/lit/ - Literature

>Boredom was about time. Our time is full. Lefebvre wrote that the media specialised in filling our time, applying a rhythm to it, but today those rhythms fall apart, synchronisation being matched by the protective obsessive-compulsivity of checking, of updating, 24/7. Time breaks down even as it is flattened. We share the same atomised temporality, the same empty time, the same empty lives. Or this is what the abolition of boredom attempts to do. Capitalism is boring but no one is bored. What does it mean? It means that everything happens so quickly- at the speed of information- and under the physiological coupling to the machine that has rendered us addicts to phenomena like social media via the conditioning of necessity introduced by work. It means that we don’t have time to feel the emptiness of our time- of our lives. As the saying goes: work, consume, die.

>Accelerationism doesn’t seem to propose a return to boredom, and rightly indicates that there can be no going back. Accelerationism seems to propose a new use of the technologies of speed that drive and are driven by capitalism. It also proposes that we repurpose the existing infrastructure- that we keep our smartphones and our computers and all the rest of it. So if boredom is out, what is it that is going to rouse us back to asking the big questions, what is going to help us to give up on survival and attempt to reanimate our moribund culture, our apparently comatose politics? It seems like the answer to that is accelerationism itself. Accelerationism seems intended to jolt us. It is a profoundly anti-depressive political gesture. It wants us to give up on conservatisms and protectionisms. If reflection has been cancelled then why do we keep trying to reflect? If capitalism is global why the hell are you acting locally? If the challenges exist on the scale of hyperobjects then why do you think molecules will win? Why do you keep distracting yourself with so much bullshit? You’re bored and you just don’t fucking no it. From the perspective of boredom, accelerationism is a kind of assault to the political, a slap in the face.

>Fundamentally, the question of boredom leads me to think about accelerationism as a kind of electroshock therapy from the depressive body of the left. It is the political use of stimulation torouse us to challenge the hegemony of those who monopolise stimulation as a technique for control. Accelerationism thus has very little to do with speeding up or slowing down as such. Accelerationism is thus also an attempt to shock some life back into what it sees as a comatose revolutionary movement.

https://syntheticzero.net/2014/06/13/no-boredom/

maybe he just got bored.