ACFM Trip 58: Boredom

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kia Milburn and I'm joined as usual by my very good friend, Nadia Idle. Hello. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about the very topical topic of boredom. Guys, why are we talking about boredom at this moment? A moment in which there seems to be a lot going on and a lot of stimulation, lots going on politically, etc. Why are we talking about boredom? Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about it partly because at the last The World Transformed in Manchester, where Kia and I did the ACFM session.

There was another session that I organised with friends of the show, Tom Williams and Juliet Jakes, who do the Pro Revolution Soccer podcast, in the first episodes of which featured Keir, actually. So it's all in the family. We did this session sort of discussing quite broadly sort of issues around the politics of culture, of artistic production. And I found myself saying at one point in the process of the discussion emerging that I thought one of the demands we needed to make for a sort of socialist politics that could revive the arts and creative sectors, the right to boredom, because I was thinking about how... historically i think the experience of boardism had been a really had been a sort of creative stimulus for lots of people and partly boardism is a historical product of an experience of people having like quite high levels of social security and quite high levels of economic security and being able actually being able to have the space in their lives to be bored is one of the things that stimulated a lot of really important cultural and narcissistic innovation so i think that's quite an interesting idea to potentially explore the first thing is is to try and define kind of what boredom is and perhaps some of the things that are construed with the idea of boredom and ideas that are extrapolated from boredom but also kind of unpicking have people always felt this way and do people really mean they are bored when they say they're bored or are there other things going on are there other socio-political factors contributing to that internal or external feeling that people attribute to boredom

I want to talk about boredom for a more personal reason, really. I was doing a talk about Radical Abundance yesterday in Manchester with my friend, comrade and co-author, Kai Heron. We were interchanging between us. Kai would talk, then I would talk, then I did a big, long bit. And someone in the front row fell asleep and started snoring incredibly loudly. It was really quite funny. But now I'm struck by an existential crisis. Am I actually boring? Am I a boring person? Please, dear listeners, write in and tell me just how goddamn interesting I am. I've got an existential crisis going on. That thing about falling asleep, though, I always think...

I think it's wrong. It's a mistaken sort of categorization that we take that as somebody being bored because a lot of us have this experience that you get, if you're a bit underslept, which everybody has had the experience of being underslept sometimes, you'll start to fall asleep when you become mentally engrossed in a thing. That's why people love to listen to stories and stuff on apps to fall asleep, podcasts like this one and others because actually getting engrossed helps you physically relax and helps your brainwaves change and it helps you fall asleep. I don't think it doesn't mean boring and boring being properly bored implies a level of sort of tension I think that doesn't you know doesn't isn't conducive to sleep actually so I don't think it doesn't mean that but it is a cliche it's a cliche if something's so boring you'll fall asleep and now I'm trying to think where does it come from and I suspect it proceeds from a whole sort of I don't know a sort of an anti-intellectualism that it can associate like intellectual stimulation with the idea of being like awake and excited but it can't really imagine it being a form of pleasure to the extent that you could actually it could help you relax and

you know, they'd fall asleep. Thanks, Jeremy. You're a very good friend, but I don't believe you. No, me and Kai were laughing about it afterwards. And Kai was going, look, it was a nice warm room. We'd reassure him that the problems of the world, we could sort them out if we followed our strategies. We just relaxed into it. Anyway, anyway, we're going to get to this stuff a bit later. We're going to explore boredom in a lot more detail. I'd also want to talk about whether boredom is the same now as it was back in the good old days of the seventies, et cetera. We might get into that, but just because of, you know, the kinds of hyper-stimulated lives that we live now.

produce a different form of border crop, something like that. Before we get into that, though, let's just do our little messages that we do at the beginning. The first one is about our newsletter. It comes out once a month. We do little bits of additional writing in there, collect up interesting links, et cetera, interesting stuff. So if you want to subscribe to that, and we do recommend you do, please go to novara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. We also have that.

every expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just go look for ACFM there. All of the music we've ever played on the show and discussed on the show is there. And it's quite an eclectic mix now. Might have to fast forward through a few of those songs, but you might enjoy some of them. Then we always ask you to leave us a five-star review. Perhaps in your next review, you could just explain just how goddamn interesting I am and how I hold your attention. That would solve my existential crisis. And finally, we always ask you to support Novara Media as they host us, et cetera. And we want to keep growing the Novara Media.

because we think it's absolutely vital in an era in which far-right oligarchs are pouring money into insanely boring right-wing news shows, et cetera, et cetera. So you can support our host, Novara Media, for as little as a pound a month by going to novara.media forward slash support. Okay, I guess on this episode, we're going to be playing a fair amount of punk rock. It is the great cultural expression of the critique of late 40s to boredom. Akir, who is your favourite of the classic British 1977 punk bands? The adverts?

correct correct answer yes my favorite of those classic first wave british punk bands is not the class it's not the pistols it's not the damned it is the criminally overlooked the adverts really recommend their album crossing the red sea with the adverts and their classic anthem from that album is this bored teenagers I think a way into the definitions is I'd like to ask you guys a personal question first. Are you ever bored? Yes. Yes, I have been bored. Yes. So I think this helps us to be once we get into definitions, we're going to talk about what boredom can mean and so whether we're all going to land on the same plane or not. According to my own, what I would call my emotional, psychological and kind of cerebral plane, I don't think I've ever been bored. I find it bizarre that anyone could be, although I accept that many people can be bored. What I do find is I can find things boring.

But that is not the same as being bored because I'm highly entertained by the external and internal world. And we're going to talk about this later in terms of how this interfaces with overstimulation, which I think is a completely different thing. But I would say if I suffer from any problem, it's from that. But from where I'm standing, I don't understand how if you wonder and have curiosity in the world, how you can't have wonder. So if you wonder with an A, how you can't have wonder with an O. I find the whole world intensely stimulating and entertaining.

basically all of the time. And if I find something boring, I find something in my head entertaining. So maybe by way of starting on that level or by that, my own self-experience, then you guys can tell me an example of when you have been bored and then we can help define what we're talking about here. I think I sort of fear boredom. I don't suffer from chronic boredom. A little bit later, I want to make this distinction between simple everyday boredom and then more existential boredom or chronic boredom, something like that. And there are times when you get bored, basically. One of the things with boredom is...

can you walk away from it? If you know what I mean? So if you wanted to start to define boredom, it would be something like, you know, a lack of stimulation, sort of like a monotony of experience, et cetera. But also confinements, you can't just walk away from it. So when you're thinking about those sorts of experience, you're talking about confinement as in prison as well, or work, or I don't know, I've been bored stiff during exams and these sorts of things. In fact, invigilating exams is one of the most boring things I've ever done, basically. But it's the sort of thing where you don't really have to do anything so you can let your mind wander a little bit. I just find, yeah.

When I have to invigilate exams, just walk around, you know, walk around and sort of like make sure nobody's cheating, but you're not really looking for that. You've basically just got to be there. It's incredibly boring. I've also been bored and I've just done monotonous work. Those are two things you can't really escape from. You can't walk away because your contractually obliged to be there, basically. And I sort of fear boredom in the...

or empty time i think it's not i don't think it's a i think it's a bad habit of mine i always you know when i go to bed i always read until the moment i fall asleep and i fear like lying there with my with nothing to do with my mind blank and then my mind going wandering etc etc that's so i think i do sort of fear bored to some degree yeah well i often say my overriding memory of my childhood up to the age of about 15 is being bored like nearly all the time that's despite the fact that a lot of it objectively was pretty traumatic you know we moved around loads my parents got divorced i was eight i was the oldest of three siblings i had to sort of help look after my little sisters quite a lot despite all that you know my overriding memory is just being just bored like nearly all the time like painfully bored like hating it and um And I think it is entirely to do with what Kia said in terms of not being able to, not having any capacity to get out of the situation you're in, not having access to any resource that would sort of stimulate you. I guess it was partly to do with living in places, but there weren't places I could go to that were easily accessible, that were even sort of aesthetically particularly stimulating or interesting. I also associate the period of my kids being really small with having to endure quite a lot of fairly intense boredom. There's quite a lot of time when you're just too tired to do anything and you're just having to sit there while they crawl around the place, making sure they don't cut themselves, but they're not really.

