A few days ago, I logged onto Twitter and saw a post advertising a reward for information on a missing person. “Looking for this man in #Lismore,” the post said. “Substantial reward plus a number of luxury, curated items. DM me.” Attached to the post were two images: the first, presumably, was of the missing person: a young man in a Nike sweatshirt, wired earbuds and transition shades. The second was a poorly cropped image of the cover artwork for a contemporary reprint of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. I stared at the picture for a good while, trying to make sense of it. The post had 27,000 views. “Is this a joke?” someone asked. “No, he’s missing,” replied the poster.

It felt appropriate to see Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century children’s classic embedded in what was presumably an AI-generated post. I have always hated Alice in Wonderland, a story about a fascist state where people are executed at random and all the animals suffer from psychosis. As a child, it felt like a betrayal that Disney would make a film about a girl moving through a senselessly hostile world; one that seemed to actively take pleasure in her confusion and terror. The fact that it is impossible to extract any meaning from the tale remains both boring and disturbing to me. Then again, maybe that’s the point. According to the conventional interpretation, Alice in Wonderland is about a child who overcomes her boredom through the power of imagination; but maybe Wonderland never was Alice’s escape from boredom. Maybe it was her descent into it.

At some point over the past few years, the internet got boring. It is boring partly because it is more predictable and more homogeneous (virality works, after all, by rewarding imitation). But it is also boring because it makes less sense. There may have been a brief moment when Dall-E was the most fascinating thing online, but by now the chaos of hallucinating machines already feels tiring. It turns out we enjoy finding meaning in things. On the whole, total randomness is no more interesting than total homogeneity.

Boredom is often considered a fairly static emotion: a state of passivity, or numbness. Unlike other negatively-charged emotions (grief, anger, sadness, or jealousy), boredom isn’t usually understood to have any sort of trajectory. It’s a blank space that exists between feelings; a state of being stuck. If this is all that boredom is, then it would make sense that I continue to spend time on the internet even though it bores me—numbness is usually preferable to anxiety. But I don’t think boredom is the same as numbness. Numbness simply distances us from our desires; boredom makes us painfully aware of the space where our desires used to be. To feel bored is to have already recognized that one is not content with the situation one finds oneself in: A child is more likely to declare “I’m bored” than “I’m sad” or “I’m happy.” It is an acute experience, sometimes almost psychedelic in its intensity—like a bad trip.

Increasingly, as I scroll through the most wasted spaces of the internet, it is not numbness I feel, but boredom. I grow angry and confused. I feel itchy; agitated, like I used to when I was a child if my mum left me in the car, or sat me down beside her in a doctors’ waiting room, or put Alice in Wonderland in the VHS player. The boredom feels all consuming. It feels like a total collapse of meaning—like I will never again know how to make sense of the world or of my place in it. I don’t think I’m the only one. How did the internet get this boring? And where is boredom leading us?

It has become something of a truism that it makes economic sense for content to be as arresting as possible. For many years, popular metaphors have imagined attention as a resource: one that tech companies mine from users and monetize; and one that powers the companies themselves (in common parlance, attention is something we “pay”). The MSNBC host Chris Hayes made the latter argument in a recent article for The Atlantic. Like a cable news show which has “no internal combustion engine to make it go,” the internet, he argues, is “powered by attention.” Attention for Hayes is “a strange and powerful force,” snatched from us “at a “sensory level, before our brain even gets to weigh in.”

But is anyone really paying attention to the internet anymore? Today, the “attention economy” feels like something of a misnomer—the “engagement economy” might be more accurate. Most websites are structured in order to generate clicks, views, purchases, and likes, not to activate the pattern-seeking mechanism of human attention; and algorithmic forces play a bigger part in shaping traffic than human judgment. It doesn’t matter if we are entertained by what we see online. It doesn’t even really matter if we can make sense of it. Attention, while valuable, is almost impossible to quantify, and therefore somewhat useless to a profit-generating machine that relies on numerically definable metrics.

The result is an online landscape that feels more suited to machines than to human users—an internet that talks to itself before talking to us. Websites are search-engine optimized to the point of being borderline unintelligible, designed less to be read or seen than to be clicked on. In a recent article for n+1, Will Tavlin explained that Netflix’s business model doesn’t just not care if its users aren’t paying attention—it actually relies on the fact that they aren’t. According to Tavlin, some of Netflix’s most reportedly successful movies are ones that few people seem to have ever seen at all. Thanks to autoplay, it can take half an hour before a user, having fallen asleep or wandered off, notices their film has ended and a new one has begun. Views metrics are cobbled together from these stray minutes: three users not paying attention equals one view.  

One could apply this logic to nearly all online platforms today. We watch things without paying attention, like things without paying attention, and even buy things without paying attention. Designed to unfold in the background, content no longer really aims to captivate us; it just needs to stop us from taking a proactive step away from the service. If attention really is the “strange and powerful fuel” that powers digital capitalism, then a boring internet is an efficient system, requiring minimal energy input (attention) to produce maximum output (engagement).

To push this metaphor further, digital capitalism today might be thought of as an increasingly smoky furnace. Labor is the coal or wood being shoveled into it. Users’ attention might be understood as the concentrated heat of the raw flame, while engagement is the smoke that the flame produces. The person stoking the fire is measuring smoke—not heat. The furnace gets smokier and smokier as the flame gets smaller and smaller. The engine is haunted by a steadily increasing force, which diffuses the heat rather than concentrating it: boredom, a form of entropy.

In her book The Birth of Energy, Cara New Daggett writes about the science of thermodynamics, and the cultural upheaval that came with its rise in the 19th century. It was around this time that people began to think of systems and processes in terms of machines and engines, and therefore in terms of efficiency and inefficiency. Energy was reimagined as something that could be “put to work.” Much of how we understand work today dates back to this crucial period at the dawn of the industrial age. So does our understanding of attention as a resource that can be captured and made productive.

As the engineers of the 19th century sought to create a perfectly efficient engine, it became apparent that in any machinic process, a certain amount of wasted energy was inevitable. In 1865, this inevitable wastage was given a name: entropy. Gradually, entropy developed a broader meaning, referring to the process by which order tends towards disorder. This is because every interaction (on every scale) ultimately causes some amount of energy to decay into a less useful form. When you boil water to make a cup of tea, a certain quantity of water will always be lost as steam, and a certain quantity of heat will always be lost through the body of the kettle.

All systems move towards disorder—but the speed at which they do so varies. A low-entropy system is one in which energy remains as concentrated as possible for as long as possible; a high-entropy system, meanwhile, is one in which energy disperses quickly, becoming diffuse and unusable. For Daggett, the first and second laws of thermodynamics described, respectively, the hopes and the fears of the industrial revolution. According to the first law, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. This seemed to validate a view of the world as stable and reliable, a place of endless resources and vitality. According to the second law, though, all energy eventually becomes less useful. This conjured the opposite feeling: the world was a place of disorder and decay.

We are still haunted by this tension between conservation and energy, order and disorder, usage and wastage. Thermodynamic narratives have seeped so liberally into our understanding of how the world works that nearly everything imagined to be a functional system has its entropic shadow. Take, for example, the mind. If attention or interest is focused or concentrated mental energy, then boredom is the force that makes our thoughts dissipate and become unusable. Boredom is the friction that makes the engine of the mind drag; it makes its wheels heavy and slow.

Contemporary understandings of how the mind works emerged around the same time as contemporary understandings of energy as both something fundamentally stable and fundamentally unpredictable. The word “boredom” is only about as old as the concept of entropy (only about as old, too, as Alice in Wonderland)—by most accounts, it was Dickens who popularized the word around 1850, although the first known usage of the word dates back to around 1829. In its earliest appearances, it described an existential state affecting the leisure classes. Dickens’ characters in Bleak House aren’t just bored; they are “bored to death.” Boredom was a kind of serious psychological affliction—unrelated to the availability of entertainment or diversion—which drained one’s life of meaning and left the mind in a free-fall of despair.

Boredom as it was first imagined was closely related to the idea of attention, which was emerging around the same time. In his history of the concept of attention, Jonathan Crary has argued that a shift occurred in the 19th century whereby perception was increasingly understood as a process of filtering out the details of the world (previously, it had been understood as a process of taking details in).² This understanding persists today. Attention is a process of refinement; a way of imposing order on a disordered world. Boredom, meanwhile, is chaotic; it indiscriminately lets everything in, thus attributing importance to nothing at all.

In English, our language for how both the mind and body work are full of thermodynamic metaphors. When we talk about concentrating on something, we are talking about applying concentrated (useful) energy to it. Boredom, meanwhile, is implicitly understood as a force of dissipation—something that makes that energy useless. What’s more, like entropy, boredom is largely understood to be irreversible. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of systems can only ever increase or stay the same. A cup of tea, once it cools, won’t spontaneously become warm again unless energy is directed towards it (which inevitably increases entropy somewhere else). In the same way, when one is bored with something, one rarely becomes spontaneously re-engaged with it.

This could be a depressing thought—my boredom with the internet is permanent. Never again will I experience the glee I felt watching LiamKyleSullivan’s “Shoes” on YouTube as a pre-teen, or gorging on Twitter drama in my early 20s, or watching an old Catalan man sing lullabies to his pigeons on TikTok even a few years ago. But there’s another way of looking at this thermodynamic analogy. Where the law of conservation of energy describes a static world, entropy speaks of a tendency towards transformation. Boredom is much less static, and more transformative, than we might assume. It tends to prompt some sort of state shift— the queue comes to an end; we walk out of the film; we quit the job.

