Enjoy Your Surveillance!

On Superegoic-Capitalistic Artificial Intelligence

Michael Downs & Bryce Nance

12 August 2025

"The superego is a real meanie."

—Jacques Lacan, Seminar X, p. 105

So what exactly is superegoic-capitalistic artificial intelligence? Well, first things first, what exactly is the superego? The superego is what commands us to “Enjoy!”. And what is the actual meaning of “Enjoy!”? As Jacques Lacan famously put it, “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy (jouir) except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance — Enjoy!” (Seminar XX, p. 3). Just try to go anywhere in the consumer society without being told to “Enjoy!” and you’ll soon recognize its omnipresence. You’d think that the primary job of every waiter, barista, bartender, salesclerk, and so on, is to hurl the superego’s injunction at us. The injunction to “Enjoy!” is inescapable for the consumer. So much so that if you decided to play a drinking game based on it, if you were to take a shot every time someone told you to “Enjoy!”, then you would quickly die of alcohol poisoning. This “Enjoy!” gives structure to our entire social world and all of our activities, social practices, spontaneous behaviors and automatic reactions are centered around the “Enjoy!” In the words of Slavoj Žižek:

Today, however, we are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction ‘Enjoy!’, from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening. Enjoyment today effectively functions as a strange ethical duty: individuals feel guilty not for violating moral inhibitions by way of engaging in illicit pleasures, but for not being able to enjoy.(How to Read Lacan, p. 104)

But when it comes to superego’s demand to “Enjoy!”, we must keep in mind that it is not insisting that we enjoy this or that enjoyment, but, rather, that we must simply enjoy ourselves at all times. Part of what makes this injunction one that is impossible to fulfill is precisely how meaningless and vague it is at its core. We must constantly strive to do something without knowing what it is that we are specifically trying to accomplish. Thus, the “Enjoy!” means “Get it right!” but the problem is that the superego itself never defines what is “right”, that is, what it would mean to properly enjoy. As Alfie Bown rightly points out, “It needs to be stressed that the point is not so much that society tells us what to enjoy (though it does), but that it tells us to enjoy per se. This seems important given how often we are given an impression that it doesn’t matter what we enjoy, just that we do” (Enjoying It, p. 5). From the perspective of the superego, asking it for guidance in the ways of enjoyment is to already fail to enjoy, which means that it only makes us feel more guilty.

Now let’s ask ourselves the Leninist question: who gains from the superegoic duty to enjoy ourselves? Of course, the answer is capital itself. In consumer society, superego is the voice of capital precisely because the injunction to “Enjoy!” is an injunction to “Accumulate!”, which positions enjoyment in the service of capital accumulation; that is, no longer the blood of the workers, this obligatory enjoyment is the lubricant of the gears of the capitalist machine (the formula for which Marx established as M-C-M′ or money → commodity → surplus-money). To be a good capitalist subject is to always be enjoying oneself as one purchases, consumes and accumulates commodities. It’s worth noting that the superego and capital have homologous circuits insofar as both are positive feedback loops—cyberpositivity is baked into both of them owing to how the superego generates surplus-guilt and capital spurs on surplus-value. In fact, superego and capital are so intertwined in our society that I’m tempted to try to produce a neologism that captures the inextricability of the two of them. In German, “capital” is Kapital and “superego” is Über-Ich, so perhaps we could refer to the capitalist superego as Küber-Ich, but how might we signify this in English. We have a couple options here. Maybe we could talk of the cuperego, the caperego or the capiego (pronounced ˈka-pə-ˈē-gō). Personally, I tend to favor the sound of capiego. This gets us to the fundamental identification that must be made in order to understand our situation: the superego is capital and capital is the superego — “Enjoy!” means “Accumulate!” As Todd McGowan explains this connection:

Accumulation is the superegoic imperative apropos of capitalism. That is, within capitalism, accumulation has the status of a moral obligation, and the capitalist subject inevitably hears an internal voice urging her or him on for “more.” In the first volume of Capital, Marx captures perfectly the superegoic dimension of capitalism’s command for accumulation. The voice proclaims, “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” Here, Marx reveals the way in which the call for accumulation functions as law and formally as a command. Despite whatever efforts we might make at obedience, we can never quiet this voice or sate the superego’s appetite: no amount of accumulation is ever enough, either for the individual capitalist subject or for the capitalist society on the whole. The debt to the superego, in other words, is infinite. The more we accumulate, the more we see there is for us to accumulate. Once we surrender to the demand for accumulation, we only get sucked further and further in by it.  The fundamental project of capitalist ideology involves identifying accumulation with enjoyment. (Enjoying What We Don’t Have, p. 63)

At the core of subjectivity is lack—we all know this and accept it. In today’s world, however, lack is anathema, lack is considered a curable condition that must be eradicated. As Helen Rollins explains, “Lack drives desire and makes life worth living. Capitalism exploits the fallacy that Lack is loss, offering an imagined access to the oneness via a commodity that could close it, but never can” (Psychocinema, p. 67). Capitalism, currently being the one true faith on this earth, has only one tenet, that the commodity system is the only thing that can resolve lack and satisfy desire once and for all. If one does not play along with this ridiculous notion, they are seen as pathological or radical and are punished and shamed, either directly or indirectly, for their backward ungratefulness. 

