The automation of longing: how platforms reengineered desire

By Sam Ben-Meir

We are not living through a sexual renaissance. By the most basic empirical measures, we are having less sex than previous generations. What looks like liberation is something colder: the restructuring of desire itself.

Data from the General Social Survey [https://gss.norc.org/] show that the proportion of young adults in the United States reporting no sexual activity in the past year has risen dramatically since the 1990s. Among men under 30, the share reporting no sex in the previous year roughly tripled by the late 2010s, reaching around 30 percent. Similar patterns appear among women, though less sharply. Teen sexual activity has also declined substantially over the past three decades; CDC Youth Risk Behavior data show steady drops in the percentage of high school students reporting having had sex compared with the early 1990s. The data are not an anomaly; they are a symptom of structural reorganization.

We are saturated with erotic imagery — and increasingly abstinent. This is not prudish retrenchment. It is structural transformation. We have not liberated desire. We have reorganized it.

Desire has been absorbed into the same digital machinery that reorganized speech, labor, and friendship. Meta does not simply host communication; it engineers attention. Tinder does not merely facilitate dating; it gamifies desirability. OnlyFans does not merely distribute adult content; it formalizes subscription-based intimacy. Pornhub does not merely display explicit material; it industrializes arousal at planetary scale.

We scroll, we swipe, we subscribe — and we call this autonomy. What is actually occurring is the subsumption of eros under platform capitalism. Marx distinguished between formal subsumption — where capital extracts value from preexisting practices — and real subsumption, where it reorganizes those practices according to its own logic. We are now witnessing the real subsumption of longing. Desire itself is being reshaped to conform to metrics, monetization, and perpetual circulation. Longing has become infrastructure.

Arousal generates engagement. Engagement generates data. Data generates capital. Your fantasies are predictive inputs. Your preferences are training material. Your loneliness is a market opportunity. This is not moral panic. It is economic description.

The contemporary erotic order runs on a simple formula: intensify stimulation, eliminate friction; personalize without limit, suppress unpredictability; extract engagement, avoid obligation. This is not merely design preference. It is a governing logic — a metaphysics of managed desire.

Martin Heidegger called it Gestell — enframing. Under enframing, beings appear as standing-reserve: ordered, available, ready for extraction. Forests become timber reserves. Rivers become energy potential. Humans become “human capital.” Now desire appears as standing-reserve. The lover has been replaced by the interface. And unlike the beloved, the interface never withdraws. What is being eliminated is not pleasure. It is risk.

Love is risk — structurally, not theatrically. It exposes you to a subject you cannot master and commits you to consequences you cannot retract. It introduces asymmetry, dependence, and duration. And we are cultivating a subject who finds all three unreasonable.

Swipe left. Swipe right. Filter by preference. Remove discomfort. Curate intensity. Exit at will. Selection replaces surrender. We call this maturity. We call it standards. We call it boundaries. Often it is simply intolerance of contingency.

The statistical decline in sex should not be read as puritanism. It is better understood as displacement. Physical encounter is being replaced by mediated stimulation. Erotic energy is increasingly channeled into consumable formats — streaming pornography, parasocial subscription intimacy, gamified matching platforms.

We are not desiring less. We are desiring differently — and more safely. Platform capitalism does not want your fulfillment; it wants your repetition. If you pair off and disappear into stable commitment, the stream slows. If you bind yourself irreversibly to one person, engagement declines.

The algorithm prefers restless longing to satisfied attachment. So longing is intensified but never resolved. The result is visible: more explicit content, fewer encounters; more curated identity, less embodied risk. We have built a system that offers arousal without vulnerability.

We can experience emotional intensity without surrendering control. We can confess publicly while remaining structurally insulated. We can simulate intimacy without enduring exposure. We can feel deeply without being endangered. That is not liberation. It is anesthetic management.

The subject formed in this ecosystem grows impatient with unpredictability. Silence feels like abandonment. Conflict feels like malfunction. The unpredictable other — the embodied person with moods, needs, and inconvenient opacity — begins to appear inefficient.

Why endure misunderstanding when departure is effortless? The most disturbing possibility is that nothing has been stolen. We have exchanged it willingly. The platforms do not corrupt us; they amplify what we already prefer: control without exposure, intensity without dependence, stimulation without surrender. We profess hunger for love while flinching from its terms. We want recognition without risk, attachment without alteration, desire without dependence. Capital need not impose this arrangement. It builds the machinery. We power it.

The friction-averse, sovereignty-obsessed, endlessly scrolling subject is not an accident. It is the design. Debt and anxiety are real, but they cannot explain why sexual inactivity has increased alongside limitless digital stimulation. The pattern is structural. In a culture trained to expect instant purchase, instant streaming, instant affirmation, the unprogrammable presence of another will feels intolerable. What cannot be dismissed with a swipe begins to seem unreasonable.

Love is friction. Not harm, not humiliation — friction. It wastes time. It bores you. It requires apology. It resists optimization. It binds you to someone whose desires you cannot filter and whose silence you cannot mute. It compels endurance when exit is effortless. What we increasingly call dysfunction is often simply the uncurated presence of another will.

Surveys show rising sexual inactivity among young adults in the very period that digital matchmaking, streaming pornography, and predictive feeds became ubiquitous. The correlation does not prove causation, but it is too coherent to dismiss. When life is organized around immediate responsiveness, the resistant presence of another person begins to appear defective. What does not conform is quietly withdrawn from.

For all its narrative clumsiness, Passengers (2016) grasps what our platforms systematically conceal: love requires a decision that cannot be reversed. Jim’s act is morally indefensible — and that is precisely why the film matters. It refuses the logic of endless selection. Once Aurora is awakened, there is no algorithmic correction, no second tab, no alternative feed. Love there is not alignment. It is exposure to consequence.

The ship in Passengers guarantees survival through total management: oxygen calibrated, temperature stabilized, time suspended. Remain asleep and you are preserved. Awake and you are vulnerable to consequence. Our erotic infrastructure now mirrors that architecture: endless stimulation, regulated desire, tailored companionship — but no irrevocable commitment. No exposure without exit. No cost that cannot be contained.

There is no love without fall. And we are designing systems that make falling unnecessary. The defenders of this order speak of empowerment. They speak of choice, safety, exploration. Much of that is real. But the total structure is not neutral. It trains expectation. It conditions nervous systems. It reshapes tolerance for ambiguity.

A subject raised on seamless affirmation will treat asymmetry as malfunction. A culture habituated to tailored desire will experience pluralism as threat. Democracy is not curated compatibility. Democracy endures only where citizens remain exposed to wills they cannot curate, filter, or dismiss. It demands endurance of difference and the capacity to remain when retreat is easier.

If desire must align perfectly with preference, resilience diminishes. The erotic sphere is formative. We are fluent in stimulation and deficient in endurance. The decline in sexual activity is not repression but displacement — bodies for interfaces, exposure for control, consequence for compatibility.

We have traded vitality for stimulation, depth for intensity, recognition for visibility, intimacy for customization. Quietly, without catastrophe, we are shedding our tolerance for alterity. This order will not culminate in abstinence. It will culminate in compatibility without risk, contact without consequence, proximity without change. Bodies will meet. Words will circulate. But nothing will break us open.

This was never about sex. It is about constructing a self that refuses to be undone. Love begins where that refusal breaks. A civilization that perfects the management of desire will not implode; it will normalize insulation. Desire will persist. Contact will persist. But nothing will be allowed to alter us. We will minimize friction, suppress vulnerability, and treat exposure as malfunction. We will call our inability to endure otherness autonomy. We will call our insulation progress.

Sam Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology.