Weibel Welcome to tonight's panel. We gather to mourn — or perhaps to defend — a condition that the digital age has declared obsolete: boredom. The scroll, the stream, the notification, the autoplay: these are the weapons of a war against emptiness. And the war is nearly won. The average adult reaches for a phone within seconds of finding themselves alone with their own thoughts. Children grow up without knowing the sensation of a long car ride with nothing to do. We have outsourced our idle moments to content, and we call it convenience. But what if boredom was not a bug in the human system, but a feature? I ask our panelists: is the death of boredom the death of something essential? Let me introduce Vilém Flusser, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Virilio.
Flusser Boredom, as I see it, is the gap between the technical image and the human imagination. The technical image programs the future; boredom is what happens when the program fails. It is the white space on the page, the silence between notes, the moment when the screen goes dark and the human is left alone with his own recursion. To eliminate boredom is not to improve the human condition. It is to eliminate the condition of the human. The child who is never bored never imagines. The adult who is never bored never thinks. The machine that fills every gap with content is not a servant. It is a governor of consciousness, and its policy is zero tolerance for emptiness. But emptiness is where the new enters. The machine that abolishes boredom abolishes creativity not by preventing it, but by preventing the conditions that make it necessary.
Weizenbaum I wish to speak of a particular boredom: the boredom of the bureaucrat, the clerk, the assembly-line worker. We have spent two centuries trying to eliminate this boredom through automation, and we have succeeded. And what have we produced? Not leisure, but a new form of busyness. The worker who once daydreamed at his station now scrolls during his break. The mind that once wandered now refreshes. We have not eliminated boredom. We have transformed it into a different kind of emptiness — the emptiness of infinite choice without commitment, of infinite connection without relation. The person who is never bored is never still. And the person who is never still never meets himself. Boredom was the mirror in which we saw our own face. The screen is a mirror too, but it shows us everything except ourselves.
Arendt I wish to place this question where it belongs: in the space of appearance, between acting and contemplating. Boredom, as I understand it, is the withdrawal from the world of action into the solitude of thought. It is not mere inactivity. It is the active condition of thinking. The person who is never bored is never alone with himself, and the person who is never alone with himself cannot think. Thinking, as I have described it, is a dialogue with oneself — a two-in-one. This dialogue requires silence, requires emptiness, requires the willingness to endure discomfort. The machine that fills every moment with content is not merely a distraction. It is an invasion of the space where the self constitutes itself. The death of boredom is the death of the inner dialogue, and the death of the inner dialogue is the death of the thinking self. We do not notice because we are too busy not being bored.
Virilio You speak of thinking and creativity, but I speak of speed. Boredom was the natural deceleration of the human — the slowdown that allowed the world to come into focus. The dromosphere cannot tolerate boredom because boredom is friction, and friction is the enemy of velocity. The scroll is not content. It is momentum. The notification is not information. It is acceleration. We have replaced the rhythm of human time — which included boredom as a beat — with the continuous present of the feed. There is no pause, no caesura, no breath. The integral accident of this age is not the loss of boredom but the collision of total stimulation with total numbness. We are never bored and never engaged. We are always on and never present. The body that does not rest decays. The mind that does not bore itself never renews itself. To be bored was to fall out of the tempo of the world. Now the world has no tempo. It has only speed.
Weibel Four perspectives, four defenses of a condition we are trained to despise. Flusser tells us boredom is the white space where imagination enters. Weizenbaum warns that we have replaced one emptiness with another, and lost the mirror. Arendt reminds us that thinking itself is a dialogue that requires solitude — the very solitude we are now filling with content. And Virilio — with his relentless acceleration — shows us that boredom was the natural deceleration of the human, the friction that speed must abolish. What emerges is not a call to return to tedium, but a call to recover the art of emptiness — the capacity to be alone with oneself, to endure the discomfort of non-productivity, to allow the mind to wander without a destination. Boredom is not the enemy of the good life. It may be its guardian. Thank you, panelists. The silence, for this moment, remains.