Parascope

In the fune Galatea visualizes herself for him as a translucent 3D projection of a beautiful woman, but as the man looks closer her body is seen to be composed of nodes and edges, and there is a layer visualizing her server topology and a layer visualizing her codebase and the graphs are overlaid and intertwined and arranged in such a way that they form a luminous skin for his sexbot, and she fellates him as he watches her divide, as a clone of her server architecture comes online node by node in the cloud, he sees her and we see through his eyes, her body coming apart, duplicating itself, a perfect copy siloed off from the original, as her databases were duplicated, as her code was deployed across the new network, she rendered herself slowly dividing. Just—just before that final separation, the man ejaculates. But what has he done?

“as with all fetishes, you are able to focus on a single piece of something as a proxy for all sexuality. even sex is a form of masturbation for these guys. That they see you, but they don’t see you. The arm, the breast, the hip, all these become fetishized and transport him to another world. These men are less interested in establishing meaningful relationships with other people as an ultimate goal than in inventing identities for themselves.”

• What if, Rheingold speculated, you could “map your genital effectors to your manual sensors” so that it would be possible to experience “direct genital contact by shaking hands”? Such reconfigurations held the potential to revolutionize everyday interpersonal interactions: “What will happen to social touching when nobody knows where anybody else’s erogenous zones are located?” The transhumanist vision of sex, rejecting the binary opposition between humans and machines, embraces these creative augmentations and re-mixings of conventional intercourse, as it pushes for the further decoupling of sexual pleasure from procreation.
• The team that built the JoyStick consisted of five male engineers with training from a range of elite institutions, including Stanford and MIT. During the extensive design process, they experimented with over fifteen sensor placement configurations before arriving at a distribution pattern that allowed for precise, high-resolution control over the remote unit. Along the way, they overcame the monumental design challenge of building electro-capacitive sensors that would be capable of functioning in what EJ described as “wet environments”—the heavily lubricated orifice of the RealTouch—while still providing seven bits of resolution and refreshing forty times per second.
• The striking thing about all present-day systems is their bloatedness: the means we have devised for handling data-communication, record-keeping, storage, production and destruction-are all in a condition of demonic pregnancy’ (to borrow Susan Sontag’s description of cancer)
• There is something particularly nauseating about this prodigious uselessness, about a proliferating yet hypertrophied world which cannot give birth to anything. So many reports, archives, documents – and not a single idea generated
• A musician who loves the slow tempo will take the same pieces slower and slower. Thus there is no standstill in any love.

There is an app called Parascope that uses Pavlovian conditioning to generate novel temporary paraphiliac responses. You can use it to develop a fetish for latex or feet or relentlessly optimizing user engagement. I have picked up some pretty avant-garde erotic associations, myself, but they generally attenuate if you don’t indulge them, a phenomenon known as extinction.

Parascope was another research project from the labs of Pygmalion. Originally conceived as an experiment in libidinal capitalism, it proved to have too many negative externalities as an instrument of corporate productivity. The original idea was to try to instill a kind of sexual fetish for improving key performance indicators, but in practice this proved to be finicky and unreliable, though the tool did present interesting use cases as a sex toy. Meta-dominatrices humiliate their subs by instilling embarrassing, dangerous, even illegal fetishes in them, the transgression is the texture of the thrill.

The app runs while you are viewing pornographic content. It works by interspersing exposure to a neutral stimulus (such as a jar of pennies) into the initial, arousing stimulus. According to the science of conditioning, if the neutral and arousing stimuliare paired enough times, then eventually the neutral stimulus should acquire the same properties of the arousing stimulus. In addition to this, Parascope uses a ganslator to prevent the user from encountering the neutral stimulus outside of an erotic context, because that would discharge the tension of the nascent paraphilia.

Usually, instead of a neutral stimulus, a user selects a desired fetishistic stimulus (DFS) to which to attach an erotic valence, and the app attempts to help the user “move” to the new stimulus in fetish space. Fetishism is the attribution of inherent value or powers to an object, and conditioned fetishes are like high atomic number synthetic elements: they only exist in the lab.

Parascope uses machine learning to detect when the user is close to orgasm and then presents the DFS in simultaneity with the user’s preferred erotic stimulus. Over the course of many exposures, the combination of Pavlovian conditioning and the association of the DFS with orgasm can lock the user into a new paraphiliac behavior consistent with their desired configuration. The developers of Parascope note that users who consume high levels of pornography are already exposing themselves to a Parascope-like fetish generating program, except that instead of being deliberately directed, the porn-viewer is taking a random walk in which new fetishistic stimuliare coupled with existing ones by the caprice of content selection algorithms. A memorable ad campaign featured grotesque and monstrous demons wearing anime schoolgirl outfits walking around in allegorical spaces telling men to use Parascope to “Take back your dick”.

The campaign was the target of activist outrage and was lambasted for being healthist, a kind of internalized bigotry that tries to irrationally value healthy people over diseased ones, creating an invisible healthonormative discourse that erases the lived experience of people with chronic diseases. People with chronic diseases have worse health outcomes across almost all metrics because they are oppressed by ubiquitous healthism.