A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration. In blinding himself, Oedipus, the mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration … according to the lex talionis … Moreover, I would not recommend any opponent of the psychoanalytic view to select the story of precisely the Sand-Man upon which to build his case that morbid anxiety about the eyes has nothing to do with the castration complex. For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into such intimate connection with the father’s death? And why does the Sand-Man appear each time in order to interfere with love? He divides the unfortunate Nathaniel from his betrothed and from her brother, his best friend; he destroys his second object of love, Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives him into suicide at the moment when he has won back his Clara and is about to be happily united with her. Things like this and many more seem arbitrary and meaningless in the story so long as we deny all connection between fears about the eye and castration; but they become intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-man by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is awaited … We shall venture, therefore, to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the child’s dread in relation to its castration complex … we are drawn to examine whether we can apply it to other instances of uncanny things. We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme upon which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll that appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. Now, dolls happen to be rather closely connected with infantile life. Freud, The Uncanny, 36–37

Instead of being left behind with our puny, cell-based brains, humans might merge themselves with AI, augmenting our brains with circuits, or even digitally uploading our minds to outlive our bodies. The result would be a supercharged humanity, capable of thinking at the speed of light and free of biological concerns … ‘It might be that, in this world, we would all be more like children in a giant Disneyland – maintained not by humans, but by these machines we have created,’ says (Nick) Bostrom, the director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute … Depending on where you stand, this might sound like a utopian fantasy, or a dystopian nightmare. Bostrom is well aware of this … There may soon be a day, Bostrom says, when we’ll need to consider not just how an AI feels about us, but simply how it feels. ‘If we have machine intelligence that becomes artificial, digital minds … then it also becomes an ethical matter [of] how we affect them.’ In this age of conscious machines, humans may have a newfound moral obligation to treat digital beings with respect. Call it the 21st century Golden Rule. Nathaniel Scharping, “Embracing the Singularity”, Discover, March – April 2021, 13, italics added

I can’t help but note that Nathaniel Scharping, the enthusiastic author of the Discover piece quoted above, has the same name as the young, ill-fated protagonist of The Sandman. Furthermore, he uses the emotionally charged expression ‘to embrace’ when he seems to suggest that we ‘embrace the singularity’, along with quoting the ambivalent dystopian sentiments of Oxford futurist Nick Bostrom, who both muses that ‘(i)t might be that, in this world, we would all be more like children in a giant Disneyland’ and invokes the ethical minefield of treating ‘digital beings with respect’. I would like to relate this to my allusion to ‘infantilising’ the public in a perpetual Wall-E Disney machine, the better to maintain a techno-feudal stranglehold on power, or the observation by Sampson of a ‘Disney-like transcendental Fordism’. In this regard, the old Roman dictum panem et circenses, bread and circuses or bread and games, is fully operational, but in this case on the basis of a pervasive ‘repetition compulsion’ user experience (UX), or as zombie-like automata rushing to the physical and/or virtual shopping mall.

I would argue here that Furio Jesi’s psycho-mythical dynamic is working overtime, constantly recreating the void [vuoto] of ‘mythical epiphanies’ and ersatz experiences that lead to his prescient idea of a macchina mitologica that is constantly persuading us in a singular direction. It is precisely in the gap and fracture where an insatiable symbiosis of lack and desire is accelerated, leaving us burned out yet always yearning for evermore elusive intensities and viscerality. This unheimlich estrangement and exploitative cycle is largely hidden and unconscious but deeply and anxiously felt, and it is the petri dish in which my emotariat concept festers. This emotariat automata is the UX cousin of the industrial proletariat and semiocapitalist cognitariat, now fused in precariat servitude. And if there were any doubts as to the machinations of these hidden processes, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic quickly disabused us.

Thus, continuing with Freud’s Hoffmann story, we encounter the Sandman in a new guise as Giuseppe Coppola, the ‘itinerant optician’ and ‘phantom’ of the childhood horrors of Nathaniel. ‘Coppola’ now sells ‘barometers’ and ‘fine eyes, beautiful eyes’. He is the same ‘wicked’ man who keeps a machine-doll, Olympia, as his lover and private automaton, much like the robot double of Maria in the 1927 film Metropolis. While the real Maria, a peaceful radical troublemaker, is trying to protect the burned-out workers from the exploitive demands of John Federer (a Henry Ford-like figure), the Moloch Lord machines devour and blind in plumes of smoke the wretched workers of the underground city below. In the meantime, the techno-scientist Rotwang, in a conspiracy of simulacra with the Metropolis overlord John Fredersen, constructs Maria’s robotic doppelgänger in order to dupe and confuse the toiling masses and Freder Fredersen, the son of the Overlord. Nathaniel, as a young man now, has to confront the menacing lingering shadow of this ‘itinerant optician’, who, with his measuring devices and computational ‘barometers’, eventually drives him to delirium, panic, and madness, precisely when he is about to get engaged to his beloved Clara (the clear-minded one). Once again deus ex machina triumphs over Eros.

It is tempting to draw some further contemporary comparisons with the Nordic Sandman and the Germanic art deco techno expressions of Metropolis: Was this a kind of early metropolitan platform urbanism of emotariat automata watched in a feudal panopticon of overlords and foremen? It seems we have not yet quite exorcised the ghosts of slavery and feudalism, which keep reappearing in different guises and formats, just like the unheimlich Sandman.

Surely there can be and must be better outcomes; meanwhile I see the Sandman as the new lord of the Vector, à la McKenzie Wark, creating myriad robotic ‘uncanny valleys’ (Mashairo Mori), for the ‘wretched of the screen’ (Hito Steyerl), or, as in The Verge’s viral picture of Facebook’s Zuckerberg at the 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, smugly walking down the aisle, à la Sandman, while hundreds of Wall-E automata types have their eyes plucked out by the screens of their virtual reality gadgets, blinded to the man smiling down the aisle, walking past them with his eyes wide open, and laughing all the way to the bank.[1] This Sandman fairy tale also gives rise to my other observation about the emotariat automaton, who de facto becomes the dividualised emotionally, cognitively, and physically exploited precariat denizen of this blinding dystopia of IoTs, UXs, IxDs, and assorted sundry chimeras relentlessly ‘updating’.

How can we not see the unheimlich creepiness in all of this? While millions die and get infected by COVID-19 and its assorted family of rapidly evolving mutants, Wall Street and Big Tech pop their champagne bottles on their private islands with their astronomical financial portfolios, oblivious to the misery of the natural world’s frozen (Texas) inferno (Australia, Siberia, California) and the damnés de la terre (Frantz Fanon): the wretched earth, the wretched of the screen, the wretched of the earth in a sort of revolving door ... is this the best that human evolution can come up with? This is why the earth might be having second thoughts about this human experiment and keeps sending us pointed warnings. We can cogently and validly argue (see again the insightful and timely discussion in McKenzie Wark’s recent book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?) about the names and the reasons we can give to these Lords: feudal, neoliberal, vectorial, pre-capitalist, capitalist, or post-capitalist, what have you, as each one brings with him a particular shade of grey, but it is important to excavate this and better understand the process and potential alternatives if we want to have a kinder and more habitable future, in fact, a future at all, for all of us. But in the meantime, of one thing I am certain, powerful platform Lords they are, and we have to urgently get the sand out of our eyes, especially if it is ‘smart dust’.