THE SIMULATION OF PARTICIPATION - EXHAUSTION AND BOREDOM IN COMMUNICATIVE CAPITALISM
Nothing. That is often the answer these days to the question between friends or partners about what you are doing. Nothing. Although the gaze is magnetically drawn to a glowing display on which you are either typing eagerly or swiping endlessly in a self-forgetful automatic manner. Something is being done, not nothing. So what do we do when we are supposedly doing nothing? In other words: what is being done to us when we do what we call doing nothing? And what are we not doing at the moment, precisely because we are doing this doing nothing?
by Benjamin Johann
by Benjamin Johann
Still watching one more episode, still exploring another page of the product range, still clicking a reel, still giving a like, still sharing a breaking news story, still an incredibly funny idea for the next story, still another reason to generate content, still another reason to be outraged, to write a comment on the critical intervention, Oh! what a cute cat, Wow! awesome, plump ass, breaking news, the Russians, how many pages does Pornhub have? Corona was a plandemic, the great exchange and there was something about Nazis, Arabs and climate too. Je suis... well, what exactly?
That's what we do. Endlessly, always too long, and we never reach the point or the state that we paradoxically hope to reach. What's more: we practice a consistent failure, find neither happiness nor satisfaction, and although we never tire of cursing it, we enjoy this consistent failure. Studies have shown that reward is all the more effective when it is coupled with the right dose of disappointment and frustration - think of the way slot machines work. Platforms like TikTok use this knowledge to optimize their algorithm. Artificial intelligence creates a user profile and systematically bombards the user with content, with only about every fourth post matching the user's alleged interests. If the user does not respond for a long time, does not use the app for a long time, or does not scroll through the reels on offer long enough, then the user's profile or its content is in turn shown to other users in order to elicit reactions. A tactical game of luring and generating attention. If we scroll too little, we are lured. If we scroll, then we have to systematically move through a huge amount of uninteresting content to reach the reward.
The desire to swipe and click is at least as strong as the desire for visibility, for attention. Nothing is more contested than our attention. But it is not us who gain access to an unlimited wealth of information, it is capitalist cyberspace that gains unlimited access to us. In fact, it taps into our attention, our desire, our energy, our time. Netflix's greatest enemy is sleep, and phenomena such as binge-watching and endless scrolling through ultimately indifferent myriads of shorts and reels prove this. While we click, swipe and scroll and rob ourselves of our own time, private companies that have grown into monopolies collect the information we generate and make available free of charge in order to generate their capital by exploiting this data. Data that we generate when we write and share a veritable political analysis as well as when we like a cat video.
Entertaining, political, artistic, critical, exciting, irrelevant, sedative, shocking, advertising, news, a wide variety of formats, content, information, affects - all indiscriminately gathered on the touch-sensitive surface of technical devices. The smoothness of touchscreens is the material flip side of the virtual smoothness of cyberspace, the smoothing mechanism of flow. Smoothness does indeed determine our present, both in an aesthetic and social sense, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han claims. Smooth, steeled bodies, smooth, reflective touchscreens, smooth, irritation-free art. Everything, even the repulsive, is smoothed. Every day and for hours on end, we are in physical and psychological contact with these smoothing technologies, the processes that integrate and homogenize everything, and in the process we gradually forget the notched feel of the material world, its complexity, ambiguity, ambivalence.
Optimize your life, become the best version of yourself, live more consciously, eat healthier, live your personal dream and let others share in it, inspire each other, connect, exchange ideas, communicate, share. While all the knowledge in the world is open to us, we photograph ourselves in front of mirrors, eat onour plates and verbally beat each other's heads in. The world is indeed coming together to form a global village under the conditions of real-time communication at quasi-light speed, but no, technical development is not synonymous with progress. The Internet, the new technologies and services seemed to fulfill essential democratic and emancipatory promises: the realization of the idea of the social, of co-determination, the possibility of individual expression. But the invitation to participate, to take part and to share, the enthusiastic incitement to exchange, falls on deaf ears.
We feel active, we think we are taking part, we believe we are political, we believe in the effectiveness of the stronger argument, so we write posts, sign petitions, share interventions, and in doing so only strengthen those platforms and companies that appeal precisely to this conviction and the effectiveness of this behavior in order to exploit it. Instead of waging a political battle, we only produce ourselves and the arrogance of certainty about our own integrity.
