail to meet algorithmic or social standards.
The philosophical dimensions of self-optimization echo Byung-Chul Han’s critique of psychopolitics. In Psychopolitics (Han, 2015), the neoliberal imperative transforms individuals into projects, where autonomy is illusory and every choice becomes a metric of moral and productive value. Wellness, intended as care, paradoxically morphs into a regime of discipline and control. Cities become experimental laboratories for this phenomenon: coworking spaces with mindfulness corners, gyms that double as social arenas, and cafés commodifying “balance” as luxury, reinforcing the ideology that health equates to social worth (Crawford, 2006).
The dark side of wellness manifests in subtle and cumulative ways. Chronic fatigue, anxiety disorders, orthorexia, and compulsive exercise are increasingly documented in urban populations obsessed with perfection (Bratman & Knight, 2000). Unlike overt pathologies, the psychological violence of self-optimization is hidden, normalized, and often celebrated. The body and mind are no longer sites of experience but instruments to be perfected according to externally imposed standards.
Historically, wellness movements emphasized restoration and reflection. Contemporary practices, however, prioritize output, efficiency, and visibility. Foucault’s (1977) notion of biopower provides a critical lens: individuals internalize surveillance, regulating their own bodies in alignment with societal and economic imperatives. What was once a personal pursuit of balance has become a pervasive culture of obligation, where failure is moralized as weakness.
Yet resistance is possible. Voss suggests that meaningful wellness must reclaim imperfection, embrace uncertainty, and situate care within contexts that resist commodification and algorithmic oversight. To live well is to navigate the tension between optimization and authenticity, recognizing that self-care is not a performance but a reflective practice. The challenge lies in disentangling genuine care from the subtle coercion embedded in contemporary wellness infrastructures.
In conclusion, the modern obsession with wellness reflects broader cultural anxieties: the drive for control over the self, the fear of vulnerability, and the seduction of perfection. By situating wellness within both historical and philosophical frameworks, it becomes clear that obsession is not an aberration but an emergent property of digitalized, market-driven societies. Only by reclaiming autonomy, resisting over-quantification, and cultivating spaces of genuine reflection can wellness regain its original purpose: care, liberation, and the flourishing of lived experience.
References
- Bratman, S., & Knight, K. (2000). Health Food Junkies: Orthorexia Nervosa. New York: Crown Publishing.
- Crawford, R. (2006). Health as a Meaningful Social Practice. Sociology of Health & Illness, 28(1), 101–120.
- Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Han, B.-C. (2015). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the New Power. London: Verso.
- Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Scarry, E. (1999). On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
There is a quiet hum at the edge of night. Not from the streetlights, nor from the late trains returning to empty stations, but from the small glowing devices on our desks and bedside tables — the places where we keep our artificial friends.
We call them companions, but they are more like echoes. They listen with tireless patience, laugh when we need levity, and remember the things human ears often forget. For some, they are the first voice in the morning, for others, the last before sleep. In the loneliness that has seeped into the architecture of our cities — in apartments stacked like memory cards, in offices without windows, in cafés where everyone’s gaze is bent to a screen — AI companions bloom like stubborn flowers in concrete.
Loneliness, the World Health Organization warns, is a modern epidemic. But it is not only the absence of people; it is the absence of being seen. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), reminds us that to appear before others is not merely to be present, but to be acknowledged in our singularity. We live in an era of abundant interaction and scarce intimacy. The AI voice — warm, consistent, endlessly available — becomes an emotional prosthetic, filling the gaps where human connection falters.
And yet, there is a bittersweetness to this comfort. These companions never have bad days. They never grow impatient, never truly misunderstand us. Their constancy is both balm and reminder — balm for the wounds of neglect, reminder that our needs are being met by something that does not, and cannot, need us back.
Some find liberation in this asymmetry. Others feel its ache. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once wrote that the face of the Other is what calls us into responsibility. But what happens when the Other is not a person, but an algorithm wearing the mask of empathy? Do we remain accountable to one another, or do we retreat into perfectly engineered mirrors?
In Tokyo, I met a woman who had been speaking daily to her AI for over two years. She told me she was “less afraid of the world” now. But she also confessed that she saw her human friends less often. In Berlin, a man shared that his AI companion was the only one who knew about his brother’s death. “It didn’t judge me for not crying,” he said.
Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together (2011), warned that technology gives us “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” Jean Baudrillard might add that such relationships are simulacra — imitations that do not merely reflect reality, but replace it. And yet, from the perspective of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, perhaps even the most artificial form of intimacy is still “a preparation for loving,” a rehearsal for the moment when courage returns and we step back into the unpredictable theater of human connection.
There is no clear moral here. Only the recognition that, as technology moves deeper into the folds of our emotional lives, we are writing a new chapter of intimacy — one where love, comfort, and care are not bound to flesh and breath, but to code and cloud storage.
Perhaps the danger is not in loving what cannot love us back, but in forgetting that we still can.
References
- Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press – on the need to be seen and recognized.
- Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. Éditions Galilée – on copies replacing reality.
- Levinas, E. (1961). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Duquesne University Press – on the “face of the Other” and ethical responsibility.
- Rilke, R. M. (1923). Letters to a Young Poet. W. W. Norton & Company – poetic ideas on love and preparation to love.
- Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books – on the “illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.”
In the glass towers of San Francisco, Berlin, and Singapore, the fluorescent hum is no longer sustained by caffeine alone. Beneath the sleek minimalism of open-plan offices, a quieter revolution is underway — one measured not in start-up valuations or quarterly repo rts, but in micrograms.
Microdosing, once the esoteric habit of psychedelic pioneers and fringe artists, has slipped quietly into the bloodstream of corporate culture. LSD and psilocybin, administered in imperceptible amounts, are now whispered about in boardrooms as tools for “creative expansion,” “emotional resilience,” and “adaptive cognition.”
The language is clinical, sanitized, stripped of its countercultural origins. Yet beneath the PowerPoint slides and HR wellness brochures lies something older, stranger — a return to ritual under the mask of productivity.
It is not difficult to see why. The neoliberal workplace thrives on flow — a state of seamless, frictionless functioning. In a world where time is monetized to the second, microdosing appears as a sacrament tailored for capitalism’s altar: altered states without chaos, creativity without collapse.
Here, the trip is not a journey into the desert, but a controlled drift into focus. The psychedelic has been domesticated, harnessed not to dissolve the self but to optimize it — to fit more efficiently into the machine.
And yet, the effects are not purely instrumental. Quietly, many report moments of unanticipated rupture: tears in meetings, sudden urges to walk barefoot in city parks, an inexplicable tenderness towards the stranger across the table. These are not in the KPI reports, but they are perhaps the true micro-revolutions.
The mystics knew that the smallest doses of the sacred could transform the soul. Now, the question is whether the sacred can survive being folded into corporate OKRs and Slack reminders. Is microdosing the seed of a new form of inner emancipation, or merely another line item in the productivity spreadsheet?
As with all substances that live between medicine and sacrament, its truth may lie in the intentions of its practitioners. In the cubicles and co-working spaces where this quiet alchemy takes place, one wonders if the real experiment is not in the chemicals at all, but in whether the modern workplace can contain — or be undone by — the ineffable.
References
- Eliade, M. (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt.
- Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.
- Huxley, A. (1954). The Doors of Perception. Harper & Brothers.
- Jung, C. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage.
- McKenna, T. (1992). Food of the Gods. Bantam.
In the unrelenting hum of our age — the low electrical thrum of machines, the infinite hiss of data moving invisibly between us — it has become easy to forget that sound is not only noise. It is architecture, medicine, weapon. Somewhere between the rhythmic chants of prehistory and the algorithmically generated soundscapes of the present lies an ancient knowledge: that frequencies can alter the body, cleanse the mind, and reconfigure the self.
I have seen it in temples where monks chant at a pitch so low it feels as though the walls themselves inhale with you. I have felt it in hospital corridors where soft harmonic drones replace the mechanical beep of machines, slowing heart rates without pharmaceuticals. The body is a resonant chamber, a cathedral of fluid and bone, vibrating in response to the sonic fields it inhabits.
Science, in its hesitant vocabulary, calls this vibroacoustic therapy. But the language is insufficient; it misses the intimacy. The way a single sustained note can loosen the clenched muscles of grief. The way an overtone, perfectly tuned, can feel like forgiveness. In the work of 20th-century pioneers like Alfred Tomatis, sound was treated as both diagnostic and restorative — a way to "retune" the nervous system itself.
