This is a work in process, that will be published (pending revision and review) in the reader for the School of Materialist Research Summer 2026 program the Political and its Limits. Do not share of circulate.
War diary // Whore diary
But should we be calling it a war, the way we’re living? The contention that war is no longer a discrete event, but is embedded, siteless, larval, everywhere and nowhere.[1] A pivot towards military logics, extraction and surveillance applied to civil society; wars by states on their own citizens; mercenary-terrorist activity undertaken by corporations as well as states, inducing populations to obey and consume. If at our most peaceful, we are immersed in a technologically mediated information environment which is an outgrowth of financial interests, and those financial interests aim for total human subjugation, should we properly say that we are at war, or not?
Are we at war and who could we trust to answer this question? Maybe a soldier, or failing that a military officer. Maybe a lawyer, or a politician. Ideally, a journalist. In a worst case scenario, a theorist of some kind. Paul Virilio, (who lived in the French town of Nantes as a child, when it was bombed in 1943; who was conscripted into the Algerian war as a young man; who became an philosopher-urbanist albeit one who, even among his friends, is often described as scattershot or un-academic) argues for war at length, or argues we are in it. Virilio’s broad-strokes claim[2] is that war has infiltrated political life, an expanding interest in surveillance and manipulation of all subjects—citizens as well as soldiers as well as criminals. He emphasizes that it is not attacks which make a war, but a set of logistics and information exchanges enabling those attacks. The acceleration of logistical-informational exchange is the capacity to win. Virilio argues this conflict has no terrain, it is a conflict over time rather than space, “chronopolitics.” He identifies speed as the component of velocity which tips an action over into violence—the varying metabolic speeds of life, of industry, of capitalist accumulation, of technology. Speed overwhelms the organism, overloads the sensory capacity. Speed is the difference between a blow and a caress.
This speed, the proliferation of images at speed, this capitalist control of the imagination, is it really a kind of warfare? Does the fusion of capitalist consumption with the war machine expand war into our lives? War, n.: a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations. According to the UN Charter, war is legal under two circumstances: in self defense, or to intervene in atrocity. Any other war is illegal, yet we see them all the time. Describing manifestations of a deleuzian war machine in Africa, philosopher Achille Mbembe writes “Increasingly, war is no longer waged between the armies of two sovereign states but between armed groups that act behind the mask of the state against armed groups that have no state but control very distinct territories, with both sides having as their main targets civilian populations that are unarmed or organized into militias. In cases where armed dissidents have not completely taken over state power, they have provoked territorial partitions and succeeded in controlling entire regions, which they administer on the model of fiefdoms, especially if they contain mineral deposits” (87). There’s been no global declaration, but certainly we are not at peace. Is there a danger in eroding the definition of war? Is war as a discrete, defined phenomenon something worth attempting to differentiate from daily life?
*
Not everyone trusts this rhetorical shift into a broader concept of war. It is syntonic with masculinist, glamorous war fantasies, embraced by the far right alongside the need for a draconian resurrection of gender roles. Not everyone trusts Virilio, either-- a disjointed, provocative thinker, too loosely articulated, too self-aggrandizing, too french. i propose another authority, on what war is: ask a sex worker. Stay with me.
Sex work is connected deeply to war[3] in war’s conventional sense, for a host of reasons which are practically self-evident: Militaries are typically, historically, groups of men removed from their ordinary social fabric and thrust into traumatizing circumstances, which creates catastrophic need for discharges of nervous excitation. Militaries in enemy territory are far from their conventional sexual morés. War immiserates the local economy while at the same time creating desperation, unpredictable blockages and catastrophic flows of sexual energy. The local people whose sexuality might be salable sell themselves, that is the profit they can try to make from war’s catastrophe. There might be a fetishization that occurs across difference, there might be a rejection of exogamy that turns the sex object from the homeland into a desired commodity par excellance. In the disrupted economy of war there is every reason for sex work to thrive. Including rancor, including disgust.
If war is a distinct paradigm, one of its defining features is that, by having a military, states designate a group of people to become murderers, in the interest of a larger social good. “Shell shock”, the fundament of our contemporary understanding of trauma, emerged in WWI. Trauma is an event which the psyche cannot integrate because it damages the individual’s schema either of themselves or of the world, this is what differentiates trauma from what it is colloquially confused with, a bummer, anything merely painful. Of course, trauma existed before the 20th century. War at a global scale was instrumental in making trauma visible to science, because it was happening at scale, because the reasons for the traumatic event were not private, and because the shell-shocked persons were mostly young white men.