We think we are exercising the right to freedom of expression, the right to freely organize our free time, the possibility of self-realization and communicative exchange, or simply the right to see the thousandth banality. But we are constantly doing unpaid work for companies that provide a seemingly free product. These services cost nothing - except time. Our time. Our attention. Our sleep. It is not the platform, but the user who is the product, and is also a resource. It is not us, but private companies that control our communication.
News becomes contributions, information transmission becomes a circulation of content. The contribution to the circulation replaces the understanding of news, which means that the meaning of the specific content tends to no longer play a role. The decisive factor is that a post gets a lot of clicks, is shared often and generates as much excitement as possible. It is not what counts, but that something circulates in the flow. Communication of communication that integrates every irritation into the smoothness and speed of the flow as quickly as possible. Hence the explosion of simplification, polarization, affectiveness - it works, it simply flows more smoothly than a complex, differentiated discussion of topic X. The propaganda of democratizing conditions obscures the fact that these platforms (and the corresponding private companies behind them) have contributed to the alarming decomposition of democratic structures that can be observed everywhere: anti-intellectualism, polarization and polemicization of discourses, massive shift to the right in societies, the resurgence of nationalism, authoritarianism and fascism, the erosion of the social in the hyper-competition of all against all, intensification of neoliberal restructuring and steadily growing inequality.
While the left, especially in the identity politics sector, tears itself apart in religious wars, the New Right benefits, sometimes acting as the voice of reason in the face of these trench battles. The strategic use of TikTok in the political struggle of the New Right is no secret and explains, among other things, although not exclusively, the high approval ratings of young people. As part of his lecture at the 2023 Summer Academy of the Institute for State Policy, a kind of think tank of the New Right, Erik Ahrens, who is, among other things, the brains behind Maximilian Krah's TikTok offensive, points out the importance of the platforms for politicizing society. The aim is to target young people in particular, as 14 to 19 year olds form the core of TikTok users. Given the average usage time, users have a 90-minute window every day in which they can broadcast.
Why do the AfD, the New Right, rely on TikTok and social media? Because it allows them to avoid the hurdles of gatekeeping, censorship and framing. On the one hand, they can specifically address their own milieu and at the same time broadcast diffusely to the general public, relying on the way the algorithm works. Because unlike other platforms, on TikTok it is not important which channels you follow, but which videos you watch. This is an essential part of the so-called metapolitical strategy of creating a new, parallel public that is no longer dependent on the classic organs of journalism.
So what should we do? Delete all these apps, leave these platforms, boycott these companies? Get out of the loops, escape the flow and the fight for our attention? How do we resist the temptation of distraction? How do we get our time back?
The important things are oftenIt may be easy to create empty spaces of non-communication, disruptive interruptions in order to escape control. This was the answer given by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - in 1990, mind you - to the question of how to escape the emphatic incitement to communication and the control of communication. This assumption seems more accurate today than ever. To be clear: Deleuze does not mean any form of counter-communication by this, but rather an appeal for the active, creative production of non-communication. We communicate not too little, but too much. This excess of communication stops us from doing anything really meaningful. Against this background, numerous attempts to slow down and withdraw should be assessed, as if it were possible to simply turn one's back on communicative capitalism and the all-encompassing sphere of its oppressive realism. Which also means subjecting all the intrusively advertised and widely touted programs and practices of self-care, mindfulness and work-life balance to severe criticism. After all, these are merely small, chic and individualistic islands of apparent calm, within a permanent noise that patronizingly appeals to the creation of these islands and remains silent about the fact that it can continue to exist in this way. #mentalhealth #metime #selfcare
Many people miss the chance to say nothing and have lost a lot as a result. This statement was made recently in the small, quiet, silently vibrating film A Quiet Girl (2022). It is difficult to bear the fact that nothing is actually said and the temptation to immediately fill every announcement of possible silence with speaking is strong. But just as little speaking means that something is actually said, not speaking means that nothing is said. But what is more intense than shared silence, not speaking in the presence of another person by mutual consent? Rarely is more said than when silence takes over language. Silence is the whispering of the most hidden secrets. It is not a retreat into passivity, but the intensification of the medium of language itself.