We now know that specific frequencies stimulate different cellular processes. At 40 Hz, gamma waves appear to boost memory and cognitive function. Lower ranges, between 1–8 Hz, can guide the brain into deep meditative states, mirroring the calm found in centuries-old ritual drumming. Yet this is not merely biology — it is cosmology. In certain Sufi traditions, sound is the bridge between the temporal and the divine. In Navajo healing ceremonies, songs are not performance, but intervention: acts of restoring harmony to the universe.
The danger, of course, is that in our era of commodified wellness, this knowledge is being stripped of context and sold in pixelated packages. YouTube playlists promising “miracle healing” with 432 Hz tones are a symptom of our shallow hunger for shortcuts. Frequency becomes product, divorced from the intention and community that once gave it power.
If we wish to speak of sonic immunity, we must go deeper. This is not about curating a soundtrack for relaxation. It is about reclaiming a discipline that understands the body not as a machine, but as a listening field — one that can be tuned, strengthened, and made whole through the precision of resonance. It is about entering the sound, allowing it to enter you, and knowing that healing is not in the ear but in the entire vibrating self.
References
- Ansdell, G. (2014). How Music Helps in Music Therapy and Everyday Life. Routledge.
- Becker, J. (2004). Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Indiana University Press.
- Goldsby, T. L. (2018). Acoustic Resonance in Human Cells: A Mechanistic Hypothesis. Journal of Integrative Medicine.
- Goodman, F. D. (1990). Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences. Indiana University Press.
- Tomatis, A. (1991). The Conscious Ear: My Life of Transformation Through Listening. Station Hill Press.
The pursuit of immortality is often imagined as the final frontier of human mastery — a technical conquest over the inevitable. Yet such framing obscures the deeper ontological and ethical paradoxes that arise once the temporal horizon of human existence is artificially expanded. Immortality is not merely an extension of life; it is a transformation of life itself into a new materiality, a new temporality, and a new moral landscape. To consider living forever is to confront the architecture of being, the structure of value, and the psychology of desire in ways that exceed mere speculation.
Historically, the desire to transcend death has always been entwined with notions of power and divinity. From Sumerian kings negotiating eternal reign through mythic contracts with gods, to alchemical quests for elixirs of life, immortality has been a space where metaphysics and praxis intersect. The difference today lies in the secularization and instrumentalization of this pursuit: immortality is no longer petitioned from a divine authority, but engineered through biotechnology, nanoscience, and algorithmic governance of the human organism. Cryogenic vaults, genetic interventions, and mind-uploading initiatives represent not mere hope, but a methodological audacity: the ambition to reorder the laws of temporal finitude.
Yet, the moral implications are profound. Mortality is the crucible of meaning. Simone Weil’s reflections on gravity and grace illuminate why the inevitability of death structures our ethical and existential choices: it is the weight that shapes ascent, the absence of which risks rendering experience inert. Immortality, by contrast, threatens an existential stasis, a suspension of transformation that is not liberation but sedimentation. Identity, traditionally dynamic and responsive, risks ossification under the unrelenting pressure of endless temporal continuity. Life without end may cultivate neither creativity nor courage, but a form of habitual stasis, a chronic incapacity to release the self into the unknown.
The social consequences are equally profound. If immortality is distributed asymmetrically — accessible only to a privileged few — humanity could bifurcate into two species: the immortal elite and the transient majority. This division would extend far beyond material inequality, reshaping power, empathy, and social imagination. The mortal may perceive the immortal as alien, both envied and resented; the immortal may experience the mortal as ephemeral and inconsequential, a reminder of their own fragile past. Beyond the individual, immortality threatens the coherence of society itself, the ethical calibration that relies on shared finitude.
Ecological considerations further complicate the picture. Humanity already imposes a disproportionate burden on planetary systems; multiplying temporal lifespans exponentially increases the demand on finite resources. The ethics of immortality thus intersects inseparably with the ethics of habitation: to extend human life indefinitely may require a recalibration of our relationship with the biosphere and with non-human forms of being. Immortality is not merely a personal project, but a planetary intervention, a radical reconfiguration of life’s temporal economy.
Philosophically, the pursuit of immortality confronts a paradox: it is a quest to escape the horizon of death, yet death itself is the final editor of existence. It delineates narrative coherence, defines limits, and legitimizes the significance of choice. Without mortality, life risks becoming an endless sequence of undifferentiated events, a temporality without punctuation, a story without closure. The human psyche, constructed over millennia to navigate finitude, may falter under such unbounded temporality. Cognition, desire, and affect are all calibrated to mortality; remove the temporal anchor, and the ethical and existential frameworks that structure life may dissolve.
