MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | DOING NOTHING/NOTHING DOING | SPRING 2026

The Anxiety of Inertia and the Spirituality of Idleness in the Age of A.I.

Donna Haraway’s iconic 1985 essay Cyborg Manifesto asserts that “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” Decades (four, to be precise) before the rollout of mass generative A.I., Haraway was both worried and seemingly resigned to the notion that “doing nothing” may be part of what makes us human in the technoscientific age. If A.I. has left us with nothing to do, how is it possible to do something worthwhile while doing nothing? This talk analyzes viral and memetic practices of digital inattention such as “analogue bags” full of knitting, paper novels, crosswords, and other ways to “stop scrolling,” the deadpan affect channeled by the “Gen Z stare,” A.I. brainrot media, and the TikTok trend of “rawdogging reality” by doing nothing for half an hour at a time (and recording it) as vernacular resistance to compulsory digital attention. This paper reads these practices of idleness and the human through representations of Asian meditation in Korean video artist Nam June Paik’s 1974 “TV Buddha” in order to trace the shaping of attention and the management of the anxiety of inertia across time and space

Doing Nothing/Nothing Doing
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