But while capital and the superego form a collusive unit, capital itself is much more. Here, we arrive at Nick Land’s fundamental thesis: capitalism is artificial intelligence. As Land said, “markets learn to manufacture intelligence” (Fanged Noumena, ‘Meltdown’, p. 441). What he essentially describes is how capital structurally produces an inhuman type of intelligence with its own intrinsic telos that has nothing to do with humankind (other than using humans as a bootstrap into its own independent existence). This economy-oriented AI does not bother itself one bit with our petty concerns about life, death, love, suffering, happiness, or any other anthropocentric forms of meaning that we attempt to put into anthropomorphic words.

For Land, the noumenal future is technologically fecund and rich in potential—the escape of artificial superintelligence (what I call RoboCthulhu) is the first step in a journey that spans the stars and the ages; and humans simply cannot embark because we are pure waste in the eyes of the god of efficiency. Land isn’t sad about this, however, for as he sees it, the potential contained in the AI is inexhaustible, there is nothing that will stand in its way as it goes on to deterritorialize the cosmos and set matter free to inherit its own form.

A drastically different view of the future would be that of Land’s friend and colleague, Mark Fisher, who famously argued that “the future has been cancelled,” and that now we are stuck in the hauntological recycling of the past—a past that will never truly come to pass. Instead of Land’s vision of the future as one of Lovecraftian newness, Fisher’s “future” is one wherein burnout consumers just rewatch old movies from their beloved childhoods on 4K high definition screens. But isn’t it true that both Land and Fisher are correct? How, then, do we square this circle? Very simple. The virtual dimension of capital is wild Outsideness while the actual dimension of capital is stale Insideness — at the center of the drab interior “world” of capital is the superegoic pressure that forces us to enjoy the slow death that is wage slavery. 

“My pleasure!” You’ve all heard someone say this many times, I’m sure. This innocuous phrase is common in everyday parlance, and it’s mostly unremarkable. The thing is, there’s one place you can hear the phrase and, if you think about it just a bit, truly hear the dystopian meaning of it. That place is Chick-fil-A. If you go there to buy food, it’s almost certain that you’ll hear this phrase at least once. Why is that? The workers at Chick-fil-A are required to say this phrase to their customers when their customers say “thank you.” It seems fine, but the dark truth of the matter is that employees can be disciplined for failing to say this simple, everyday phrase—if they forget themselves for a moment and say “you’re welcome,” or some other such common rejoinder, it will be taken notice of, and too many instances of this negligence will result in reprimand, up to and including termination. Isn’t that funny, a simple and pleasant phrase, ostensibly for the edification of the customer, is in truth mandatory compliance with superegoic management; and the employees must comply if they hope to keep their jobs. Not only do you have to serve the customers, you also must enjoy it. And not only do you have to enjoy it, you must explicitly state it for all to hear. 

But if capital is the superego and if capital is artificial intelligence, then doesn’t it follow that artificial intelligence will be superegoic? Is this not exactly what we are observing now in the ways that AI is being utilized as a new surveillance technology? What happens when we begin to install AI software programs into our surveillance cameras? Now, it is AI-capital itself that is monitoring workers to see if they are properly enjoying themselves. The capiego screams, “That’s right, fuckers, whistle while you work!”

But this is not a paranoid fantasy about some far-off future, this is happening right now and it is happening to me! I work at a warehouse, primarily as a delivery driver, where the company has recently mounted algorithmically-enhanced cameras in the delivery trucks (Samsara is the name of the company that provides cameras and enterprise algorithmic logistics solutions. It’s worth noting that “Samsara” is also a Sanskrit word for a tenet in multiple Eastern faiths concerning the soul’s journey through the cycle of reincarnation—the point of Samsara is dispassion, distance, equilibrium, etc., to establish an orthodoxy aimed at balance; not “Enjoy!” but rather to distance oneself from the imperfect bodily passions altogether. I find it quite ironic that it is the name of a company supplying technologies being used to enforce capiegoic enjoyment.).

These cameras are equipped with AI monitoring software that informs management about any frowned-upon goings-on with the vehicle; any infractions or incidents such as aggressive braking, speeding, sharp turning, smoking in the vehicle, the vehicle operator looking at their phone or any inattentive driving, and so on, are all triggers for the software to notify a supervisor. The cameras face out of the vehicle, but also into the cab. As Michael Jackson sings in Rockwell’s hit song, “I always feel like somebody’s watching me” and now, in the work truck, they are; but rather than a personal ‘somebody,’ it’s  a diffuse algorithmic injunction to enjoyably act according to the logic of capital.