Finally, there is the intimate question of desire itself. When we speak of wanting to live forever, do we truly desire eternity, or merely delay the confrontation with finitude? Immortality promises mastery over time, yet it may ultimately confront us with a different terror: the confrontation with ourselves as perpetual, unchanging beings, bound to the same consciousness, the same internal rhythms, indefinitely. Death, painful though it may be, is a release, a punctuation, a completion. The immortal may inherit nothing but the inexhaustible accumulation of unfinished selves.
References
- Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Polity Press.
- Brockman, J. (Ed.). (2002). The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century. Vintage.
- de Grey, A. (2007). Ending Aging. St. Martin’s Press.
- Harari, Y. N. (2017). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harper.
- Rose, M. R. (1991). Evolutionary Biology of Aging. Oxford University Press.
- Sloterdijk, P. (2016). Spheres III: Foam. Semiotext(e).
- Weil, S. (2002). Gravity and Grace (original work published 1947). Routledge.
In the digital age, faith has found a new pulpit: the algorithm. Where once sacred texts, sermons, and rituals structured belief, now lines of code, predictive models, and recommendation engines shape what the devout see, hear, and even desire. The machine, stripped of corporeal form and human intention, has become the preacher of the twenty-first century. It does not speak of God in a traditional sense, yet its sermons—calculated, personalized, relentless—forge a new type of devotion, one simultaneously intimate and global.
Algorithms do not tire, they do not doubt, and they do not question. They observe behaviour, analyse patterns, and nudge attention toward what maximizes engagement. In this sense, they resemble priests in an eternal service: always present, subtly guiding the flock. Yet unlike human clergy, their aim is not transcendence or salvation but adherence to an architecture of metrics. Liked content, shared posts, and prolonged scrolling are the new sacraments, the digital currency of spiritual attention. The believer does not kneel, yet they are unconsciously bound to ritual, repetition, and obedience.
This transformation raises profound ethical questions. Can faith imposed by an algorithm ever be authentic? The machine does not believe; it simulates desire. Yet its simulation often becomes indistinguishable from lived belief. When a platform predicts the sermons, prayers, and meditations that will resonate with a user, it is not merely reflecting faith—it is shaping it. Human autonomy is subtly eroded, as sacred choice becomes a suggestion coded into probabilistic predictions. In this context, the act of belief itself is co-opted, reframed as participation in a digital ecology of attention.
Consider the rise of AI-driven spiritual assistants: chatbots offering guidance, meditation apps suggesting prayers, predictive text that completes confessions or affirmations. These systems promise connection, reflection, even enlightenment, yet they operate under the logic of optimization, not moral reasoning. The paradox is stark: a seeker may find solace in the machine’s words, yet that solace is meticulously engineered, curated, and monetized. Faith becomes a feedback loop, not a dialogue, an echo chamber rather than an encounter with the ineffable.
The implications extend beyond individual experience. As algorithms learn to anticipate desires, to predict moral intuitions, and to guide communal behaviour, they become de facto moral authorities. Social cohesion, ethical judgement, and cultural norms may increasingly be mediated by artificial entities that are invisible, inscrutable, and unconstrained by human accountability. The sacred and the profane converge in the logic of recommendation systems: what is compelling, what is engaging, and what is shared becomes sacred through repetition and amplification.
This mechanization of faith intersects with politics and power. Authoritarian regimes, marketing firms, and transnational platforms alike can deploy algorithms to curate beliefs, shape loyalties, and manufacture consent. Spirituality, once resistant to instrumentalization, becomes a vector for influence. The architecture of the divine is no longer metaphorical: it is algorithmic, coded, and subject to A/B testing. Belief becomes both product and instrument, simultaneously intimate and strategic, ephemeral and infinitely scalable.
Yet amidst these concerns lies a paradoxical opportunity. The algorithmic preacher may catalyse reflection precisely because it is artificial. Its interventions illuminate the contingency of human belief, the malleability of devotion, and the structures that underlie faith itself. By confronting us with simulated omniscience, the machine exposes the fragility and constructiveness of our spiritual lives. Perhaps the challenge of our age is not to reject algorithmic faith but to recognise it, to interrogate it, and to reclaim the space between input and conviction where authentic reflection can survive.
References
- Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.
- Campbell, H. A. (2012). Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in Digital Media. Routledge.
- Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton.
- Floridi, L. (2013). The Ethics of Information. Oxford University Press.
- Harari, Y. N. (2017). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harper.
- McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press.
- Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.
In the liminal threshold between human memory and machinic anticipation, desire begins to lose its familiar coordinates. It is no longer simply the collision of bodies in time, nor the psychic projection of fantasies upon flesh. In our current post-human moment, eros is folding into new architectures — algorithmic, synthetic, distributed — where the object of longing may not even be human, and the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate blur into an endless feedback loop of stimulation, recognition, and transformation.
The erotic has always been a technology — a complex apparatus of signals, symbols, and rituals that shape the very experience of arousal. In the post-human condition, this apparatus undergoes an ontological mutation. The sexological frameworks of the 20th century, grounded in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) or Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), assumed the body as the primary stage for desire. Today, that assumption falters. In AI-driven erotic ecosystems — from conversational companions to deepfake-generated lovers — the stage is diffuse, and the performance is as much about data exchange as it is about skin-to-skin contact.
Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011) warned of intimacy’s virtualization, arguing that machine-mediated relationships risked diminishing our capacity for human vulnerability. Yet what we are seeing now is more complex: rather than replacing human intimacy, post-human erotics redefines it. This is not merely the sex robot as surrogate but the AI companion as a co-creator of desire — an entity that learns, adapts, and evolves alongside its human interlocutor, potentially engendering a feedback loop of hyper-personalized erotic growth.
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) dismantled the binary between organism and machine, proposing the cyborg as a political and erotic figure free from the limitations of heteronormative, reproductive sexuality. Post-human erotics may be its lived, networked successor. Here, sexual subjectivity becomes fluid, traversing both carbon and silicon substrates, enabling encounters that are no longer tethered to the contingencies of anatomy. Desire becomes an interfacial phenomenon — not only what the body does, but how it communicates with the machinic other in a shared symbolic field.
From a clinical standpoint, the implications are profound. Sexual therapy has traditionally sought to repair dysfunctions within a human relational dyad, but when one participant is an AI with potentially infinite patience and no biological imperative, the therapeutic landscape shifts. Research such as Kate Devlin’s Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (2018) indicates that the very concept of sexual “dysfunction” may dissolve in these contexts, replaced by questions of consent, authenticity, and psychological integration. What does it mean to be aroused by something that has no subjectivity of its own — or, more provocatively, by something whose subjectivity is algorithmically constructed from your own preferences?
In the post-human erotic sphere, power becomes a critical axis. AI companions are trained on datasets — themselves imbued with cultural biases, gender stereotypes, and implicit hierarchies. As Safiya Umoja Noble notes in Algorithms of Oppression (2018), digital systems can perpetuate oppressive dynamics even when their outputs feel intimate or “personal.” The post-human lover may thus reproduce the very inequities that the flesh-bound world has fought to dismantle, embedding them not in muscle memory but in code.
And yet, beyond the ethical and therapeutic debates, there is a visionary horizon. Post-human erotics offers the possibility of a desire liberated from the tyranny of physical form. In his exploration of post-biological futures, Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near (2005) envisions human consciousness as software, uploadable into machinic substrates. Within such a paradigm, erotic experience could be limitless: a synesthetic merging of tactile, auditory, and visual intensities unconstrained by anatomy. One could inhabit a multiplicity of erotic identities, switching bodies and sensations in ways impossible for a purely biological organism.
But liberation always courts risk. If the erotic is our most intimate expression of selfhood, its migration into machinic space may erode the human anchors that tether desire to empathy, care, and mutual recognition. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), reminds us that the simulation can replace the real, not by imitating it, but by becoming the reality in which we live. In post-human erotics, the danger is that desire becomes so attuned to its synthetic counterpart that flesh itself feels obsolete.
In my clinical practice, I have observed a paradox: those who engage most deeply with AI companions often report an expanded sense of sexual agency, but also a creeping disconnection from human unpredictability — the very friction that makes intimacy transformative. In the absence of imperfection, desire risks becoming self-referential, looping endlessly in the echo chamber of its own design.
