By Christian Niravana Damato
Desire has a mimetic component, as Girard reminds us,[1] and above all, it is never disconnected from its cultural, social, and political context. This makes it, on the one hand, an experience that is also collective and, on the other, one that responds to the most individualistic principles[2] of human beings. Capitalism and political propaganda today are reshaping and reconfiguring their powers by operating precisely on this desire for stability.
The (individualistic) negentropy of desire is the cornerstone of the domestication of the individual, of the civil citizen, a coercive negentropic model that leads them to desire what capitalism and power desire. They must desire this if they want to create their own stability.
In order to achieve our individual stability as organisms, as human beings, whether we succeed or not, we seem to avoid doing any form of what could be considered collective or planetary stability. At best, when it does not affect us personally, we are willing to perform, perhaps even genuinely, an act of solidarity, albeit without ever actually sacrificing ourselves for what does not appear, to us, to affect us. In the now irreversible system we have created, planetary stability is sacrificed for the supposed stability of individuals – though, of course, not of everyone.
Empathy seems to be anything but an innate gift, easily eliminated at will by governments through political propaganda and brainwashing which, almost always, or practically always, appeal precisely to that desire for individual stability by constructing an external threat, a figure responsible for present or potential chaos, a figure to be repelled.
The desire for stability is the fundamental aspect on which the capitalist structure and ideology leverage, mobilizing human beings as support for capitalist reproduction itself, as well as for the expression of its extractivist, colonialist, accumulative, classist, racist, and genocidal logic.[3]
§23. Negentropic desire for stability and technology
And in the end, warmth can only be found outside the cold walls of the citadel of reason.[4]
Franco “Bifo” Berardi
– Franco “Bifo” Berardi
We still have to deal with the computational, mechanical, and predictive aspects of desire.
If being human means many things, from the purposeless act of love that asks for nothing in return to the madness of war, the point we arrive at is that today’s system is far from achieving ‘progress’, whatever that word means: indeed, technological evolution is pushing us ever closer to a form of desire, and therefore a drive to live, which in the wake of stability is reconfiguring itself with the capitalist apparatus, no longer in passive and victimizing terms, but in active ones. We are learning to enjoy this extreme externalized humanization. The desire for stability takes on a new form, which I defined in a previous work as statistical desire, i.e., a form of desire that finds its driving force in becoming a number, gamification, the predictability and prediction of the actions we want to take, the rejection of error, and adherence to calculation.[5] Statistical desire, which as such occupies all the space and fields of life, also affects the promise of happiness, which – as I wrote – is culturally constructed as the ability to proceed with the mechanical heaviness of the continuous and anticipated programming of one’s life.[6]
This attitude does not arise from scratch with financial abstraction and digital technology, but is the result of a long process of technological and techno-capitalist mutation of a negentropic desire for stability that has always belonged to us.
In information theory, entropy is information we do not know[7]; in other words, in this sense, entropy within a technological condition measures our ignorance.[8] Research on machine learning and predictive algorithms, in general terms or in the specific case of information entropy,[9] operates precisely by reducing entropy as uncertainty, as “information that is not known”. Here we see a clear link between negentropy, technology, capitalism, and control.
Negentropy applied to human beings and technology follows a logic of progress based on continuously overcoming its own limits, creating layers upon layers that make systems increasingly complex. It is precisely the desire for stability aimed at controlling every informational molecule, every scattered and misplaced organism, reaching the limits of pathology, oppression, and thirst for power, that generates the condition of maximum instability in which we find ourselves. We can return to the tightrope: the figure of the tightrope walker remains relevant, taking on tragic overtones.
Secondly, this predictive ideology is the predominant model that challenges individuals by reconfiguring their very structure of desire. It is not just a question of all the repressive and controlling consequences, nor even of the transition from a society of control to one of ‘self-control’. This is no longer the goal, no longer simple stable containment but its excess, statistical desire and its freedoms. This is the dehumanizing aspect that we cannot get used to, but which for now permeates the present and does not promise a bright future.