As war is the public and legitimate face of trauma, an acceptable reason to become traumatized, sex work is the endemic inverse, where trauma is made private, kept private. Sex work— global industry, a spectacle, a public health issue— simultaneously secretively and continuously sanitizes the public sphere: it cordons sex workers off as a subset of the population who can hold a fantasy projection that would damage another kind of person, another relation. By taking in and transmuting sexual fantasies that cannot find their place in the home, or by providing ersatz intimacies to people who can’t or won’t cultivate intimacies in non-commercial relationships, sex work conceals the failure of modernity to fulfil its promise of sexual freedom.
Sex work is something a particular type of theorist loves to cheekily evoke, and then be applauded for being vaguely transgressive or sex positive. Many sex workers and sex work advocates frame sex work as a utopian possibility, an exit from the harrowing demands of other kinds of labor under neoliberal capitalism. What this fantasy turns away from is the symbiosis between sex work and power; sex work in itself does not transgress, even as it can create livable conditions, fugitive eroticism, and outlets for the thwarted rage and stolen dignity of sexual Others under capitalism. But if the product is to sell, it has to be a simulacra of the reality that capitalist patriarchy insisted on to begin with. The space of survival, then, is the space that the sex worker can cultivate in between themselves and their actions, the inner secret that they can maintain within what they appear to be doing, are paid to be doing. The problem with this is not that it is sex, but that it is work.
If there is a war, the whores are somewhere. A tent, a caravan, a jungle hut. If we are in a war of no terrain, a war of time, of information, where are the whores? If there is no terrain how do you get to them?
They are here and we are them.
The war is the whore’s place of work.
*
As we try to reconcile with what we’re seeing-- what a war is, if it’s this-- we should also note that sex work has undergone technological paradigm shifts. Like the military’s remote operators, many sex workers are not in the room with the person they’re effecting: the work is image-driven, digital. That the internet and indeed lens-based practices of image capture are military in origin is worth remembering, but we can say more about the pornographic turn of sex work as a war activity. Reiterating Virilio, as a part of the military takeover of civilian life, we take on a military temporality and perception, their speed and pace. Turning this observation towards digital sexual media; the screen after screen of camgirl thumbnails, animated, the compilations’ frantic montage, attempting to see something from the inside and the outside at the same time, to isolate the climactic moment and then subject it to repetition or expansion such that the climax as a structure is lost – acceleration without arrival, there is no end, no exit.
*
It is extremely difficult to keep a discussion of sex on sex. It becomes quickly wink wink a discussion of financial exchange, of property, of rights, of power—sex as something else. Not to say there is no erotic dimension of these, but to argue, along with Alenka Zupančič[4], that sex is not merely the metaphor for these other socio-political functions, nor the theater where they are played out, but rather that sex is itself the disturbance, the quality defying our consciousness that motivates and underwrites our attempts at contacting the real.
There is a danger, in looking to eroticism and sublimation as reasons for economic activity, including war, that we lose our materialism, following a vibey and symbolic train of thought, train of feeling. While in the main his arguments reinscribe the desubjectification of the sex worker, Pierre Klossowski (writer, artist, influential figure for Deleuze, Foucault, and others) provides us with some bulwark against this descent into vibes. Klossowski argues that “voluptuous emotion” through the desire to repeat it results in a kind of materialism—the repetition becomes a stereotype, the stereotype a phantasm—and through their repetition and rendering into their own compelling ends, they become a kind of material, something concrete. This should be thought of as an economic pursuit, the psychic force that holds the consumer in place as a kind of repetition-compulsion directed at an excess of sensual feeling, not just the erotic desire, but its manifestation.
Indeed, war and sex work must both be understood as activities driven by economic need. (Epstein-linked linguist and leftist thought leader) Noam Chomsky, describing the war economy says that the choice of the military in the military-industrial complex is basically arbitrary. A similar point with different emphasis is made by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, about the conversion from agriculture to a prison economy in California. We could choose to dump money into anything and it would move the economy, but we chose war, we chose prison. Virilio’s formulation of this is that we made war structural, central, and invisible because the regular consumerism of mass culture was not sufficient to uphold the economy. War was the only black hole sufficiently absorbent to take in enough resources that the economy would move.
