AUGMENTED DESIRE DISORDER (ADD)

June 2026

The clinical core of the present work is the claim that contemporary desire is no longer merely aroused; it is engineered and augmented by a scopic‑technical apparatus that fabricates salience, assigns urgency, and routinizes repetition. What the subject experiences as “my” craving — intense, personal, necessary — is in fact externally optimized motivation: a stream of cues composed by interfaces, metrics, and narratives that pre‑activate goals (priming), sequence stimuli (ranking), and reward compliance (feedback).

The pipeline begins with profiling (continuous capture of behavioral traces), proceeds through priming (sub‑attentive cueing of affect and readiness), and culminates in programmable visibility (recommendations that bind the next action to the last). Each loop is closed by monetization — purchases, data extraction, or the incitement to produce more traces that keep the loop fed.

Clinically, the syndrome presents as intrusive salience (a felt compulsion to check, to see, to buy), comparison‑shame cycles (self‑worth yoked to dashboards of likes, views, and streaks), and tempo disorders (sleep erosion, circadian drift, accelerated pacing of thought). The patient names it “anxiety,” “boredom,” or “lack of will,” but the phenomenology reveals possession by engineered cues: the wish that does not rest, the image that will not release the gaze, the metric that silently judges and commands.

Behaviorally, this possession consolidates as consumption — of commodities, content, identities — while the body is progressively corrected/augmented to match external templates (filters, regimes, trackers). Historically, such possession was sporadic; under platform capitalism it becomes ambient: the media serves as host, the platform as vector, the economy as ecology.

The result is not simply addiction; it is normative automation of motivation. The harm is twofold. First, misattribution: subjects interpret engineered urgency as inner necessity and blame themselves for failure to comply or to quit. Second, occlusion: the industrial origin of desire is hidden by the intimate feel of the craving.

For diagnosis I therefore propose Augmented Desire Disorder (ADD) — not a codified psychiatric category, but a critical diagnostic lens that re‑locates pathology from the individual psyche to the socio‑technical design of salience. ADD names a state in which motivational sovereignty is chronically undermined by optimized cues, where interruptions are brief and every pause is treated as a defect to be corrected by more stimulus.

Relief requires more than self-optimization: it means de-automating vision and motivation, interrupting algorithmic command, demetricating self-worth, and restoring time for desire to pass through body, memory, relation, and meaning.

Liviu Poenaru, Engineered Desire and Autonomous Weapons: Media as Host and Vector

[work in progress]

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