Text page
On the Usefulness of Anxiety
"On the Usefulness of Anxiety" uses feedback, automation, or machinic desire to describe modernity as a recursive system rather than a human-centered project.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The key claim is that cybernetic process and capitalist abstraction belong to the same field. Feedback, machinic desire, and recursive automation describe how modernity runs through distributed systems rather than sovereign subjects.
These pages make recursion operational by tying desire, signal, and control to technical process. Cybernetics becomes a vocabulary for understanding how abstraction feeds back through bodies, media, and institutions.
That matters because the archive's account of meltdown depends on feedback rather than simple linear progress. The future arrives here as recursive escalation, not as planned development.
How to read this text
Begin with the page's account of feedback or machinic desire, then move outward to its claims about culture or politics.
Track how automation, recursion, or systems language displaces centered agency. That shift usually reveals why the text sits in this section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
Fear is indeed preferable to love in that it carries less unpredictability and risk of loss. A technics of fear, as something transmissible, calculable and directional, needs to be supplemented by the cybernetic recognition of feedback.
Definition · paragraph 3
A technics of fear, as something transmissible, calculable and directional, needs to be supplemented by the cybernetic recognition of feedback. Evil Media approaches provide this necessary reflexivity.
Definition · paragraph 3
A technics of fear, as something transmissible, calculable and directional, needs to be supplemented by the cybernetic recognition of feedback.
Definition · paragraph 2
Matthew Fuller + Andrew Goffey On the Usefulness of Anxiety Two Evil Media Stratagems
Definition · paragraph 10
Look how quickly user groups set themselves up on the Internet – doctor-patient confidentiality doesn’t enter the equation. Anyway, anxiety offers a useful cover story for dealing with harmful or fearful incursions from the outside world and,
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.