Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

The anxiety of inertia: binge watching as death drive 

I’ve been reading the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s Not Working: Why We Have To Stop for the last few days, during a week in which I have been forced to stop by a chest infection which prevented me from making a trip to Sweden I’d been looking forward to for months. It’s a useful time to read the book because my mood this week embodies its core concern, as I realise how ill equipped I am to stop. The most success I’ve had has been through the narcotising effect of Netflix, surrendering myself to auto-play in order to watch the entirety of You and The People Vs OJ Simpson. 

In the process I’ve been struck by how little space I experienced between action out there and compulsion in here, with the former providing a rhythm to my days which the latter obliterates. If I understand Cohen correctly, the problem is the limited character of that rhythm, as we come to find security through a constant motion orientated towards external factors forever escalating in the demands we place on ourselves and encourage in others. He has a vivid description on loc 119 of the fidgety activity which comes to substitute for rest in this state:

The emblematic image of our culture is the panicky phonechecker, filling in any interval of rest or silence, on the train or at the family dinner table or in bed, with emails and work documents, or else with social media updates, addictive games and viral videos. Nervous distraction provides the only relief from a perpetually incomplete to-do list. Not working becomes at least as tiring and incessant as working. We know we have no choice but to stop, yet doing so makes us so fearful, scornful and guilty.

It occurs there’s something of the death drive in binge watching. An embrace of what he describes in his patients as “a wish for the world, or themselves, to dissolve” (loc 162). It’s well known that Netflix see ‘sleep as the enemy’. But I wonder if they also see rest as the enemy, capitalising on the anxieties of inertia in order to ensure a surrender to the algorithmic void in lieu of a winding down an recovery of rhythm. 

If the breakdown of an established rhythm is something we increasingly struggle to cope with, how are persuasive technologies capitalising on this and entrenching it in the process? I’m still not well but I’ve deleted Netflix from my iPad, as much as I want to watch the OJ sequel. There can be something profoundly deadening about extended binge watching, even though it entails a degree of sustained immersion which would seem cultivated if performed in relation to other media.