That the body is an object, well psychoanalysis knows this from its origins. An object that can be loved, hated, manipulated, bought, sold, cared for, corrupted, desecrated, destroyed… whether it is our own or that of others. The obsession with the body has become epidemic in the microclimate of Silicon Valley (which sometimes would deserve to be written “Silly-con”).

The last shout of fashion there is fasting. Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter and its current CEO, does not eat or drink for 22 hours a day, reserving his small dose of calories for dinner time. According to him and many other supporters of this method, fasting is an extraordinary stimulant of productivity, since it astonishingly increases the ability to concentrate and have work energy at one’s disposal. Its promoters have become addicted to the euphoric effects caused by the ketone bodies, substances that the body produces in situations of prolonged fasting and that provide an exceptional source of energy source for the brain and the heart.

Why limit yourself to external devices if the body is one device more, perfectly manipulated digitally? This is called “biohacking”, and consists of a set of techniques that combine bioengineering and data processing obtained through the tracking of certain organic variables. The body is not only our personal temple, but another device to be optimized from the point of view of health, but above all in order to maximize its productive capacity. The exploitation of the labor force (a concept that some believe obsolete) redoubles its entire validity in the proposal of self-exploitation in order to achieve a fantastic increase in performance.

Since the term “fast” means both “fast” and “fast, fast” in English, it is not very difficult to discover an interesting variation of the superego’s ferocity. Speed ​​is a supreme value for the prophets of technologies. It is interesting to know the new modalities of jouissance that come from the thinking heads of Silicon Valley.

One can deprive oneself of food and paradoxically feed the gluttony of the superego. There is no doubt that these people have a real talent for Lacanian logics, and it brings us a clinical novelty. Now we know that eating nothing not only achieves anorexia. From it, we can also get a high-competition worker.