Reality in collapse: a psychoanalytic reading of detachment from reality in the age of digital devices

Abstract

This article examines the thesis that intensive use of digital devices produces a detachment in the subject's relation to reality, and that such detachment is not a side effect of technology but the result of an economic architecture that extracts value from it. The approach is theoretical and conceptual. It recovers the Lacanian distinction between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary and the Freudian analysis of the suspension of critical judgement in group formation; it then examines three accounts of the technical mediation of experience — Debord's spectacle, Baudrillard's simulacrum and Zuboff's surveillance capitalism — and Han's diagnosis of the regime of positivity. Articulating these traditions is legitimate but requires explicit justification: cultural critique, political economy and psychoanalysis do not describe the same object, and homonymous terms such as desire and the real receive non-interchangeable definitions in each. The specifically psychoanalytic yield lies not in diagnosing culture but in locating what, in the digital device, bears upon the economy of desire: a continuous supply of objects that suspends the inscription of lack. What collapses is not reality, but the symbolic labour that sustains it as shared.