The capitalist discourse between algorithms and automation

Abstract

By understanding the platformed internet as a field of neoliberal advancement, the status of the technological object, algorithms, is questioned considering the perspectives of Freud and Lacan. The aim is to investigate the Freudian idea of a prosthetic god that juxtaposes itself with the position of the subject in Lacan’s proposal of the Discourse of the Capitalist. We interrogate contemporary automatons and ideals from the technological context, which promote a new automaton reason. Thus, the film Metropolis (Lang, 1927) guides the discussion about ordering through capital and its relationship with science and helps with questions regarding this necessary articulation in the technological field. In this sense, the platformed internet is understood as a vehicle and support for a reason that turns relations subjective in objects, the fallacious attempt to unify subject and object, into a subjective project by sustaining ideals through the identification of the masses and obedience to the demand forged by the algorithm. Thus, it is understood that the character of the Capitalist Discourse at the same time automates the subject and also affirms its anti-discursive logic in the field of psychoanalysis.