Desire Without Ethics: Evolutionary Control Theory and the Architecture of Adaptive Capture

What if modern systems do not simply respond to human desire, but learn from it?

Desire Without Ethics argues that platforms, institutions, and media systems increasingly convert attention, vulnerability, outrage, and care into usable forms of control.

This book begins the first major formulation of Evolutionary Control Theory after Boundary-Coupled Selection, Archival Prestige, and Harm Persistence in Networked Systems.

It develops adaptive capture as a diagnostic framework for systems that learn from desire, vulnerability, attention, outrage, institutional avoidance, and platform circulation. Its central claim is that contemporary systems do not merely reflect human behavior: they convert behavior into usable signal, then route consequence away from the structures that profit from that conversion.

Moving across networked violence, animal suffering, media systems, institutional failure, liability management, cybernetics, and control theory, the book examines how care becomes leverage, how recognition becomes workload, and how visibility can increase without closure.

This is a theoretical work on control, attention, consequence, and the architecture of adaptive capture.