Notes on Boredom 1

These are polished notes I had written after reading articles about boredom, capitalism, and how technology has impacted boredom.

Creative Boredom and Thomas Demand

Modern boredom is characterized by a state of semi-forgetfulness, where the brain is trying to protect itself from the rapidness of modern life. A blase response, an indifference where the world becomes too overstimulating for the individual, too fast for someone to connect with it. Through typical non-distracted boredom, experiences become more vivid and become easier to remember.

When someone relies on technology and machines to remember for the individual, the skill of thinking for ourselves degrades. Information is found so effortlessly and so rapidly, like how memories are retrieved so quickly through phone storage, deeper information and contexts are lost with no need to think for ourselves. Your private experiences become commercialized, where different structures of knowledge aren’t being utilized regularly. The author wonders if long-genuine experiences are still possible in modern distracted boredom.

Boredom and Creativity in the Era of Accelerated Living

Artists and creatives in the past were defined by enduring periods of deep solitude, embodying boredom waiting for creativity to strike. Modern artists are constantly under-stimulated, regularly creating, and are less impressed from over-exposure of visual information. Old creatives embraced boredom, new creatives rejected it.

Modern capitalist society has required artists to engage in fast paced competition and an integration of STEM into their work to justify its value or relevancy. Capitalism lures artists into smaller cities through the promise of cheap rent and cultural legacy, but then uses the artist’s work to bolster rent and make the artist inaccessible to the community. A prime example of which being New York City’s Soho, and San Francisco.

You Must (Not) Be Bored!: Boredom and Creativity in Global Capitalism

In capitalism, boredom is negative, used to degrade or critique an object, an emotion that is weaponized to force workers into the realm of labor or consumption. This emotion is commodified, creating a complex where its push for efficiency creates pockets of waiting– pockets of boredom. Everything is accounted for and automated for you, your pleasure and your work are expendable. The capitalist schedule are bursts of liminalities in between slots of work or pleasure. In train stations, highways, and waiting rooms, boredom is experienced because you are not meant to live in these places, you are not meant to be seen or acknowledged.

Inaction is boredom, and inaction is death as you have no capital to play with. You must be bored so you can work or consume, but you cannot be bored because there’s so much to do in a capitalist society. The system has a relentless push to act in an economically productive manner, there is always something to do to continue.

Within capitalism, one can consume non-objective ideas or the commodifiable internal experience, examples of which are community, culture, lifestyle, or nostalgia– all opportunities for control. Microexperiences are commodified where the aestheticization of difficulty without real struggle is sold. As a response counter-cultural aesthetics are pursued in order to feel in control to escape modern normalcy and standardization. The fear of embracing boredom results in the commodification of the self and one’s experiences to become products and fuel of the larger capitalist system.

Media hype and the interaction of news media, social media, and the user

Newsprint is not flashy enough information, not fast enough for relevancy, and not convenient enough to be shared. Online news however lacks all three of these pitfalls, proliferating and shared on a global level as the user is now an arbiter of information. In exchange, the news must have qualities such as shareable headlines, emotion-inducing prose, and the ability to feed biases or political polarizations. The news must create a sense of community, confirming insiders and excluding outsiders, even if the information presented in the article was incorrect. Echo chambers are developed as algorithms do not show users information that challenges their biases. Information cannot make users feel like they’re being sold a product, it must give the feeling of interacting with another human being.

This threatens editorial autonomy and free speech, as information is restricted and altered to maximize capital. If all information must be entertaining, unchallenging, stimulating, and relatable in order to give users a reason to interact with it, where is the real news?

Twenty years of boredom

When one experiences boredom, they exist in space not made for them, it is a pervasive and existential emotion where you cannot see yourself or engage with anything. It is seen as lost time where nothing of value was experienced. To endure too much boredom and indifference, is being dead to the world where one cannot accept the life surrounding them. A disconnect to the material world (including time) indicates a loss of self. In the same way declaring someone is dead to you, you are declaring an aspect of yourself that is dead.

Through advertising, the self is a separate, ever-changing, and unattainable goal that is pushed to be authentic, adored, and buyable. This idea of a separate self is exacerbated through technology, where your identity is often split and categorized to be profitable. Labor and life exists on either side of a blurry line as industrialization creates the need to exist in allocated time slots where there is no room to breathe.

In the old internet, its experience has stemmed from an organic question as the web became a tool of wandering with an end goal. In the new internet, there is no organic question to prompt ‘logging in’, it is a world built for your entertainment as the algorithm takes the user from place to place. The idea of organic exploration from the user is lost as the algorithm presents content for you. New knowledge is inorganic and limited, the user loses time as there is no destination but an endless wandering, along with lost time, a kind of organic self is lost as well.

The Sacredness of Digital Liminality

The author describes the internet as godlike in its omniscience, all knowing nature, its abstract form distant from the organic world, personalized and contextualized to the user. Through the internet patchwork communities are developed and organized, where the idea of a unitary self is often dissolved. The self is no longer strictly physical but in fact a reflection of your online performance. The internet is a state of a permanent transition, where the final performance either is forever postponed or never ending as the actors become the characters they play.

These online personas are both freeing and restricting, where the internet’s main appeal is its ability to escape the physical self. It is built of illusions of escapism, control, and an endless access to information. The persona is not more or less authentic as its performance is controlled by algorithms and the freedom of expression is restricted as information can be censored or highlighted.

As the internet is seen as a cultural escape in a post-globalized world where racial, ethnic, and nationalist identity is lost. Its users hyperfocus on their online identity as a bastion of order as the future is seen as uncontrollable and uncertain compared to the expected march of progress the past has offered.

In the end, there is never a moment of disconnect with the internet, the performance never truly ceases as we can never truly ‘log out’. The physical self is now seen as inferior and burdened by real world responsibilities and its limitations, but the ‘real’ self can be accessed by simply opening your phone.