quotes

Maybe you’ve glanced down at your phone and caught yourself scrolling mindlessly through a list of friends, rather than choosing to connect with any of them. Maybe you suddenly feel you’ve run out of words in a world where you are free, even expected, to express yourself, and all you can come up with is three letters: “lol.” Maybe a job lead arrives but you find it easier to click away the hours at your current gig than think about your future. There’s a recalcitrant set of feelings here—of being passive, or wanting to disassociate and be anyone but yourself, or avoiding decisions—that I call digital lethargy. Because they go against the sense of agency and liveness that digital platforms produce, and against the permission they tout for users to simply be themselves, these feelings can seem perverse, even self-defeating. (vii)

Today, the disengaged, lethargic user is “treated” by algorithms that prod the user into individuating themselves through a stream of clicks, or by social networks that remind the user of opportunities missed, or by trackers and sensors that convert even the failure to respond—what those who study consumer choice call the “no-choice option”—into another form of data. Lethargy in a digital age is distinguished by the fact that you’re always “on” as far as technology is concerned, even if you think you’ve logged off. ... Under digital capitalism, “being yourself” is the dominant set of codes for how we understand ourselves and others. It is a form of empowered individualism, where we equate a user account with personhood, and we equate choice with agency. It is a mandate to continually act and communicate that has come to feel like normal life, indeed, like life expressed, participated in, personalized, and lived more fully, where we are simply how we act and what we choose. ... Even for those who don’t have to continually market themselves, selfhood is not always a site of agency. Whether this looks like burnout from an overload of decisions to make or as a continual if exhausting demand for you to represent your racial or ethnic identity at school or work, selfhood can sometimes be a weight. Often, though, one is only vaguely aware of a feeling of not wanting to be oneself; lethargy is typically experienced as the absence or a blockage of feeling than as a clearly definable emotion. (viii - vix)

Lethargic artworks are dispatches from an age of disconnection. They sit with the ambivalence, disappointments, and desires in the present, and with the experiences of those workers, content moderators, and customer service agents who occupy time “in the meantime” (as anthropologist Sarah Sharma puts it), and who, through their labor, allow their wealthier clients to have more lively, engaged experiences. They explore the disappointments of the present day, rather than narratives of futures that are always about to come, whether dystopian or utopian. By attempting to better describe the time that seems dead or otherwise in suspension, they help to develop different vocabulary for conceiving of time in the digital age.

Today’s conversations around time almost invariably reference the speed of contemporary life, which then leads to a diagnosis of exhaustion and a prescription of “slowness” to cure it. ... Today’s conversations around time almost invariably reference the speed of contemporary life, which then leads to a diagnosis of exhaustion and a prescription of “slowness” to cure it. ... Our experience of these technologies is formed by cultural and design codes that alternately make time feel live or dead, present or absent. ... The feelings of fatigue or burnout or boredom that users experience today are not simply a result of speed or societal acceleration, but also come from the dominant narratives of digital capitalism, which map doing and actualization onto liveness and subjectivity, which prom- ise to turn even unproductive moments into productive ones, and which devalue any form of time that cannot resolve itself. (xxii-xxiii)

... lethargy is concerned with enduring a condition rather than refusing it. What on first glance seems like a lack of engagement, action, or responsiveness (argos, not-working, not-acting) is in fact a way of abiding, remaining intact, or tolerating the intolerable; it is generally a set of tactics to survive within a condition (e.g., delaying tactics that forestall the inevitable), rather than a way of overturning that condition. ... lethargy is a problem of self-forgetting; it sidesteps the liberal-democratic narrative in which a subject “finds one’s voice” and begins to participate in political change. (xxvii)