2025-09-29, 1740h

Considering On Fediverse narrating contradictions into aesthetic cruel optimism, if we consider postliberal cybernetics as the analytical frame, then I might say: The affect economy and libidinal economy are complementary postliberal complexes that process experience into liberal subjectivity.

By complementary complexes, I mean two distinct but interdependent postliberal complexes acting in response to the same pressures: the libidinal economy incites investment in response to desiring, the affect economy orients feedback, and together they stabilize the postliberal circuit of liberal subjectivity.

I think I'm drawing most on Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, which explicitly treats libido as an energetic flow that moves through social and economic systems, but I'm also influenced by Jacques Lacan, who discussed desire as a circulating structural function of investing in the Other, and A Thousand Plateaus, which also rejected Freudian lack to look at generative desiring. The three share the claim that desire circulates through systems, and those systems are animated and sustained by that circulation.

Looking at the Fediverse, we can say that these investments are in a sense of preserving ethics, cultivating them in community, and doing it (using social media) "right:" the desire is routed into a system that generates it into an affect of ethicalness, which is shaped by the feeling rules of the Fediverse.

On Twitter, the same desire is captured the enjoyment of competing for visibility, and the system regulates toward that affective of virality.