One of the most confounding realizations of the new science of the steam engine was that entropy is a directional force. When things decay, they do not tend to un-decay. As Cara New Daggett puts it, “Waterwheels can run in reverse: blade moves water, water moves blade […] but no amount of pumping pistons can reconstitute ash into a lump of coal.” Entropy has a bad name, mainly because it is linked to notions of death and futility. As the universe shuffles through random arrangements of matter, the less ordered (higher entropy) arrangements are consistently the likelier ones. Every cleaned room will only get messy again.

Where is this directional force taking us? One theory is a phenomenon merrily named “the heat death of the universe”: a scenario whereby the universe reaches a state of maximum entropy and therefore total thermodynamic equilibrium. In this scenario, the universe is the ultimate “closed” system, so every time energy is put to use (whether in the birth of a star, or the powering up of a computer here on earth) a little more useful energy decays into a dissipated, useless form. This is a fairly bleak picture of existence: we are simply one expression of the long decay of energy as it moves from the ultra-concentrated entities that produced the big bang to the great cold death of non-existence. If we think about entropy only through the lens of heat-death, then the idea of boredom as entropic also paints a bleak picture. Boredom is the force of dissipation that works against our futile attempts to construct meaning out of the chaos of the world.

But the heat-death of the universe is not a given, because there is no real scientific consensus about what exactly entropy is, let alone where it might lead us. In an article for Quanta magazine, Zack Savitsky points out that part of the confusion stems from the fact that entropy has overlapping but nonetheless distinct meanings across various fields, including physics, information theory, and ecology. The only real thing that scientists studying entropy across fields agree on is its relationship to uncertainty. “What entropy consistently measures is ignorance,” Savitsky concludes.

Like the cheeky particle-waves of quantum theory, measures of entropy have a way of shifting depending on who’s observing, because any measure of the “disorder” of a system is highly dependent on the information we have about how that system actually works (as Savitsky points out, “Disorder is in the eye of the beholder.”). In other words, entropy has always been more of a scientific problem than a cohesive set of theories. Daggett points out that though entropy was at first used to bolster deterministic physics, it would eventually contribute to its unraveling, paving the way for new theories to emerge. The concept of entropy stood in for all the internal contradictions and unanswered questions at the heart of the new science of energy. It reminded scientists again and again that the world was neither as stable nor as predictable as they might like to believe.  

It is possible that boredom plays the same cultural role. Like entropy, boredom is a deeply mysterious force, haunting our understanding of the mind as something that can be easily harnessed and put to work. Everyone knows it exists—it is as real to us as the rot that sets into a fallen leaf—but no one can say with any certainty exactly what it is or what it does. Even on an individual or anecdotal level, boredom proves frustratingly difficult to examine. It is not an emotion that invites scrutiny: like pain, it feels too immediate and all-encompassing to allow for much analysis at all, and by the time it is over, it’s difficult to recall what it felt like. The times in my life when I have experienced true, bone-penetrating boredom have always precipitated great change. It is almost impossible for me to say whether these changes represent my triumph over boredom or the fruits of the boredom itself.

It is hard to pull ourselves away from the internet because a lot of the time what’s going on outside of the screen isn’t all that alluring. The same boring logics that organize our lives online also organize our lives in general. Tiered systems of payment mean that companies can get away with offering products and services of lower and lower quality under the guise of offering more affordable options. Ads are plastered over every available inch of physical space, and even things that aren’t ads feel like ads. Everyday aesthetics have flattened into a boring homogeneity, and the most benign experiences have an extractive undertone to them. More and more blatantly are we made to suffer and then sold prophylactics. I caught a flight recently where they cranked up the aircon and offered blankets for twelve dollars.

Boredom feels like a trap not because it is a static experience, but because it is an all-encompassing way of being; a fog that dissipates attention and dissolves meaning. In a heat death–type narrative of the internet’s demise, we are all infected and rendered senseless by the machine-driven decay of online content into meaninglessness. Human culture is sucked into the vortex of online collapse, and thought ceases to exist. With no escape from boredom, it grows and grows, propelling us towards non-existence.

In an alternative scenario, though, the boredom we experience online carries us towards something new. It is quite likely that the companies that have allowed their services to become so infuriatingly boring have misunderstood what boredom is, and underestimated what it can do. What if, in permitting boredom to seep so liberally into our experiences of the apps and websites that organize our lives, they were also allowing the conditions for a sort of mass-disenchantment with the ways the commercialized internet disorders the world? Things tend not to un-decay, but they might be transformed into new forms.

I can’t seem to stop myself from getting bored and going online; from going online even though it bores me. But I can let my boredom exist as friction; as drag against the wheel. It is still unclear what effect all this boredom is having on me. My thoughts feel more disjointed than they ever have before. At the same time, I am increasingly grateful for my body, which increasingly seems a wonder to me. Such is my own entropic trajectory: I am decaying into an insane person and I am decaying into an animal. All the while I refuse to decay into a machine. ◼