interested in doing anything with you at that moment you can't really leave but you you're not there isn't really anything to do you're watching pepper pig for the hundredth time and yeah i mean the falling asleep to reading i was like i was in my early 20s and i was basically you know sleeping with other with another person oh i should try that like who didn't want the light on uh and then for years and years i could only fall asleep smoking weed and then eventually you know i learned enough yoga and meditation to make myself go to sleep but i still if i still if i'm strung out i'll like listen to an audiobook or something is this boredom we're talking about or is it something else it's to do with that fear of boredom yeah it's the fear of boredom and that that falling asleep thing we talked about this when we talked about this did the sleep episode didn't we i mean that's something you see people referring to going back almost 200 years like it's really common i think it's probably less common now because indeed it's a lot more practical for people to listen to an audiobook or something on special headphones i think like falling asleep to read things dying out but but that is yeah it is to do with that fear of boredom like for me and it does have to do with that childhood experience it's like the kind of terror of boredom but also but i think more importantly though outside those those windows outside that kind of my now distant childhood and that experience of my kids early childhood i am also really conscious in some ways boredom and even the legitimate fear of boredom are things that are now memories they're not things i really experience and when we were talking about this thing for the episode like producer chal said yeah the last time i was bored was like 2002 like just before myspace i sort of relate to that there's something about the way in which the online world has made possible like an accessible various forms of stimulation for better or worse that means it's really difficult to feel bored and it's something that

we're really aware of like young people like with kids they don't really they don't have the experience of being bored the way we did certainly the way that seems to i think was certainly was normal for like people in kids age we can now look back on and say we were still sort of in the long post-war period it was a cultural cliche of that time and it's something we'll talk about in a lot more detail that the idea that somehow boredom was one of the sort of products of that culture like for better or worse and its absence is felt now in ways that are sort of Well, I mean, mostly we tend to focus on as negative because it's to do with young people just being unable to relax, being understimulated, like having really short attention spans. I mean, boredom does help you cultivate a long attention span. Like if you've got nothing else to do but read that book, you learn to sit and read a book for hours. Whereas if there's like 50 other things you can be doing, it's physically much harder for people to learn the quite peculiar and neurological practice of concentrating on a book for hours. And now it's a really notorious phenomenon that the proportion of young people, even in like elite universities, who are physically capable of sitting and reading a printed book for more than like 20 minutes at a time isn't vanishingly small.

And I think that is all to do with not having actually had that sort of disciplining experience of boredom. I've just got a different perspective on this, which is that, going back to what I was saying earlier, that doesn't resonate with me, that experience. I have had a lot of issues in my life of not being able to fall asleep, but that doesn't resonate with me as being related to boredom. For me, I would call that overstimulation or a fear or anxiety or various different things of that ilk. I wouldn't call it being bored because I've never experienced my internal self in a way that had that much space. From my perspective and my experience,

there's a difference between what I would call like an internal and external attribution. So internally, I don't think I've ever been bored, but I can attribute boringness or things being boring to other things. So I have had experiences where I thought this is boring, but if I think this is boring or this experience is boring or this person is boring, I've always got my own head or other things that are happening in the environment. That's the point I was trying to make. So I think it's like a different way of understanding boredom. But even in contemporary life, there are like situations in which you're confined in a predictable and monotonous.

So places where people used to experience boredom, such as waiting for a bus, you would just get your phone out, wouldn't you? Or taking a long journey, et cetera. Perhaps we listen to a podcast, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there are times, you know, when you're confined, you know, I've been arrested a few times and I have to spend a bit of time in the cells. I've normally just got my head down and had to sleep, basically, because it's for all else to do. But like also like work environments as well. Like lots of people's work is still incredibly boring and you cannot get your phone out in those sorts of environments. I'm agreeing that these things exist. I'm just saying I'm, you know, I'm flying the flag for the people out there who just don't get bored. I probably enjoy monotonous environments because my brain is wandering anyway.

Yeah, I think there are people who are more prone to being bored and people who are less prone to being bored. I think that's probably just true. And I think there's also, you can train yourself to like watch long, boring films, et cetera. I'm quite prone to myself and read long, boring books, et cetera. I particularly like long, boring lectures about radical abundance. I get snuggled down at the front, drop off. Hopefully don't snore too loud.

Yes, well, in an episode about boredom, we should definitely hear a piece of music by Japanese psychedelic, noise rock, avant-garde, experimentalist, Boredoms. So let's see their 2004 track, C-Drum. I think there are other aspects to boredom, though, that we haven't got into. One of the ways to talk about this is to talk about the terms which are associated with boredom.

or phrases that are associated to boredom, which might give us a clue about some of the other sort of dimensions to boredom. I was thinking about it earlier. And so there's obvious ones like ennui, the French, and tedium, which has a root in the Latin tedia, which does sort of indicate that even though the concept of boredom was invented around the time of the Enlightenment, et cetera, the experiences of boredom are probably longer than that. I've been reading this book, Boredom, A Lively History. It's quite a boring book, actually, by Peter Toohy. He cites this bit of graffiti. It's in Pompeii, which says,

I don't know how you're still standing with all of the tedium, of all of these tedious graffiti on you. It's like critiquing all the boring graffiti that people have put on the wall, basically. You know, what that word tedium means, I'm not sure, but like the idea that you would be bored, the ball would be so bored by the repetitive graffiti that it'd fall asleep or fall over. That indicates some continuity of experience. I like tedium. I like tedium. I kind of feel like it says a little bit more. So that resonates more with me. I think about like, something can really be tedious. Life admin is so fucking tedious. It's like, it's such a waste. Things that, but I still attribute.

like an active emotion to that. Like I get frustrated that I'm spending any time in my life, like dealing with fucking gas bills or whatever. I feel like it's a waste of my intellectual capacity or like, you know, I could be dancing or, you know, recording ACFM or having a nice meal or something. So I get, but what I get from that is frustrating because it's so tedious. I get frustrated. I don't get bored. I think frustration is one of those things that you associate with boredom, particularly that confined boredom, like the classic image of like a bored kid or something like that is looking out the window, et cetera. And it's a nice sunny day. In fact, there's an episode of The Simpsons.

where all our great philosophical lessons originate, where Bart has got, he's got detention from Principal Skinner. Principal Skinner's making him lick envelopes or stamps or something like that. Bart's looking outside and it's like a sunny day and, you know, all the kids are playing. You probably have the mute. And like, like basically it's that episode where he, like he's looking at the clock, which is moving incredibly slowly, time is slowed. And all of a sudden he looks and the clock is moving backwards. But like, that is like, you know, that frustration that you could be.

that you could be somewhere where you could be having a good time is like one sort of form of boredom, I think. I mean, that term ennui is interesting because we tend to use it in English because we associate French terms with philosophy and philosophical attitudes. We're the sort of almost philosophical, almost an existential sense of, you know, of pointlessness. But actually, in colloquial French, ennui, the word can just mean annoyance. And the word to be bored and the word to be irritated by something are the same. So it's sort of to do with frustration. And I think that's...

True. I think boredom, it also has to do with the sort of relationship to the future. Because I was thinking about Nadia saying she doesn't get bored and having said in the past she also doesn't look forward to the future. Boredom is partly about anticipating the end of this condition and wishing it would come sooner. It's about anticipating something more interesting happening. Yeah, the clock ticking backwards for Bart, yeah. I sort of think Nadia saying she doesn't get bored, I think she's evoking a really, a sort of very purist idea of boredom. There'd be a kind of a complete, a sort of non-state.

And that is something that historically, like some people have been sort of interested in aesthetically, you know, like Andy Warhol, those films like Sleeper, which is just like somebody asleep for hours and said he was genuinely interested in the aesthetics of boredom. And there's this almost sort of quasi Zen idea of what it would mean to just have a completely empty and an effortless condition. in a given moment and then you know you can relate that to the ideas around you know meditation and contemplation i mean one of the one of the first benefits of learning meditation is supposed to be when you're never bored because you can always just you know you just start meditating basically and that will and that will that makes the moment into something completely different i think you're right i think you're right and that does resonate you know with me like i'm you know just to be clear i'm not at all an introvert and i love being out with people and out in the world and stuff but it doesn't take much for me to be entertained so somebody who looks at you know a lot of my life or how i spend my time it might just look like pottering or it might be look like I'm doing nothing or I'm bored and I'm not bored at all. I can be highly entertained by just watching the birds on the trees in my garden, like the entire day. And then thinking about developing an idea for a podcast or a lecture that I'm going to do or something. I don't need much stimulation because I feel like the world is stimulating enough. It doesn't necessarily look the same from the outside as it is experienced from the inside. I mean, the thing with like, you know, Zen meditation and stuff like that, there's lots of other religious practice, which is based around tedium.

It's repetition. It's repetition. Yeah, but okay, yeah, so it's like monastic life, et cetera. There's lots of writings from monastic life about this really incredible tedium, but like a tedium that they were completely prepared to put up with because it had meaning. The state you're supposed to cultivate in monastic life is what Nadi is describing. It's a state where you're finding meaning in every moment, so you don't require, you're not dependent upon some kind of external stimuli to feel sort of, you know, to feel satisfied, to feel engaged.

But I think it's important to understand that is a kind of ideal, an ideal of happiness within the way a lot of people have thought about what it is to be like a Trudy's or happy human being. Like going back centuries, thousands of years. I think it's, you know, I think it's interesting. I think that's interesting. I mean, the idea of monasticism there, that is really interesting because to a lot of people that monasticism seems like a complete, like an image of a kind of nightmarish existence because it would be so boring. But I think...

you know i mean the whole point is whether it's like a like a western or it's like a theistical tradition where you're doing a lot of praying and singing whether it's like an asian tradition where you're doing a lot of sort of form of sitting meditation or something like you're actually you're supposed to be doing all these exercises which if you do them properly they cultivate a kind of blissful affect sort of all the time it's all calm but blissful affect and so from that point of view it's kind of you're supposed to cultivate that exactly like state where you're not able to be bored like you can't be bored but also you're not stressed it's completely divorced from any the kind of frustration and stress of sort of ordinary existence. I think that's a really interesting point, Jeremy. And I think what would be, I was trying to think about how this would work for me as you were speaking. And I think the thing that's missing for me becomes is connection. So I need people because I need to connect and engage with human beings, not just kind of nature or, you know, my own head or whatever. So connection comes in, but I absolutely have experienced tedium and some of the other things that we've put down there, like, you know, mind numbing shit, but I've experienced it actively as frustration. I think of boredom as a cruel.

affect or experience. Maybe it's because I'm thinking about it that way that I think, oh, I don't get bored. Maybe you guys are thinking about boredom as more of an active kind of frustrated, you know, like hot emotion, so to speak. Well, I think it can be either kind of because people talk about like the paralysis of boredom that you cannot, particularly like chronic boredom, existential boredom, you cannot like raise yourself to do anything. Do you know what I mean? That's depression, isn't it? Yeah, but like, but like people talk about it as existential boredom as well. Do you know what I mean? It's sort of linked to boredom, I think. I think it helps us to think about like boredom also having that, that element of like, because what you're, especially when you're a kid, like what you're wanting is, it's like you're experiencing like a lack of.

desire you you want or you know you don't know what you want to do what am i going to do myself etc i can't be bothered to do any of it you know i mean that's a sort of boredom of as like chronic or existential boredom it's almost like a wish for some sort of desire to come along when you put it in that way you can see that like contemporary forms of boredom which are much more like hyper-stimulated compulsive boredom that's a paralysis you get you know the paralysis you get from from that compulsive scrolling etc compulsive interaction with like the meaningless interaction that you get on on social media or etc i find myself paralyzed as i cannot stop doing this thing that i don't want to be doing and it's boring basically but it's not boring in the same way as like the empty boredom like that simple form of boredom which i did experience a lot as a kid yeah i think all that's true for me i think it has something to do learning like i'm bored in a moment when i'm not learning anything You know, a book can be boring, a lecture can be boring if I'm not learning anything. I know all this. I already know all this. They're not saying it in a new way. And then, and I think as a kid, you know, it was a lot of the time I was bored when I wasn't learning anything. I think the idea of learning anything, the way I'm using it here, it's really expansive. Like you might, you might, you can learn something just by, you know, going down the street you've not been down before or going down the street you've been down before and there's a plant growing there that wasn't there before.

Exactly. But that was my, that was going to be my question to you is that, you know, if you're cycling down the same route over and over and over again, like exactly what you just said, you will always notice if you allow yourself new things, but you might not have the capacity to notice those things. There might be all sorts of really good reasons about how you experience the world and your day that you are unable because you're either stuck in your head or whatever to notice these things, or you're worried or you're scared or, you know, and these are like totally legitimate. But, you know, for example, I walk, I've been walking the same route in the nature reserve near my house for like five years. Like I'm never bored of that same route. I'm the same with my cycling route. Yeah, I'm the same with my running route.

Those are situations which are not boring because things change and because you are always, even at a really subtle level, learning something. Part of the point of meditative and contemplative practice is partly the idea that it takes years, decades, to get through this process. It's a huge thing to learn and you can always be working on it. So there's always something to learn. You have the situations I was describing before. I think I've been really bored. The situation where you're having to watch Peppa Pig for the hundredth time. Which I've not experienced, to be fair. You should try it, Maddy. A form of meditative training. Strangely, I've made my life decisions in a way that I wouldn't have to, quite deliberately. I think this thing about learning and the human desire to learn, like being a real motivating factor, it's one of my worries about video games. I think about computer games. My worry is that computer games can play on the pleasure of learning while giving you just a completely pointless set of things to spend hours learning. And I worry that a lot of the time they're...

They're training young people especially not to enjoy learning things that are actually useful and giving them a kind of dopamine. The dopamine hit you get from learning something just by learning how to go through that imaginary door in that imaginary scenario. But that doesn't mean computer games are bad because a lot of the time you're learning something good by doing it. I'm not really sure you are. But anyway, I think that term mind-numbing is really good. Just thinking about different terms in which we use to describe being bored. But mind-numbing is that, isn't it? It's like that thing of I'm not learning anything. My mind has just become numb. It's being made numb. It's not just that. It's being made numb by this thing.

Yeah, but that's different to like watching paint dry, isn't it? Watching paint dry is when nothing's going on, where it's just, you're under-stimulated, et cetera. But you can have that sort of mind-numbingness of interaction. You know, it's like playing Candy Crush or something really compulsive, but like pointless and meaningless. So it gets to the stage where it becomes mind-numbing, but in a compulsive way, basically. And it has those things such as paralysis, basically, or compulsion or confinement, confinement by compulsion, et cetera. I just think it's a different form of boredom, basically. I was also interested, Gem, earlier you said that you were painfully bored.

Where's the pain come from in that? What is the pain? Yeah. Is that frustration? Well, it was like extreme frustration, yeah. Just extreme frustration in the sense that there are all kinds of things that one could do in the world, but I wasn't old enough to do them and didn't have the resources or the people to do them with. Yeah, yeah. The thing is, that was objectively true. I was a precocious kid in a poor family where nobody really had time or inclination to do anything with me. There were really limited resources available. It was materially true. It was really boring. I think from the perspective of a woman, like...

I could imagine saying that there's a lot of experienced sexism and misogyny which could be boring, but I don't experience it as boring. I experience it as frustrating and it fills me with rage that I can't walk down any street that I want to at any time that I want to. It makes my life much more boring than it necessarily needs to be. But I experience that as frustrating, the limits that society puts on me because I'm born on this body and assault, fear, going back to fear again, fear of assault, getting in the way of... staying out in bars till 3am by myself and then walking back home or whatever. So, but again, that's like frustration and anger. And I don't think it's boring. I'll watch paint dry any day. If you know anyone's got any, that can, that'll be, that'll be, that'll be an art project where you can dare me to do it for 24 hours and I'll do it.

The musical genre most associated with boredom and the critique of boredom and the expression of boredom is, of course, punk rock. And you cannot have a show about boredom without playing Boredom by the Buzzcocks from 1977. It was off the Spiral Scratch EP. So this is sort of like almost the birth of the connection between punk and DIY culture, because it was an EP put together in a DIY manner by the Buzzcocks, who were the most famous members at Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto, etc. Kia, Kia, you've misnamed the band Buzzcocks. Fuck it is Buzzcocks, isn't it?

Let's hear it anyway. Let's hear it. Another punk song about boredom is I'm so bored with the USA by The Clash. It's got an interesting story attached to it, actually. When I think it was Mick Jones wrote the song, he first wrote it with the lyrics, I'm so bored of you. And then they thought that they ought to politicise that up a bit. So they changed it to I'm so bored with the USA and wrote it as a critique of these American bands, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The other interesting fact about this is that the bass line comes from SOS by the non-punk band ABBA, which is also where the Sex Pistols song Pretty Vacant's riff comes from, copying SOS by ABBA. A little glimpse into the various tastes of 1970s punk bands. I want to just think as well about like the physiological effects of boredom. Yeah, that's a good one. Because it's like, well, yawning is one of them, falling asleep and snoring maybe another, but yawning is this sort of like, that's that desperate attempt to get some oxygen in, isn't it? Because your brain has become numb. You know, if you want to have an image of somebody who's bored, it would be somebody who's got their head in their hands, et cetera. Elbows on the table, head in the hand, eyes unfocused. You know what I mean? I've had that thing where I'm so bored, I can't fucking focus my eyes. Falling asleep is a bit like that as well, isn't it? Basically, your eyes become unfocused and that sort of stuff.

