Guattari, I am meeting them again in my new life on the screen. But this time, the Gallic abstractions are more concrete. In my computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections; it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis. And in the machine-generated world of MUDs, I meet characters who put me in a new relationship with my own identity.» [40]

It is precisely that ‹getting light› pointed out by Lacan with reference to speech that is invalidated by the dedifferentiation or conforming of signifier and signified, of sign and referent. Applied to Deleuze and Guitarri's definition of desire as an effect of overflowing being, [41] this means an existence under the control of the adding machine, which is forced to obey the law of algorithmic operations. Both of the positions cited here—Lacan's and Deleuze's—have followed the motions of desire, have described it with the aid of mathematic formulae (Lacan) and plastic metaphors (Deleuze), have tracked it down in various terrains and awarded the media machines different

potentialities. But when today certain media theories describe the digital as «the Real» (Lacan), they are as wrong as those who celebrate computer users as «nomadic subjects» (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari).