L'appétit vient en mangeant - Machines of Multiplying Desire

(Source)

I.

There is something strange happening when I use Claude Code. 

It always starts small. A single problem. A bug. A config file that won’t parse. The intent feels modest, almost disciplined: fix this, then move on. I tell myself I’m being efficient. Responsible. This is a tool, after all. Tools save time.

But then an hour passes.

And I realize I’m no longer fixing the thing I came for. I’m refactoring modules I hadn’t planned to touch. I’m cleaning up abstractions that were “good enough” five minutes ago. Three hours in, I’m building features that didn’t even exist in my original conception of the system. Not improvements. New directions. This is the part that feels wrong.

Automation is supposed to compress effort. That’s the story. You work, you deploy the tool, you arrive at completion faster—and then you rest. Work → tool → relief. That’s the rhythm we assume we’re buying into.

But that isn’t what’s happening.

What’s happening feels more like: work → tool → desire to keep working. The appetite grows with eating. I finish the bug and instead of closure, I feel… possibility. A sense that something has opened up, and that stopping now would be arbitrary.

You could call this addictive. And I wouldn’t immediately disagree. But it’s a strange kind of addiction. It doesn’t numb me. It doesn’t dissolve my attention. It doesn’t leave me passive or glazed over. Quite the opposite. It sharpens me. It multiplies my capacity to act. And in doing so, it multiplies my wanting. I don’t feel dragged forward. I feel invited.

This is what makes it unsettling. The desire doesn’t come from lack or pressure or obligation. It comes from a sudden surplus of agency. From seeing what else might be reachable now. I don’t want to stop because nothing is asking me to stop. The system feels unfinished in a generative way.

And this collides badly with the story we’ve been telling ourselves about automation for decades, the story where the end goal is freedom from work. Liberation as rest. As absence. As finally being done.

Because here’s AI which does the opposite. It doesn’t liberate me from labor. It liberates me into it. And somehow, I experience that not as exhaustion, but as increase. As appetite. As a kind of quiet exhilaration.

Which makes me wonder whether the problem isn’t the tool at all.

What if we’ve misunderstood desire?

What if wanting isn’t fundamentally about filling gaps or reducing strain? What if it’s something that awakens when capacity expands—when the world suddenly offers more handles, more surfaces to grip, more paths to follow?

If that’s true, then what I’m feeling with Claude Code isn’t a bug in AI's promise.

It’s a glimpse of something much older—something about how desire actually works, when it’s allowed to be productive rather than appeased.

II. PLATO: THE ORIGIN OF LACK

In the *Symposium*, Socrates recounts what Diotima taught him: Love is desire, and desire is always desire for what we do not have. Eros pursues the beautiful because it lacks beauty. It hungers for the good because it exists in deficiency. The lover climbs a ladder—from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls to beautiful ideas to Beauty itself—always reaching toward what is absent.

This picture has a certain elegance. Desire points. It orients us toward transcendence. But notice the structure: desire arises from *privation*. It is fundamentally negative. You want because you lack. The movement is from emptiness toward fullness, from poverty toward possession. And if you ever arrive—if you finally grasp the Form of Beauty—desire should, in principle, cease.

This model has dominated our thinking about desire for centuries. It seems obvious: why would you want what you already have? Desire must be the signature of incompleteness.

III. SPINOZA & NIETZSCHE: ESSENCE AND AFFIRMATION

In 1677, Spinoza published a quiet revolution. Desire, he said, is not what you lack. Desire is *what you are*. Every entity strives to persist in its own being—this is *conatus*, and it is essence itself. You don't desire because you are incomplete. You desire because you are alive, and life is striving. Joy is the passage to greater perfection, which means greater power to act. Not the filling of a hole, but the intensification of capacity.

This inverts Plato completely. You don't want in order to finally arrive and cease wanting. You want because wanting is the fundamental activity of existence. Satisfaction doesn't end desire—it increases your power to desire more.

Two centuries later, Nietzsche radicalized this. The will to power is not domination. It is the will to *more*—more capacity, more intensity, more creation. It says yes to existence, not because existence is perfect, but because affirmation is what life does. The person who needs desire to be lack is the person who resents being. But if you love existence—if you would will it eternally—then desire is not complaint. It is exuberance. Not "I lack X" but "I overflow into X."

Together, Spinoza and Nietzsche give us desire as productive force, as essence, as affirmation. But they describe the *what* without fully describing the *how*. What does productive desire actually look like in motion? What is its mechanism?

For that, we need the factory.

IV. THE FACTORY

When you write code with Claude, something happens that the lack-model cannot explain.

Notice what happens when you use the tool. You produce a prompt. The tool produces code. The code produces an idea. The idea produces a new prompt. Neither you nor the tool is the "subject" who lacks and seeks. Both are desiring-machines that couple and produce. The production doesn't stop when you get what you asked for, because getting *is* producing, and producing produces more desire.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called this a desiring-machine: an assemblage that couples, connects, produces. Your mouth couples to bread. Bread couples to wheat. Wheat couples to soil, labor, economics, sunlight. Desire is the force that makes these couplings happen, that keeps production flowing.

This is why they called it a factory, not a theatre. In theatre, you watch representations of absent things. In a factory, you produce real things. Desire doesn't *represent* what's missing. Desire *makes* what comes next.

Anyone who writes knows this already. You don't lack a perfect sentence and then find it. You write a sentence. The sentence produces the next sentence. That sentence opens a paragraph. The paragraph demands a section. The section suggests a structure. The structure reveals gaps that want filling. Writing is not the satisfaction of pre-existing desire. Writing *is* desire producing itself.

The loop doesn't close. It spirals. We built desiring-machines out of silicon.

V. THE APPETITE THAT GROWS WITH EATING

Why is this surprising? The arc of technology was always assumed to bend toward rest but I think it is bending towards more desire. You experience increased power as increased wanting. Not burden. Appetite.

And notice the phenomenology. This doesn't feel like compulsion. It feels like *increase*. Like joy. Like your capacity to make things has suddenly expanded, and the expansion itself is pleasurable. You experience it as freedom, not constraint. The factory metaphor stops being metaphor. The desiring-machine doesn't complete you. It completes *into* you, producing new wants as fast as it satisfies old ones. Coupling. Production. Flow. Interruption. New coupling. New production. The spiral accelerates.

This has implications. This could be terrifying. An engine of perpetual intensification, no endpoint, no satisfaction, just more and more and more.

Or it could be joyful. The realization that you were never supposed to arrive. That desire is not a problem to solve but the very structure of aliveness. That the good life is not achieving fullness but expanding capacity. That rest is not the cessation of wanting but the joy of wanting well.

The appetite comes with eating.

And the eating never stops.