what was boredom? [pt 1]

on "2:30 AM at a 7-11 near Disney World - 1987"

When people notice they’re bored, they stop being bored.

- May ‘68 graffiti

For a long time I’ve wanted to write in a boring way about what boredom was. Or, if there ever was something called “boredom,” whether it can still exist. 

Was boredom pure waste, or was there a gift within it? Was boredom “counterrevolutionary” as the Situationists proclaimed? Or is it something absolutely necessary? Could the above slogan be reversed – when we notice we are no longer bored, and haven’t been bored for so long, can we become bored again? Is it too late for boredom?

When I think of boredom I think first of the YouTube video “2:30 AM at a 7-11 near Disney World - 1987.” I think of the word Debord (but pronounced “De-Bored”) of Debord (the person not the word) scribbling over a comic strip, of someone trolling the comments section. In other words, writing, or whatever excess writing still is now that this work has been handed off to work itself out:

Is this still boredom when I begin at the altar of the chatbot? Is this still boredom I’m feeling when I read the bot’s canned answer, which, like the comments section of the video, includes boring words like values, communities, change? 

Like the comments section, which I’ll deal with later, the bot mostly describes a video that doesn’t exist. Fictional details like the anonymous author and the establishing shot of the parking lot set the bot’s imagined video at a distance from the real one – and yet, uncannily, not far enough apart to be essentially wrong. Perhaps, like the comment section, the title of the video was enough to generate this content, a title which announces it as an alibi for the working out of a plausible set of concerns. This automatism represents maybe a first definition of boredom, an incuriosity like that of my students who use the bot, like that of the commenters on the Youtube video, which results in tautological writing, what is already well-known repeating itself, plausibly and competently, to infinity.

In the real video, there are three boys, possibly stoned, who laugh and interview customers one by one for just under nine minutes. The night manager is smoking stoically (indoors!) and watching, while his girlfriend, who seems drunk, laughs and dances before the camera. The cashier laughs too, tolerant of their antics, sagely appreciating the flourishes of youth. Several customers come in and engage with the boys, sometimes goofily, sometimes standoffishly, sometimes with a flicker of mistrust, but largely amiably and un-self-consciously. For nine minutes encounters follow one another in an intoxicated/-ing dance of warmth and spontaneity. At one point the filmmakers and some customers burst into song: “it’s a small world after all.”

Whatever I feel about the boys, I return to this video again and again, in an attempt to remember what boredom felt like. In some ways the video reminds me of many I once made when bored as a (pre/)teen, on an early handheld digital camera. One of those videos (circa 2005) begins with a shot of me and my friend Ryan in his bedroom, sitting across from each other in a surreal tableau, neither looking at the camera nor at each other. The wall behind us is a deep blue, and the shutters are closed (it is night), our faces shot slightly from below and lit with a harsh indoor light. “I’m bored,” he says, with affectless delivery. “Me too,” I reply. “What should we do?” “Let’s make a montage.” “OK.” Cue music: “Everybody plays the fool” by The Main Ingredient.

Like my own early movies, the 7/11 video was shot on home video in a prelapsarian world before user-generated content, and its original audience was whoever was involved in filming it. However, the 7/11 video was digitized and uploaded to Youtube in 2007, quickly going viral as a window into a bygone era. Most of its fans are younger people born long after the video was created, who lament what they imagine of a time before smartphones and the alienation they engender:

The takeaway of this video’s 7 million viewers seems to be about social disintegration in the near 40 years since the video was shot, that this melancholy feeling we get when watching this video, its punctum, is actually grief at the death of a kind of unmediated sociality. Or the way people acted on camera before they knew the world would actually see it. Almost none of the comments mentions boredom.

When I watch this video, though, what I see is not true sociality at all though, but pure diversion and simulation. The boys in the video anticipate a future in which a 7/11 near Disney World can become absorbed in the spectacle of Disney World, but as this future does not yet exist, the desire is expressed through play. The paradox of the video is that it was always meant to be a Youtube video - the sociality expressed in the 7/11 is not true friendliness but a kind of protean desire for a life that is more spectacular, and therefore less boring. They are interviewing people as a joke, but the joke lands – these people are game to play along in the fantasy of existing before an audience, because this is their deepest and most secret desire – to become part of a spectacle. This is the fertile soil for the later technologies mourned by the comments section – the technologies gave us the diversion that was already practiced, as an avant garde expression of play, in this 7/11 dissolving in the acidically expanding borders of Disney World. 

