I thought I’d share this. It is taken from a collection of essays *(*[*Towards a Theory of Dark Immersion*](https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1113926/?ref=BlackScreen)) which discuss the emergence of Dark Immersion in virtual culture (a concept for which *Dark Erotica* is just one example).
The general hypothesis is that it is the structure of a culture which creates the conditions under which certain kinds of thought and experience are possible. The essays take the Foucaultean idea that through the modern era, sex was *deployed* rather than *repressed*, and that in the electric networked age, sex (abstracted into ‘sexual fantasy’) provides a means of enmeshing nervous systems in what we call *immersive experience*.
The essays focus on Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard and Georges Bataille and consider Bataille to have been the first man to properly experience the shift from a mechanical rational age to an electric immersive age. What we call ‘immersion’ is the complete involvement of the nervous system in artificial phenomena and other nervous systems. Sexual intensity is one means by which nervous systems can be involved in other nervous systems; the degree of immersion and the intensity of involvement may depend on the extremity of the experience. This then is the key to *Dark Immersion* – it is the use of extreme sexual and emotional experiences to deeply involve nervous systems in reciprocal mutually beneficial games with each other.