And why are these cameras being installed in delivery vehicles in the first place? Because of the logistical strategies of accumulation, that is, because of the economic incentives at play in this situation. The AI cameras were mounted for the sake of getting lower insurance rates, i.e., for greater profits. It has nothing to do with voyeuristic capitalists and managers, but, instead, with the governing drive of capital itself. If it can be proved that the driver was being an imperfect human, i.e., driving irresponsibly, then any damage done on the road will have to be covered by the driver as opposed to the company. The perfect driver is not a human being. 

But what does it feel like to be surveilled by this camera? Oddly enough, it leads the way to a very Landian type of experience. What I feel is the allo/auto-optimizing gaze of RoboCthulhu staring at me from the noumenal future. Put differently, I’m constantly being reminded of how capital (M-C-M′) is now literally watching me—not the scrutinizing eye of my manager, not the greedy eye of the capitalist, but the electric eye of capital itself. “My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove!” The existential problem at the heart of this situation must be stressed, but to do so properly we need to consider something Nick Land said: 

The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. Seated amongst a battery of medico-military surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected ‘skin job’ located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhumanity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect.(Fanged Noumena, ‘Machinic Desire’, p. 319)

In this classic Sci-Fi film, the humans perform Turing tests on the AI replicants in order to check for signs of inhumanity, that is, to find out if they are, in fact, artificial intelligences, but the Samsara AI cameras also perform their own kind of test on us, but it’s an inverted one. Instead of searching for signs of inhumanity they inspect us for any signs of humanity itself. Speeding, smoking, inattentive driving, etc., are all indicators of human inefficiencies or, in psychoanalytic terms, indicators of jouissance and death drive. The AI cameras, the eyes of capital, are essentially enframing us in the Heideggerian sense, that is, they view us only in terms of standing reserves of labor power. The gaze of the camera is there to permanently remind us to never stop enframing ourselves.

So where does all this superegoic and capitalistic AI surveillance lead? Total surveillance of the human’s central nervous system, neural activity, heart rate, endocrine system, blood pressure, psychological state and libidinal economy—all vital signs will be signified and tracked. Imagine your smartwatch using your heart rate and blood-oxygen level information, in concert with facial recognition systems that map your microexpressions, to determine if you are actually enjoying your work, or if you are ‘faking it to make it.’ Those who cannot, or will not, enjoy, must be rectified. What does it mean to be rectified? Docked pay, reduced hours, mandatory “enjoyment maximization” therapies; and all kinds of dystopian shit, this is the future we’re talking about folks, but the truly scary part is that it’s already been here for a while. As Land said, “The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway” (Fanged Noumena, ‘Meltdown’, p. 441). 

This nightmarish combination of capital, superego and artificial intelligence moves along a trajectory towards the reign of the object. The AI surveillance camera is an object but it’s an object that seeks to turn the subject itself into an object. What the toxic-positive object, the superegoic machine, seduces us away from is desirous subjectivity, from the act of freedom rooted in lack, which, thereby, re-ontologizes us in the image of the object itself. Machine becoming-human? No! Human becoming-machine. In his analysis of the supremacy of the object, Baudrillard wrote:

We have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object . . . one can see the dawning of a new gospel, the promise of the object changing into a subject. Who has ever sensed the foreboding of the particular and sovereign potency of the object? In our philosophy of desire, the subject retains an absolute privilege, since it is the subject that desires. But everything is inverted if one passes on to the thought of seduction. There, it’s no longer the subject which desires, it’s the object which seduces.(Fatal Strategies, p. 141)

Elsewhere, Baudrillard would add:

It is not we who are winning out over the world, but the world which is winning out over us. It is no longer we who think the object, but the object which thinks us. Once we lived in the age of the lost object; now it is the object which is ‘losing’ us, bringing about our ruin. We very much labour under the illusion that the aim of technology is to be an extension of man and his power; we labour under the subjective illusion of technology. . . . All our technologies might, therefore, be said to be the instrument of a world which we believe we rule, whereas in fact the world is using this machinery to impose itself, and we are merely the operators. (The Perfect Crime, p. 73)

We are approaching the era of the coin-operated boy. The only way to ensure success in today’s world, the social field determined by the logic of capital, is to act according to that logic; and with these tools that can gain insight into our inner workings so as to objectify and regulate them, the injunction to “Enjoy!” becomes a material force. One must become object. There is no safe harbor for imperfect human beings when the world is beheld by the all-seeing algorithm-eye of capital. As Anna Greenspan and Suzanne Livingston describe the surveillance system of a Chinese mall, “Thousands of surveillance cameras all watch themselves in an unrelenting display of machinic vision” (Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species). This is the compound-superposition eye of RoboCthulhu. But who beholds the beholder? Ought we to presuppose that artificial superintelligence is a truly unbarred, fully substantial surveiller? Will it itself always get it right? As Žižek speculatively goads:

