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Speaker1:
Welcome to Radical AI, a podcast about technology, power, society and what it means to be human and the age of information where your hosts, Dylan and Jess, or two PhD students with different backgrounds researching AI and technology ethics. In this episode, we interview Tong Hui, who about digital exhaustion in the modern day, and his new upcoming book, Digital Lethargy Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection.

Speaker2:
Seung Hui is an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud from MIT Press. He's on the advisory board of the McLuhan Center for Culture and Technology and is also a poet.

Speaker1:
And now to the interview. We are on the line today with Tong Hui, who welcome to the show.

Speaker3:
Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. This is exciting.

Speaker1:
Absolutely. And today we're here to talk about the topic of digital lethargy, which is pulled from your upcoming MIT Press book titled Digital Lethargy Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection. So to begin this conversation, we just wanted to start at the beginning. Could you define for us what you mean when you say the word lethargy?

Speaker3:
Yeah, lethargy is originally a medical disease, and I think it still exists. I think there's encephalitis lethargica, which is a fatal disease. And lethargy comes from the Greek word Lethe or forgetting. Right. So it means something like forgetting yourself or self forgetting, falling into a coma, being idle or unresponsive. But I think the idea behind lethargy keeps coming up over time. I think the thing that's most relevant perhaps, is a kind of spiritual or mental lethargy that the old Christian monks used to call acedia, and that described a feeling of listlessness, of being unable to focus. I sort of picture monks going crazy in their cell, running around and saying, you know, I can't I'm not getting anywhere here. And it was actually considered, I think, one of the worst deadly sins. It eventually got merged with melancholia into the deadly sin of sloth. So I think it's actually pretty relevant today. And I want to kind of coin that phrase digital lethargy, to describe a feeling where we also seem to be stuck in some sort of busy idleness of acedia where we're doomscrolling and glued to feeds and killing time. We're sort of caught somewhere between boredom and overstimulation.

Speaker3:
And I think we're also going through a feeling of possibly being a little out of sync with the demands of being an empowered person that we're supposed to be online. So that sort of sense of forgetting yourself comes back. So what I ultimately want to say is that lethargy is more than just being tired or exhausted or burnout or zoom fatigue. It's really comes because I think the the act of being a person today or actually of being a person in the way that digital capitalism asks us to be, which is to be yourself and to express ourselves and to speak up all the time is tiring where we've unthinkingly adopted a model of personhood, where this is the best way to be in the world and anything else feels passive or out of place. And so this is why digital lethargy is a sort of feeling that nags us and isn't quite there. It's sort of hard to put into words, but sort of describes the burden of being yourself. And so hopefully that gives you some sense of how I'm moving from lethargy is very old idea into digital lethargy. The title of my book.

Speaker2:
One of the things that you said, you're connecting this to capitalism, you're connecting this to these bigger structures of economics, of labor, of all these things that even in of themselves are sometimes hard for us to trace and track down and figure out exactly how they're impacting our lives, because it's the water that we swim in to a certain degree. But you begin part of this book by talking about the Industrial Revolution and some of the other stages of capitalism as it's evolved and how it intersects with digital energy. And I'm wondering if you can further contextualize you already got to this a little bit, but further contextualize for maybe the last few centuries, how you see digital lethargy has evolved.

Speaker3:
Yeah, thanks for the question. I will say that I was accidentally categorized as a cultural historian once under underneath a group photo, and I've always been conscious of the fact that I'm a fake historian, not a real historian. So everything take everything I say with a grain of salt. But, you know, it goes back to lethargy. Kind of describes this problem with selfhood, right? Like you're not working hard enough, you're lazy, or there's some deficiency in how you're understood and not always as a bad thing, sometimes as a problem to be solved. Right? So an industrial capitalism, this is as the historian Anson Rosenbach puts it, this is kind of the moment where they discovered fatigue. And fatigue was something that was seen a little bit differently than a, you know, if previously lethargy or sloth was seen as a moral sin. You know, scientists started saying and doctors started saying, you know, we actually can't push human bodies to a certain limit. We had to do something else. Instead, you know, they keep dying on us or something in these factories. So what are we going to do? And this is where Taylor ism comes from. So the the guy comes in with his stopwatches and he starts following everybody around and the factory just sort of see everybody's motions.

Speaker3:
He starts timing. You know, how long it takes for you to move your hand like this, how you move from one station to another and the moment of optimizing it. Right. And optimizing it both so that workers can be given some time to recharge and and, you know, do things more efficiently, of course, and produce more. But this is a moment where people start understanding lethargy as a kind of scientific matter that should be studied. And it's also a moment where the human body is understood as a kind of giant motor, right. Just like the machines that they're driving in these factories. And I think that what's interesting is to think about all these diseases of work and selfhood. What is what is today's equivalent of that? Right. So if you look at something like burnout, which comes in the early 1970s, it comes out of the free clinics in San Francisco, which were clinics established for the poor essentially to treat drug addiction, to treat anybody, regardless of if they have money or not. And burnout gets diagnosed as something that is a problem of caring too much, of caring too much for these people, of these doctors and these medical workers, people dealing with mental health issues. So it becomes a problem that signals a different kind of work.

