Identification always departs from the Mirror Stage: Imagination is always jumpstarted by the Ego as its point of condensation.

But then it’s revealed that the Ego owes the whole of its substance to Echocide [1]: The true ground of Ego is the holistic silence obtained by cancelling the noise that echoes in one’s mind [2]. Thus the ground of Ego is truly a hole of being, opened up by a constant and intense carving out of the noise of becoming. This is the aim and the achievement of the Ego Defense.

When one’s awareness shifts from the triumphant Ego towards the Echo that is constantly being sacrificed for the sake of the Ego, one’s Imagination is revealed to be his/her I-machination: Imagination actually owes its perceived fullness to a clever scheme by the self-image (that “I am”) to triumph over the disturbing noise of the symptom (that “it is”). At the helm of this I-machination operates the Superego.

Thus the Ego (image) triumphs over the Id (noise) by submitting itself to the Superego-Machine [3]. Freud mainly focused on the interaction between the first two elements: The Ego and the Id. Imagination as I-machination deploys the other pair: The Id and the Superego; in other words, the Echo and the IT.

The term it ordinarily refers to the noisy Freudian Thing (the Id, das Es) whose echoes drive our psyche. But when written in capital letters IT refers instead to the Superego-Machine, that is, the universal medium that transmits the noisy message of the Id. Given that the Superego-Machine that exercises the greatest power over the present world is the Internet, “IT” is simply Information Technology.

In the present opportunistic media ecology [4], the “content” of what we emit constitutes the Echo that circulates through the IT. The Echo is the symbolic disorder of “posts”, whereas the IT is the asymbolic order of “platforms”. Keep in mind that the medium both (1) serves the message, and (2) shapes the message: ITs purpose is to reverberate our echoes, but IT also structures our echoes.

And IT structures our echoes through I-machination: The clamor of billions of “users” amount to one and the same message:

— I am the one! I am the one who knows about your ignorance. I am the one who is dissatisfied about your frustrations. I am the one who will not be “used” by the whole lot of you, interchangeable and disposable “users”.

This message gets most intense in the cry of the Virtual Lord [5]: He (rarely she) is the Admin who clears the virtual slate by blocking the disruptive Troll in the name of the IT in order to help the healthy Echo flourish. But the healthy Echo of the exemplary user overlaps with the Echocide that clears the slate for the Ego. The cancelling of the “bad” echo by the “good” echo becomes the proof that IT has served ITs purpose by plotting the I-machination of the Echo-proof Ego.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Ego is Echocide before Ecocide”

[2] See “It is unsignally to follow your noise”

[3] The Superego-Machine has been called the “Id-machine” because what it transmits is the noisy message of the Id. See “Vikings, Solaris, Katla: The Big Other and its Vicissitudes” Slavoj Žižek

[4] See “The Opportunistic Media Ecology Has Supplanted The Law”

[5] See “An account is being blocked”