An essential and irritating paradox of the present: there is supposedly no reason to be bored, and yet an omnipresent boredom dominates. Because instead of really engaging with things, topics, people, we only seek distraction, we are only given distraction. We move through a universe of boredom in cyberspace (what do we remember? What really excites us?) and are so overstimulated that the possibility of real relaxation and non-communication is impossible. We have forgotten how to be bored, just as we have banished calm, silence, and stillness from life. Today there is neither an excuse for being bored nor a real opportunity to do so, wrote the cultural theorist Mark Fisher aptly. Boredom was once a reaction to repetitive work, and taming boredom was therefore one of the main tasks of capitalist systems. At present, the success of this taming is obvious, at least from the perspective of the system: boredom, monotony, predictability are considered unattractive and negative. What counteracts these emotions is the propaganda of the unpredictable, of fluid flexibility, of enthusiastic spontaneity, the promise of something new all the time. Social media, platforms, streaming services, podcasts, constant noise, gadgets and gimmicks galore. Anyone who claims to be bored and ennui simply hasn't tried enough. The new, however, is just the familiar with a more or less successful veneer of newness. Endless repetitions of the familiar. Hence the downside of this propaganda: permanent tension and stress, withdrawal and isolation, FOMO (fear of missing out), privatization of systemic diseases, collective and individual insecurity and exhaustion, which extends to depression and existential fear. It seems to have become impossible to actually do nothing and to be able to enjoy doing nothing.
Yet boredom has always had a resistant and creative potential when it is transformed. For this to happen, however, boredom must first be allowed and endured. So many people, as the Corona pandemic has painfully revealed, are finding it increasingly difficult to be alone with themselves and without distraction. Even children are prevented from learning a positive relationship to boredom by the oversupply of distraction, non-stop entertainment and almost compulsive leisure activism. When the children finally go to sleep in the evening, their parents sit quietlybut extremely irritated on the couch, their gaze fixed on their smartphones, whose screens they caress. If you even notice it, you wonder about this other person who is sitting there breathing next to you and wonder what he is doing. Probably nothing.
P.S:
(1) Maybe the problem is not the millions of users of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, but the fact that these platforms do not belong to them?
(2) Do we perhaps have to learn again how to evade the effort of our attention in order to regain the stolen time? Actively create gaps and interruptions in order to give boredom and the confrontation with it its due?
12/13/2024
Benjamin Johann (born 1988) studied theater and media studies, German studies and the ethics of text cultures, worked at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, is now a freelance author, publishes in various forms and formats and is co-host of the podcast "Projections - Cinema Talks". His involvement with film, art and culture is always also an engagement with society, philosophy and politics - always looking for the ethical and aesthetic lines of flight of our present. Since her birth, his daughter has reminded him of the vital power of fascination and anarchy.
That's what we do. Endlessly, always too long, and we never reach the point or the state that we paradoxically hope to reach. What's more: we practice a consistent failure, find neither happiness nor satisfaction, and although we never tire of cursing it, we enjoy this consistent failure. Studies have shown that reward is all the more effective when it is coupled with the right dose of disappointment and frustration - think of the way slot machines work. Platforms like TikTok use this knowledge to optimize their algorithm. Artificial intelligence creates a user profile and systematically bombards the user with content, with only about every fourth post matching the user's alleged interests. If the user does not respond for a long time, does not use the app for a long time, or does not scroll through the reels on offer long enough, then the user's profile or its content is in turn shown to other users in order to elicit reactions. A tactical game of luring and generating attention. If we scroll too little, we are lured. If we scroll, then we have to systematically move through a huge amount of uninteresting content to reach the reward.
The desire to swipe and click is at least as strong as the desire for visibility, for attention. Nothing is more contested than our attention. But it is not us who gain access to an unlimited wealth of information, it is capitalist cyberspace that gains unlimited access to us. In fact, it taps into our attention, our desire, our energy, our time. Netflix's greatest enemy is sleep, and phenomena such as binge-watching and endless scrolling through ultimately indifferent myriads of shorts and reels prove this. While we click, swipe and scroll and rob ourselves of our own time, private companies that have grown into monopolies collect the information we generate and make available free of charge in order to generate their capital by exploiting this data. Data that we generate when we write and share a veritable political analysis as well as when we like a cat video.
