ABSTRACT
“Disruptive technologies” of the twenty-first-century technology boom promise a life in which we can “optimize” for suffering, leaving many with a hunger to engineer their psyches as if rewriting a piece of outdated code. Using Bollas’ notion of the “transformational object,” I formulate this collective desire as a desperate bid for an internal object that soothes and disavows vulnerability. Many of our patients—from the engineers of Silicon Valley to those who consume their products—may be locked in a bid for a techno-transformational object. I also contend that fantasies of the transformational capacities of technology are a developmentally aspirational object relationship. Yet, there is a problematic relation here between transformation and suffering. Berlant posits the notion of cruel optimism—when something you desire is an obstacle to your flourishing. The wish for transformation and control of human suffering creates a relation that I call cruel optimization—where the quest to optimize is at odds with the depressive realities of the limitations and vulnerability inherent to being human. I expand on the socio-political forces (e.g. neoliberalism) that potentiate this cruel relation between a fantasy of techno-omnipotence and the impossible task of outrunning the limitations of being human.
