(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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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.