Table of Contents

Introduction vii
1 Start When It's Too Late 1
2 Wait, Then Give Up 29
3 Laugh Out Loud 63
4 Enter Sleep Mode 95
5 Feel Normal 123
6 Do Nothing Together 147
Postscript: Look Alive 177
Acknowledgments 181
Notes 183
Bibliography 217
Index 237

About the Author

Tung-Hui Hu is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. A former network engineer and a published poet, he is the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press), praised by the New Yorker as "mesmerizing" and by the Guardian as "witty, sharp and theoretically aware." He was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature in 2022.

Reviews

“The acclaimed professor outlines his concept of digital lethargy — a state of exhaustion and listlessness under digital capitalism — through a collection of works by contemporary artists.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“In Digital Lethargy, the academic and poet Tung-Hui Hu quotes from the scholar Anne Anlin Cheng when discussing the German writer Heike Geissler’s novel, Seasonal Associate, set in an Amazon sorting facility: “How do we take seriously the life of a subject who lives as an object?” Hu’s point, essentially, is to ask how art can best approach the flattening, depersonalizing effects of the internet. It’s a good question, one that I’m unsure if many novels have yet answered.”
—The Baffler