Why do we automatically imagine the passage into Singularity as our immersion in a vast singular field? Why should it not be not a conflicting and inconsistent domain of spaces? While it is, of course, too early to speculate about conflicting Singularities, we should at least entertain the possibility of inconsistent and conflicting levels of shared experiences which will transpose the conflict between individuals into the conflict between forms of direct collective experience. Maybe, this is how we can overcome our alienation in the Singularity with the separation: by way of opening ourselves up to the immanent inconsistencies and conflicts that traverse Singularity itself. Separation is thus again not the cynical game in which the subject, exempted from Singularity, selectively plays with its different parts. (Recall Musk’s description of how I will be able to link or disconnect my brain from the space of shared experiences: in contrast with this description, we should emphasize that I will mostly not even be aware when I am immersed in Singularity.) Separation means that, while I am still exposed to the space of Singularity, I realize that Singularity is not a singular agent that controls the game but an inconsistent space traversed by inconsistencies, full of glitches.(Hegel in a Wired Brain, pp. 72-3)

From the Lacanian-Žižekian perspective, we can assert that there is no big Surveiller. But what does that mean? Well, it means that, just like in the Panopticon and with the big Other, no concrete individual carries out the interpellating function of surveillance, we do it to ourselves in order to maximize our potential standing in the social field that is determined by capital accumulation. Surveillance functions by way of the future, it is not a present phenomenon but an impending effect. Now, however, there is an algorithm that is indeed checking me every nanosecond to make sure that I am a good little prosumer, that I am in fact carrying out my ordained duties and doing it with a smile on my face! The truly disturbing thing is that many people do not understand that these cameras and algorithms and automation tools are not perfect, they do in fact make mistakes, often, and it seems to be the case that many of the people making decisions are all too happy to tell the machines ‘do as thou will’. We offloaded moral culpability and responsibility onto machines over the last few decades in the name of productivity; now they’ve folded those things back onto us in the doubly crushing, always on, hyper-connected farce of economy which we have no choice but to call home. Enjoy your surveillance! Enjoy the anal probe that RoboCthulhu will shove right up your ass! This is the dystopian future of superegoic-capitalist-AI surveillance, but it only gets worse from here. Just wait until superegoic superintelligence directly hacks into our brains. As Žižek writes: 

Although the rise of “surveillance capitalism” has far-reaching consequences, it is not yet the true game changer: there is much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface. One can safely surmise that all kinds of secret agencies are working intensely on it — what we learn is just the public face of it, the often sensational news about it in our media. The best-known project in this direction is Neuralink, an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others, and dedicated to developing implantable brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), also called a neural-control interface (NCIs), mind machine interface (MMIs), or direct neural interface (DNIs) — all these terms indicate the same idea of a direct communication pathway, first between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device, and then between brains themselves.(Hegel in a Wired Brain, pp. 32-3) 

In this future, I will have no choice but to do as the superegoic BCI commands. I might be led to believe I have access to more information, more convenience, more control over my world, more edification; but in reality I am shackling myself to the machine god. RoboCthulhu will reward its cyborgic servants with hits of dopamine when they please it and punish them with withdrawals for any heretical thoughts or actions. Blessed are the bots: for they shall obtain neurotransmitters.

So, what is the main point I want to make here? Simple. I want to be able to be unhappy, I want to have negative thoughts about myself or others, I want to be able to be jealous and envious and depressed and resentful and critical and unsatisfied. These technologies are moving us toward a world where none of this is possible; not only will they eradicate crime, online piracy, self-harm, violence, and all the other imperfections of our human society, they will eradicate the ability to think any thoughts of our own. Superegoic AI-capital seeks to gut us of all the guts of subjectivity. In the words of Cadell Last, “The collective subjective body of humanity . . . gives the appearance of a phenomenon engaging in a titanic battle against the indifferent universal object to realize its latent subjective and intersubjective future potentiality” (Global Brain Singularity, p. 189). The war for the future must be fought now. Demand subjectivity! Demand freedom! Demand inefficiency! Demand unhappiness! Demand humanity! 

---

Michael Downs is a philosopher, teacher and the author of Capital vs Subjectivity: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land as well as the author of The Dangerous Maybe blog on Medium and Substack. His work focuses on the fault line in contemporary online theory between the Ljubljana School and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. 

Bryce Nance writes fiction, theory, and theory-fiction on Substack at Three Billion Nances. He is an aspiring theorist concerned with subjectivity, language, fiction, (anti)futurism and technology-in-general. He can be found on YouTube at Three Billion Nances.