The horror of communication

Abstract

This article is concerned with the Lacanian subject of cyberwar and how the Real of network communication in the post-Trump era is experienced as horror. The centrality of the technological sublime and practices of self-divination to the American political imaginary give this moment of the Real a properly cosmic and spiritual scale. What returns are techno-horrors of intersubjective dread and the capitalist Real of the network in which we are fragmented and manipulated by occulted forces. The generalization of cyberwar shapes the liberal/populist entanglement between the hysteria of the disinformation expert and the perversion of the QAnon digital soldier.