“Digital Death Drive” | @ MGLC Švicarija, Ljubljana
By Alessandro Sbordoni
Transcription
Claire Elise: It's been a long time that we are waiting to hear this next talk, because one of our authors that we collaborate with, and also one of the editors of Becoming Press, Alessandro Sbordoni, has been kind of exploring a new topic in terms of their research, and we are going to consider this session as something that is kind of experimental, where we're going to go together into something new that relates to what is being called the digital death drive, which I think is going to serve as a really nice basis for elaboration later, as it really connects to all of these topics about digital structures, internet culture, etc.
Alessandro Sbordoni: Hi everyone. Thank you for the introduction, Claire. The title of this talk is "The Digital Death Drive." After a short introduction, I'll focus on the relationship between the Freudian death drive — the Todestrieb — and the military digital complex. But first of all, I have to break a kind of taboo: the death drive, which is the wish to return to the lifeless, does not only have a biological basis, but also a technological one. This psychoanalytical theory is inseparable from industrial technology and automation.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud theorized the death drive as a compulsion to repeat. The most popular example of the Freudian death drive was represented by a game played by his grandson, while his mother, Sophie Freud, was away. The child used to throw an object away and take it back, and every time he threw it away, he gave vent to a long "oooh" sound, which was interpreted as the German word "fort," meaning "gone," and every time he took it back, he shouted the word "da," meaning "there." So it was a game of disappearance and reappearance, "fort" and "da," that maintained the energy of the psychical system constant, at the same time as it was discharged in accordance with the first and second law of thermodynamics, which psychoanalysis translated as "pleasure" and "unpleasure."
But the notion of a Freudian death drive was actually developed years before by Sabina Spielrein, a Russian psychoanalyst and a friend of Sigmund Freud, who was also a lover of C.G. Jung. In 1912, Sabina Spielrein theorized the death drive in an article titled "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being." From biology to mythology, Sabina Spielrein argued that the act of destruction precedes the act of creation, that death brings forth new life. In biological reproduction, for example, the sex cells are destroyed during meiosis. In romantic relationships, the lover symbolically dies and is born again through symbolic union with the other. But also in war, the soldier sacrifices his life for the sake of the motherland. So, in all these instances, the "I" — the ego — dies for the sake of a "We." It's a drive to return life to death, the organic to the inorganic, the animate to the inanimate. So let this suffice as a general introduction to the definition of the death drive provided by Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein.
So, today I'll argue for the existence of a digital form of the death drive. According to Sigmund Freud's original 1920 paper, the child did not always take back the object that he threw away. In engineering terms, the input was greater than the output, the system was highly inefficient, and it's only with the advent of digital technology, I would argue, that the repetition automatism is perfected.
So, the notion of a death drive as a technical default was introduced by Jacques Lacan in his second seminar, at Hospital of Sainte-Anne. The Freudian compulsion to repeat is translated into French as the automatism of repetition — "automatisme de répétition." In the second seminar, Jacques Lacan compared the Freudian death drive with a message inside a machine that works through binary code, as open or closed, present or absent, yes or no, on a par with digital technology. In his commentary on "The Purloined Letter," he describes a message inside a machine as something that proceeds by opening and closing, the way an electronic lamp does, articulated through the same basic oppositions as the symbolic register — something always ready to answer, completing itself in the act of replying, by folding itself back into the wider circuit of things rather than remaining an isolated, closed loop.
But what if, instead of an electronic lamp like in Lacan's example, one were to imagine a computer? In "The Freudian Robot," Chinese scholar Lydia H. Liu emphasizes that Sigmund Freud's theory of the death drive is indissociable from thermodynamics, in the same way that Jacques Lacan's seminar series in 1954–5 was influenced by the development of game theory, cybernetics and information theory. Today, the advent of digital technology and artificial intelligence marks the possibility of a passage from reproduction mediated by sex to replication. As Isabel Millar argues in her [The] Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence — she asks what happens when humans don't ever need to have sex at all to procreate. From in vitro fertilization to the current research on ectogenesis, the biological finality of sex is surrogated by ever more perfect technical machines. But as the machine is able to supplement human sexuality, it is also able to replicate itself autonomously. We can think here of Von Neumann's self-reproducing automata, and Ray Kurzweil's notion of "singularity." In both cases, anyway, sexuality and reproduction are separated from each other.
Now, among the most underrated critics of Freudian psychoanalysis, there is Wilhelm Reich. According to Reich's theory, the death drive, which is the compulsion to repeat, develops from a negation of sexuality. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism — which French demonstrators literally threw at the police during the May 1968 protests — Wilhelm Reich argued that fascism is in large part a symptom of sexual repression. Wilhelm Reich's books would be burned twice: first in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, then in the United States in the 1950s. In any case, what was argued by the Austrian psychoanalyst about fascism in the 20th century is increasingly more relevant to the current form of techno-fascism.