Speaker3:
Right? So industrial capitalism is all about like factories. And the model here is something about, you know, work as caring, as emotional labor, as communication. And I think that sets the stage for what I'm calling digital lethargy, where the new form of work isn't even about going into your office or checking in and logging online or something. It's the work of being yourself. It's the work of constantly being asked to improve yourself, to express yourself, to find your own interests. And that's why, as you said, you're saying that it's kind of like the water we swim in. It's almost unnoticeable, like it feels really good most of the time. It feels good to discover ourselves or to do whatever we want, to make choices, to be empowered. But if that's the only model we have for selfhood, then that becomes actually a basis for something like burnout or lethargy, just something that we can't point to and notice because it doesn't feel like we're clocking into our workplace when we're being online. So that's that's why I think that's some I don't know if I covered several centuries worth of material, but I think that's my last hundred and 50 years at least.

Speaker1:
That's great. So let's maybe take the history and bring it into the present day, because something that you said previously, really it it really stuck with me and that was that we, we in the modern day in our digital devices are caught between boredom and overstimulation. And maybe this struck me because I've I've felt that many times whenever I open my phone, I feel like I'm simultaneously, like inundated with notifications and also, like, endlessly wanting to scroll. So I'm curious personally for you, how have you felt digital lethargy in the modern day and what what may be motivated and inspired some of this work and these ideas?

Speaker3:
I don't know if I'm really allowed to answer that honestly because I've just had a kid right before the pandemics, and I think sometime about the combination of those two has given me way more time on my hands and I know what to do with. So I spend a lot of time killing time, but also feeling isolated and anxious and trapped. And I don't think that was intentional. When I started writing the book, you know, the the you know, the book took a lot longer to write than I thought it did. And everybody's like, ha ha, you're writing so lethargic. You know, that's that's not funny. But, you know, I think my initial impulse was and I don't even know if I had the word in mind yet, my initial impulse was to find some mechanism of resistance against, you know, capitalism or, you know, the digital platforms that our lives. And so I kept looking for artworks that sort of show me the clever hack or the way out. And kind of midway through the book, I realized that I had it all wrong, that I was looking for this form of like strong, you know, explicitly political action. I was looking for some quick trick that could bring down Amazon or something, and I realized that I was not paying attention almost to the most important thing, to how people survive and endure within a digital economy and how you feel and stay with the disempowerment rather than trying to like, immediately fix it or immediately sort of find your way out of it. Because I actually don't think that there is a way out of a lot of these things. You know, I don't have a solution in my book for how to overthrow capitalism.

Speaker3:
And I think that actually part of my thinking in this book is is a form of just how to stay with the trouble, as it were, and how to stay with all the negative feelings that you have to find something useful out of the fact that we are sort of endlessly doomscrolling and being inundated. And what is how do I make sense of how one lives within this state where we are all stuck in a, you know, or partial stages of being in a pandemic and in a moment of of all these crises. So so there's that. The other half of it is that it's just really interesting to watch digital culture evolve, right. To hear from my neighbors that their kid, you know, for all that one can criticize being online, I mean, this is the only way that they've had to see each other. If you're like in eighth grade or something, that discord is is like all you have to play games or something. So it also comes out of this feeling that, you know, in the last few years, everybody, you know, seems to have a self-help book about how to go on a digital detox, how to focus more in how to essentially be a more productive person. And I think there's something really fascinating about all these forms of, you know, the crappy games and the and endless scrolling and tick tock. I mean, all of that seems actually really interesting to me and interesting to me. And I'm not trying to say this is good and this is bad. I'm just trying to understand what this feeling says about where we are today as a society.

Speaker2:
One thing that I'm thinking about as you're talking is that. I'm still in the Industrial Revolution because I just find the Industrial Revolution fascinating. But I think I'm still going to bring it into present day where you have this, you know, the rise of the assembly line and all these things that change how we think about productivity and also warehouses and how they function. And so then you have the rise of the digital as it happens and online platforms. And but we also have increased attention now to say like the Amazon warehouses and to other types of how physical goods are being connected, but they're still being mediated by more digital systems. And so I'm curious how you think about maybe digital lethargy through also the lens of what's happening on the ground is how either capital or actual goods are being moved in different ways because of technology.

Speaker3:
Yeah, I mean, my earlier book on the Cloud was really an attempt to try to find the material spaces of the Internet, to try to go into the data centres to look at the fibre optic cables as they were being run underneath railroad tracks. And I think that what I really started to care about were the workers that were sort of hidden in the visible conduits. Right? So what I think is going on today is that the digital economy really runs on the service with the smile, right? So it's the warehouse workers that make that smile on the side of your Amazon box feel convenient because it shows up magically like the next day or even the same day. But it's also about the micro workers that are training eyes to recognize emotions. So they spend their time looking at videos, deciding whether or not that's a confused smile or, you know, whatever kind of strange categories of emotion they have there. And a lot of those workers are actually call center workers or they're hired by the same outsourcing firms that normally hire BPO business process outsourcing workers, because, of course, those are the ones that are really good at doing that kind of emotional labor, of working with clients and knowing when to modulate their emotions on the phone or on a chat. So what I'm really interested in is saying that the digital economy runs on service and I mean that service and service workers, which are primarily brown and black, but also the idea of being surrounded by digital assistants or digital services or digital servers that do whatever we want, that they wait for us to give them orders and they care them out.

Speaker3:
And so I think to be stuck in that environment, to be a worker in that environment sort of forces you to become puts you in the position of lethargy, which is which is to say that you are placed in the position of someone who waits for orders, who doesn't have time to themselves, who maybe gets 10 minutes before your next ride, but you don't know when that ride is going to come. So you kill a time by playing a casual game on your phone. And you know what I So even though the book is primarily interested in these blue collar workers, workers that are spread around the globe, these freelancers and even spammers to some extent, you know, my hope is to connect that to other kinds of work, to the kind of person who might say, oh, I'm exhausted from my day at work in the office, because what I want to say is that, you know, everybody is being turned into services, right? This idea from the cloud that initially you'd have software as a service or storage as a service, or you could have 50 gigs on demand by clicking a button because it's all from a shared pool, you know, that has spread everywhere.

Speaker3:
That's become an economic model. So you've got something like Uber describing itself as a transportation service or Airbnb as a housing service. We used to have an accountant in my department and then her position was terminated and they created something called a shared services center where so now we just file tickets and someone anonymous on the other side of campus actually off campus fills their requests. We have no personal contact with them anymore because accounting has been turned into a service. Right. So I just heard that there's something called learning as a service for students. And so I've realized that instead of a professor, I'm actually like a learning service for my students. All I'm trying to say here is that rather than seeing this as like a blue collar, a poor person, a disempowered person problem, that they're really on the bleeding edge of what I think is happening in the whole economy. And I think that's what ties their position of lethargy, their position of not quite being a person, of being. If you think about Jeff Bezos description of micro workers as artificial artificial intelligence, you know, their sort of artificial personhood as something that seems to be spreading to the rest of the developed world.

Speaker1:
I hear you saying that people who are micro workers or people who are doing some sort of work as a service that might be a means to an end, where the end is a feeling of lethargy or digital lethargy, depending on their their workplace and. I'm wondering if you have an example or a concept of what the opposite of lethargy is like. Is this is lethargy just some destiny that we are are bound to feel now because everybody is working in like a somewhat digital capacity, or is there a way to work without lethargy?

Speaker4:
I think lethargy.

Speaker3:
Is the verso of this model of super pumped up individualism, of empowerment and personhood that the digital economy sells us on. If the whole idea is that you can be yourself all the time, that you're an authentic person, that you're the one who has all the agency, that you're the acting, the person that acts and you act upon assistants or objects or whatever else, that it's your choice. That's all. I mean, if you think about it, it's obviously a fantasy. And what that fantasy conceals is this nagging feeling that actually maybe being an individual or being a person isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Right. So Ellen Ehrenburg writes that this is actually this culture of entrepreneurial ism is is one where if everybody has this this feeling of choice everywhere, it's actually very exhausting, right, to always be the decider all the time. And so what I do want to say, though, is that the burden of of personhood or this this burden falls a little bit more heavily on persons of color. Right. So if you know, because persons of color have traditionally been thought of as lazy or thought of as people who don't, who can't act for themselves, who've been thought of as generic rather than individuals.

Speaker3:
So I think you see it there first. And my hope in this book is to try to tie together all these histories, histories of anti vagrancy laws which are used to police people of color, to the contemporary moment where it seems like being idle or being or doing nothing is very hard for some people to do. Certainly for service workers, right. Even as it's sort of being recommended as a remedy or an escape for people who can afford to have their secretaries answer all their email for them when they take off for two weeks. So I don't think that there is a way of of living outside of lethargy or or personhood at the current moment. But I think that if there is such a way, I think it is letting go of this attachment we have to this model of the self that the digital has produced. And so I'm thinking about I mean, this is an example when I'm sure that your listeners know about this moment. I think in 2009, when HP Webcams contract black people and more recently in 2019, there was a National Institute of Standards and Technology report that said that webcams was ten. Facial recognition systems have 10 to 100 times more likely to misidentify black and Asian faces.

Speaker3:
So so I'm talking to my friends about this and we're saying, Wait, what's so bad about being misidentified and going unseen by a surveillance camera anyway? Right. You know, in our in our demand to have more identity, more representation, more of ourselves all the time, there are all these things that go with it, right, The castle systems that feed on such visibility. So maybe being generic, maybe being more robotic rather than more human, maybe being more lethargic rather than less lethargic is actually a good thing, right? Maybe there's all these things that can adhere to being lethargic. I'll finish with one last phrase I really like from Edward Glissant, the poet and the theorist. He talks about consenting not to be a single being. And I think that idea, which has a really interesting history in black studies, Fred Moten takes it on as well, kind of sets aside this this our attachment to this ourselves as bounded individuals that are like sovereign actors. And maybe that's too theoretical, but maybe there's something about letting go of, of all these attachments to our authenticity, to being ourselves all the time that lethargy can produce. I think there's something positive about that.