We chose war, prison, and choose, currently, AI infrastructure. Those concerned about the fact that AI is the only growth sector in the US economy point to the ineffectiveness of AI as an economic generator—AI companies keep promising major disruption, major cost- and labor-saving developments are moments away, but they have basically failed to arrive. Critics point to this economic holding pattern, smoke and mirrors, and say the future isn’t coming. But what was our plan to recoup on war, on prison? It is an unwarranted optimism to think that it will not “succeed” merely because it fails utterly on its own terms. The “growth sectors” of the economy are the things we have agreed are necessary or inevitable. At some point we decided, if it is in the name of war or science, we have to do it, we will do anything.
*
What makes someone a sex worker, what makes someone a whore[5]? Sex work is the exchange of sex for money, but sometimes there’s no money, sometimes the money doesn’t go to the one who’s getting fucked. What makes a whore in this case is the loss of a right to refusal, a whore is identical to a woman except in that she cannot refuse. This is the panic sex work caused for second wave feminism: that a financial transaction (legitimate) could excuse a loss of sexual agency (unlegitimate). But this is a stereotype, a whorephobic, client centered idea of what a whore is. Whores in reality refuse all the time. Whores have refused social legitimacy, 9-5 work. Whores have refused the social prohibition on whoring, the self-preserving command to not be a whore. And they have betrayed also this self-annihilating passage, by taking money after all, admitting that they want to live.
When i say that whores are the ones to ask, the ones who would know whether we are at war, i’m not implying that their authority equates to good politics. To survive a war is morally corrosive. Aella, an independent sex researcher, camgirl, and rationalist involved in the AI safety for-lack-of-a-better-word social body, is one example of sex work in symbiosis with power, or whatever appears to be assuming power. “I like capitalism,” says Aella. She organizes orgies, makes a chart of who comes where during her birthday gangbang. She writes on substack, gets venture capital, starts a kind of content-generating think tank called “Plz Don’t Kill Us” to tip the internet’s general contents in a pro-human direction, to raise awareness about the need for AI safety through celebrity tweets.
Whether or not the data analysis works is not important to me. The non-data analysis, rationalists’ conclusions, proposals, and narrativizations of a future, are much more distressing, and are only flimsily connected to the data. AI thought leaders aknowledge that what they are building works towards human subjugation and ecological destruction, yet there’s no question of not building that thing. The anxiety is heavily weighted towards the future development of superintelligent anti-human AI agents, rather than very much already existing ecological devastation necessitated by AI-support infrastructure, or the more banal economic collapse that will occur if and when artificial intelligence succeeds in taking everyone’s job. They are only afraid of a science fiction future, speculative destruction. They play metaphysical-philosophical logic games about the potential human cost of AI projects, the sort of thought experiments appropriate to bright edgelord high school students, versions of the trolley problem, trying to train themselves to think like machines.
With AI, as with war, as with the activity of states, we have accepted that there is a specialist knowledge, a need for expertise that ordinary civilians do not possess. We are not competent to understand what our needs are. The global system, financialization, we are told it’s simply too complicated. As we interact with an icon-based user interface on our phone or computer, as we communicate via platforms, believing that we are simply on the internet itself, or even interacting with the un-mediated world, we lose our sense that we are manipulating symbols, that we are using a product. This world of symbols has led us to a reality-TV star US president, who in turn confers power based on appearances. He’s preoccupied with people looking the part, “like he was sent from central casting.” A conflation of commentating, enthusiasm, and expertise, podcasters running the FBI, handsome alcoholics in charge of the military. The sex worker is special, in these constellations, as the only figure for whom this kind of credential is appropriate. If we take whore as a subset of women, and women as a fictional construct are all artifice as described for example in Alenka Zupancic’s reading of psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, that “genuine womanliness” and masquerade are indistinguishable (55-56); Not masculinity’s failure to perform correctly, but a performativity which has nothing at its center; the deception is the thing itself. To be accepted by the gaze of power as a whore means that you are qualified to be one.
