Cover image for The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence by Benjamin Mangrum (2025) | Stanford University Press
Slavoj Žižek argues that gaming and virtual reality programs figure the computer as “a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner.” This claim follows on the heels of a reference to Jacques Lacan’s diagnosis in an infamous koan about the impossibility of sexual relations. For Lacan, the processes by which we differentiate between sexes make it impossible to have an intersubjective union with someone whose subjectivity is positioned within the opposite sex. Žižek applies this argument to the experience of computing. He argues that the computer presents itself as a solution to the inability to achieve an intersubjective union. By coming into intimate contact with an entity so entirely different from human subjectivity, users feel as though they have become capable of previously foreclosed intimacies. Sex, in this view, is only possible with a computer.
A related confluence of psychology and sexuality provides the central premise in Cameron Labine’s film Control Alt Delete (2008), which depicts how a programmer named Lewis (Tyler Labine) develops a sexual fetish for computers. Lewis works at Millenitech, a company that prepares corporate software systems for Y2K. The film sets up an extended parallel between the uncertainty of Y2K and Lewis’s unsettled heterosexuality. In the film’s opening scene, he fails to be aroused during a sexual encounter with his girlfriend, Sarah (Laura Bertram). He later avoids a sexual encounter with another woman named Jane (Sonja Bennett), largely because he worries about being impotent. The day after this failed sexual encounter, Lewis tells Jane, “I’m a very normal person. Maybe you were just coming on a little strong.” The fact that he objects to Jane coming on “strong” echoes an earlier moment when he tries to reconnect with Sarah over dinner at her apartment. He undresses when she goes to the restroom. Sarah gasps when she returns, and he explains, “Let me show you I’m a man.” She says she already knows he’s a man, but he clarifies: “I’m a real man. I have power.”
Lewis imagines masculinity as a subject position constituted by strength and prodigious sexuality. He differentiates this gendered position from femininity, which he seems to associate with passivity. The leading women in the film—Sarah; Jane; and Lewis’s supervisor, Angela (Alisen Down)—disturb Lewis’s sense of his place within “normal” social relations. Sarah and Jane are both more sexually aggressive and experimental; their erotic interests unsettle his apparent need for control in relationships with women. Angela, too, holds authority over Lewis and the other male programmers, thus compromising his ability to “have power.” These challenges are in fact relatively mild, but they prevent Lewis from embodying the subject position he has imagined for himself.
What’s interesting about this otherwise puerile insecurity is that the film maps it onto Lewis’s relationship to technology. At Millenitech, Lewis is responsible for updating an insurance company’s computer systems within a narrow timeframe. Despite his best efforts to control, alter, and delete social uncertainty through software, his code for the insurance company fails to prevent disaster in repeated test phases. When speaking with another programmer, Keith (Keith Dallas), Lewis says, “I seem to be a little bit blocked or something. I can’t see the code the way I used to before.” This professional “block” mirrors his sexual impotence. He no longer understands or controls the symbolic relations that once seemed “normal” to him. Just as he is a “real man” who cannot copulate, he is a coder who cannot code. His self-understanding no longer makes sense.
Y2K serves as a potent setting for the crisis of this subject position. As Lewis explains, computers “can’t panic. They can’t spin out or cave in or second guess. They don’t follow opinion polls or fashion reports. They operate according to known quantities. If they can’t assign something an exact value, they don’t assign it at all.” Computing signifies stability in the world of the film, but Y2K unsettles this stability: it marked a moment when computing technology, rather than organizing the social world, had become a source of widespread social uncertainty. Could a system of “exact value” generate self-defeating contradictions?
Lewis develops a sexual fetish for mainframes and computer towers in response to these layers of personal, professional, and technological anxieties. His first direct sexual encounter with a machine occurs after his failed attempt to reconnect with Sarah. He returns home and yells at his computer, asking if it wants him to be abject. He then kicks the table where the machine rests, causing a part to fall off and a port in the tower to open. The film then includes several graphic scenes of Lewis’s sexual encounters with the computer; it intersperses images from apocalyptic websites and other Y2K material during these scenes—an ironic portrayal of turn-of-the-millennium digital culture and its obsession with social control.
Masculinity and technical expertise, erotic pleasure and technological mastery, sex and professional labor—being the subject of managerial capital transforms each into a model for failed experience in the other. Lewis attempts to recuperate his imperiled subject position by coupling with computers, but this only leads to self-abasement. After further failures at work, Lewis has sexual encounters with two of Millenitech’s machines. He looks haggard and ashamed afterward. His attempts to regain control over his sense of masculinity and abilities as a coder only further alienate him. In seeking to assert control over his self, he loses it.
Lewis eventually abandons his search for sexual and technological control—partly because Y2K does not lead to the widespread crises that some feared—and in his newfound humility, he apologizes to Jane, and the two leave Millenitech together in search of different jobs. This reconciliation implies that Lewis and Jane may try to date again, a reconciliation that only becomes possible once Lewis abandons his association of “power” and being a “real man.” Rejecting this subject position, he also rejects the view of computers as tools of control. In contrast to this view, Lewis sees the computer as the instrument of a humbler and more ordinary form of happiness.
Excerpted from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence by Benjamin Mangrum, published by Stanford University Press, ©2025 by Benjamin Mangrum. All Rights Reserved.
Click here to read Benjamin Mangrum’s conversation with Rayna Salam how intimate activities that have become computational—and why we laugh about it.