Entertaining, political, artistic, critical, exciting, irrelevant, sedative, shocking, advertising, news, a wide variety of formats, content, information, affects - all indiscriminately gathered on the touch-sensitive surface of technical devices. The smoothness of touchscreens is the material flip side of the virtual smoothness of cyberspace, the smoothing mechanism of flow. Smoothness does indeed determine our present, both in an aesthetic and social sense, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han claims. Smooth, steeled bodies, smooth, reflective touchscreens, smooth, irritation-free art. Everything, even the repulsive, is smoothed. Every day and for hours on end, we are in physical and psychological contact with these smoothing technologies, the processes that integrate and homogenize everything, and in the process we gradually forget the notched feel of the material world, its complexity, ambiguity, ambivalence.
Optimize your life, become the best version of yourself, live more consciously, eat healthier, live your personal dream and let others share in it, inspire each other, connect, exchange ideas, communicate, share. While all the knowledge in the world is open to us, we photograph ourselves in front of mirrors, eat onour plates and verbally beat each other's heads in. The world is indeed coming together to form a global village under the conditions of real-time communication at quasi-light speed, but no, technical development is not synonymous with progress. The Internet, the new technologies and services seemed to fulfill essential democratic and emancipatory promises: the realization of the idea of the social, of co-determination, the possibility of individual expression. But the invitation to participate, to take part and to share, the enthusiastic incitement to exchange, falls on deaf ears.
We feel active, we think we are taking part, we believe we are political, we believe in the effectiveness of the stronger argument, so we write posts, sign petitions, share interventions, and in doing so only strengthen those platforms and companies that appeal precisely to this conviction and the effectiveness of this behavior in order to exploit it. Instead of waging a political battle, we only produce ourselves and the arrogance of certainty about our own integrity.
We think we are exercising the right to freedom of expression, the right to freely organize our free time, the possibility of self-realization and communicative exchange, or simply the right to see the thousandth banality. But we are constantly doing unpaid work for companies that provide a seemingly free product. These services cost nothing - except time. Our time. Our attention. Our sleep. It is not the platform, but the user who is the product, and is also a resource. It is not us, but private companies that control our communication.
News becomes contributions, information transmission becomes a circulation of content. The contribution to the circulation replaces the understanding of news, which means that the meaning of the specific content tends to no longer play a role. The decisive factor is that a post gets a lot of clicks, is shared often and generates as much excitement as possible. It is not what counts, but that something circulates in the flow. Communication of communication that integrates every irritation into the smoothness and speed of the flow as quickly as possible. Hence the explosion of simplification, polarization, affectiveness - it works, it simply flows more smoothly than a complex, differentiated discussion of topic X. The propaganda of democratizing conditions obscures the fact that these platforms (and the corresponding private companies behind them) have contributed to the alarming decomposition of democratic structures that can be observed everywhere: anti-intellectualism, polarization and polemicization of discourses, massive shift to the right in societies, the resurgence of nationalism, authoritarianism and fascism, the erosion of the social in the hyper-competition of all against all, intensification of neoliberal restructuring and steadily growing inequality.
While the left, especially in the identity politics sector, tears itself apart in religious wars, the New Right benefits, sometimes acting as the voice of reason in the face of these trench battles. The strategic use of TikTok in the political struggle of the New Right is no secret and explains, among other things, although not exclusively, the high approval ratings of young people. As part of his lecture at the 2023 Summer Academy of the Institute for State Policy, a kind of think tank of the New Right, Erik Ahrens, who is, among other things, the brains behind Maximilian Krah's TikTok offensive, points out the importance of the platforms for politicizing society. The aim is to target young people in particular, as 14 to 19 year olds form the core of TikTok users. Given the average usage time, users have a 90-minute window every day in which they can broadcast.
Why do the AfD, the New Right, rely on TikTok and social media? Because it allows them to avoid the hurdles of gatekeeping, censorship and framing. On the one hand, they can specifically address their own milieu and at the same time broadcast diffusely to the general public, relying on the way the algorithm works. Because unlike other platforms, on TikTok it is not important which channels you follow, but which videos you watch. This is an essential part of the so-called metapolitical strategy of creating a new, parallel public that is no longer dependent on the classic organs of journalism.
So what should we do? Delete all these apps, leave these platforms, boycott these companies? Get out of the loops, escape the flow and the fight for our attention? How do we resist the temptation of distraction? How do we get our time back?