The kind of sexuality that Aella (as one example—she has a lot of friends) facilitates for not overly socially skilled or charismatic tech guys is not interesting as a site of shock or prurience—i deny them the satisfaction of being shocking. What is worth thinking about is how the insistence on a version of sexual freedom is completely compatible with the denial of other freedoms; the freedom to live in a habitable environment, for example, the freedom to exist in a society where wealth is not heavily and inexplicably concentrated in the fraction of a percentage of persons who have been given access to wealth-compounding financial instruments, producing nothing in the real world. The denials of these freedoms for broad populations are compatible with the sexual freedom of the Berkeley AI safety guys, because there are defined human groups with different kinds of entitlements and rights. Freedom for some is enslavement of the other, in their ideology there is no contradiction. This is framed as contemporary, edgy, of a piece with their futuristic-speculative fascinations, but putative freedom within a heavily stratified and hierarchical society is not freedom and is not new. Nazism administrated and controlled the price of brothels on every military base, during the 3rd reich (Herzog, 2004). War is a sex-making project, offering sexual rewards to those who execute violence most effectively. The idea that some people, a ruling class, deserves complete sexual agency at the expense of an underclass is not a contradiction, it is part of the same movement, the creation and naturalization of categories. Those who take pleasure and those who must provide it.
The beliefs and concepts driving AI development and AI safety research, rationalism, is not an alternative to capitalism’s death drive, but its acceleration. Rationally, its practitioners desire “success” (including a particular postfeminist sexual freedom for the ruling class). This is given the status of logic or nature, when it is clearly a construct based on unforced human choices. Is this war? In Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenrich expresses the prevalence of war as a social phenomenon as a kind of equation: if two societies want to make war, there is a war between them, whereas if one society wants to make war and the other refuses, there is a slaughter. Meaning war as a meme is highly resilient: to refuse war is to be wiped out (1997, 233-234). This is perhaps rational, an account of how we got here, but does that mean we have to take it? Do we have to enshrine it merely because it has happened and keeps happening?
*
Should we properly call this a war? Public intellectuals like Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron articulate the platform-capitalism as enshittification: the technology exists, it’s fun at first, people get addicted to it and then, (or perhaps from the beginning,) capitalism hollows it out. But others argue against this as a problem, let alone a war. In the columns arguing against the concept of enshittification, people who call themselves tech optimists or tech altruists or simply “realists” or “normal” argue that nothing like this is happening, human life is improved by technology and its speed, the platforms which we are addicted to must be enjoyable, because we spend more time on them every year. [6]
It’s arguably not a war because people arguably aren’t dying: war is a sanctioned mutual period of mass murders. The killing, and the field of murdered bodies after it’s over. It doesn’t look like this, but people do die. In mines for lithium and other conflict minerals[7], in wars over resources required for tech infrastructure[8], in climate change accelerated by water- and resource-hungry faciltities,[9] in pollution and toxicity caused by the facilities themselves[10]. In a loop uniting war and whatever this other thing is, maybe also war, that we’re discussing, data centers are in turn worthwhile military targets, as seen in the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine.
Then, as we need to update our concept of war, we should expand our common sense of death itself. Examining the present in the shadow of colonialism, Achille Mbembe tells us that warfare undertaken through violent resource appropriation, fast capitalism, and slippages between conventional military action and terrorism, we have created “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (2019, p92). We are no longer in an era of biopolitics, and administration of life, but have moved onto necropolitics, the administration of death, debilitation, states of injury. Without trivializing the physical attacks, debilitiy, murder, and traumas which Mbembe invokes and which we can see, on social media, as the reality of {colonialism and resource war,} we can say that the affective despair, the sense of meaninglessness and inefficacy, the inability to focus ones attention that paralyses much of the global north in a depoliticized consumer consciousness is a soft-power manifestation of the same war effort. This affective blankness creates mass complicity with the same necropolitical goal, even if not all subjects are equally dead.
And sex workers are related to death and to death, to both variants. Because sex and death drives are bound, desire and revulsion meet in the figure of the sex worker. The sex worker under capitalism is linked to death of the soul because that is where the whore becomes necessary, a navigation of the impossibility of being desired as ourselves, loved on our own terms: mercenary love[11] slides around us in a dissociative scrim that makes the world survivable. A sex worker is a body where the client can arrest themselves in the enjoyment of their experience without the burden of creating mutuality. And more literally, a sex worker is at the border of death and life, socially dead: fair game for murder. The death in its retelling already forms itself more into moralistic anecdote than tragedy. At the beginning of the joke, the anecdote, the news story, you can tell already that the sex worker is dead.