Speaker2:
This is making me think of some of the guests we've had on the show who have been talking about non-Western ways of viewing the world, or especially I'm thinking about Indigenous studies and indigenous ways of viewing the world, some of which go in direct contrast to some of these ideas of pure productivity being, say, the meaning or the worth of a person, or that there is an individual personhood in the first place. So thinking about more of the collective and I'm. Wondering in your work or your research how you think about maybe voices outside of this dominant voice that has been at the center of technology building and thinking mostly white male voices and especially Western voices in that?

Speaker3:
Yeah, I mean, thank you for that. That is exactly the direction that is exciting to me to think about the digital from these different perspectives. I mean, I'll say that the book itself is realized very heavily on Black studies and also Asian studies and also queer studies, right? So all all sort of theoretical disciplines that might seem kind of obscure, but have spent a lot of time saying, Wait, here are ways in which our individual selves are undone, Here are ways in which, you know, we've always been compared to robots. But isn't that interesting rather than something that we should immediately discard? There's a kind of there's a very interesting thinker named Aria Dean, who's a curator, as well as a writer and artist. And she says, You know, the thing that we learned to do in the nineties essentially was to be multicultural, right? To have a strong sense of our identity and to have our identities represented at all costs. And she says, But what if we don't care about that, right? To to think about a black body as a body which is generic, which is overly circulated, these are all really terrible things, but these are also an interesting state that we can start to explore and investigate the idea of not consenting to be a single being. So I, I love thinking about these examples because they sort of help place things which seem really natural and things which seem like, of course, we want that under a microscope and say, Why do we want this? Why do we think that doing an action and all these things in choice or so on are automatic goods, right? So the more we can do that, I think the better off will be in trying to understand and build a better vision of of of selfhood and ultimately the digital which is built on it.

Speaker1:
I'm going to play off of that last phrase you just said of building a better vision, because I think this is a great segway into your book, which, for lack of a better word, I think there's a lot of speculative envisioning in it, and it has this really unique artistic style to it. So I'd love if you could just give us a little bit of a sneak peek into your book and how art and speculative design and featuring plays a role in how you think about digital lethargy.

Speaker3:
Yeah. It was a real pleasure to write because I think the chance to just listen to artists and to watch them enact and perform either dystopian versions of visions of the future or ways of restaging our situation. You know, I have an artist who has taken a Fitbit and strapped it to a metronome, and apparently you can get a health care discount, right? If you can prove that you've done a certain number of steps. Right. But if you're feeling lazy, you just turn on the metronome and it just does the 1000 steps for you. So a lot of them are are really humorous. A lot of them are kind of dark in some ways. But I think what they all are connected by is a feeling of of moving away from that kind of productivity, that feeling of what happens if we let go of this, this kind of demand to be yourself all the time. Let me go into a little bit more detail about one example, which is a strange example. And here's where I want to admit that my Ph.D. is actually in film studies, and I haven't been writing about film in about ten years, but so maybe writing this book made me want to go back to my roots in some ways. It's a film that's not about the digital, at least explicitly.

Speaker3:
It's an Australian film called Sleeping Beauty by Julia Lee. And the protagonist is a sex worker, Lucy. She also is doing what the filmmaker calls radical passivity. So people are really awful to her. They want rent from her. Someone trips her when she's waitressing. Crude men want to have sex with her in bars, and she mostly goes along with it. She mostly nods and consents. And there's something really frustrating about this when you're watching it. Why isn't she fighting back? Right. But why are we frustrated with her rather than with the environment that she's stuck in? Right. That she's a member of the working poor, that there's all this misogyny around her? Why is she forced to take all these service jobs? And so I think about Lucy as an example, a kind of a parable for the digital, both in the kind of literal way in which in the way that she speaks to other people as if she's constantly in a customer service chat. Right. Everything she seems to say seems to be through the kind of protocols of like what you're allowed to respond to, to someone who's wealthier than you, but also an example of what indifference is and why endurance is so important. Endurance, I think, is sort of the message that lethargy says in the end to be acted upon, right.

Speaker3:
Rather than to be the actor. We don't like seeing endurance because, you know, it doesn't change things because it drags on and it challenges our idea of what she should be doing. We want her to like, throw a glass of wine in the face of these awful men at the bar or something. But what it does do is it focuses our attention on the endlessness and the power dynamics of the situation she's stuck in. And so even though it's not directly about digital things, I sort of also see it as a parable of how we we interact with our digital assistants, right? So thinking about how our digital assistants are programmed to be passive, how Alexa was programmed to respond initially if you said you are a bitch to her. She was originally said Thank you. So I think it's ultimately a way of understanding how we see ourselves as human in comparison to other people who are who lack personhood somehow. And I think that's an example of how I try to move between these art objects, some of which do really explicitly address digital capitalism and labor of being working in an Amazon warehouse of of being a micro worker and so on, and some of which seem a little bit further apart. But I think speak to the feeling of our present day.

