Marquis de Sade — the inventor of the interface

The article analyzes the user interface as a condition of presence in digital reality. It is shown that the interface in the unity of linguistic practices, desire apparatuses and social institutions is closer to forms of life than to formal systems. Therefore, based on a rational and technological approach to the interface, its capabilities, functions and limitations, it is necessary to recognize and describe the myth that determines the way of existence in the interface. It is a common belief that a myth suggested by a digital interface was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and could be described in terms of the social establishment, the perfect language, the optimum of government.

It is shown that we only imagine to be living in a Rousseau’s mythopoeic scenario while supporting and affirming with our actions and behavior a completely different one — quite far in its intentions from the first one (and just at the moment when we think that we are pursuing that first one). Thus, a number of epistemic distortions and contradictions make it clear that the forms of logic and pragmatics, which the interface prescribes to forms of digital behavior and interaction, are closer to the hallucinatory-autoerotic narrative machines created by Marquis de Sade than to Rousseau’s utopian myth. We always find Sade where we most aspire to Rousseau. To give Sade the voice as the inventor of the interface means to show that the antinomianism found at the heart of digital interaction is the product of the struggle between two views on utopia: formally-roussoistic one and another one — actor-sadistic, one of which is invariably hypostatized and another one is usually ignored.