Like a half-remembered text by the Situationists, ChatGPT’s essay anticipates this line of thought, speaking correctly of consumers who are “part of the spectacle” of “everyday life.” Readymade insight, chatgpt fodder. So boredom is inseparable from the diversions of the spectacle - is that all? Or is this just a species of boredom, boredom as the lassitude that expresses a lived tension between the spectacular “real” and the comparatively boring “unreality” of everyday life? Is it possible to extricate boredom from this boring binary and get to the deeper boredom below it?

In the 2014 essay/manifesto “We Are All Very Anxious” by a group calling themselves the “Institute for Precarious Consciousness” within the UK organizing group Plan C, the anonymous authors sketch out a history of capitalism’s symptomatic affects. The first phase of industrial capitalism, they say, resulted in a predominant affect of immiseration, and political struggle coalesced around combatting this misery. In the postwar period of post-industrial capitalism, they write, the predominant affect was boredom - a stable sense that survival had been won but at the expense of a life truly worth living - and the tactics of mid-to-late 20th century activism were directed against this boredom. The authors go on to show that although political organizing continues to follow this paradigm, capitalism has moved on to a new, more precarious phase whose predominant symptom is a ubiquitous anxiety. 

The same year the manifesto was published, the once-teenaged filmmakers of the original “7/11 near Disney World” video returned to the 7/11 to make a long-awaited follow-up video, “Almost 11pm at a 7-11 near Disney World - 2014.” The boys, now aging Gen-X’ers with children of their own, interview a series of seemingly dazed, overworked, and over-medicated customers, who shuffle through the convenience store and reply with polite but clipped non-answers. As Plan C writes, the post-Fordist loss of social/economic safety has led to a pervasive emotional precarity in which “all forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety.”  

The sheen of safety has worn off even near Disneyland, and the camera’s eye presents little more than a threat, no longer an invitation into the fantasy of a spectacle but now an implication in a very real surveillance. The manager, like everyone else, answers the filmmakers’ questions flatly, nervous for the interview to be over. 

“It was a magic night in america 27 years ago,” the cameraman narrates with relish, presenting the thesis of the video: “tonight, not so much.”

The video’s comments narrate through similar jeremiads the viewers’ more immediate experiences of what Plan C describes - the joy of the social is gone, now there is nothing but nervous, shifting quasi-solitude. No one seems to comment on the fact that the video having being made and uploaded in the first place is just as much a sign of this degeneration… the once-bored teenagers, shooting a film for their own misguided pleasure, are now putting themselves in the humiliating position of full-grown adults dragging their children to a 7/11 to interview strangers for Youtube likes. The immediacy of boredom has been replaced here too with a kind of anxiety, not that of the surveilled but that of the self-surveilled, as Plan C writes, the “deliberate and ostensibly voluntary self-exposure” in which selfhood is now anxiously constructed.

The only ones in the video who seem to display any unmediated boredom are the children of these adult Youtubers, who wait on top of a pile of water bottles. They look shy and uncomfortable when the camera is trained on them, reclining awkwardly, the boy in an awkward black fedora (clearly a preteen experiment), his sister (or friend?) in an oversized Adventure Time t-shirt. “Is it time to go home?” one of them asks. “No one cares about the 80s anymore.” 

But upon a second viewing, even this boredom begins to show its cracks: the replies of the children are clearly scripted, lines fed to them by their fathers. They are sweetly obliging, but it’s hard not to see that their uncomfortability lies in an uneasy attempt to embody their fathers’ desires – that is, their fathers’ desires to recreate a boredom which they themselves no longer possess – and which in fact may no longer be possible.

This filmic recreation of boredom calls to mind Guy Debord’s 1959 film, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps. The film, which can also be accessed on Youtube, begins with a still of Debord & co (Jorn, Bernstein) drinking and smoking in a bar with the narration: “[these streets] would the external setting of our story, where a few people have put into practice a systemic questioning of all the works and diversions of a society, a total critique of its notion of happiness.” A story with an internal and external setting, whose internal setting is the bar, the bar of questioning, the bar of “a few people.” That is, of friends.

This masterpiece of Situationist self-marketing travels wildly after this through collaged ideas and images, but returns several times to this bar: the bar as a site of friendship, the movement really a movement of friendship: the film which records this friendship becoming a spectacle, then, of the Friends Situation, the Friends Experience.

Sometime last year I noticed that the building across from the school where I work hosts a space called The FRIENDS Experience. For several months I took a series of selfies in front of this space, enjoying the lyric qualities of the name. There were often many people lined up outside, waiting eagerly for their Experience.