But it is that almost like shutting down sort of thing, isn't it? I think that's why people talk about paralysis or something like that. Or being bored stiff, basically. The lack of an ability to get up and do something, to move or something like that. Self-imposed confinement, something like that. One of the other terms I wanted to talk about, and you may not agree that this is a synonym for bored, but like being fed up. It's like such a fucking strange term, being fed up.

being fed up is like being miserable but being miserable because you're bored i think yeah i mean you can also say you're fed up with something meaning you can't take any more of it yeah yeah it's linked to boredom via that sense of frustration and kind of in the moment of being fed up you're not yet taking action fed up means i've had my dinner i'm full and like there is that sort of like there's a boredom which is linked to sort of like being sated in some way being over sated you know what i mean you're not having any urgent needs do you know i mean that sort of thing i think that that links to but it means also your capacity to take any more has been absorbed yeah exactly yeah so just just like your capacity to eat anymore is gone your capacity to tolerate any more of this thing you're not fed up of It's been exhausting. Yes, you may be feeling that now, dear listeners, but there's another hour and a half to go. Yeah, no, I'll still be the boredom purist and you could be the boredom expansive voice here on the show. I'm all right with that. We can have different perspectives on this. One of the other things we want to talk about is whether, is there a distinction between being bored and being boring? Do you get boring people? Is that a really unfair thing to say? And in that, I'm thinking of the Colin Robinson, the energy vampire from What We Do in the Shadows, if you've ever watched that show.

Have you seen that show, you two? No, I haven't. No, I haven't. I know what bit. They're basically vampires who go around drinking blood and they introduce Colin Robinson as an energy vampire who works in an office and he basically sucks everybody's energy by being incredibly, incredibly boring. Yeah, I think being boring or not boring is like charisma. I think it's entirely situational. Do you think so? Yeah, I think so. I don't think it's a personal quality that people have or don't have. I think it's an individualist fantasy. That's very reassuring after my falling asleep audience last night.

I think it's true. I think it's true. I think I'd go one further than that and say, you know, people, I wouldn't think it's fair to say this is a boring person. I would say they are being boring, right? So it's a state that they are in and there will be some other state that I would like to think all human beings would have the ability to experience in their life where they are not bored or boring, right? But again, like Jeremy said, I think it's situational. Some people might never have the opportunity to not be the most boring person on earth.

you know maybe they are to most people but they have potential at the very least to not be boring all human beings okay let me draw it back a bit then instead of just catechizing some people as inherently essentially boring what is it what we find boring in other people when people are being boring because in that it's sort of like i always think about people who are just talking about themselves and don't basically have an interest in you or in the world no i mean i buy that if i think of situations where i've been bored talking to other people like it isn't about any particular thing or any particular topic and it's not like someone going on about the thing they're really interested in because that's normally interesting isn't it yeah it is it is yeah no it is the people who just talk about themselves like they're in the job interview And I'm thinking, I can think of at least one really famous academic who I still recall very strongly being extremely bored by talking to them. So decades ago, because of exactly that, all they did was talk about themselves. And they sort of are notorious for that. I'm not saying who it is by any means. It's not anyone anyone's thinking of either. We'll put the names and acrostic in the show notes for you to work out. I think there's something there. I think those are good suggestions. I also think...

There's something to do with self-awareness that's interesting there. So I think if you are too hyper-aware because of some level of insecurity, performing that kind of anxiety could be quite boring for the other person because it's quite taxing, which I would say is a cousin, but not the same as boring because when something is taxing, it's kind of weighing you down, I think in a slightly different way than it is boring. So that's one side of the spectrum, being hyper-aware and kind of what that performs. But I think the other side is kind of a kind of posturing. When the hot takes crew, people who only speak in...

bites and uh and phrases that have been in the the news or you know like that week or whatever it's just like really fucking boring like i don't buy any of it god i feel seen yeah i'm just not i'm just not interested but then of course i mean you know there's also the gendered lines as well like i think i think a lot of women i mean i don't have obviously the lens of the male experience but a lot of women have been in a situation where you know like a guy is trying to impress you and i kind of feel a responsibility to like be kind But it's meant I've had to put up with a lot of incredibly boring conversation because that person is not being real, right? They're not being genuine. They're trying to put on a performance because they're trying to impress you. I'm not saying this is conscious. It's often subconscious. And it's kind of like, and I can see that straight away. So it's, yeah, it's quite boring. Yeah, I mean, I think women probably experience it more. But yeah, you also experience it as a man of the men trying to be... Being talked at. I think these are all different kinds of like being talked at, different facets or like ways that it can show up, which is just kind of like, it's not being present with a person.

opposite you. And there's no curiosity. There's no space for curiosity or interest or actual, you know, discourse between two people. I think you mentioned it earlier, Nadia, that like social isolation as well is one of the sort of symptoms of being bored. And boredom can come back in old age, basically. Because in old age, people can get lonely as well. And you get, you know, lack of stimulation, lack of like variety in your life. And I suppose, you know.

Somebody just talking in a way which doesn't respect the rules of social intercourse is also quite, you can feel isolated when you're talking to somebody who's boring in that sort of manner. Right. As your resident 90s fan, I think we should play Flagpole Sitter by the American alt-rock band Harvey Danger, featuring the amazing lyric, if you're bored, then you're boring. Should we talk about some of the more philosophical approaches to boredom? It's a topic in philosophy. I mentioned this idea of existential boredom earlier. I think it is closer to depression, but I think the two are linked in a way. This boredom of you cannot find anything interesting. You have this collapse of desire in some sort of way. One of the most famous novels about this is Nausea by Sartre, which is a very interesting title, this idea of nausea. There's some sort of link between...

boredom and disgust, I think. When I think of that, a friend of mine went to Nicaragua in the 80s on a sort of like political sort of solidarity thing, ended up doing like really boring work in the jungle, et cetera. But she always goes on about like, she basically got fed the same meal of like boiled beans, every really bland meal every day for like three months or something. And it got to the stage where she was so bored of that food, it made her nauseous basically, it made her feel sick. Do you know what I mean? She couldn't eat it, whereas she quite enjoyed it the first time she ate it. But it was just that, that sort of repetition, that unchangingness can be linked to some sort of...

to disgust or nausea or something like that. That's fed up. That speaks to the fed up very literally. You've had too much of the same. In a literal sense, your body, it's like a visceral reaction. Your body is like, I can take no more. One phrase, important phrase, which we haven't mentioned, although we've alluded to this, is Marx and alienation. And we've talked about repetitive tasks and stuff, but politicizing it around this concept of alienated labor, which is obviously central to...

to the wider socialist politics in the wider sense is also interesting to think about, to think about alienation as a process where somebody is made, in a way, made bored in terms of like what they are, in terms of an actual action or craft that they are engaged in as a very specific process and kind of obviously like all the sociopolitical effects of that. So it's also interesting to think about, well, if we would attribute that idea of alienation, like what other forms could it take and how does it, again, interact with boredom in different ways, you kind of, in spaces outside Marxist theories. Well, I think alienation... In the way you're describing, the product of the person's labour gets taken away from them and made into a separate thing that they have no real relationship to anymore. It's closely related to the idea of reification as well, the way in which the commodity or the social institution come to be seen as these things over which we don't have any control, rather than being the lively product of social relationships. It's an idea that gets taken up by Djurgi Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist thinker in the early 20th century, and it's important in the situation, it's actually in Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, and Tim Bewes.

a British academic based in America, an old friend of mine wrote a book called Reification, the Anxiety of Late Capitalism, about 20 years ago. And you can say there is, all those things can be taken as a kind of diagnosis of how it is that the capitalist process of commodification tends to sort of make things boring, as a kind of structural tendency to remove the kind of affective charge from things, by flattening everything out, by turning everything into a commodity, meaning... it has, you create, you end up having an identical relationship to like a record, a movie, a t-shirt, a sandwich, you know, whether you've made it or someone else has made it. They're all just these things. I mean, reification means literally thingification. He's turning everything into a thing as opposed to a relationship, basically. Alienation is like also linked to, it's like a loss of control, but it's a loss of meanings. You're detached from the object that you're creating in some sort of way. And we can think about that lack of learning or lack of like, you know, engagement of the brain becomes, gets to its high point during the Fordist era. So one of the, one of the like innovations of Fordism,

of Taylorism, which is like the management theory that went along with it, or the management practice that went along with it, was that like in the pre-Fordist era, you know, the knowledge about the work process that would be held in the workers' heads and like the whole project of Fordism or Taylorism is to like, is that the knowledge about the work process is moved into the managers' heads, basically, and the workers are reduced to like an appendage of the machine, basically, and the work process is broken down into as simple, simplified tasks as possible. Move your arm in this way in order to do this, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like a move from like more craft work to... to Fordist work or boring Fordist work. But one of the things people talk about in terms of that is that that sort of work only needs your body and you can actually free your mind and like use the techniques that people use to use that sort of boredom or that empty brain time as a spark of creativity. I can't remember what poet it was now, worked on the assembly line up at Ford up in Detroit. Like I said, I use all that to sort of create poems, et cetera, all of that time. And then contemporary work involves much more of your brain, basically. You don't have that empty.

time. You know what I mean? You can't, you can't compose poetry. I'm not saying that every, every worker on the Ford is assembly line, uh, use that time to, to dream up poetry, et cetera. But like contemporary work, just, it demands much more of you. It demands your brain power.

Attention. Not necessarily brain power, I would say, in the classic sense, you know, as in your intellectual power. But your attention is needed, you know, in the way that we work in a contemporary sense, like you were saying. I think that's an important distinction because I would keep, you know, the intellectual, the ideas part of my life. But there's parts of my work that are demanding and need my attention in a way that I don't have the space that I would like to just ponder and wonder and, you know, write the poetry or, you know, have ideas or connect things together. It's too fast moving. There's too much of it. I want more space. And that's very difficult in the modern working life to find. Yeah, I think that's already...

useful. I mean, Gramsci, who coins the term Fordism, is writing in a context where there's a quite widespread social critique already emerging in the late 30s of assembly line work and what it's like to people. I mean, I'm sure I've talked about this on the show before, but the most obvious popular manifestation of that critique is the Charlie Chaplin film, Modern Times. And it's consistent with a lot of other critiques, both sort of conservative and liberal and radical as well. And its critique is that assembly line work is incredibly boring and this is mind-numbing to people and that is bad. It makes people unhappy and nobody likes to do it. And Gramsci does have this different take. Gramsci sort of thinks that more people are going to be like Nadia, basically. There are more people who are working on the assembly lines because they don't have to put their attention into it. They'll think about other stuff all day and they'll think about revolution.

And all the historical evidence is like all of those things were true. They're all true at the same time. The Fordist subject is really bored at work and gets quite bored of the material culture because it's all based on mass production of huge numbers of identical objects. You can have any colour you like as long as it's black. But at the same time, the structural conditions, including the relative liberation of their conscious mind from needing to be engaged in the work process, make the organisation of class struggle really easy by historic standards. So they are able to win massive gains in the workplace and at the level of the state and the wider society. And all those things are true at the same time. There seems to be a kind of deep connection.

between the kind of advance of those things over the course of the decades of the middle 20th century, because we're kind of leaping ahead a bit in the notes now to the history of boredism, aren't we? I like boredisms. Yeah, boredism, yeah, boredism and post-boredism. You know, it was a cliche of like comparative social commentary, like in the 70s and 80s, that these countries that had established like very, very successful sort of, you know, 40s industrial systems and had high levels of social equality also promoted this, you know, had this tendency to people to suffer this sort of existential angst. So it was a cliche that Sweden supposedly had the highest suicide rate in the world. There was also a lot of worry about high suicide rates in Japan in the 70s when their kind of industrial miracle had established itself. And Japan also famously has very relatively high levels of equality, very low levels of social inequality. And there was this sense that it was attributed partly to the kind of conformism of those kind of societies, the people who felt that they were sort of outside of social norm in any way found it very hard to tolerate. But it was also...

attributed by social psychologists. I mean, some of them were coming from really dodgy places to this idea that, well, people were just, people were bored, like people just had this, there's not enough stuff to do. I mean, actually, it's a theme that's explored in Alistair Gray's novel, A History Maker, which is this sort of comic science fiction novel set in a post-scarcity future, where basically this technology has been invented that is like the replicator in Star Trek. It's like a perfect 3D printer. It can just basically produce anything. And so you're living in a completely post-scarcity society.

And he posits that in that society, he sees it's kind of gendered, and he says male boredom becomes a massive problem. And so basically what happens, the way they deal with male boredom is men just spend all their time doing these LARPs, basically doing live-action role plays. You pretend you're in a war and stuff, even though no one actually gets killed. And that's how they deal with it. Sign me up. I know. There is something to the sense that...

in a world where people aren't facing certain kinds of challenges and also don't have certain kinds of creative opportunities, then they can become very frustrated and very bored. And there's an argument that this is part of what drives the whole shift to post-Fordism. I mean, in the debates over what is actually the nature of the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, like what drives it? Is it just driven by capitalist profit-seeking? Is it driven by technological change? Or is it driven by various social groups making demands that can't be met by Fordism? So one of the most influential texts is brought by the French sociologists, you know, Luc Bult, Tanski and Ichiopeno.

i'm sure i've probably mentioned before it's worth mentioning again that book is the new spirit of capitalism and uh incidentally it's a book that is sort of hated by certain strands of the marxist left because they think it's arguing against any sort of a it's hated by some of the marxists and it's hated by strand of the sort of countercultural sort of anarcho left in france and i think they all sort of misread it i'm not going to bother getting into the details there but one of their kind of approaches in that book is to say historically there's been two critiques of capitalism going back to the beginning of capitalism going back to the end of the 18th century there's been what they call the social critique which is basically the way i always summarize this for students is capitalism is bad because it's unfair it's unjust produces all kinds of social injustices and what they call the artistic critique which they associate with like the romantic movement with artistic movement with bohemians with artists and also with the counterculture in the 60s And the artistic critique, the way I always sum that up for students is, look, the problem with capitalism is it's boring. But that's why you should be against capitalism. And I mean, I think Boltanski and Trebello's framework is useful. And I think they correctly point out that historically the most powerful movements against capitalism are those that bring those two together. And I think that's entirely the project. That's entirely the project of ACFM, actually. That's the way it left. I think the boring dystopia thing, which we'll get to, is like, it's interesting. You know, like it is interesting. I mean, I do accept that structurally capitalism is very dynamic and ever-changing, but it seems to be that somehow it's got us to kind of a really sludge-ified, boring, repetitive.

tedious reality, basically, in late neoliberalism. Boring dystopia, that was one of Mark Fisher's catchphrases, and it's all caught on as a Twitter hashtag and stuff for a while, didn't it? Yeah, but we almost did a book. We started doing a book before he sadly passed away. We were putting together the notes to me and him and a couple of other people in Plan C to make a book called Boring Dystopia. Well, I think you should talk about that. I feel like we should revisit it and do it anyway.

in whatever, in whatever. Because I think it would be, it was meant to be like, you know, a bit of a coffee table book with like pictures of all of these different things that encapsulate why capitalism is incredibly boring. You know, like ATMs that don't work and shit. Well, yeah, but it was, I mean, for me, boring this tape was a way of describing, for example, the way in which like large parts of London were being remodeled according to, you know, as these sort of corporate spaces, which are sort of semi-public, semi-privatized spaces and the architectural style and all these parts of, all these areas around Waterloo. Solace, solace, solace.

To me, I always say it just looks like an airport. Everything now looks like an airport. No, but airports used to be better. Some airports used to be fun. Like airports weren't all identicate and shit. The idea that capitalism is still producing the boring dystopia is slightly in tension with the idea that boredom actually belonged to the age of Fordism. Like post-Fordism already was based on, was partly based on, post-Fordism was capitalist saying to the youth in particular, all right, you're never going to be bored again. You want to not be bored? Here we go. How about short-term contracts for all work? How about just-in-time ordering? How about an endless proliferation of consumer culture? You're never going to be bored again.

An answer to that, which goes back to my initial distinction, which is I think that capitalism can be boring, but it creates a material reality on the ground so that you are overstimulated and never bored. But at the same time, it produces different social realities or different experiences, rather, that are incredibly boring. You know, like the ATMs that never work or like the, you know, how was your day? And all of this shit, like things that just make you want to punch the wall. Well, I was going to say the complete instrumentalisation of the education system. An education system which is all about standardized testing, exams, you know, vacational metrics, getting a job. Yeah, in fact, there's been a real project to make education boring again.

as boring as possible, rote learning, testing all the time, et cetera, et cetera. You're only allowed to do interesting subjects if you go to any university. You can now basically, when the right describes the university subject as a Mickey Mouse degree, what they mean is it would be interesting to ordinary people. There is an interesting tension there, isn't there, though? Because it's partly about, partly the project of post-Fordism and then platform capitalism under the aegis of the neoliberal programme has been to make boring the kind of public space and public institution that actually, like, Fordism was actually able to make interesting. This is like, I mean, Haverley's point about the golden age of public modernism. That is like the era when actually, like, public architecture gets really interesting. So you're allowed to do interesting stuff at school and universities, etc. And then... And then the high point of participation in political culture as well.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Politics isn't boring because it can actually deliver things. So loads of people are involved in it. And so you can see this as a sort of dialectic in a way that like Fordism, you know, Fordism kind of offers people the security and partly offers people the security they've been struggling for since the beginning of the industrial revolution. People have been desperately trying to make life more boring. So there isn't this like hideous, terrifying, you know, struggle just to stay alive. And, you know, they want healthcare. They want education. They want pensions. They want stable jobs for life. That's what they've been after since they were forced off the land 200 years earlier. And so finally they get it.

then, you know, that itself, that does produce a whole set of other, you know, costs in a way, like for young people growing up in that context. And, you know, people feel bored, they feel frustrated, and they start pushing for things which, if they really got what they wanted, would take us even, they would undermine the power of capital even further, you know, push in the direction of some kind of democratic socialism. And so to prevent that, like post-40ism comes along and it gives people this, it gives us this kind of saturated consumer culture where increasingly your kind of personal life is allowed to become really exciting. As a consumer, you're allowed to have a really fun life. You can have sex with whoever you want. You can do drugs as long as you don't do it too publicly. You can listen to a hundred different kinds of music. But all this public stuff that Fordism kind of made potentially interesting starts to become, it starts to get broken up. It starts to become stuff that you're basically not allowed to have any relationship to other than the market relationship. And then to some extent, the shift of platform capitalism is partly driven by people looking for forms of connection and community online because they've been driven out of those public spaces. It partly is driven by the multitude, as Hart and Negri call it, moving online in a genuine search for connection and novelty and creativity.

and collective agency and then and now we're living through the period actually where that all that stuff capital is now has reacted against that by saying right you're here online we've got you now you know we're gonna and we're gonna concentrate all that power we're gonna concentrate control over all those platforms and networks in the hands of a half a dozen people in southern california and that's sort of where we are now i think so it produces a really complicated distribution of kind of boredoms in some ways and anxieties and terrors in others yeah that's interesting trying to think through like platform capitalism in relationship to an intervention into boredom or overstimulation or something like that Platform capitalism is also based on that compulsion, that sort of like gamification, social interaction, using the insights of the compulsive nature of gambling and these sorts of things, all of that sort of stuff that we've talked about before. I just wanted to think a little bit more about that, though, is that like we might have moved from, we might have moved back towards people getting bored with social media. And part of that is this idea that Cory Doctorow's got about the institution of the internet in which the platforms have to be useful. They have to give us something that we want in order to get us on there. But once we're on there...

They basically turn off that usability. Everything gets a bit more bullshit, basically. The point of those platforms is to extract as much value as possible to the oligarchs who own them. And so more and more social media becomes less and less usable. I almost think as though we might be moving out of the social media, which functions as a public space or a replacement for public space. It's almost breaking down, I think, that role it used to have.

Even like Twitter, which I cannot get off, with the Iran war going on now, it's almost useless. There's so much slop and propaganda and so much hidden on there that it's not playing the role it played in previous conflicts where it would be something you could get immediate news. Now it's just impossible to... You may as well watch BBC if you want to work out what's going on. It is fucking useless and of no use at all, basically. It's incredibly difficult. And it seems to be that breakdown of a public space where people are retreating to sort of...

semi-private spaces you know so whatsapp lists etc these sorts of things discord discord yeah these sorts of things which are yeah i really like the idea that like it was a replacement for a public sphere and i think we might be moving out of that because of dynamics internal to platform capitalism i may or may not be wrong the experience i've been on twitter these days is quite boring because it's just full of slop do you know i mean ai slop and this sort of stuff i mean that is consistent with the whole model of capitalist history going back centuries in which like all these things are true i know this is my most repeated slogan like all those things are true at the same time it's true but you know capitalism is a massive site of exploitation which People, workers will try to resist. It's true that it also does produce fantastic innovations, but its capacity for innovation is also parasitic on innovations. Capitalism as such isn't really the engine of actually. It will create conditions to facilitate them because it needs them. But once it gets full control of them, it always has a way of sort of making them boring. And both that kind of desire to escape from the boredom that it creates and the search for justice and peace and equality are kind of driving motors of radicalism, which are always contesting those capitalist forces.

Capitalism as dynamic and capitalism as an inshittification process or an inshittifier, in a sense. Interestingly, we think about it through the prism of boredom. Bullshit abundance is perhaps an easier way to talk about instantification. I can't remember who came up with that fantastic phrase. It's amazing, amazing. I can't imagine who did come up with it though. We should play one of my favourite bands, Green Day's song Longview from the brilliant 1994 album Dookie, featuring the line, I'm so damn bored I'm going blind, and also the story of the last ever generation to sit around and watch their phone but no one's calling. Last generation be able to say that. So that is Longview from Green Day's album Dookie from 1994.

Before we move on and start thinking about maybe some of the contemporary ways in which we experience boredom or overstimulation or stuff like that, I think we need to go back to the 20th century to just mention a couple of really important theoretical positions on this. I mean, one is, of course, the feminist angle on boredom. We've got writers like Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. And others, which are obviously talking about domestic labour, right? And we couldn't do an episode on boredom without talking about that. And, you know, she's writing about, of course, this is in the West, you know, specifically in the US and Europe. In the mid-20th century, we talked about Fordism and we talked about boredom in that sense. But she's obviously making the argument that many of us will have heard before, which is about the structural condition of boredom, which is created by specific gender roles. And this idea that existed, you know, the discourse that women were encouraged to see domestic life and labour, all the cleaning, cooking, childcare, et cetera, as fulfilment. But of course, the work, like, you know, the factory work, you're mirroring the factory work was repetitive, but it was also isolated.

right because it's not happening in groups it's not happening as a group of different women uh it's happening as an individual woman in in her own home alone usually during the day or with with the children and it's also on top of that not recognized as real labor so that kind of so-called unspoken dissatisfaction is a form of boredom. And it becomes politically significant, of course, because when you start thinking about patriarchy and how patriarchy organises time and work, whereas the men's work in the factories might have been repetitive and boring, but at least it's seen as productive and, I guess, socially meaningful in some way, whereas women's labour at home, as we always say, the housework never ends. I mean, it never ends for us, and it definitely didn't end for those women, but it's also invisibilised, right? So the boredom then is seen in a slightly different way that we've been talking about, which is not so much about having nothing to do, I guess, but it's doing repetitive work that is undervalued or hidden. But importantly, and I think there's three things that we need to talk about here.

there's a lack of autonomy and there's a lack of recognition, as I said, but there's also a lack of opportunity for like an intellectual life of some sort. And I think that's really important. That's like the central thing that when we talk about the kind of boredom of domestic labor there. And it's really interesting actually that like, what was the response to that? You know, when second wave feminism came around, we've talked about this lots of times before, of course, but like, you know, the core organizational mechanism for that was a consciousness raising group, precisely because it was like, it was the way to overcome the isolation of the individualized housewife.

And it was a way to engage in collective intellectual practice. Well, I mean, we're obviously very pro-consciousness raising group, but I also think that like that is the experience of being individualized, et cetera, of being isolated in various different ways and also being like separated from collective intellectual production. That is a pretty widespread condition now. Do you know what I mean? Which is why I do think that consciousness raising groups are, that sort of practice is something that we really do need to pick up. Do you know what I mean? It's something that can be transported from the experience of the housewife and the way to get out of it to our own experiences, our own particular experiences of boredom. Yeah, I really agree. What Nadia was saying is incredibly useful.

I mean, the bored housewife, like that was the cliche. The bored housewife is a cliche phrase. And that was the thing which, as much as anything else, that's what women's liberation was a revolt against, that condition of boredom. And I think historically that's really important. I mean, we've already alluded to on this episode quite a lot of these debates around what is driving historical transitions between, you know, Fordism between the 30s and 70s and then post-Fordism between the 70s and 2000s and to platform capitalism. And I think lots of people listening will know this, but lots of people will not or benefit from having it spelled out. I mean, a big intellectual influence on all of us is the sort of, you know, the autonomous Marxist tradition from Italy.

I would say it has quite a similar approach to some British Marxists like E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, which really stresses the extent to which these big changes in the nature of capitalism, they don't just come about because capitalists decide to change things or just because capitalists are competing with each other tends to be this kind of orthodox American Marxist assertion that it's all just capitalists competing with each other that produce these changes. This perspective I'm talking about tends to say, no, a lot of the time capitalists are having to adapt their practices to the ways in which various social groups, especially workers, organise to defend their own interests and make social demands, which capitalists find it very difficult to meet. There's a kind of variation on that theory or kind of addition to it, which I've been really committed to. Like I've given lectures to undergraduates about this, so one and off for years, but I've never written anything about it and I've never found anyone really write it down. So I think it's really, I think it is women's dissatisfaction with the full dissettlement in the 50s and 60s. It is a really key to driving that. Insofar as this Marxist tradition or neo-Marxist tradition conceptualizes it, it conceptualizes it in terms of workers, workers in the factories, finding ways to be disobedient, like demanding shorter hours, skiving off work, getting into the counterculture, calling wildcat strikes.

demanding workers control and this sort of thing. And the argument is that is what drives capitalists eventually to develop all these technologies from container shipping to just-in-time ordering to global communications networks, which basically makes it possible to shut down loads of factories in difficult places like Italy or Britain or across the States and kind of move manufacturing elsewhere and automate loads of it. And I think what's really understudied is the extent to which it's not just that, it's specifically the fact that women do not, especially after the experience of a degree of emancipation in the 20s, in the great period of modernism, and after the experiences of wartime as well, they will not tolerate. this kind of restoration and this recreation of the role of the bored housewife. They're bored and they're frustrated. To me, that's really manifested in some of the most interesting cultural productions of the time. Doris Lessing's novels like The Golden Notebook, the greatest British film of all time, A Taste of Honey. These are all kind of expressions of this frustration that women are experiencing at that time, which I think ends up being a real driver of historic change. And it is as much as anything about boredom. It's about being forced into this condition of boredom and wanting to escape from it. And that's not...

That's not a non-materialist critique from that perspective, because from that perspective, that struggle for emancipation from boredom is exactly also a struggle for economical autonomy, a struggle for collective agency, all those things at the same time. And so what was the sanctioned patriarchal solution for that in the United States in the 1950s? Mother's little helper, give the ladies some valium. So that's really interesting of like how you take the condition of boredom and therefore the frustration and potential collectivity and emancipation, and you just dull it, right? You give it a downer.

so that you make it more difficult for women to be able to organize and express their frustration. Yeah, but also a precursor of the more generalized condition of people self-medicating. with all sorts of things to cope with the stresses of the sensory life. That's a really good point. The Valium-prescribed housewife just anticipates the Prozac-prescribed everybody in the 80s and 90s. Are we anti-drugs on this? I can't remember. We're straight-edged. Didn't you get the memo? Did you not get that memo? This is now a straight-edged podcast. Drugs are bad, okay. Can I add a quote from Antonio Negri? In the 70s, he says,

a big autonomous Marxist theory. The discovery that workers were smoking marijuana on the assembly lines of Alfa Romeo was as important as discovering that workers' struggle drives capitalist development. That was acid negri. I think he went back on that. I think he'd been smoking a bit himself. We're talking about housewives being prescribed Valium, the most famous Valium being the brand name for diazepam when marketed by the pharmacy school company Roach.

Obviously, the most famous song about that is The Stoned, Mother's Little Helper. But the best song about that is, of course, from 1980, Manchester's greatest, The Fall. This is the Roach Rumble. Roach! There's one more perspective on boredom before we move on to the contemporary, or at least in contemporary Western world. And that's the perspective of Australian Lebanese anthropologist called Ghassan Hajj, who's actually from Baabda in Lebanon at the time of recording, is currently being bombed, or at least it was yesterday. So Ghassan Hajj has this kind of interesting theory. I mean, it would make sense to many of us, but I thought it's interesting how he encapsulates it, which is this idea of boredom, you know, migrants, refugees, and the unemployed youth is not actually about not having something to do. It's what he calls stuckness.

which is groups of people in society being forced to wait long periods, you know, not for the bus, et cetera, but for political and economic systems, right? So what that looks like is things like waiting for a visa, waiting for a job, waiting for some kind of bureaucracy to allow their life to move forward. And it's kind of different, he says, from a kind of middle-class experience, which he is saying is about comfort or too much free time, necessarily. I mean, we can debate that. We have been. But he's saying, and this is the key thing here, which is interesting to come...

back to, you know, the housewives in the 1950s example, is a lack of agency. So he's making a relatedness to between boredom and a lack of agency because the time that you've got, that you're stuck in, is not your own, right? And so it's your idea of the future. And again, we might want to talk about the futures again here. It's kind of on pause because of institutions, because of borders and things like this. So he basically politicizes it and says, okay, it's about power structures and who gets to move life forward and who is forced to kind of be stuck behind. And I thought that was an interesting piece of research to bring forward. I don't want to like first world problems this, but that sort of like in shitification of everything, you know, part of the thing of that is...

introduction of like you know the contemporary forms of bureaucracy basically which are basically figured by the call center you know that like being put on hold for like you know however so so long getting through to somebody some perhaps like these days that like you know a machine etc like where where basically everything you said before is gone and disappeared etc you know i mean it's like it's almost kafka-esque bureaucracy but like kafka-esque in like you know, that you experience on the phone listening to Muzak. I'm not comparing that to the sorts of conditions that stateless people have when they're waiting for their documents. It's Kafka plus Beckett, right? Because it's also absurd, right? It's both things at the same time. Because I think the difference there in terms of like the old bureaucracy, I'm not saying old bureaucracy was perfect, guys. So I'm not that person. But at least, you know, the intention behind the system was to kind of solve the problem. Whereas the intention behind a lot of the bureaucratic systems that exist that we all have to engage with today is to fob you off. Like that is the point of why they exist, is to kind of stop you from being able to get any kind of answer or justice. So it's kind of...

double frustrating in a sense. So I would see that as more frustrating than boring, but yeah, I take your point. Contemporary bureaucracy tends to be more privatized. So it's a private company and, you know, it's linked to that bullshitization thing because basically, you know, they're all monopolies or oligopolies. It's like, oh yeah, well, you can either be on this platform or that platform, you know, like a streaming service or whatever. You know what? They're both a shit, so we don't give a fuck about your own experience or any of this sort of stuff. What choice have you got? That's the lack of agency thing that comes about. But I like that idea of like boredom through stuckness or waiting, et cetera, because it also relates to like more simple forms of boredom.

what you experienced as a child. Do you know what I mean? That thing of like you're waiting for somebody to come along and like it's a lack of agency to be able to create something new or sometimes it's a prompt to create something new. That's the route out of border basically. Yeah, I think you're completely right. And I think what actually happens in a contemporary example is this idea of agency and how that agency is kind of displaced or materializes in a contemporary example. So you're standing at the bus stop, you are bored. What does everyone do these days? You take action. What does that action look like? You reach for your phone. So I think that's interesting how the scroll or the engaging with digital media, always the need for stimulation being like literally at your fingertips, it becomes a solution for the lack of agency.

I think that's what happens in the 21st century or in the late 21st century, I mean, where we are now, in fact, with the last 15 years with smartphones. So should we talk about, you know, how this relates to kind of anxiety and maybe some of the things that have been written about that? Well, let's just talk about this. We are all very anxious, this article by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, actually a guy from Nottingham, which Pansy published probably around like 2014. It's got a very interesting thesis and it relates to some of the stuff that Jen was saying earlier about Boltanski and Ciapello, their sort of critique. The argument is something like this, that every phase of capitalism, it has a sort of affect that goes along with it, a sort of dominant passive affect, basically. And so...

Early capitalism, the dominant affect is misery, basically. The misery of living in the new towns, et cetera, et cetera. In order to fight against that, the workers' movement creates machines for fighting misery, basically, both by trying to directly organise social life and almost directly organise social reproduction in the cities. If you think about the all-encompassing life of the socialist movement, particularly in Germany with the SPD before the First World War, but in Britain as well. Organised workers, cycling clubs, et cetera, these sorts of things, get yourself out of the misery of the cities, et cetera, et cetera.

And then the sort of like the affect, the dominant affect in the sort of four days period is this affect of boredom, which we've talked about. What tends to happen in the post-war period around the counterculture, et cetera, is this, we create machines for fighting boredom, basically, right? These sort of countercultural machines, these sorts of things. And then he says, you know, what's the dominant affect that goes along with contemporary capitalism is anxiety, basically. Anxiety that, you know, we don't have the power to influence our lives, et cetera, et cetera. You know, that we're isolated individuals who happen to face the world and it's huge, huge problems as individuals or perhaps as families, et cetera.

this increasing precarization of work, the precarity of work, precarious nature of like renting, et cetera. All of this stuff just builds up these sort of anxiety disorders or low level anxiety. And the argument that was put forward in this article was that the left is still too focused on fighting, you know, post-war 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s conception of boredom, right? You know what I mean? And this is sort of like a critique perhaps of things such as reclaim the streets and these sorts of things, you know, this sort of creative protest, all that sort of stuff. The answer actually that the Institute for Precarious Consciousness comes up with, it says, look, you know, we need to...

He does make this argument. He says that we need a consciousness raising group. We need to learn from the second wave feminist movement of how to get out of isolation, et cetera. You know, the consciousness raising group should be focused on our shared condition of anxiety and precariousness. And that's the precondition for any other sort of action.

I think we've problematised that a little bit on this show by thinking that boredom is not gone. In fact, boredom has changed shape in many ways. A lot of the countercultural practices that developed in response to this, even stuff like punk, et cetera, where shock was used as a way of escaping from the boredom and the conformity of the classic 40s post-war period, a lot of that repertoire, I think, is defunct. That whole provocation and shock and all that sort of stuff. If anything, it's been captured by the rights. So I do think he's right in that sort of way. But I think there is a different form of boredom, which I think that boredom is much more that idea of like, literally everything is boring, you know, when you get out into the public sphere, et cetera. Like social media is fucking boring. Do you know what I mean? Nature isn't boring. Nature isn't boring. This conversation is not boring. Well, that's not for us as attorney. The real world is not boring for us.

