Technology-based Delusions: The History and Future of a Concept facilitated by Michael Uebel, PhD, LCSW
April 25 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
In early 2024, longtime Tesla shareholder Ross Gerber called Elon Musk “the most delusional” CEO he’s ever invested with. Indeed, the adjective most associated with the technological fantasies and business maneuvers of Musk—e. g., the prospect of colonizing Mars with one million people by 2050 or creating one billion humanoid robots by 2040 or rebranding Twitter as X as a pillar of democracy or claiming the pyramids were built by aliens or that human beings exist in a video game—is “delusional.” I have no interest in (nor would it be ethical) diagnosing Musk, but rather in exploring the psychoanalytic relays between technological thematics and delusional content.
The early involvement of psychoanalysis in assessing the relationship between technology and the production of delusion traces to discussions of the influence of technology at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Freud’s declaration in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) that, thanks to technological advancement, the human being “has almost become a god himself . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God” clearly resonates now when the separation between what is digital (e. g., AI-generated) and what is “real life” has collapsed.
In this talk, I will construct a history of psychoanalytic thought on the question of technology’s role in shaping and unshaping thought processes, with a focus on delusional content. We will look also at the literature exploring the connection between delusional presentations and sociopolitical change more generally, from changes in societal religiosity (e. g., Stompe et al., 2003; Krzystanek et al., 2012) to political destabilization (Bohlken & Priebe, 1991) and nuclear armament (Sher, 2000). Doubtless, delusional content evolves in response to contemporary cultural instantiations of technology (and we’ll look at some fascinating cases involving delusions and technologies including satellite dishes, video games, the Internet, and smartphones). I will consider the evidence (and lack thereof) for digital media as a risk factor for psychosis. Finally, in mapping some sort of future for exploring the interanimation of the technological and the delusional, I will build upon the recent work of feminist scholars of psychoanalysis, affect and the social (Clough, 2019; Johanssen, 2019) to suggest that delusional concerns related to technology are only likely to increase. Let us remember that it was Lacan (1967) who announced way before the smartphone: “The psychotic has the object, he never separated himself from it; He carries it on himself, he carries the object in his pocket” (p. 19).