"Digital Lethargy is a book about decentering digital technologies. His definition of the digital is expansive; it includes workers, servers and infrastructures, environments, as well as users. It also includes historical contexts. It's the kind of far-reaching exploration that new media studies (as it's come to be known) is lacking and sorely needs. By exploring digital technology through art, Tung-Hui Hu creates ways of thinking about what it means to live with, use, and be used by digital technology"--
The exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness experienced under digital capitalism, explored through works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers.
Sometimes, interacting with digital platforms, we want to be passivein 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. Tung-Hui Hu calls 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.
Hu explores digital lethargy through a series of works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers. These dispatches from the bleeding edge of digital culture include 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. These works dwell within the ordinariness and even banality of digital life, redirecting our attention toward moments of thwarted agency, waiting and passing time. Lethargy, writes Hu, is a drag: it weighs down our ability to rush to solutions, and forces us to talk about the unresolved present.