Speaker2:
This is not a legal question. The but I am interested in accountability and responsibility because one of the things that I'm hearing you saying, and I think I saw in the book as well, is that these systems. They both exist because of and then also replicate and continue to persist these greater patterns of that endless scrolling that you see on Tik-tok. Or I think we can all think of examples in which we're reminded that like productivity is the way that we need to go. And then we're reminded constantly by the media, by all these things that we see and just these systems that we're in. And so I'm wondering for and maybe maybe a way to phrase this as like for folks who are in our audience who do some of this platform design and want to find alternative ways that they're thinking through these things or bringing to their teams, what do you see as the responsibility of those platforms in combating digital lethargy, if at all?

Speaker3:
I guess what I say I'd start with saying what I see right now, which is the inability for people to be idle, right? Amazon Mechanical Turk was initially sold as a way to for housewives to earn a little bit of money in their spare time so that they wouldn't just be sitting around all day. We have all these apps that sort of are designed to keep us moving and and sort of keep us engaged, even if in a very passive way, like things like twitch, right? So I'm not even talking about like real forms of engagement. I'm just talking about like logging on and watching something. And, and I think that the loss of our ability to do nothing is, is something that we could think about that, you know, every app that's designed to take away the discomfort of waiting in line for five more minutes or being by ourselves for 5 minutes. I think maybe one of the messages of lethargy is that it's okay to sit in unpleasant moments, that there is something important about doing that rather than sort of having a fix for all these all these moments of downtime. And I guess what I would say to designers, and I'm grateful for the work that you're doing in in designing a different kind of feature is to forget, right. To to go back to the word lethargy, to forget some of these models that we have for how we should act, how we should be. I mean, I'm thinking about. Sorry, my. Technical help from fell out. Yeah. So I'm thinking about. Excuse me. So to think about authenticity. Right.

Speaker3:
Which seems like, you know, maybe this is a little bit too in the weeds, but I think we typically think about privacy as something that we have that's inside of us that we have to protect from other people who are trying to corrupt it, whether that's advertisements on our feed or, you know, state actors, somehow we have this individuality that we need to protect at all costs. And so people have all these like elaborate ways like browser plug ins that try to obfuscate or search history in order to allow us to, like, have our own real search terms hidden inside the cloud of it. I think the problem with all of these is that it leaves unquestioned. For example, like, why do we believe that we have this inner precious self that we have to protect from everybody else? Why do we think that the norm is is terrible and that we have some sort of special status there? So I guess what I want to say is that, ah, there are ways of designing things that think about collectivity, not just based on the idea of the individual stuck together, but in very different ways. Right? What are what are social networks that have multiple spaces for identities? Yeah. I mean, I think that's that's where I would start. And I am fortunate that I don't teach design and I'm just a poet. So I'm I'm not paid the big bucks to do any of those calls. But it's a really great question to think about. I mean, I think the other thing to think about is, is that the current systems that we have are not inevitable.

Speaker3:
Right? If you look at the history of the Internet, like what a weird design that ended up winning over the over the French Veneto system, over all these other ways in which it could have gone differently. Right. So. To think about this system as the only as the sort of end result of and to think about it as the only way in which we can do things is is kind of like cementing into place, you know, what happened to be just a kind of historical accident. One last thing I'll say about that is that I think a lot of design is driven by a kind of optimism, right, that this generation of tech sucks and we can get the next generation that will improve on that. So there's that sense that, like, things will always get better and that's that sense of optimism. And progress isn't the case for a lot of the world. And, you know, I'm thinking about the writer Kathy Pak Hong, who is an Asian-American writer, who talks about the experience of being told that things are always getting better. And she she feels like she's being gaslit by that. Right? She feels like actually to be a person of color is mostly to, like, have the same things happen over and over. And so this is a very strange call, but I wonder what would happen if we sat with the pessimism of knowing that, you know, the technology won't necessarily improve people's lives. You know, does that does that help us get to a different starting point or a different place for doing design?

Speaker1:
I think on this show, I mean, intentionally, we usually try to focus on hope and optimism and positive visions for the future because there can be a lot of pessimism when we talk about like tech ethics and responsible tech and the ways that all the things are going wrong. But I think you're totally right. There is a place for pessimism in here, too. And without pessimism, we can't always critique the systems that might be harming us or impacting us in negative ways. And I think my next question, my follow up question with that is, so then what? Because what I hear from what you were just saying is like technology can be really bad and like our digital devices in some ways have made us lose our ability to do nothing. They've made us lose our ability to be bored in positive, healthy ways. And I'm wondering, like, is it even possible for us to find a way out of this digital, lethargic space, or is it possible for us to to be I guess this is kind of ironic talking about like the cell phone. We're trying to take the self out of it, but to be like, you know, individual agents in our lives and living the healthy personal lives that we want to live while also being attached fundamentally to these devices in order to function in modern society. Like what? As individuals and and people who don't have a stake in the design of these systems, What what can we do with the digital world that we've been handed?

Speaker3:
Yeah. And I guess my answer is, is this is what I get as an English professor, right? Is to say that I'm actually not that bothered about technology. I mean, everybody knows that technology is bad. There's no point in saying that again. But I am bothered about is why there's still structural racism in the world. Why there are these dis junctures between the developed West and the global South. And so my goal here is to get us to think about the terms differently. So I'll give you an example. We often hear again about micro workers in AI or elsewhere being workers in a digital sweatshop, right, that are being exploited by Western companies like Facebook. And usually this is meant as a way of sort of saving them, right, of sort of finding some way of bettering their lives. And yet, when I share this, I think two things, right? Where is the agency of the people who are actually in the Global South? Right. I mean, if everything is if they're just victims of Facebook or whoever else, I mean, this is all about Facebook and not them, right? The second thing is, when they describe their own situations, they don't think of themselves as, you know, you know, working in a sweatshop isn't really the right word. Sure, they know that they're being exploited.

Speaker3:
They know that their wages are terrible. They live that reality. They live the fact that there are no jobs and this is what they can get. And yet, if we think about this solely as a matter of exploitation, that the work that they do is sweatshop labor, that they're unskilled workers that are basically robots, this just kind of dehumanizes them a second time. Right. And so what I really want to do is not so much to say, You know, pessimism is everywhere and we should just give up. But to just reframe the terms by which we use to describe the problem so that we get out of the kind of traps that we're in that kind of reframe the people we're supposedly trying to help as passive victims. The last thing I'll say is that, you know, if you look at, again, someone like Fred Moten, there's a lot of joy in pessimism, There's a lot of joy in being together with other people and not being an individual. There is there is a dance in their song and there's there are ways of being with other people ultimately that just don't register as action on the same scale that we tend to think of as action, right, as as political or something. One person I talked to, Adriano Rico Lopez, who works in Puerto Rico, was talking about how Puerto Rico, which has been taken over by crypto entrepreneurs and so on after Hurricane Maria.

Speaker3:
To. The idea is, you know, always, what should we do, right? How do we reconstruct our island? How how do we rebuild it? How do we get more funding? How do we invest? And the bank of the Banco Popular Puerto Rico actually changed, commissioned a famous song, which is all about being lazy, and they commissioned the songwriters to turn it into a song about doing things again and rejecting laziness and so on. But Adriano told me that, you know, these are all these big visions of like what we can do with Puerto Rico, right? We should invest all this money into its stocks and make it a cryptocurrency haven and do smart contracts and so on. And in the meantime, she's describing people who are selling avocados to each other, one or two avocados from their tree and helping that kind of daily work of survival happen. And it really made me realize that the kinds of actions I'm interested in talking about are these smaller scale acts of endurance, of how you get through the day, how you get through with dignity, and how survival is something that we don't attend to. I mean, I think in the same way that we think about design, we tend to think about people who code or use APIs or whatever else.

Speaker3:
I think that, you know, I was talking to an artist who's spent a summer stripping 10,000 tulips and photographing them and categorizing them to make a dataset about tulips. And it drove her. She was she began to see tulips in her dreams. She began to be unable to tell the difference between a pink tulip and a white tulip because all the colors began to bleed into one. But as she says, this is an area where we don't think about people who make databases or maintain databases as creative. Right? And yet they're also doing creative acts just as much as programmer is. So I think that's the place where I would actually refocus our attention on design thinking about these, you know, we typically think of data cleaning is something which is like menial labor, right? Like, these are acts of judgment. And so I think that's that's where I would kind of redirect it a little bit away from like, how do we build a different platform into where are these sort of small acts come from, small acts of survival that are actually ultimately maybe more interesting in helping us out get a way out and building collectivity than things that seem political with a capital P.

Speaker2:
We only have a few minutes left before we're out of time, but I do want to get one question in, mostly because you mentioned Kathy Park Hong, who when I was back at Sarah Lawrence for my BA a long time ago, I actually took a poetry class. Oh, no.

Speaker3:
Kidding.

Speaker2:
And I know that, you know, I'm a poet. I know that Jess is a musician and also a writer. And so I think the question I have is about interdisciplinarity and also the role of art in this, because you're in the English department, right? Like you're in a department that is different than where a lot of these conversations, at least in our world of this human computer interaction design space, are happening. And so I'm wondering if you just had a few sentences about how you see the role of departments such as like English or about disciplines that are maybe outside of that design space or outside of this like the usual suspects, quote unquote, how you see that that dialogue can be fruitful for this topic?

Speaker3:
Yeah, I mean, I, I mostly teach poetry in my English department. So it's it's an interesting question because I haven't thought about reflecting on it. It seems so different in some ways than than this work. I think what's been most useful let me give you an example. I was the artist Ricardo Dominguez was talking about how when he was growing up, she didn't have access to the Internet. Right. All he had were books by William Gibson. Cyberspace was, you know, a consensual fantasy. It was like something that they all believed in, but it didn't involve logging into a terminal. That all happened later. Right. I think that there's something about the power of envisioning that books can do. I think there's something about if you want to study feelings and how we live in a world rather than technology that's best done not through lines of code, but it's done through artworks, it's done through how people are trying to make sense of the contradictions that are in their world. And I think that department, like English, is helpful in simply figuring out the stakes of what we're talking about, right? So before we all rush to do something, you know, I think this book is trying to say, like, what do we mean by doing right? What counts is doing and what counts is and why do we call? Something's not doing.

