Manufactured Desire

Desire has always been one of the forces in human civilization. It has inspired exploring, creating, trading and making art. Many economies were built around it. Thinkers have talked about it, religions have tried to control it. Businesses have spent a long time trying to understand it. For most of history one idea was taken for granted: desire came from inside the person. People wanted money, praise, friends or beauty because those wishes came from their experiences, beliefs and imagination. Society could influence desire. It didn’t make it in amounts.

The digital world brings up a disturbing question.

What if desire is no longer just found.. More and more made?

The Business of Anticipation

Every day billions of actions show what catches peoples attention. Searches show curiosity. Buying shows preference. Stopping, clicking and scrolling show interests that people might not even notice. This information has become one of the important things in the current economy. Not because it tells what people already want but because it lets a system guess what they will want next.

Suggestion systems recommend items before someone even starts to look. Ads show up before a need is fully formed. People who have followers turn lives into things to want and websites learn, more and more exactly which pictures, stories and symbols are most likely to make desire. None of these systems tell people to act. They just make certain options look more appealing than others. Which is a quieter and over time powerful way to influence than any slogan ever was.

The anthropologist and philosopher René Girard spent a lot of time saying people don’t create their desires. They learn what to want by seeing what others want. People don’t just copy actions. They copy what they want. The thing itself often is not as important as the meaning attached to it: a bag is appealing less for what it holds than for who else is seen with it. The digital world has taken this idea. Used it on a scale Girard never had to deal with. Millions of people now watch each other all the time. A vacation becomes appealing because it is admired online. A way of life becomes attractive because it keeps showing up in front of the eyes. Desire no longer spreads slowly through culture. It moves fast as the feed.

When Persuasion Becomes Personal

The power of todays websites was never really about their ability to advertise. It’s about their ability to make persuasion personal. Traditional ads sent the message to many people regardless of who they were. The digital world changed that: every suggestion, every ad every recommended buy can now be adjusted to one persons behavior, habits and past. Persuasion stopped being for many. Became for one. Influence stopped being occasional. Became constant.

The philosopher Herbert Marcuse called some of these wants ” needs”. Desires that feel completely personal but are, in his view mostly created by the economic systems that are made to satisfy them. People think they are making choices while in reality chasing wishes shaped by forces they never looked at. Marcuse was writing about ads in the 1960s. The digital world has given the argument a sharper point because algorithms don’t just react to demand anymore. They help make it. The line between finding a desire and making one gets harder to see each year.

This is most clear where buying meets how people see themselves. In 2021 the Wall Street Journal shared research from Meta. It showed that Instagrams own studies had found the app made body-image problems worse for a third of teenage girls already struggling with them. Some teens who said they had thoughts of suicide linked those feelings in part to the platform. The company didn’t make a system to hurt anyones image on purpose. It made a system to keep people watching. A feed that likes comparison turned out to be really good at that. With the mental cost as an unmeasured side effect instead of the main goal. That difference is what this article is looking at: nobody had to mean harm for the setup to create it anyway.

The Economics of Being Seen

The economist Thorstein Veblen writing at the end of the 1800s noticed that people often buy not for use but for recognition. That some things work like signals of status and fitting in than as actual items. Digital websites have taken that idea. Put it on a stage that never ends. Recognition is no longer asked for from neighbors or people at work; its asked for from audiences that can be thousands or millions. Being noticed has become a kind of money.

The result is a important change in the question people have. It used to be: what do I want? More and more it’s: what will be appreciated? The gap between those two questions may be what decides if a desire is still truly someones

None of this makes desire the guy in the story. Without it there’s no drive, no discovery, no reason to imagine a life than the one a person was born into. The real question was never whether people should want things. It’s whether they are the ones creating their wanting instead of being the audience for someone elses plan.

What Prediction Turns Into

AI systems will keep getting better at reading behavior. Websites will keep getting better at guessing what catches attention and what makes someone act. None of that is automatically bad. Used well it can connect people to knowledge chances and experiences they would never find on their own. The problem starts at a point: when commercial prediction quietly turns into psychological guidance, when markets stop trying to meet desire and start trying to shape it.

The Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff created the term “surveillance capitalism” for that change and gave the main idea a name. Instrumentarian power: the ability to know and guide human behavior toward someone elses goals, not through force but through a constant mostly hidden system of prediction. Her main idea is an one to ignore: the best way to predict behavior is to change it at the start. That idea goes beyond money. A society whose wants are always shaped from risks losing something important about what freedom really means.

Because freedom was never about the ability to choose between different products or opinions. It’s also about the ability to ask why those things are wanted in the place.

Some of the important choices in a life were never going to be given to a suggestion. No algorithm can decide what makes a life meaningful. No marketplace can figure out happiness. No ad can decide contentment. These discoveries need thinking, not buying. And thinking is what a system built to hold attention has no interest in giving back.

The digital world has made tools for satisfying desire. Its bigger challenge is keeping the ability to tell the difference between what’s just nice and what is actually worth wanting. Because not every wish deserves to be followed not every lure deserves to become a goal and not every desire deserves to be part of a persons identity.

Maybe the main question of this century was never what do we want. It’s who taught us to want it.

Because the biggest change in the world may not be that machines have learned to read human desire. It may be that they have quietly become part of writing it. And the future of freedom will depend less on getting rid of desire than, on getting back the ability to look at it. A civilization that stops asking why it wants what it wants may eventually find out that it never really chose any of it.