The important things are oftenIt may be easy to create empty spaces of non-communication, disruptive interruptions in order to escape control. This was the answer given by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - in 1990, mind you - to the question of how to escape the emphatic incitement to communication and the control of communication. This assumption seems more accurate today than ever. To be clear: Deleuze does not mean any form of counter-communication by this, but rather an appeal for the active, creative production of non-communication. We communicate not too little, but too much. This excess of communication stops us from doing anything really meaningful. Against this background, numerous attempts to slow down and withdraw should be assessed, as if it were possible to simply turn one's back on communicative capitalism and the all-encompassing sphere of its oppressive realism. Which also means subjecting all the intrusively advertised and widely touted programs and practices of self-care, mindfulness and work-life balance to severe criticism. After all, these are merely small, chic and individualistic islands of apparent calm, within a permanent noise that patronizingly appeals to the creation of these islands and remains silent about the fact that it can continue to exist in this way. #mentalhealth #metime #selfcare
Many people miss the chance to say nothing and have lost a lot as a result. This statement was made recently in the small, quiet, silently vibrating film A Quiet Girl (2022). It is difficult to bear the fact that nothing is actually said and the temptation to immediately fill every announcement of possible silence with speaking is strong. But just as little speaking means that something is actually said, not speaking means that nothing is said. But what is more intense than shared silence, not speaking in the presence of another person by mutual consent? Rarely is more said than when silence takes over language. Silence is the whispering of the most hidden secrets. It is not a retreat into passivity, but the intensification of the medium of language itself.
An essential and irritating paradox of the present: there is supposedly no reason to be bored, and yet an omnipresent boredom dominates. Because instead of really engaging with things, topics, people, we only seek distraction, we are only given distraction. We move through a universe of boredom in cyberspace (what do we remember? What really excites us?) and are so overstimulated that the possibility of real relaxation and non-communication is impossible. We have forgotten how to be bored, just as we have banished calm, silence, and stillness from life. Today there is neither an excuse for being bored nor a real opportunity to do so, wrote the cultural theorist Mark Fisher aptly. Boredom was once a reaction to repetitive work, and taming boredom was therefore one of the main tasks of capitalist systems. At present, the success of this taming is obvious, at least from the perspective of the system: boredom, monotony, predictability are considered unattractive and negative. What counteracts these emotions is the propaganda of the unpredictable, of fluid flexibility, of enthusiastic spontaneity, the promise of something new all the time. Social media, platforms, streaming services, podcasts, constant noise, gadgets and gimmicks galore. Anyone who claims to be bored and ennui simply hasn't tried enough. The new, however, is just the familiar with a more or less successful veneer of newness. Endless repetitions of the familiar. Hence the downside of this propaganda: permanent tension and stress, withdrawal and isolation, FOMO (fear of missing out), privatization of systemic diseases, collective and individual insecurity and exhaustion, which extends to depression and existential fear. It seems to have become impossible to actually do nothing and to be able to enjoy doing nothing.
Yet boredom has always had a resistant and creative potential when it is transformed. For this to happen, however, boredom must first be allowed and endured. So many people, as the Corona pandemic has painfully revealed, are finding it increasingly difficult to be alone with themselves and without distraction. Even children are prevented from learning a positive relationship to boredom by the oversupply of distraction, non-stop entertainment and almost compulsive leisure activism. When the children finally go to sleep in the evening, their parents sit quietlybut extremely irritated on the couch, their gaze fixed on their smartphones, whose screens they caress. If you even notice it, you wonder about this other person who is sitting there breathing next to you and wonder what he is doing. Probably nothing.
P.S:
(1) Maybe the problem is not the millions of users of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, but the fact that these platforms do not belong to them?
(2) Do we perhaps have to learn again how to evade the effort of our attention in order to regain the stolen time? Actively create gaps and interruptions in order to give boredom and the confrontation with it its due?
12/13/2024
Benjamin Johann (born 1988) studied theater and media studies, German studies and the ethics of text cultures, worked at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, is now a freelance author, publishes in various forms and formats and is co-host of the podcast "Projections - Cinema Talks". His involvement with film, art and culture is always also an engagement with society, philosophy and politics - always looking for the ethical and aesthetic lines of flight of our present. Since her birth, his daughter has reminded him of the vital power of fascination and anarchy.
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