I often wondered what could drive people to stand in line for the Friends Experience. Is this all the evidence we need that Plan C is right – a true epidemic of anxiety and loneliness, manifested in the hunger for a Friends Experience at any cost? I’ve never seen FRIENDS, so I can’t really say. But watching Debord’s film, I think I understand what it feels like to wait outside for your Experience. I want to be inside that bar with these drunk Situationists, to be alongside them for this “systematic questioning of all the works and diversions of a society.” 

Debord is, of course, aware that he’s creating his own spectacle, and plays along. The film’s only tracking shot, which begins with a sullen young woman with short hair carrying a bottle of champagne to a long table of co-conspirators, then pans down the length of the table, is cut with bold intertitles that look like they could be taken from an action film trailer. The young people at the table drink together seriously, sullen and bored, resisting diversions together. Meanwhile, the film’s narrator warns that “the ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment ‘everyday life’ may prevail again.” The intertitle declares: “A tale of suspense!” This situation, then, is being captured at the unstable point of its potential (or already-happened?) reabsorption into so-called ‘everyday life,’ at the point where its resistance to the diversions of a society becomes another diversion. 

Later on in the film, after a proto-new-wave montage of newsreels and advertisements with philosophical voiceover, the shot reappears, the young woman at the bar returns to the table with her wine bottle, suggesting an eternally recurring moment, suggesting monotony, suggesting re-creation. The voiceover: “Of course, one might make a film about it. But even if that film succeeded in being as fundamentally incoherent and unsatisfying as the reality it dealt with, it could never be more than a recreation, as impoverished and false as this botched tracking shot.” After this is spoken, the shot continues in silence, panning over the table. But for a moment, the camera swings a bit in the wrong direction as it moves, revealing for a split second a crowd of people standing outside the bar, who are clearly not supposed to be in the scene but are rather bar patrons who have been cleared out expressly for this scene and are now watching the film set with curiosity. The woman in front in her apron could be an employee, raising questions of class. The moment of recreating this spectacle of boredom has itself become a diversion - the ghostly spectators outside the bar situation prefiguring the customers in the 7/11 Situation, prefiguring the spectators waiting in line outside the Friends Experience, prefiguring us (ok, me) watching enviously from outside the Situationist Friends Experience.

By turning something “fundamentally incoherent and unsatisfying” into a spectacle Debord perhaps shows us the way boredom is never pure boredom, but is unstable, always threatening to give way entertainment or diversion. This fundamental incoherence and dissatisfaction is too difficult to sustain itself for long within the general entertainment-reality, as Byung Chul Han writes in his book Good Entertainment:

Entertainment… [in its] apparently infinite capacity for incorporation: ‘info-tainment,’ ‘edutainment,’ ‘servotainment,’ ‘confrotainment,’ ‘docu-drama’ ... has been raised to a new paradigm, to a new formula of world and being. In order to be, in order to belong to the world, it is necessary to be entertaining. Only the entertaining is real or true. The distinction between fictional and real reality, which Luhmann’s concept of entertainment cleaves to, is no longer relevant. Reality itself appears to be an effect of entertainment. 

Debord et al decried boredom as counterrevolutionary because of its passivity, the way that it turns workers and potential revolutionaries into consumers of pacifying ideological entertainment. But maybe it’s the very difficulty of resisting diversion, which Debord already recognized then, and which now before the enormous weight and power of diversion has become almost impossible, that takes away its passivity and makes it an activity - becoming bored. Bore-ing. Let’s get bored.

Now that the beach has been removed from beneath the street and the street is the beach, that diversion has been implanted into every facet of human experience in a pervasive entertainment-scape that takes up every waking minute, even stealing into the work-/art-/education-day, it no longer makes sense at all to say as the Situationists did that play is an end goal, revolutionary in itself. Play may still be part of what’s necessary now that we are all very anxious, but a more important step might just be getting back to boredom, to the lived time of boredom in which minutes could actually go by without “satisfying.” As active a push as possible against diversion, though, and an attempt to create some new (that is, recreate old) temporalities from which something real can be born. If we are all very anxious it’s at least partly because we no longer live in time, the monotonous boredom of minutes, an “incoherence” from which narratives (including revolutionary narratives) can emerge. 

I wonder if boredom (and time) is still there waiting for us, the boredom beneath the street. Can we get back to it? Can we return to the 7/11 before the 7/11 near Disneyworld in 1987. A true 7/11 where the Friends Experience didn’t need to have a name yet, where there didn’t need to be 7/11 Situations because 7/11 just was the situation?