Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

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, ...
Read More
Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

First as Comedy, Then as Farce

A conversation with Benjamin Mangrum on the assembly of The Comedy of Computation

When confronted with change we don’t understand, there is only one thing to do: laugh. Or so says MIT literature professor Benjamin Mangrum. In his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford University Press, 2025), Mangrum peers into the archives ...
Read More
First as Comedy, Then as Farce