Another example mentioned at the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud are the recurring nightmares of soldiers returning from World War One. Once again, this went against the wish-fulfilling function of dreams, as the soldiers reenacted their traumatic experiences on the war front. Almost 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud replied to a letter sent by Albert Einstein, in which the German physicist asked the psychoanalyst the question: "Why war?" According to Freud, an instinct for violence is at the core of every armed conflict. The death drive — the Todestrieb — is the biological justification of war. According to Freud, the death drive turns to the destructive instinct when it's exteriorized by some auxiliary organs. The death drive is now engineered into technology, and I'd like to emphasize this aspect that Freud was aware of.
So today, capitalism is really the economic justification for war. We can think of doomscrolling as the technological format of the automatism of repetition, as Jacques Lacan called the death drive. So war is part of a spectacle. Today, the same social media companies that reproduce war-related content are the ones that turn it into a business model. There was a post circulating on Facebook, generated with AI, that had the caption "like and share this picture to stop the war," which obviously is a perverse contradiction. So war, as such, is reduced to an information war. This is the lesson taught by Jean Baudrillard, among others, who developed this theory in his books, most notably The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, but also in a debate which Jacques Derrida titled "Why War?" which took place around the time of the Iraq conflict in 2003. Today, the sign of war itself disappears and reappears, just like the game of Freud's grandson, on the social media feed.
The internet was first developed as a military technology. It was created in the '60s during the Cold War, as a decentralized communication network designed to keep computers connected in the case of a nuclear attack. The internet is the medium par excellence of the death drive, from infinite scrolling all the way to auto-play. The computer screen is the site of a bombardment, both literally and metaphorically. In the 21st century, there is a shift from a military-industrial complex to a military-digital complex. The military-industrial complex was popularized as a term by Eisenhower in his 1961 Farewell Address, where he warned that this alliance could endanger democratic processes. At the beginning of the 21st century, the War on Terror was lobbied by major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon for increased military spending, which amounted to $6 trillion for taxpayers. This was at the time of the Derrida–Baudrillard debate, but now the United States military contracts with Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, X and OpenAI, among others. The same companies that promote the war are the same ones that profit from its mediatized content.
Meanwhile, the market for artificial intelligence is expanded by the aggression in Gaza and Ukraine — from the use of an AI system nicknamed "The Gospel" to determine which targets the Israeli Air Force would bomb, to drones with AI-based software that lock onto a target and then fly autonomously in Ukrainian territory. War exists on a continuum that cuts across life and death, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic matter. War in the 21st century represents an interlocking of commoditization and computers, as Nick Land once argued.
So, to summarize, Big Tech today acts as a defense contractor — which obviously is an ironic term — encompassing both defensive and offensive systems. I'd like to provide you just a short summary: Meta working on VR technology for the United States military; Amazon Web Services providing cloud services to the Department of Defense; Alphabet, which is also Google, providing AI drone technology for the battlefield; Microsoft developing augmented reality visors for the Army; X bringing their Grok for Government chatbot inside the Pentagon; OpenAI using AI-based technology on classified networks. So war is no longer a state of exception, but the economy behind digital technologies as such. There is no difference between consumer and soldier any longer — they exist inside the same economic circuit. They both exist only in order to reproduce more and more capital.
There is a video circulating online about the cost for the United States Navy to fire different weapons. Every time, in the video, a weapon fires, the price listed at the top of the video increases rapidly — from $0 to around $10,000 within seconds of firing a machine gun, and then from $0 to more than $10 million with just one anti-ballistic missile. But there is also another number listed below the video, for the hundreds of thousands of views, which are soon enough converted into money. The digital death drive is reproduced as the video is liked, shared and replayed again and again. And so there is this strange and almost apparent relationship between weapons and consumption.
"The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution," writes Otto Gross, who, like other physicians, was kept out of the psychoanalytic circle for his political views. According to the maverick psychoanalyst, all revolutions in recorded history have not succeeded, in the end, because the revolutionaries of yesterday carried ideology on their shoulders. Revolutionaries of today, on the other hand, are able to envision this relation through the theory of the unconscious, but all the while they hold ideology in the palm of their hands. One century after the first psychoanalytic society, there is no revolution whatsoever without the revaluation of the relationship with the technical system at large. And I'd like to conclude by saying that the revolution of tomorrow is, and can only be, a feedback loop with technology at its forefront. Thank you.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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