The Seven
Subsystems

Seven companion essays, treating each of the apparatus's subsystems in depth. The order is the order they appear in the main essay's § V. Each follows a common skeleton — figure, definition, mechanism, inheritance, in the chair, a note — so the seven read as a series.

1. 01
   Desire Engines

   Content surface producing what it then fulfills.
   Deleuze & Guattari · Baudrillard · McLuhan
   →
2. 02
   Consent Loops

   Ritualised agreement architecture.
   Foucault · legal-positivist tradition
   →
3. 03
   Compliance Monitors

   The panopticon at saturation.
   Foucault · Bentham · Zuboff
   →
4. 04
   Surplus Reservoirs

   Where the apparatus stores what it has extracted.
   Marx, transposed · Zuboff
   →
5. 05
   Feedback Rituals

   Variable-ratio reinforcement, deployed across consumer life.
   Klein · Winnicott · Skinner · casino industry
   →
6. 06
   Affective Signal Translators

   Every other subsystem's afferent nerve.
   Preciado · Damasio · affective computing
   →
7. 07
   Algorithmic Libido Governors

   The apparatus's central nervous system.
   Lyotard · Berardi · cybernetics tradition
   →

The list of seven is misleading if read as a list of seven separate things. The subsystems are facets of one operation — the closed loop running — and the analytic question is rarely which subsystem but which moment of the loop the occupant is currently inside.