User:Ssstephen/Reading/digitallethargy

In the 1850s manual labour began to be replaced by immaterial or communicative work. We still use our hands though.

these changes led Western society to increasingly idealise a subject who is less a follower of norms or fixed rules than one who takes responsibility and initiative to make their own rules.

Alain Ehrenberg, La fatigue d'etre soi. Autonomy is the root of burnout and depression.

The metaphor of the dam in Sleep Dealers as control of resources, the water is sold at an extortionate price and the villagers have to walk miles to meet their needs. Meanwhile labour is piped as a service directly to employers' building sites, media outlets and attack drones. Ultimately the labourer uses the drone to destroy the dam, where guerrilla tactics outside of the system were always ineffective. Unblocking the system at this point is optimistically portrayed as a solution to all problems, but presumably in real life each chakra needs to be flowing freely to become an airbender. Designers don't fly attack drones but they do have some power.

racial capitalism... Robinson gives the example of poor mercinaries—"free lancers"—recruiters into sixteenth-century European armies, such as Scottish and Welsh fighting for England

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism p23. Is there presumably an Irish element to this story also. Free lancers history in the past 400 years.

What if I do the same interviews on fffiver? Or with wdka students who are yet to start a career in design? These people I suspect have very similar manual tasks, and maybe similar ideological stances. But geographically socially economically in different positions.

in this extended present, in the interim period, waiting is both torturous and celebratory, affectively charged but not yet resolved into an emotion or an action. Waiting is "in the air", as it were, and waiting with other people is as much a political state as an actual confrontation.

Am InDesign plugin that makes you wait or stops the software or introduces another being.

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.

To talk about any work with care involves less assumptions, no need to "humanise" what is already human. It at the same time is and is not boring, satisfying, stressful, menial, meaningless, impactful, important, damaging, temporary, craft, art, labour to varying degrees. All work. And it's always more andklpp less than just work.

liberal imaginations of freedom can be limiting... [liberals] tend to see agency as something that resists the constraints of power, and miss actions that might be indifferent to or even want to subsist within norms or constraints.

Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety.

feelings of attachment and aspiration... The self sabotaging thoughts that spring from the lethargy at the periphery of our digital lives

Not caring. Sometimes caring. Whatever. Just leave me alone. No wait don't go please. I'm sorry. I'm just a bit frustrated and I'm tired I guess. I dunno.

attempts to undo the privileged position of the agentive subject can help us understand both the strange status of repetitive and quasi-robotic labour in today's digital age and the fact that this labour is often racialised or gendered performed not by humans but by things.

Does treating all work as robotic and boring add to or remove from this? It keeps breaking the distinction, everyone is pressing buttons, everyone is bored, nothing matters, nothing makes sense.

Is a visual communicator a caricature of what were all doing all the time?

Grasping desperately to hold onto the real world just as desperately hoping and needing to stay disconnected. Not believing in reality but loving and fearing and feeling it in a way that is often bearable. The boredom that emerges on average.

questions of lethargy delay us from discussing and stabilising various forms of being into definable states (human, bot, subject, object) and 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.

This is essentially what I'm trying to do with chapter one of my thesis and also the project generally. Maybe chapter two is too aspirational, even with the defeatism of chapter three? Would it be more interesting to just sit in the treacle of now and totally ignore the idea that anything will come after this? Less visioning and more looking. No projection, where are you even projecting from?