Engineering Desire: Algorithmic Environments and the Promise of Wholeness

Why do technological promises remain so compelling? Artificial intelligence, digital platforms and algorithmic systems continue to attract extraordinary levels of attention, investment and hope. Their transformative promise persists despite visible shortcomings, recurring disappointments and mounting social and environmental concerns.
Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Ciano Aydin offers a new way of understanding this enduring appeal. Shifting attention from behavior to desire and from power to receptivity, he reveals the existential dimensions of our investment in algorithmic environments. Using Tinder as a paradigmatic case, the book shows how these environments increasingly organize desire itself by offering recognition, orientation, certainty and the fantasy of wholeness.
But algorithmic environments are not merely sites of illusion. The same systems that sustain fantasies of self-knowledge and completion can also lay bare the structure of desire itself. Engineering Desire offers a distinctive framework for understanding both the risks and possibilities of contemporary technological life, rethinking singular self-formation as a possibility within technological mediation.

Ciano Aydin is Full Professor of Philosophy of Technology at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is the author of Extimate Technology: Self-Formation in a Technological World (Routledge, 2021). He has published in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Philosophy and Technology, AI & Society, Philosophical Psychology and other journals.