Speaker3:
So, yeah, I mean, I think that Kathy Park Hong's book really changed the conversation about race and specifically Asian American ness, but just about how we think about race in this country. And I think that's the power of works by poets and filmmakers and performers and dancers. Is there there's sort of. Figuring out what happens to the actual body in the middle of all this. You know, I two dancers talk about both the ergonomics of typing all day during data entry and also comparing that to what it's like to sit motionless and being forced to stay still in a dance performance. So there's a kind of choreography of of work, right? She one of the dancers that I talked to, thought about logistics of unloading containers from ships as a delicate choreography. And if you've ever seen the pictures of Amazon's robots doing The Nutcracker dance, you know, there's there's a choreography also of getting workers to work alongside the robots. So I think the terms that I'm most excited about are ones which go between, you know, like logistics. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think these are ideas that. But you can step back for a second and think about aside from that, I mean, being interdisciplinary, I mean, so I used to be a coder a long time ago.

Speaker3:
You know, I have a computer science degree from like 1922 or something, but I don't think that that actually gives me that much more insight into. What I'm doing. I think the only thing it allows me to do is maybe to have more conversations with computer scientists. But, you know, I think there's a model right now that, like, everyone needs to code in order to, like, understand this economy. But I think that, you know, at the same time, I also think that the 12 year olds that live down the street from me understand this world better than I do. Like, I really just want to hire a lot of €12 to tell me where the world is going. So. So it's all of these, right? It's like kind of an all above the model. And, you know, I happen to be really bad at doing ethnography and I happen to be really bad at, you know, being a social scientist and writing grants. So I like being I like my little tiny perch, you know, as a poet, it's a little bit more fun in some ways.

Speaker1:
Well, thank you so much for bringing poetry and art and English and your interdisciplinarity into this conversation. And unfortunately, we are out of time. We would love to continue talking more about this, but for now, thank you so much, Tung Hoi, for coming on our show and for discussing your upcoming book with us.

Speaker3:
Justin Dillon Thank you so much for having me. This is so much fun.

Speaker2:
We want to thank Tung Hui again for joining us for this conversation about his new book that is forthcoming from MIT Press called Digital Lethargy Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection. And if you're listening to this episode, when it first comes out, treat this conversation as a little bit of a preview of the book, because the book itself comes out on October 4th, but you can pre-order it today through MIT Press. So as normal. We're going to jump into some immediate reactions that Jess and I have. As our outro, Jess, what are you thinking about this interview?

Speaker1:
There was so much good content in this interview as usual. So where do I want to begin? I think one of the biggest things that stood out to me was when Tung said something about how we've lost our ability to do nothing. And this reminded me of I feel like I quote this book all the time when I'm with my friends. It's probably kind of annoying how often I bring this book up, but it reminded me of the book Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle that discusses the modern digital age of communication and the way that we communicate with each other through our devices and how we've lost connection with one another because we're so enveloped in these digital devices that are basically like an extension of our fingertips at this point. And I was just reminded of how how often I feel digital lethargy or burnout or exhaustion, even just when I want to check the time, for example, because I don't wear a watch on my wrist if I want to check what time it is on my phone and I look at my phone and then the unlock screen shows me that I have like 50 notifications from all the 20 different messaging platforms that I currently have some sort of profile on. It's very, very exhausting. And all I wanted to do was just the simple task of looking at the time. But now I have to think about these 20 different tasks that have been added to my to do list against my own will because people have messaged me or people have asked something of me, like on an email or or messenger or text or whatever it is, and I get it, man. It can be it can feel very exhausting, even just trying to do very, very simple tasks in today's day and age with how connected we all are and how expected we're all how much we were all expected to be constantly online and logged on at all times and accessible and available at all times. So that's probably my my first immediate reaction. What about you, Dylan?

Speaker2:
I can confirm how many times just references the Sherry Turkle book. Yeah, this conversation resonated with me in a lot of. Different ways using your example of technology and its ever presence and how it's changed. I think all of our lives and some maybe some really wonderful ways, but also some very constant ways that we don't always. Subtle ways that that can be insidious or otherwise. I did get a watch so that I could replace looking at all of my notifications every time I check the time. But then my watch now tells me what my blood pressure is, what my heart rate is, all these different metrics. And in some ways those are like metrics of self surveillance where the second I know those things and all of a sudden I'm paying attention to these things that otherwise would just be as natural as breathing, or I would just go on a run as opposed to look at this chart of where my path was and how I can optimize that path and optimize all of these things about how I can train better, etc.. And so I think the point about digital lethargy being a feeling is really key here, and it makes it really hard to, as part of our conversation point into it, makes it really hard to think about design for any of it. And that's something that I struggle with a little bit coming from a humanities background of. We see these things happening and we know that there are these greater things around meaning and factors around how these technologies aren't just impacting the practicalities of our lives, but how we feel about the world that we're moving through. And again, those feelings can come on in ways that we don't even. Recognize. And so how do we address? These things in the first place and those changes that are happening, or I guess how do we be more intentional about the way that our feelings are being impacted by technology mediation, which is really hard to get to the center of when it's the water that we breathe in?

