Digital Lethargy: Dispatches From an Age of Disconnection
MIT Press, October 4, 2022
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The exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness experienced under digital capitalism, explored through works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers.
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Sometimes, interacting with digital platforms, we want to be passive—in those moments of dissociation when we scroll mindlessly rather than connecting with anyone, for example, or when our only response is a shrugging “lol.” Despite encouragement by these platforms to “be yourself,” we want to be anyone but ourselves. I call this state of exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness digital lethargy. This condition permeates our lives under digital capitalism, whether we are “users,” who are what they click, or racialized workers in Asia and the Global South. Far from being a state of apathy, however, lethargy may hold the potential for social change.
Praise for Digital Lethargy
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“An engrossing account of lethargy not as stasis but as potential and power. Through his thoughtful and generous analysis of art and everyday life, Hu reveals an original map of digital life, and a new lexicon for digital politics.”
James Bridle, author of New Dark Age and Ways of Being
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“Tung-Hui Hu presents a compelling case to reclaim “lethargy” from the criticism of cultural apathy, characterizing it instead as a mirror to the dysfunctional dynamics in society.”
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Artist and Visiting Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at New York University Abu Dhabi
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“Tung-Hui Hu provides deep insight into the mechanisms of the digital age while avoiding any hint of feel-good criticism. Poetic and incisive, Digital Lethargy masterfully diagnoses a disease of our time.”
Christiane Paul, Professor of Media Studies, The New School and Adjunct Curator of Digital Art, Whitney Museum of American Art
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Excerpt
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While probing the workings of digital capitalism, I found a number of investigative projects that exposed a hidden aspect of the data economy. I also found countless critics and thinkers who proposed new tactics to disrupt the domination of companies such as Google or Microsoft. But I also began to notice a handful of artists, performers, and writers who seemed to work against the grain of their peers. Rather than engaging directly in the boisterous debate over technology’s impact on society, their works were recessive, self-defeating, even passive. I found, for example, a fictional dystopia where low-wage Mexican workers laugh and emote for white audiences; a group that invites lazy viewers to strap their Fitbits to a swinging metronome, faking fitness and earning a discount on their health insurance premiums; and a memoir of burnout in an Amazon warehouse.
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Though those works held up the contemporary moment for closer examination, they were not easily instrumentalized. Instead, I increasingly saw them as offering language and images for describing a nascent feeling that I began to understand as lethargy. They made a compelling link between social discontent—youth disconnection, exhaustion and sleeplessness, the colonial legacy of perceived laziness, the “too-late” of a generation used to precarity rather than the promises of the good life—and the new forms and techniques of digital culture.
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It is common now to argue that digital capitalism is flawed, whether due to concerns about privacy and dataveillance, the way it exacerbates societal inequalities, the monopolistic power of companies, or the bias of its algorithms. It seems we are in a tipping point or crisis induced by technology, and that something must be done. But we won’t fully understand it if we focus only on the crisis mentality that the technology itself constructs. Questions of lethargy delay us from prescribing a redemptive form of action. Lethargy is a drag: it weighs down our ability to rush to solutions, and forces us to listen to the unresolved present.