Welcome to the Metaverse: Social Media, the Phantasmatic Big Other, and the Anxiety of the Prosthetic Gods

Abstract

In Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, Matthew Flisfeder develops an alternative structuralist theory of social media. As a Žižekian analysis of social media, this book is an important contribution to the field of Žižekian studies. While Flisfeder theorizes social media in relation to Slavoj Žižek’s idea of the big Other, he nonetheless proposes an unorthodox understanding, importantly choosing not to engage Žižek’s analysis of technology, which develops in the context of his discussion of artificial intelligence and virtual reality in relation to Freud’s “prosthetic God” and Lacan’s lathouses. The present essay suggests that Žižek’s analysis of technology has radical implications for understanding social media, providing an important perspective that shifts the emphasis of theorizing social media from desire to anxiety in a zone “beyond the pleasure principle,” an analysis that Žižek situates in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the big Other.