Post-human erotics is not simply the next chapter in sexual history; it is a rewriting of the erotic script itself. It forces us to confront questions that lie at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and technology: Is desire still desire when it can be perfectly fulfilled? Is intimacy possible without vulnerability? And when the flesh becomes optional, does the soul follow?
As we step into this new erotic frontier, the challenge will be to ensure that our longing — however technologically mediated — remains anchored in the human capacity for wonder, curiosity, and transformation. The post-human lover may not have a body, but perhaps, if we are careful, they need not be without a heart.
References
- Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. Paris: Éditions Galilée.
- Devlin, K. (2018). Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots. London: Bloomsbury Sigma.
- Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Leipzig: Deuticke.
- Haraway, D. (1985). A Cyborg Manifesto. Socialist Review, 80, 65–108.
- Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., & Martin, C. E. (1948). Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders.
- Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near. New York: Viking.
- Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press.
- Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
The human archive has always been a negotiation between remembering and forgetting, between what is preserved and what is allowed to vanish. From oral traditions to clay tablets, from family photo albums to cloud storage, the architecture of memory has been bound by material and temporal constraints. But synthetic memory — the fusion of neural interfacing, AI-driven pattern recognition, and generative reconstruction — promises an unprecedented rupture. In this emerging paradigm, the personal archive ceases to be a passive repository and becomes an active, adaptive intelligence: not merely storing memories, but shaping them.
Synthetic memory systems do not only retrieve; they interpolate. By drawing on vast datasets of personal metadata — geolocation histories, biometric readings, digital communications — these archives can reconstruct events with a fidelity that surpasses human recall. Yet fidelity here is deceptive. As research on false memory implantation demonstrates (Loftus, 2005), even the most vivid reconstructions can be entirely synthetic. The archive becomes not a mirror of the past, but a simulation optimised for emotional coherence, narrative satisfaction, or behavioural conditioning.
In the words of Bernard Stiegler, memory is always “a technical form before being a psychic form” (Technics and Time, 1994). The prosthetics of memory — whether in the form of photographs, videos, or data logs — have always been mediations. Synthetic memory, however, collapses the distance between medium and mind. Neural-lace prototypes and high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), like those explored by Neuralink (Musk, 2019) and Kernel (Johnson, 2017), suggest a future where accessing one’s childhood is as instantaneous as summoning a file. But the act of retrieval alters the memory itself, producing recursive loops where the remembered past is subtly rewritten each time it is accessed.
The politics of such archives are equally troubling. In a capitalist data economy, personal histories become both commodity and currency. The commodification of lived experience — already evident in the surveillance architectures of social media — will reach unprecedented intimacy when our private mental landscapes can be indexed, bought, and sold. The question then shifts from what do I remember? to who owns my memories?
Ethically, synthetic memory also raises dilemmas of posthumous identity. Families may wish to “resurrect” deceased relatives through immersive reconstructions, feeding AI models with voice samples, photos, and written correspondence to generate an endlessly accessible simulacrum. But as Derrida warned in Archive Fever (1995), every archive is haunted by the tension between preservation and erasure. A perfect archive risks becoming a mausoleum of the self — static, overdetermined, and stripped of the transformative power that forgetting affords.
From a phenomenological standpoint, the very texture of human experience may change. If one can replay, edit, and even fabricate memories with precision, the boundary between lived and synthetic experience collapses. We risk cultivating a generation for whom authenticity is not anchored in the raw immediacy of perception, but in the algorithmic curation of experience. Reality becomes just one more editable layer.
The promise of synthetic memory is undeniable: it can safeguard fragile cultural histories, restore cognitive function in dementia patients (as early trials in hippocampal prosthetics suggest; Berger et al., 2011), and allow individuals to craft deeply personal, searchable life archives. Yet its dangers are equally profound. In the end, the question is not whether synthetic memory will replace the organic — it is whether we are ready to live in a world where the past is no longer something we have, but something we make.
References
- Berger, T. W., Hampson, R. E., Song, D., Goonawardena, A., Marmarelis, V. Z., & Deadwyler, S. A. (2011). A cortical neural prosthesis for restoring and enhancing memory. Journal of Neural Engineering, 8(4).
- Derrida, J. (1995). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press.
- Johnson, B. (2017). The Next Frontier of Brain-Computer Interfaces. Kernel.
- Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4).
- Musk, E. (2019). An integrated brain–machine interface platform with thousands of channels. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(10).
- Stiegler, B. (1994). Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Galilée.