Digital Lethargy, or Living with Dead Time

With Tung-Hui Hu
(in English)

If we can understand time as something to be passed or wasted or killed, rather than saved and spent, we might move away from the drug of liveness that digital capitalism uses to bind us to its rhythms. Living with and within dead time can outwardly look like passivity, pessimism, or stagnation, rather than changing the future: doomscrolling, for example, rather than picketing at a demonstration. Yet this is how many people inhabit the world, gather strength to endure, and make do within digital capitalism. What academic scholar Tung-Hui Hu calls “digital lethargy” is (paradoxically) full of joy, struggle, and life, and it has the potential to help us rethink the temporal biases that undergird most discussions of politics, resistance, and the future.