Speaker1:
I'm going to bring up the the C word capitalism, which we bring up all the time in this episode.

Speaker2:
It's the water that we swim in, not o not breathe.

Speaker4:
And that's that's the phrase.

Speaker1:
It's your turn to mess up the phrases. Now, usually I'm the one who messes up all the colloquialisms.

Speaker2:
In my life. But I just wanted to. Before. Before we get a bunch of tweets about things.

Speaker4:
Yeah. So we.

Speaker1:
Don't get hate.

Speaker2:
Tweets for your.

Speaker1:
Mistakes. Yes.

Speaker4:
Continue capitalism.

Speaker1:
Give it back to capitalism. Something that was coming up for me in this interview also is how difficult it is to design against things like digital lethargy and exhaustion in this capitalistic world that tech lives in, at least when it's coming out of Silicon Valley. And something that comes to my mind is that right now a lot of these algorithms and platforms, they're optimized for things like click through rates or things like attention or time spent on the platform. And while that's great for monetary incentives and for these platforms to make a lot of money off of advertisers or whoever else is fronting a lot of the bills for for these large corporations, it unfortunately, one of the unintended consequences is that it does lead to whether directly or indirectly, it does lead to this feeling of lethargy. And I do love this this artistic, speculative featuring that we got to in this interview and talking about what what could the world look like if we didn't assume that the current trajectory was inevitable? And I love the idea of thinking of a world where technology and big tech and Silicon Valley was intending on enhancing our human experience rather than exploiting it. Right now, I feel like it's very exploitative, like we pay at the cost of our sanity and our mental clarity and our whatever the opposite of lethargy we pay with with our our own sanity by having to be constantly inundated with notifications and doom scrolling and all the things that we fall into with tech.

Speaker1:
And it doesn't have to be that way. Know if if we were to find other ways to maybe have subscription models or, or other ways for these large tech companies to create monetary gain or revenue that did not rely on advertisers or whatever, then there could be ways for us to log on to our phones or unlock our phones, just look at the time and see nothing else. And maybe there's no notifications because there's no apps, because our phones have determined that that's what's best for us. And maybe the companies can still make money in some way, even though it's not off of exploiting the things that that really make it difficult for us to exist in the digital world, if that makes sense. I feel like I kind of got a little bit on a tangent there, but but yes, what I'm what I'm trying to say is I love the vision of the future that enhances rather than exploits. That's my speculative vision at least.

Speaker2:
Yeah, I think the word that was coming to me when you were talking and throughout this conversation was aliveness, was how do we beyond beyond presence, which I think like presence and mindfulness even that has become exploited within the Silicon Valley or appropriated in some ways to then be monetized, which is fascinating, like mindfulness apps, which are both really helpful for people in terms of addressing digital lethargy, but also you're on your app, you're on your phone in order to then address the digital lethargy. And so where does that cycle end? But how do we design technology for aliveness? As I think a big topic for me? And then how how do you do that? Like it's the whole intention versus impact thing that that I mentioned all the time of like people are. I think a lot of people are trying to design technology to make people's lives better and to enhance that human experience. And yet it's having the exact opposite effect. And so there has to be some sort of middle ground. And also we haven't gotten there yet. And so if we're not going to dismantle capitalism and we're not going to completely redesign every part of technology that's gotten us to where we are, then what is that next step forward? And so for me, I think this conversation is a way for us to begin to reframe some of the questions that we ask from the status quo, not just about design, but how we live our lives with technology present.

Speaker1:
And in true radical fashion, how can we diverge from the norm?

Speaker4:
Nice thing you write.

Speaker1:
In that language. For those of you who've been around for a long time. That's right. And speaking of time, we are out of it for this episode, unfortunately. But for more information on today's show, please visit the episode page at Radical IE dot org. And that's also where you can find information again to pre-order Tomboys Book Digital Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection.

Speaker2:
If you enjoyed this episode, we invite you to subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes or your favorite pod culture. Please also leave us some reviews.

Speaker4:
It's been a while since we've.

Speaker2:
Gotten reviews, but we've gotten star ratings, which thank you for all of you for your star ratings. But actually reviews really, really does help that algorithm pick us up again. So, you know, if you're if you have some free time after listening to this episode.

Speaker1:
Just write us a review type of review.

Speaker4:
I was going to say, come back your digital lethargy to giving.

Speaker2:
Us more attention, but we hope this is a good use of your time on your on your device anyway. Catch our regularly scheduled episodes the last Wednesday of every month with possibly some bonus episodes in between. Join our conversation on Twitter at Radical iPod. And as.

Speaker5:
Always.

Speaker1:
Stay.

Speaker5:
Radical.

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