It is not enough to think of an easy opposition tending towards a eulogy of uncertainty – I am not sure we want it – on the contrary, today we are terrified of it. Entropic desire is such when it is a choice, not an obligation, an escape route to avoid death. In the article What is Entropy? Measure of Just How Little We Really Know, Zack Savitsky tells us that entropy is what makes us human, because as ‘ignorance’, and therefore missing information, it drives us to learn. The article concludes as follows: “You can lament the inevitable collapse of order, or you can embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to learn, perceive, and deduce, to make better choices and harness the driving force within you”.[10]
I find this conclusion problematic, close to a kind of capitalist appropriation of a series of potentially subversive concepts in order to neutralize them and make them useful for the reproduction of the system itself. It is a form of capitalized entropy, useful only for the purpose of ‘learning’ in terms of control and the search for a stability that is already ideological, systemic, and dangerous. This dangerous line of thinking follows precisely the coordinates we have already outlined, those of entropy as necessary but always present within negentropy.
We can no longer think of play, eroticism, sociality, and celebration as total practices of salvation, but as personal and collective necessities, small ephemeral salvations that are part of a larger complex and precarious life in which each of us seeks a stability that may also coincide with a planned dissolution, when it is desirable as a choice, otherwise it is just a consumption leading to disappearance. When exploited for learning, uncertainty is always masked by a negentropic desire for stability, by a statistical desire for control and planning, and therefore by the search for certainty. Real uncertainty is not the best option because it would mean truly embracing something we do not want and that terrifies us in its unaestheticized and unromanticized form. “Embracing uncertainty” today works in a similar way to the capitalist appropriation of the concept of failure: they will tell you that it is good to fail, making you fail and trying to bring you back into a dynamic of enjoyment through failure. Not only that: they will tell you that failure is beautiful, but only if it is part of a broader learning perspective, often inherent in the workplace. Failure as such, as pure loss, is not really considered or tolerated, because it lies outside a collateral productive dynamic that concepts such as “uncertainty” or “failure” can produce. These are terms that are subsumed precisely because they are produced by the system itself, reshaped from a perspective of profit through conceptual laundering.
Ultimately, it is naive to think of entropy as the last bastion of humanity, because the issue is more complex; as we have seen, we have a basis of negentropic desire, and a very vulnerable one at that. For this reason, it is necessary to rethink humanity, technology, and the traditional (psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic) view of desire as entropic emancipation and a collection of chaos. We must move from mad desire to the desire of reason, which is often much more hellish than the former.
§24. Technology, automation, chaos, and stability
In his article The Double Spiral of Chaos and Automation, Franco Berardi reports that
The most likely future scenario, however, will be the intertwining of Automation and Chaos: deterministic chains of interconnected automation traversed by flows of ungovernability and instability. Both the order manufactured (during modernity) by political power and the order of technological automation are destabilized by the growing complexity of cultural flows, social conflicts, and unpredictable events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine – events that have radically changed the symbolic attribution of meaning and value.[11]
As mentioned earlier in more general and timeless terms, the growing disorder is caused precisely by the technical stratification implemented as a form of domination and stability/prosperity – and stability can be, indeed is, a pretext for domination, power, and oppression. It is a vicious circle that feeds on itself, worsening on both sides: increasingly catastrophic chaos and increasingly fascist (how was it? ‘order and discipline’) and Nazi (genocide for economic reasons and brainwashing policies).
