Vestigial Unconscious and Oceanic Feelings

According to Sigmund Freud, the unconscious is full of contradictions (wild emotional impulses, baseless fears, and repressive forces) but it is also a control mechanism. It is no wonder that digital platforms—requiring uniformity, reliable protocols, secure transmissions and proprietary algorithms as well as an enormous database about human desire and impulses—would gravitate toward a model of control, or more specifically, the ideal of automating impulsive actions and reactions. Similar to the Freudian unconscious, digital platforms and networks are infamously black-boxed, meaning their operations (inner workings) are made invisible to the average user, including information about them. Yet, the digital unconscious also seems to perfect and promote this as an automatic destructive force (a death drive fed by extraction, consumption and a will to endless profit) that is incommensurate with life on the planet. Using the recent pleas by the Tuvaluan Minister of Justice, Communication, and Foreign Affairs (Simon Kofe) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, this article will argue that denial has replaced repression as the key mechanism of the digital unconscious, allowing twenty-first century media to offer itself as pharmakon (both poison and a remedy or at least a distraction) to those twenty-first century crises that nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century media continue to advance.