*
Whores, in the country i am from, are almost everywhere criminals. What is the crime, behind the crime, what is the moral affront? That they are on some level lying, by giving access to themselves for money, when sex is meant to be a marker of love or intimacy, a demonstration of the belonging i.e. mutual ownership in the family unit, and as such should not be for sale. The moral failing is that instead of being owned by love in the context of marriage and nuclear family, they are rented. But pinning this disgust and derision on the worker is an obvious targeting error: the tendency of capitalism is slavery, the consumer at some point will of course want to purchase a human life, human love as a form of subservience.
The distinction between a slave and a worker is capitalism’s claim to morality. The argument is that a slave is sold, their self is sold, whereas a worker sells the commodity of their labor power[12]. The sex worker is particularly useful, particularly brutal, in her demonstration how this distinction fails, forcing us to see the failure elsewhere. Klossowski: “Once the bodily presence of the industrial slave is included in appraising her productive yield (her physiognomy being inseparable from her work), it is specious to draw a distinction between the person and her activity” (2017, p76).
The sex worker as she exists in Klossowski’s theoretical work is a marker for perversity, paraphilia. There is no such thing as an unproblematic sex worker. He doesn’t bother to substantiate this, it is for him a commonplace. Klossowski tracks back through de Sade to propose that in fact it is not the sex act in exchange for money, which is erotic. Rather, the thrill resides in the fact that a person, capable of shame, is transgressing their own will for money: the source of value is not the sex but the humiliation, the outraged moral emotion of the person whose sex is for sale.
Meaning that the whore’s value rests either in the extent to which she is hurt by her work, or in her ability to pretend that she is being hurt by it, which any good pretender will tell you is almost the same thing.
*
i would prefer to be able to launch into a full-throated defense of sex work and workers. Sex work is not problematic because it is sex, but because it is work. A pervasive subject of discussion debate fantasy and speculation outside the field of practice, sex work is framed as a way to beat the system of capitalism, free money. Sex workers themselves, though they know they’re working, believe they are undermining capitalism, by creating survivable spaces for themselves. Both of these fantasies turn away from the way that sex work has functioned under neoliberalism, not as a subversion but as an acceleration, an intuitive next step.
So i cannot offer an unconditional defense, but there is a proposition within sex work that it pains me to abandon: sex offered neutrally, an exchange, beyond attraction, beyond romanticism. If it could be liberated from the money exchange, isn’t that attitude, to be approached in need, to make an exchange of needs, liberatory? Rather than the excess of romanticism, prohibition, drama, jouissance, an alternative: desire attached to sexuality can be fulfilled, and the fight can be taken somewhere else. Revulsion and vengeance and enmity and avarice do not need to anchor onto sexual difference. This is the utopian promise of sex work, the potential not just to individually escape the predation of neoliberal capitalism, but to undo the prior assumption that sex is meaningful via a psychodrama which is alternately entwined around or sublimated in the service of our psychotic need for a gender binary, a sexed other, a family as an organizing unit.
That would be the utopia. But the truth is it’s never like this. It’s never an exchange of needs, not because of the pathology of whores, but because the capitalist system has deformed another class of person: the consumer. Clients do not want what they say or believe they want. Clients want an excess, an unadvertised service, a betrayal of the whore’s boundaries that will prove that the client is uniquely special and lovable, among all other clients. Capitalism performs its trick again—what you think you want, what you can admit to wanting, is utterly unsatisfying. Desire pulls us beyond the price list, beyond reason, negotiation. Because what we can grasp is not the same as the fantasy that ignited our desire, it fills us with rage and despair. And knowing this, having been grasped and grasped, whores have foreknowledge of the profound psychic crisis that we are facing, will face, as we go into a reality where the social sphere is populated with virtual presences designed to fulfil us; Marc Zuckerberg’s[13] imagined reality where infrequent or anemic friendships are supplemented by the presence of AI agents. We addict ourselves, allow ourselves to be addicted, to the apparatus that limits our imagination. Philosopher and cultural theorist Marc Fisher describes this as “depressive hedonia, Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition [he’s] referring to is constituted not by an inability to gel pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure” (2009, p21). To inflect this with a more psychoanalytic register, pursuing jouissance-enjoyment paralyses us in a repetition, a superficial, driven experience where analysis, repair, or fulfillment are impossible.
