On Anton Jäger’s 'Hyperpolitics'

In a 2014 blog post titled “No One is Bored, Everything is Boring,” the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher refined the suggestion that the dominant affect of the twentieth century, boredom, had been replaced by the anxiety of the twenty-first. While capturing a certain shift from the tedium of Fordism to the precarity of post-Fordism—the “dreary void of Sundays” displaced by the saturation of capitalist cyberspace, and the stabilization of “top-down bureaucracy” supplanted by the oscillations of financial (mis)management—this schema nevertheless occluded the particular forms of languor characteristic of our new condition. This was the age of repetition and reboots, of listicles and overstimulation, in which the apparent innovations of neoliberal governance—having brutally suppressed its endogenous sources of opposition—amounted to little more than an overproduction of the trite. It was, in other words, a proliferation of activity that left much the same; the machine whirred on the same spot.