There is a perfect coincidence of ceaseless activity and boredom. Today this fact is easy to miss. The people who talk about the effects of new media lament that the smartphone has done away with boredom, especially for kids, and that we can no longer tolerate being alone with our thoughts. We’ve come to prefer distraction. But while this observation is true enough, it also risks obscuring what is more fundamental and obvious: online “activity” is a decision for boredom and against actual activity.
One of the conditions of human action, including things like thinking, observing, wondering, and deliberating, is stillness, but boredom and stillness are no more the same thing than are holding one’s breath and being dead. Most fundamentally, frenetic activity, especially online, is an escape from taking action, and reaching for the phone in a moment of stillness is a decision against making decisions. Time spent consuming content leaves us similarly consumed, liberated from having to remember or anticipate, unburdened by algorithmic processes, personas, and infinite scrolling from being a self with agency. This kind of activity is more accurately called restless passivity. Most things that once might have taken their place as events of history are trivialized into what is trending. And somehow, because we cannot break the spell of the spectacle, we fail to notice that our fascination with its ceaselessness is in fact boredom.
By confusing restlessness with activity, stillness with boredom, and algorithmically directed attention with the recognition of historical significance, we have also fallen into an abusive relationship with time.
The time of restless activity slips through our fingers. What begins with a little notification becomes minutes and eventually hours. Time slips away because it has become time without bounds: an infinity of moments that are not grasped by any sort of eternity. Online it is always the present, but not the encompassing present of eternity. The timeline is everlasting but not eternal. The sense of what constitutes “now” shrinks more and more: one mustn’t be late to a trend. One must always be ready with smart commentary on the news of the moment.
This mode of existence is incompatible with permanence. Temporal things in this sphere do not find their significance relative to eternal things; there is no ultimate against which things are penultimate or preliminary. What Hannah Arendt said about entertainment, that it, “like labor and sleep, is irrevocably part of the biological life process,” that is, “a metabolism feeding on things by devouring them,” applies with greater force to life under the conditions of the timeline. To her observation that there “are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say,” we are in the awkward position of having to respond that the question has been unhappily closed.
The conversion of ultimate things into consumables fit for the metabolism of the timeline is, by definition, an abuse of those things. Neither the accuracy or inaccuracy of a theological or doctrinal point, nor the fidelity or infidelity of an interpretation, nor the rightness or wrongness of a moral argument overcomes this most basic problem. And despite our protests to the contrary, we already know this is the problem we face: whenever we work hard to ensure that a matter of self-evident importance is exciting or entertaining or catchy, we have already admitted, if only inadvertently, that the problem we face is that this important thing is, in the world of consumption, boring. And the tragic irony, of course, is that it is our willingness to convert ultimate things into consumables that has ensured any discussion of them with integrity has become intolerable to those whose mode of existence is consumption.
In response to this problem, Christians have retreated into online ghettos where they can maintain the illusion they are engaged in serious discourse, and the result is noticeable homogeneity of perspective that risks becoming so boring one fears it may kill its participants. In other words, Christian discourse under the conditions of the algorithm is inherently self-refuting sola forma, by form alone, regardless of its ostensible content: it is a performative contradiction because the implicit or explicit ultimacy of its claims is already excluded by virtue of turning itself into junk food for the internet’s insatiable hunger. Regardless of what side one takes in the culture wars, a Christian perspective offered in the form of a consumable for the metabolism of the timeline has already capitulated to the culture of the world.
Again, sensing this problem, the online Christian’s response has been to join in on the fun—and I can’t deny that it’s fun because, whatever else it may be, it’s definitely fun—of having something to say about what is trending, hoping in vain to reassert the relevance of the Christian faith after having subverted it. The algorithm dictates what the Christian has to say, putting the Christian message in a position of perpetual reaction. And it has spilled from social media into real life, ruining, among other things, Christian preaching, too much of which has become this same predictable commentary. The net effect is that the vast majority of Christian discourse has become only tangentially theological but overwhelmingly moralistic. Were, God forbid, a person to receive his or her Christian catechesis online, he or she might never get around to noticing that the ultimate horizon of the Christian life is the forgiveness of sins and the promise that the hell we’ve made of our lives is redeemable, the gift of knowing that despite the unpredictability and randomness of life and the evils we suffer, most especially death, God speaks the last word, and that word is his love for us and the resurrection of his Son, and therefore that this life is full of meaning despite its apparent absurdity. No, catechized online, this imaginary wretch would be fully armed with moral opinions on the algorithmically determined news of the day and would be an intolerable, predictable bore—like a parrot rewarded with crackers for saying “virtue” or “feminism.”
Lest I be misunderstood, I am not saying that Christians have nothing to say about what is happening in the world or that they should not say it online or on time—claims which would make this argument its own performative contradiction. Neither am I saying that I have not been guilty of the thing I am attacking. Rather, I am saying the Christian must recover a relationship to time and to activity that is not normed by the metabolism of the internet and must therefore also contradict this metabolism. The Christian must recover a more robust and longer lasting sense of “now.” The Christian must remember that frenetic, restless passivity of the internet is boring and confront boredom with a perspective that is actually interesting—rooted in a larger history, distinctive, not predictable, not offered for the sole purpose of exciting and eliciting the praise of other Christian social media users.
As with many tragic cases, the ostensible solution Christians have been running towards is in fact the very problem they ought to be running from. Christians have come to fear their irrelevance and marginalization, and so they’ve embraced a mode of existence that all but guarantees their worst fears will be realized. Conveniently, the solution is simple enough: embrace stillness, take time, think, read, deliberate, and then, when the moment is right, strike.
"Stillness and boredom are no more the same thing than holding one's breath and being dead." Amen. This whole piece was beautifully written and spot on. Thank you.