The part of me that's missing: the angst of automation

What has been showing up on your timeline lately? The video of Jout Jout reading the children's book The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein? The Gucci runway show with models carrying hyper-realistic versions of their own heads? Or perhaps the latest Dolce & Gabbana show that brought drones onto the runway carrying handbags instead of models? More than that, it is the great trend of anxiety in the face of exponential technological development that makes us question our relevance as workers, as peers, as human beings.

But what does the book The Missing Piecehave to do with it? Why did the vlogger's reading impact so many people today, given that it addresses a theme that has shaken humanity since its inception? The subject, by the way, is one of the great questions of psychoanalysis, which figures like Lacan, for example, explored throughout their studies.

The thing is, this anxiety—this fear of incompleteness, insufficiency, and of being disposable individuals—is returning today not because of how we relate to one another, but because we are facing the increasingly latent possibility that automatons will be able to emulate us so perfectly and, at the same time, so improved, as they would be able to shed some of our "flaws" and offer maximum performance.

Just as Pygmalion wanted his sculpture to speak, Dr. Frankenstein found himself facing the problem caused by his ambition to bring his creature to life. In modern science fiction, it is the myth of Prometheus and his audacity in playing with fire that returns to haunt the dystopian imagination of works like Westworld or Ex Machina, or, from another point of view, in the franchise Alien by Ridley Scott, or even the not-so-popular sequel Prometheus.

While the existence of artificial beings created in the image and likeness of their makers clearly and quickly evokes a biblical narrative, it also raises countless other philosophical, economic, political, and social questions. After all, as we create machines—artificial beings that emulate us in so many ways—the natural consequence is to face the side effects in every other space we inhabit as human beings. In other words, the closer they are to us, the more these automatons will impact everything related to our existence.

And it is this fear of becoming disposable, obsolete, replaceable, and incapable that causes this anguish and makes people weep at narratives as simple as the one in the book The Missing Piece. At a time when so many people suffer from anxiety (Brazil is the most anxious country in the world), the feeling of anguish and the loss of meaning in one's own existence as a human being emerges as an offshoot of Freud’s castration anxiety—the fear of impending danger and psychic trauma. And this anguish, as the psychoanalyst argues, functions as a mechanism that precedes even the pleasure principle.

“Producing it [anguish], as a protection against encountering the traumatic, is the goal of traumatic dreams. Thus, Freud says, in traumatic neurosis, dreams reproduce a situation of extreme suffering and repetition of the trauma, and therefore cannot be referred to the pleasure principle. Such repetition could thus be thought of as an attempt to establish it through the development of anguish, because there was no possibility of its acting as a signal at the moment of the traumatic experience. They thus indicate, as a rule, an attempt to establish pleasure, which indicates that it, the pleasure principle, would not be established a priori. It can no longer be considered, then, that it is unused libido that causes anguish, but, based on the theory of trauma, Freud indicates two origins of anguish: one resulting from the traumatic moment and another as a signal that threatens as a repetition of a given moment. Here, the logical necessity for the egoic instance to be considered the producer and the real seat of anguish becomes apparent. (PISETTA, 2009)

Therefore, this anguish stems from the assumption of our own personal experience lived out on different scales, up to the visualization, or anticipation, of a prominent event capable of causing a new traumatic moment. This, consequently, can be glimpsed through narratives, whether in dreams (traumatic or otherwise), in news about a new advanced robot (or in fake news about killer drones), in science fiction films and books, in music, or in a biased reading that triggers in each individual the identification (egoic instance) that produces the anguish.

This is perhaps why the horror theater of series like Black Mirror They are successful both because they reflect the inner angst of our contemporary culture and our state of mind, and because, in a vicious cycle, they feed back into this anxiety, which is indeed well-founded but has not necessarily been rationalized.

Just as we need to educate ourselves against fake news, for example through media literacy, we also need to educate ourselves on the principles of technology, so that our lack of knowledge does not provide, and is not fueled by, fear-mongering. Furthermore, it is not only through technical knowledge that we will achieve "enlightenment," as the Enlightenment intended, but rather through a broad and complex perspective on the various layers that construct our reality, which suggests, for example, new educational systems such as STEAM.