Love and Shadow: Algorithmic Intimacy and Affective Governance

This article theorizes algorithmic intimacy as both a psychological adaptation and a form of affective governance. Drawing on psychoanalytic and feminist theory, it develops the concept of the shadow of love, describing the self-referential desire that arises when AI companions and digital platforms provide unconditional affirmation without reciprocity. Within this framework, digital intimacy is reinterpreted as a sociotechnical formation that contains and regulates emotion while displacing relational vulnerability. Rather than signalling the decline of intimacy, these transformations reveal how emotional life is increasingly governed through data feedback and predictive modeling. The article contributes to media studies debates on mediation, affect, and platformization, arguing that in contemporary digital culture, love has itself become an infrastructure of control.