This post was written by Jiaqi Wen, PhD researcher on the DDI’s Cyberwar Topologies research stream.
“War is big data.” With this statement, Tung-Hui Hu questions how ordinary users suddenly begin to participate in the warfare that was formerly the domain of the state. In the open-source intelligence community, users in the current Ukraine war try to target bunker complexes by tracking suspicious flights appearing above Ukraine’s territory and then post the information on their social media. Users, thus, become the freelancers of the security apparatus.
To explore such entanglement of technology, humanities, and digital media, Tung-Hui Hu, Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Michigan, presented his upcoming book Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection at Digital Democracies Institute.
Digital Lethargy continues the conversation initiated by Hu’s 2015 book A Prehistory of the Cloud, and further examines the paranoid vision of the cloud, an idea that there are hidden truths that we can disclose with a large amount of data. This mode of exposing hidden knowledge or violence leads us to believe that photojournalism could reveal the hidden secrets of the Internet, but what results is often repetitive rather than new. Likewise, scholarship that employs such evidence for making an environmental argument, in fact, just distributes the same images one often sees online.
These visual practices raise concerns about the art world’s optimism in finding and using tech tools as a revealing of the system. In the last ten years, numerous art exhibitions have tried to incorporate themes of fighting back or sabotaging the system. Such “clever hacks” glorify their hacking tools as tactics to fight the market and the Internet. However, “To take the dominate symbolic order and undermine it [is to] reanimate all sorts of problematic constructions simply in order to knock them down provisionally.” (Walead Beshty)
Works of this kind present a strong mode of critique, which typically involves fighting, speaking up, and activity instead of passivity. Hu intends to interrogate this notion of active doing and asserts that such forms of “good politics” are often racialized. As Kevin Quashie points out, we immediately recognize the photo of Greensboro sit-ins as a form of resistance – the students’ heroic actions and the violence imposed on them, which is certainly true. Meanwhile, we seem to miss whatever that might be going through their mind and the sovereignty of quiet within them, while we are busy mapping them on our received political categories. The similar also applies to how blackness is automatically associated with fighting back or resistance. If we keep conceiving politics in this way, we flatten the accent of the artistic expression.
Queer theory also helps to explain the issue. The common idea of the agency omits other forms of being, especially what Leo Bersani’s terms as the valley of powerlessness. In Bersani’s theory of queer sex, passive sex – to be penetrated or to abdicate power – has long been dismissed. We usually understand sex as something one actively conducts on someone else. Similarly, doing nothing is always unavailable or differentially available for the subjects of color, who have been historically marked as lazy. Colored groups are pushed into taking action because doing nothing has been policed, such as in the case of the Black Codes in U.S. history.
Liberal agency is consequently aligned with whiteness. Addressing Garret Bradley’s documentary Like, which reveals micro workers’ life in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Hu argues against the general conception that micro workers are merely being exploited by digital capitalism. While aware of that exploitation, he states, they sometimes find meaning and even a feeling of cool in micro work, which is so often overlooked by many Western scholars and depicted as robot-like work or work that is not fit for humans. We value certain forms of work and devalue other forms, which “good” Western subjects would never take on.
Hu is more interested in the ultimate and ordinary forms of being political than the spectacular moments of just sneaking into a place and taking photos. Such agency could come from unpleasant situations, even out of the state of exhaustion. Differing from the notion of doing coined by (territorial and digital) colonialism worldwide, digital lethargy emerges as a political feeling, or a feeling in general, of forgetting yourself, not wanting to be yourself, not wanting to act, and so on, where one is constantly asked to stand in for the self. It allows one to agree to be acted upon and explore the potential of being more like objects or robots as a strategy of endurance, of maintaining and surviving a condition. Digital lethargy can seem self-destructive or to be simply wearing away the self. Thinking about Lauren Berlant’s lateral agency, lethargy could be just eating chips. The digital equivalence of this snacking could be time-killing games such as Candy Crush Saga, where time is defined differently from the idea that time is instrumental to producing a certain kind of future. Lethargy has also allowed us to understand moments of killing time, impasse, waiting, and deferring decisions, rather than acting, as moments that may ultimately become political.
As a political feeling, for Hu, lethargy may precipitate resistance, but also occur without an eventual goal. The term lethe is related to the Greek word for latent, a latent potential inherent within the feeling, where life is going to be unpleasant and one tries to figure out what to do with that. Many artworks and performances exemplify this kind of feeling, such as Katherine Behar’s dance performance Data’s Entry in Istanbul, 2016, where the performer was holding a data capsule that is covered with black keys taken from keyboards. The piece is calling for a lethargic politics that is not oppositional or not about action, which Behar would identify as coming from a genealogy of feminist, and endurance art. It is a common complaint that despite us supposedly being the users of the Internet, we are actually used by the digital platforms that we engage with. Yet no one seems to take seriously what it means to be used.
After collecting various surplus keyboards from a warehouse in Seattle, Behar used them on the outside of her sculptures, which became the base of her performance that choreographed the lethargic motions. The performer attempted to enter data and demonstrated how our bodies register the presence of data when in motions that big data produce. Behar captures the data as an everyday material presence of the world that we must contend with, as if data has a body of its own and we are weighted down by its accumulation and feel its materiality. Accessing the interior form of data, which cyberneticians theorized as black boxes– the basic component of cybernetic logic–is impossible in this piece. Instead, it renders the work of data entry, which is often the time outsourced to the Global South or marginalized populations, as repetitive and laborious tasks. Behar tries to produce fatigue instead of eliminating it.
Hu keeps thinking about why he sees the plastic capsule made of keys as a separate entity when the performer and the capsule seem to fuse in the same mass – a person with two heads. The person should be part of the object, too, and the capsule is a weight and burden, as well as a companion and survival strategy at the same time. There is no suggestion that the capsule is coming into life – being fleshy or interior – instead, Hu finds that the vitalized forms of life are constituted out of data and the organic interplay. In the end, the performer also pauses, mimicking the exhaustion from the data entry. Here, the absence of action resulting from exhaustion is not a withdrawal from the data economy, but, according to Behar, more like “standing in place, reasserting oneself in a place over time – it is persisting instead of resisting.”