*
The whore sells voluptuous emotion, and we continue to lose our literacy as far as parsing aesthetic-symbolic from other dimensions of our society, of our economy, of our reality interface. The voluptuous emotion is perhaps the only thing that we understand ourselves to be paying for—a luxury brand does not make us rich, in fact expenditure on the brand achieves the opposite, but we can feel rich, and that is the only reward available. Klossowski describes this as “affects … reconfigured into a need for goods.” Whores are selling the only thing we understand to have real value, that is, a promise that the horror of our reality can be escaped, even if that promise can only be fulfilled in a momentary ephemerality.
To an extent, of course, i am airing my little polemic because i love whores. But my proclivities aside, it is an actual problem-- We have eliminated the expert.
The whore is a kind of hacker of the biomechanical organism, her expertise denigrated but undeniable. An expertise grounded in an understanding of the desire that’s aimed at her, an attuning interaction with that desire. The sex worker navigates ethics of this position, or the impossibility of being ethical from this position, through the felt knowledge that the client wants something. i am not arguing that relations are always caring, or even that empathy is always good—the claim is only that empathy does happen, it is a basis for human relations, and even if it can be subverted or manipulated or made tactical, operating from a basis of understanding is qualitatively different form operating as a machine that is attempting to maximize user engagement and has no other interiority or purpose.
GenAI, then, is really muscling in on the work of whores. If AI, programmed by humans and increasingly by prior generations of AI, wants an limitless amount of user engagement, how different is that from trying to get money from your class enemy, from trying to get love from a desired object? Do we approach the machine as we would a desired other, to turn our restless yearning into something else, outrage, entertainment, an expanded numbness, shimmering surface over an uncontemplateable depth.
*
If the sex worker is our war authority, does that extend to this new kind? Sex work without a body, without a mind; genAI data-phantom, virtual girlfriend, therapy chatbot, deepfakes without a referent, predictive, recombinatory. We are building whores who do not have the interiority which would allow them to answer us. This is a psychic crisis because we conflate language and sentience, in our common sense as well as in our specialist theories of mind. Zupančič via Lacan describes his early concept of the “speaking being,” the introduction of language representing a “pure loss” on the non-signifying side, a loss of extralingual experience(46). The function of language in holding us apart from reality makes analysis possible, and also makes it necessary. In this respect, while there are use cases of AI that are more immediately destructive (in military targeting, for example, or in predictive policing), the endowment of language and of the personal pronoun “I” upon AI agents significantly undermines our ability to understand genAI’s nature and our relation to the technology.
*
The argument, made by Klossowski decades ago, is that we’re all whoring already. It’s true enough, attention as labor, engagement as labor, our pleasure our act of self-reproduction becoming another source of profit for the platform owners (social media videos pornography shopping). But if we are whores, in this fashion, we are whores whose sensitivity and awareness, whose agential use of a hostile system, is being catastrophically underdeveloped. We take the whore’s activity, even her aesthetics, while failing to access her intelligence.
If a whore is the one who supposedly lacks the right of refusal, but in fact harbors a fugitive agency, then we need whore guidance desperately. And if what we use whores for is the excess of voluptuous emotion, and we now turn to machines for this, we are eliminating the position of moral authority, the person who could tell us if we are at war or not.
Like Ehrenrich’s observation that war is resilient as a meme because to resist war is to be annihilated, to resist platform technology is only to find another kind of death, opacity is invisibility, isolation from the networks through which we sustain ourselves and seek help. To attempt to resist genAI and platform technology, to resist the pleasure of subservience and instantaneity, that genAI offers, is “unrealistic” or “self-destructive,” i am informed over and over in conversation with artists, peers, students. Am i writing this hoping that people stop having sex with their computers? Haha, i’ve lost already. We’ve lost already, we’re already dead.
Works Cited
Alenka Zupančič. 2017. What Is Sex? The Mit Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1998. Blood Rites. Holt Paperbacks.
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason : Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag : Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press.
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.
Herzog, Dagmar. 2005. Sexuality and German Fascism. Berghahn Books.
Klossowski, Pierre. 2017. Living Currency. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press.
Virilio, Paul, and Sylvère Lotringer. 2008. Pure War 25 years later. Semiotext(e).