That's just the mediated world. It's bullshit. It's a mediated world, but it's also like boring dystopia that we were talking about earlier. You know what I mean? The like built environment, et cetera. The environments, the architecture in which we're supposed to wander around and all this sort of stuff is boring. It's the same. There's no variation. There's no creativity in that. Do you know what I mean? But we don't experience it as like empty boredom. It's not the boredom of like the 1970s and 80s youth in which like TV stops at like whatever it was, half past 11 or something like that. You know, nothing was like literally nothing was open on a Sunday. Do you know what I mean? That sort of like empty boredom, which was a stir to creativity. Instead we have boredom.

We have a boredom of like being distracted all the time. Our attention is constantly distracted. So it's not empty. It's filled, but it's like filled by this sort of like meaningless distraction, which can feel like a form of boredom. If you ask me, I think it was called like, everything is boring, but no one's bored because we're not allowed to be bored because the constant, our attention is constantly distracted. And yet, you know, where's the interest? Where's the creativity? Where is our ability to influence the world?

I think everything you're saying is right. I think with an article like that, Institute for Precarious Consciousness 1, you know, it's always going to be possible to unpick it. I mean, the idea there's like one dominant effect per phase is always going to be easy to problematise. I still think it, I think there's something very insightful about it. I think it was really helpful in kind of illuminating the sense of what is different indeed from the shift from Fordism and the way it produces boredom and post-Fordism and the way it produced anxiety. Although, of course...

You've got to say, that wasn't a new observation. I mean, people like Richard Sennett in his book, The Corrosion of Character, had been talking about how post-Fordism was making everybody anxious. I mean, people have been talking about that since the 80s. But the contrast with boredom being like the main focus of critique and resistance was really useful. Partly what's going on is like, the question is, well, what's the site of boredom? Because under Fordism, it was work primarily. Work becomes really boring. It becomes routinized, becomes bureaucratized, becomes institutionalized. Of course, that's partly because people have wanted it to become more boring because before that, it was terrifying. So the site of work becomes boring and youth really...

you know, there's very specific historical conditions which mean that youth are bored because youth are either going out to work very young or if they're not going out to work a lot of the time, like when they're not in school or in college, there isn't that much of them to do. actually what's happened is young people have been protected from work they're not having to go out to work as young as they did in the past but there isn't really anything else for them to do a lot of the time now so they're wandering the streets or going to youth clubs with very low resources and this sort of thing so and obviously no one's really going to say like boredom's gone obviously once you start digging into it you're talking about modulations of boredom and modulations of anxiety and modulations of other things but i do think there is a sort of truth in it there's a recognizable truth and i also but i also think ultimately that that was that essay was writing about post-fordism it was a long it was years ago now That was about post-forwardism. It wasn't about platform capitalism. I mean, maybe hyper-anxiety is still the effect of platform capitalism, but I also have a sense that, in a sense, the notion of anxiety seems almost kind of banal compared to the levels of paranoia and fear that people are now experiencing that is now normal. I think anxiety was the condition of post-forwardism and the post-forwardist labour market. It was a labour market in which everyone was insecure, and jobs, individual jobs were insecure, but actual rates of unemployment were pretty low.

So you could never really feel comfortable that you were settled into a job for a long time, but you probably were going to get another one when you inevitably lost this one. But that is not where things are now, especially for young people. Now we're in a situation where things are much more challenging. If anything, things are returning to some amplified version of 19th century capitalism. maybe it's banal to look for like, as I've already suggested it would be, to look for like one affect that names it all. But the sense that, you know, the shift from postmodern to platform capitalism, I mean, certainly according to my model, you know, I'm one of the big advocates for that as an analytical model, is it's not that everything changes, it's that some things get really amplified, some things change, some things get reversed, you know, the outcomes are kind of uneven. So clearly loads of people still experience loads of anxiety, but it's almost, like I say, it seems like that's almost a banal term for what people are having to endure in terms of fear for the future.

and um but it's still a useful it's still a useful model and it's still the case that yeah boredism boredism but boredom is sort of part of it i don't know if it is actually i don't know because like we're coming now full service what we talked about at the top of the show and i think especially if we're talking about young people however expansive we want the term to be and however much we want to modulate it i don't think boredom can be useful as a term for naming what they're experiencing and i think there is this sense that in fact it's never as i said earlier never having the experience of anything you could really recognize as bored partly because you know anxiety has been ramped up to levels where you can't even feel bored like borders can't be the term what you experience the level of frustration that you're experiencing now that i think is a problem because i think i do think historically that experience of boredom it was part of an affective regime i would as i would put it a kind of set of interlocking and overlapping structures of feeling you might put it that also that produced like huge stimulated and produced huge amounts of creativity i mean that creativity was also dependent on material circumstances but you know it was that experience of being really bored as a teenager that pushed loads of people you know into the art schools and the art schools were getting loads of funding from the state and you could just go and like spend five years like fucking around figuring out something to do and get a band out of it or get a film out of it or something like that it produced that produced extraordinary sort of creativity and i do i do think that experience of boredom was really necessary i mean we've talked about this before i mean for me there's no question i don't if i'd been able to just play computer games with my

mates on a platform i don't know what would have happened to me like my like everything everything about who i'm everything that everyone likes about me publicly and i'm not saying i know lots of people hate me lots of people in different but there are plenty of people listening to this show there are things i do that they like and everything i do that people like out there is totally dependent upon me having this experience for about 10 years of my life when i was really bored and basically the only thing to do half the time is go down the library and find a book to look at so there's like nothing else to do and if i've been if i've been able to play like roblox with my mates i would have done and i wouldn't have done any of that i don't know where i'd been and i think to me that is sort of a terrifying thought I want to just emphasize on that as well. It's like, particularly when I was growing up, the object of life was to be an interesting person. It's so important to me that you would be interested in things. Do you know what I mean? And have obsessions and these sorts of things and be interested in the world and all of that sort of stuff, which was a reaction to this fear of boredom, I think, or the experience of boredom. I never thought about any of those things. But you're younger than us, aren't you? No, I don't think it's just that. I just think it's the kind of person I am. And I think it's how I grew up in the environment. I don't think it's anything to do with age. I also think it's slightly to do with gender. It's never, ever something that I've worried about, about being too boring for people.

It's not a fear of being boring or a fear of being bored, I think, but like a sort of valorisation of like being an interesting person. Okay, we seem to have ended up choosing a lot of guitar rock of various kinds for this episode. So let's hear a bit of classic British Electro Pop from 1991. The Pet Shop Boys, a classic elegy to the idea of a boredom-free adolescent being boring. I mean, this leads us to a question here of like, should we be demanding the right to boredom? Should we be demanding empty time, basically? You can see things which are sort of like people,

almost gesturing towards that, like the need for a right to boredom. People talk about like raw dogging, raw dogging bustions or raw dogging flights or whatever. It's this idea that like, you know, you live in this hyper-stimulated world where your attention is constantly being grabbed by algorithms you're not in control of, etc. The key there is that it's the norm. The key with the argument is that the assumption is that the norm is you have no control over your attention. So it is a challenge to be able to control it, which is the interesting bit, right? Yeah, totally. And it's also that thing of...

Well, we come back to where we started, haven't we, basically. You need to sort of learn how to, like, you know, read books these days. You know what I mean? And be able to, like, you know, basically go through things which aren't immediately giving you stimulation. Do you know what I mean? And that includes, like, long, boring French films and these sorts of things. I think there is some sort of yearning towards having that empty space to some degree. Empty time as well. Empty time I meant to say, really. Yeah, I don't think we'd disagree with this, would we? We'd have to say, I mean, any element of a contemporary socialist project is partly wanting to restore some things that have been taken away.

And maybe that would be, I mean, ideally what we want, this is the politics of the dialectic in a way, we want to construct a situation in which young people in particular, at least they are free from the forms of anxiety and worse than anxiety that are inflicted by spending all their time on capitalist-owned platforms and living in a hyper-competitive education system and a high-competitive and very insecure labour market. so that they do feel once again like we did when we were younger, like they are free to experience some empty time. But at the same time, I don't want them to have to be subject to the kind of boredom that I was. I want them still to be able to listen to all the music in the world, like at the touch of a bar, and I want them to be able to get every book in the world on their phone. I just want them to be able to have the attention to them to sit and read it instead of flicking onto Instagram every two seconds. And all of those things are achievable, I think, but they are only achievable by virtue of some very concerted political struggle to take control of all those technologies and to democratise them and make them useful.

Now, dear listener, we're going to reveal what our strategy has been all along. The reason we've been doing two and a half hour podcasts is that we are training you for a world in which there is a right to be bored.