The unattainable other: a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective on digital laborers’ traffic anxiety
Front. Psychol., 29 July 2026
Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
“Traffic anxiety” has become a collective psychic condition among digital content producers. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis as its theoretical framework, this article conceptualizes “traffic” (viewership metrics) as objet petit a, arguing that it is constructed under the gaze of the algorithmic “big Other” as an ever-escaping object-cause of desire. After clarifying the functional division of labor between objet petit a and surplus jouissance, it further introduces the distinction between phallic jouissance and the jouissance of the Other, providing theoretical resources for understanding different subtypes of traffic anxiety. The article then theoretically articulates five mechanisms at work in traffic anxiety: frustration anxiety arising from blocked libidinal investment, castration panic under the threat to symbolic identification, the somatization and social displacement of anxiety, repetition compulsion within a temporal structure, and the failure of defense mechanisms and deepening of self-exploitation. Rather than offering empirical validation, the study deploys a theoretical-interpretive design in which autoethnographic diaries serve as an exemplary case that renders a psychic structure legible, while findings from existing qualitative and quantitative literature are drawn upon as corroborating context. The theoretical contribution of this article lies in demonstrating that traffic anxiety reflects a deeper reorganization of the economy of desire by digital platforms—a restructuring that shapes laborers’ subjectivity at the unconscious level, extending platform exploitation beyond the appropriation of labor products to the depletion of laborers’ very libidinal production.
CITE
Fan Q (2026) The unattainable other: a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective on digital laborers’ traffic anxiety. Front. Psychol. 17:1870187. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1870187
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