You Shall Not Covet? Desire and the Semiotic Regulation of Possible Futures in Digital Ecologies
- Author (as listed in source)
- Cristian Jofre-Barrera
- Status (source-reported, not externally verified)
- Accepted — in editing
This work is not yet published. Stage and venue are reported by the author. Bibliographic details come from the author’s CV and have not been externally verified.
This chapter takes the tenth commandment, You shall not covet, as a semiotic-affective device for examining how desire is culturally regulated. Digital ecologies organise recognition through visibility, comparison and recommendation, while generative AI takes part in how people narrate and project possible selves. Without assuming technological determinism, the chapter explores the tension between signs rigidified around comparative scripts and meaning that stays open to reorganisation, asking how life projects remain open to transformation.
The tenth commandment, You shall not covet, acquires renewed analytical relevance when approached not simply as a religious prohibition, but as a semiotic-affective device for examining how desire becomes culturally regulated. Contemporary digital ecologies increasingly organize recognition through visibility, comparison, and recommendation, potentially transforming the conditions through which people orient themselves toward others and anticipate possible futures. From a semiotic-cultural perspective, coveting may be understood relationally, as the desired object acquires significance through the self–other relation, becoming not merely something to possess but a sign through which worth and possible ways of being are negotiated (Mead, 1934/1967; Valsiner, 2021). Digital platforms intensify these relational fields, while generative AI introduces further mediation by participating in how people narrate, elaborate, and project possible selves and trajectories. Rather than assuming that such technologies determine desire, this chapter examines how they may reorganize the semiotic conditions within which desire and futurity are constructed. Drawing on semiotic-cultural psychology and approaches to imagination (Zittoun, 2006; Tateo, 2018), it explores a tension between processes through which signs become rigidified around comparative cultural scripts and those through which meaning remains available for reorganization and the emergence of alternatives. The commandment therefore becomes a historical lens for examining a contemporary transformation in which comparison may no longer appear primarily as an individually regulated fault but as an ordinary condition of digital participation. The resulting question concerns how life projects remain open to transformation when the same ecologies through which futures are imagined continuously organize what becomes visible, desirable, and seemingly possible.
Keywords: Semiotic regulation; Desire; Futurity; Digital ecologies; Generative AI