[does this have to be here? AI-safety]
SE Gyges, Aella/AI safety bluesky thread: https://tbsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mvom4b4dn22q
Burton, Tara Isabella. 2023. Rational Magic. The New Atlantis. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/rational-magic
[1] Perhaps the best-known such formulation is Deleuze & Guattari’s Nomadology: the War Machine, but this has also been taken up by many contemporary thinkers, for example Nandita Biswas Mallamphy on larval warfare. Right public figures (Alex Jones and Infowars, Steve Bannon’s War Room) also embrace this concept.
[2] Throughout i cite Virilio’s Pure War, a book length interview with Sylvere Lotiringer. First published in 1983, with postscripts added in 1997 and 2007. Like Baudrillard, who Virilio agrees with in substance regarding simulation while disagreeing in the value assessment, Virilio usefully frames the crisis of meaning we are faced with while writing from a recent past and therefore not caught in day-to-day technological advancements of 2026, the time of this writing.
[3] It is irresponsible to conflate rape and sex work but also irresponsible to go through my points without acknowledging the widespread usage of rape as a weapon of war, a practice of war. Sexual violence as an endemic war activity. Gayatri Spivak: "group rape perpetrated by the conquerors" is "a metonymic celebration of territorial acquisition" (1999, 300). Killing is normalized but rape, since the 1990s, has become one of the few practices around which a conversation about decency or rules of law in war can arise. Rape is distinct from sex work in the monetary exchange which becomes a way of navigating consent, which of course is spurious; one can be coerced by money or barter as easily as by violence, in a state of desperation. Rape as a narrative device is also used to shore up the imagination of the enemy as bestial and subhuman, to evoke miscegenation fears, to inflame feelings of property related to “our” women, etc. In short there are several ways that rape enters the discussion which are not pure ethical concerns regarding agency, mutuality or care. It is completely happening, rape, but it is not what i am addressing.
[4] In Zupančič’s reading of Freud and Lacan which comprises “What is Sex” 2017, for example p6.
[5] The range of experience is vast, and the range which i can speak to, an activity of a certain class in certain nations, my good English, my advanced age, my effective retirement, my formerly female body, this is heavily culture bound. Attendant to my resentment of the provocateur theorists is that they occasionally latch onto something correct, as when irredeemably racist Nietzche says that hookers manage to sell what they could not give away for free. How dare you describe my sex life.
[6] as exemplar, Ruby Justice Thelot’s column “’Enshittification’ isn’t Real” https://www.a16z.news/p/enshittification-isnt-real
[7] https://www.globalminingreview.com/special-reports/14012026/lithium-minings-new-problem-fire-risks-and-worker-safety-in-battery-era-mining/
[8] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/6/us-sanctions-target-rwandan-firms-linked-to-conflict-minerals-funding-m23
[9] https://mit-genai.pubpub.org/pub/8ulgrckc/release/2
[10] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/27/datacenter-developers-us-pollution-rules https://sustainabilitydialogue.uchicago.edu/news/data-centers-pollution-and-the-communities-left-behind/
[11] “Mercenary love” is a given translation for prostitution or sex work, from antiquity up through the early modern period when it was the title of moralistic allegory paintings by von Aachen, de Costa, Hans Balding Grien and others.
[12] There is a baffling ripple of non-recognition of enslavement as a non-metaphorical phenomenon in Marx and Klossowski. Marx, as taken up by Fred Moten (2003), says in Capital (vol 1 Ch 1 section 4 “the Fetishism of Commodities”) that commodities do not speak, that the imaginary voice of a commodity must be invented and inserted into it by a theorist, when in fact a traffic of speaking commodities, enslaved people, was the originating moment of global capitalism. (The assertion made in the imaginary voice of the commodity creates additional problems, but this initial denial of the existence of speaking commodiites and their agency is the first delegitimizing sign.) Klossowski for his part in the interest of pinning the commodity-for-pleasure on the “industrial age” bafflingly states that the sexual use of slaves was conceived of as a non-reproductive use. For Klossowski especially, while the idea of slavery is crucial, the features of literal enslavement, including its sexual features, seem fundamentally uninteresting, to the detriment of their concepts.
[13] Zuckerberg interviewed on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, April 29 2025, says the average American has about 3 friends but a desire for about 15 friends, and that this gap will be filled by Meta’s AIs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYXeQbTuVl0