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Overflowing email inboxes. Back-to-back Zoom meetings. Unending data extraction. Constant connectivity. Disruptive notification pings. Social media ‘addiction’. Binge-watching. Daily life in digital culture can be exhausting.
This timely and urgent edited collection takes the theme of ‘digital exhaustion’ as a starting point for critical inquiry into the ever-expanding presence of digital technologies in our personal and professional lives. We offer ‘exhaustion’ as a broad and versatile conceptual prism for thinking through human-technology relations in the current climate of constant digital connectivity.
Digital exhaustion - along with a range of other related affects and experiences, including burnout, Zoom fatigue, information overload, social media overuse, and bed rotting – have all emerged as key structures of feeling in the present. As digital technologies become increasingly entrenched in our daily lives the need to engage in sustained dialogue about digital futures and the ways that these technologies are being deployed, embraced, and opposed is of pressing importance. This edited collection is responsive to this need.
— Neta Alexander, assistant professor of film and media at Yale University and author of Interface Frictions
'While digital media positions us as users, it has become clear, especially since the pandemic, that we are the ones being used, and used up. This essential volume interrogates how the fatal combination of the internet and capitalism wears us down at work, school, and play, and how even its remedies turn into just another grind.'
— Gavin Mueller, assistant professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam and author of Breaking Things at Work (Verso 2021).
— Melissa Gregg, Professor of Digital Futures at the University of Bristol Business School.
A.R.E. Taylor is an anthropologist and senior lecturer in communications at the University of Exeter. His research concentrates on the material infrastructure and labour that underpins digital services, with a particular focus on the failure and breakdown of internet infrastructure. He is an editor for the Journal of Extreme Anthropology and a founder of the Cambridge Infrastructure Resilience Group, a network of researchers exploring critical infrastructure protection in relation to global catastrophic risks.
Linda Kopitz connects her professional experience as a creative director with her interdisciplinary academic work to explore the intersection between technology and imagination in everyday meaning-making. She is currently working as a lecturer in cross-media culture in the Netherlands and Germany, where her main research interests are architectural media and the entanglements between real and virtual environments. Bringing together her academic and editorial work, she is an assistant editor for the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Yiğit Soncul is senior lecturer in communications and media at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. His research spans media theory; visual and material culture; media and the environment. He is co-editor of a special issue of the journal parallax , on “Networked Liminality” (2020), and a special issue of Media Theory on “Pharmacologies of Media” (2022). He is also a co-editor of De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Cultures (2026).
Alexandra Kviat is lecturer in marketing and consumption at the University of Bristol Business School. She works across the fields of consumer and service research, cultural and media studies, urban sociology and human geography. Her interdisciplinary research projects have explored the relationship between digital technology, urban space and everyday consumption in the context of the hospitality, retail and leisure industries. Alexandra's work has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council, the University of Warwick Institute of Advanced Study and Chancellor's International Scholarship, and the Fulbright Program.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Preface
A.R.E. Taylor
1. Digital Exhaustion: An Introduction
A.R.E. Taylor, Linda Kopitz, Yiğit Soncul and Alexandra Kviat
SECTION I: PLATFORMS
2. The Email Charter: A Manifesto for Digital Humanity
A.R.E. Taylor
3. Work harder, not smarter: Passive Income and the Exhaustion of Influencer Labor
Grant Bollmer & Katherine Guinness
4. Do Hustlers Dream of Restful Sleep? The Digital Denial of Rejuvenation in an Age of Endless Work
Jamie Allen
5. Stepping Away from FIFA: An Autoethnographic Recollection of Burning Out Annually
Aditya Deshbandhu, Prashant Rai, and Baibhav Singh
6. Learning Management and the Production of Exhaustion: An Analysis of D2L Brightspace LMS
Mario Khreiche & Zhuoru Deng
SECTION II: PLACES
7. Fears of Exhaustion, Dreams of Resilience: The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act and the Cínovec Lithium Deposit
Johannes Bruder & Anastasia Kubrak
8. Exhausting Environments: Urban Installation(s) and the Green City
Linda Kopitz
9. Keep Calm and AmaZen: Materialities of Energy-as-Work in Digital Mindfulness Technologies
Natalia Stanusch
10. ‘Virtual Commute’ as Digital Remedy
Artur de Matos Alves & Ana Jorge
SECTION III: PRACTICES
11. Experimenting with Exhaustion: A Roundtable Conversation
The Fuck Healing (?) Collective and Linda Kopitz
12. Coaching Digital Minimalism: The Labour of Upkeeping Digital Media
by Ana Jorge and Patrícia Dias
13. Designated WIP Time: Craft Videos, Female Labour, and Online Communities of Care
Maryn Wilkinson
14. Touching Sounds: ASMR as a Digital Remedy
Yiğit Soncul
15. Digital Exhaustion and Human Rights Defenders
Siena Anstis
Coda: Z-mail
Steven B. Katz
Notes on Contributors
Index