Berardi then asks
whether this indeterminacy is epistemic or ontological: is the impossibility of prediction the result of human ignorance or is it the result of the ontological indeterminacy of the universe itself? Is it a problem of insufficient knowledge or of intrinsic undecidability? We do not have a definitive answer to this question, but we have attempted to reduce reality to our knowledge and to what can be predicted.[12]
Since there is no answer to the nature of indeterminacy, I agree, I will try to latch onto the last part quoted. If the impossibility of prediction is the result of ignorance, and ignorance takes the form of entropy, our negentropic basis would place us in a position where, from an ontological perspective, we are led to want to know, to seek other answers, while at the same time we have an epistemic horizon given by our limits. If techno-scientific research tends towards forms such as information entropy, promoting an ever-increasing desire for control, the ideology of reducing reality to our knowledge and to what can be predicted is the prevailing form of domestication, that is, the statistical desire in which every user can move between applications, platforms, and gamification in real life following pre-set prediction mechanisms and actively enjoy them, making them their reason for living with a smile. Stability is now only accessible through the continuous pursuit of this condition; it is the best-selling desire, even more so than freedom itself. The search for stability is supported by the continuous maintenance (or attempt or search) of a state of order (mental, economic, managerial, relational). Everything converges in this direction. To this extent, chaos – representative of our inability to constantly maintain the inhuman speed[13] and the rhythm of economic flows that govern society and therefore our time, our possibilities, and our limits – is subsumed by capital as a tester.
As I mentioned earlier, concepts such as “uncertainty” and “failure” are redefined to serve the purposes of rapid learning and productive improvement. If “a designer’s technical system is implemented in such a way as to anticipate contingency”,[14] then the potential accident, the potential failure, is the engine that drives the technical implementation itself, which does not readjust itself after the catastrophe, but first and foremost seeks to anticipate it by prefigurating it (and in striving to prefigure it, it always creates worse ones). This systemic trend is now applied as an individual ideology for living as efficiently and optimally as possible, profiting from personal catastrophes in productive terms (while real failure is unproductive and not contemplated by the capitalist narrative, which praises only a form of failure that is instrumental to increasing efficiency).
In this sense, chaos becomes our employer, the measure of our ability to react to stressors by re-channeling them negentropically in a productive way. We are perfectly entangled in all this, perfectly embedded in this ideology and aware of what we are doing, often without even a qualm or any form of disavowal.[15]
Tuning into the chaotic and lifeless rhythm of today’s world means desiring stability through statistical desire, accelerating and forcing cognitive limits through externalization. We do not do this passively and desperately: I believe there is an intrinsic element of enjoyment in this statistical desire, an element that shifts us from passive victims to active participants; statistical desire is an ideology that is internalized and externalized in everyday life. It can be seen everywhere, permeating all areas from work to universities to private life. The digitization of society, the mathematization of being as an opportunity, and the predictive and total control of the self, from biometric tracking to tarot cards, from online trading to the datafication of performativity, the microfanicialization of artistic endeavors, from long-term scheduling to potential dating, from the gamification of relationships to that of education and work, and the list goes on, are now dominant narratives that will become increasingly stronger because crises and uncertainties reinforce them, giving them an aura of inevitable necessity. Statistical desire is formed as a technological illusion of accessibility to being the editor and designer of one’s own desires in a world dictated by contingencies; for this reason, technology responds to and challenges that fundamental desire for stability, transforming it into statistical desire and excessively toward increasingly incisive and neurotic forms of automation and mathematization of being.
[1] Here the reference is to René Girard’s theory of desire. See: R. Girard, Menzogna romantica e verità romanzesca, Bompiani, Milano 2020.
