The inaugural Terminally Online symposium is built around the concept of Fatigue and how it relates to new media technologies, cultures, and experiences. New media and fatigue appear to have a concrete relationship which manifests in manifold ways (e.g., doomscrolling, burnout, environmental exhaustion) and operates in different domains. AI hype, attention economy, platform labor, gigwork, online subcultures, and networked conspiracy (to name a few), raise questions about how fatigue is (re-)produced, networked, and embodied at local and collective levels. How does fatigue shape emergent technology and the ways we grapple with it? Through these relations, how does fatigue contour our shared possibilities?  And to what extent have promises of change or resolution themself become fatigued?

Event Programme: 

16:00 – 16:50  Keynote by Geert Lovink

• Fatigue could be framed as one of many causes and expressions of techno-mental breakdown, from sadness, loneliness to anger, anxiety and burn-out. Remember Zoom fatigue? In this zombie state there is tiredness-without-reason. It is a never-ending fatigue. There’s this longing for physical exhaustion but we won’t get there. Like infinite scrolling, the endless stream of disasters provokes a desire for a resolute solution, but the escape button is impossible to find.

17:00 – 18:00  Weary/Wearisome Worlds: Student presentations of original research by Ruben Hazenbos, Shiyun Qian & Qingyu Yang, Maanvi Khurana

• Fatigue appears across a variety of encounters with new media technologies, from the precarious semiotics of the emoji, to aesthetic articulations of agency on Tumblr/TikTok, to the temporal distortion and existential impasse of ‘doomscrolling.’ These presentations offer three illustrations of how Fatigue is thoroughly immanent to new media in late-capitalism so that it comes to mark our communities of practice, online subcultures, and networked dispositions.

18:10 – 19:00  Fatigue Squared (I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired): roundtable with Misha Kavka, Jernej Markelj, and Marc Tuters (UvA faculty)

• Our conversation will kick-off by exploring the figuration of fatigue (how can we conceptualise fatigue?). Second, we will dive into the production of fatigue (e.g. is fatigue manufactured? who does it serve? what are the material conditions that produce it?). The panel will culminate in a collective reflection on the political potential of fatigue (e.g. can there be productive engagement with fatigue? How to move with fatigue? How can fatigue be employed as a mode of critique?).

19:00 – 20:00 Borrel!