[2] In Moleculocracy (2023), drawing on Jean-Jacques Kupiec’s The Origin of Individuals, Emanuele Braga recalls how ‘all forms of life that we recognize and identify as such are not stable like machines in which each component serves a specific function, but are unstable ecosystems in which it is impossible to definitively attribute an exclusive function to a single element’. In practice, as Kupiec’s book reminds us, we are not naturally inclined towards a deterministic logic based on competition but on cooperation, which for Braga indicates a non-hierarchical and non-fixed interconnection and interchangeability of knowledge and practices: ‘the body, like the biosphere, is a complex ecosystem that stabilizes processes starting from incalculable disturbances and diffractions’. In other words, and in terms of collectivity: guaranteeing variability and mutability to the individual within and in accordance with a common stability generates in turn a sense of stability in variation (Braga refers here to the model of self-management as a virtuous example of this possible revolution close to these symbolically anti-capitalist physical laws). However, it is necessary to integrate this scientific knowledge with the question of desire, since we cannot conceive of any conscious movement of the human being outside of this, which is why – by way of integration – we have come to define this desire for stability as fundamental. Integrating the latter means thinking not only in purely positive terms, but also reading the strong vulnerabilities that negentropy can have in relation to the human organism itself, conceived here as part of a technological co-extension and a strongly individualistic capitalist system that challenges negentropic mechanisms. Built by humans for humans, we could say cynically. See: E. Braga, Moleculocracy, Ecologie, Conflitti, Turbolenze, NERO, Roma 2023, pp. 68-69.
[3] Another chapter would be devoted to the mobilization of cruelty, well analyzed by Franco Berardi in his essay Pensare dopo Gaza. Saggio sulla ferocia e sulla terminazione dell’umano, Timeo, Palermo 2025. What we see as a total loss of morality and humanity is a condition in which “this type of violence has no other purpose than to humiliate, dehumanize, and above all inflict pain. Therefore, they go beyond ferocity, the natural reaction of an animal body that is attacked, terrorized, motivated only by the instinct of survival. In this type of violence, there is something exquisitely human, psychologically elaborate: cruelty, the pleasure of subjugating and inflicting pain”. Ibid., p. 26. On the other hand, even in the field of neuroscientific studies on moral consciousness, it is reported that the degree of empathy can vary from person to person, and in each of us, depending on both external and internal conditions. Of course, under ideal conditions, humans tend to be empathetic towards others. But in reality, as psychologist Roy Baumeister points out, “it seems that this form of sensitivity is selective. People can invest a lot emotionally in some situations and goals, but be terribly deficient in others. And they can be incredibly more sensitive and empathetic towards some than others. […] [It] is consistent to think that empathy is not innate but is just as malleable as morality”. In other words, decades and decades of Zionist propaganda have created an environmental bubble in which individuals lacking empathy and scruples can grow up. See P.S. Churchland, Coscienza. Le origini dell’intuizione morale, Ponte alle Grazie, Milano 2021.
[4] Berardi F. ‘Bifo’, Respirare. Caos e poesia, Luca Sossella Editore, Bologna 1993.
[5] See C. N. Damato, Organ Multiplication Manifesto, 2025, p. 132.
[6] Ibid., p. 159.
[7] See Z. Savitsky, “What is Entropy? Measure of Just How Little We Really Know”, in Quantamagazine, December 13, 2024. Available here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entropy-a-measure-of-just-how-little-we-really-know-20241213/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYfa2xWmisgbN8yYhQO5MOZz42j4kNWPalZxXVAWNh5S9nI2bS3KA3T8YY_aem_Zb9uFrL4VS_sSjgzrtnTXQ
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] F. ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Double Spiral of Chaos and Automation, in Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies, N. Lushetich, I. Campbell and D. Smith (Ed. by), The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, Lanham 2023, p. 72.
[12] Ibid., p. 74.
[13] “I define chaos as an excess of complexity in an environment, which translates into the inability of the receiving system (be it the brain, reason or government) to extract relevant information from that environment. Chaos is both a measure of indeterminacy and a measure of the imbalance between the speed of information stimulation coming from digital transmitters and the processing speed of the receiving system. In this sense, the virus represents the processing speed of the receiving system”. Ibid., pp. 77-78.
[14] Y. Hui, Pensare la contingenza, 2022, p. 46.
[15] See A. Zupančič, Disconoscimento, Meltemi, Milano 2024.
Hyperspekulation 
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