Chinese Youth Announce That They’re “Lying Flat” and Resisting the Pressures of Modern Life

in Current Affairs, Economics, Politics | September 1st, 2021

The “Lying Flat” move­ment tak­ing hold among young peo­ple in Chi­na involves doing exact­ly what it sug­gests: work­ing lit­tle, rest­ing a lot, and cul­ti­vat­ing the most min­i­mal­ist lifestyle pos­si­ble. Unlike Tim­o­thy Leary’s 1960’s mantra, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” lying flat, or tang ping (躺平), takes no stance on a coun­ter­cul­tur­al ethos or the con­sump­tion of mind-alter­ing drugs. But it has caused the author­i­ties alarm, even among Eng­lish-lan­guage observers. Con­sid­er the Brook­ings Insti­tute head­line, “The ‘lying flat’ move­ment stand­ing in the way of China’s inno­va­tion dri­ve.” Stand­ing in the way of inno­va­tion is a car­di­nal sin of cap­i­tal­ism, one rea­son the “niche Chi­nese Gen Z meme” of tang ping, Jane Li writes, “is ring­ing alarm bells for Bei­jing.”

The phe­nom­e­non began — where else — on social media, when 31-year-old for­mer fac­to­ry work­er Luo Huazhong “drew the cur­tains and crawled into bed,” Cas­sady Rosen­blum writes at The New York Times. Luo then “post­ed a pic­ture of him­self [in bed] to the Chi­nese web­site Baidu along with a mes­sage: ‘Lying Flat is Jus­tice.’”

His man­i­festo (above) claimed the “right to choose a slow lifestyle” by doing lit­tle work to get by, read­ing, gar­den­ing, exer­cis­ing, and, yes, lying supine as often as he liked. To fur­ther elab­o­rate, Luo wrote, “lying flat is my sophis­tic move­ment,” with a ref­er­ence to Dio­genes the Cyn­ic, the Greek philoso­pher “said to have lived inside a bar­rel to crit­i­cize the excess­es of Athen­ian aris­to­crats.”

Dio­genes did more than that. He and his fol­low­ers reject­ed every­thing about Athen­ian soci­ety, from work and mar­riage to the abstract rea­son­ing of Pla­to. Luo might have turned to a more tra­di­tion­al source for “lying flat” — the Daoist prin­ci­ple of wu-wei, or non-doing. But lying flat is not so much about liv­ing in har­mo­ny with nature as it is a state of exhaus­tion, a full-body admis­sion that the promis­es of cap­i­tal­ism — work hard now, rest hard lat­er — have not and will not mate­ri­al­ize. They are phan­toms, mirages, pre­cise­ly the kind of fic­tions that made Dio­genes bark with laugh­ter. The truth, Rosen­blum writes, is that for “essen­tial” work­ers at the bot­tom all the way up to the “inner sanc­tums” of Gold­man Sachs, “work has become intol­er­a­ble. Rest is resis­tance.”

In a work cul­ture that cel­e­brates “996” — 12-hour days, six days a week– rest may be the only form of resis­tance. Polit­i­cal repres­sion and lack of upward mobil­i­ty have fos­tered “an almost monas­tic out­look” in Chi­na, writes Li, “includ­ing not get­ting mar­ried, not hav­ing chil­dren, not hav­ing a job, not own­ing prop­er­ty, and con­sum­ing as lit­tle as pos­si­ble.” Since pick­ing up tens of thou­sands of fol­low­ers online, the lying flat move­ment has become the tar­get of a cen­sor­ship cam­paign aimed at stop­ping young Chi­nese work­ers from check­ing out. One gov­ern­ment-backed news­pa­per called the move­ment “shame­ful,” and news agency Xin­hua unfa­vor­ably com­pared “lying flat­tists” to front-line med­ical work­ers. The orig­i­nal man­i­festo, Lying Flat groups, and mes­sage boards where users post­ed pho­tos of seals, cats, and them­selves lying flat have been tak­en down.

Zijia Song writes of tang ping as part­ly a response to a tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese cul­ture of com­pet­i­tive­ness and over­work, but notes that there are sim­i­lar move­ments in Japan, Korea, and the U.S., where “Black activists, writ­ers and thinkers are among the clear­est voic­es artic­u­lat­ing this spir­i­tu­al malaise and its solu­tions,” writes Rosen­blum, “per­haps because they’ve borne the brunt of cap­i­tal­ism more than oth­er groups of Amer­i­cans.” What­ev­er their nation­al ori­gin, each of these state­ments defi­ant­ly claims the right to rest, pos­ing a threat not only to the Par­ty but to an ide­al of human life as end­less over­work for shiny trin­kets and emp­ty promis­es, dur­ing a glob­al pan­dem­ic and cli­mate cri­sis that have revealed to us like noth­ing else the need to slow down, rest, and com­plete­ly reimag­ine the way we live.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

Will You Real­ly Achieve Hap­pi­ness If You Final­ly Win the Rat Race? Don’t Answer the Ques­tion Until You’ve Watched Steve Cutts’ New Ani­ma­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch “Degrees of Uncertainty,” an Animated Documentary about Climate Science, Uncertainty & Knowing When to Trust the Experts

in Current Affairs, Data, Science | May 5th, 2021

We should just trust the experts. But wait: to iden­ti­fy true exper­tise requires its own kind of even more spe­cial­ized exper­tise. Besides, experts dis­agree with each oth­er, and over time dis­agree with them­selves as well. This makes it chal­leng­ing indeed for all of us non-experts — and we’re all non-experts in the fields to which we have not ded­i­cat­ed our lives — to under­stand phe­nom­e­na of any com­plex­i­ty. As for grasp­ing cli­mate change, with its enor­mous his­tor­i­cal scale and count­less many vari­ables, might we as well just throw up our hands? Many have done so: Neil Hal­lo­ran, cre­ator of the short doc­u­men­tary Degrees of Uncer­tain­ty above, labels them “cli­mate denial­ists” and “cli­mate defeatists.”

Cli­mate denial­ists choose to believe that man­made cli­mate change isn’t hap­pen­ing, cli­mate defeatists choose to believe that it’s inevitable, and both there­by let them­selves off the hook. Not only do they not have to address the issue, they don’t even have to under­stand it — which itself can seem a fair­ly daunt­ing task, giv­en that sci­en­tists them­selves express no small degree of uncer­tain­ty about cli­mate change’s degree and tra­jec­to­ry. “The only way to learn how sure sci­en­tists are is to dig in a lit­tle and view their work with some healthy skep­ti­cism,” says Hal­lo­ran. This entails devel­op­ing an instinct not for refu­ta­tion, exact­ly, but for exam­in­ing just how the experts arrive at their con­clu­sions and what pit­falls they encounter along the way.

Often, sci­en­tists “don’t know how close they are to the truth, and they’re prone to con­fir­ma­tion bias,” and as any­one pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved in the sci­ences knows full well, they work “under pres­sure to pub­lish note­wor­thy find­ings.” Their pub­li­ca­tions then find their way to a media cul­ture in which, increas­ing­ly, “trust­ing or dis­trust­ing sci­en­tists is becom­ing a mat­ter of polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty.” As he did in his pre­vi­ous doc­u­men­tary The Fall­en of World War II, Hal­lo­ran uses ani­ma­tion and data visu­al­iza­tion to illu­mi­nate his own path to under­stand­ing a glob­al occur­rence whose sheer pro­por­tions make it dif­fi­cult to per­ceive.

This jour­ney takes Hal­lo­ran not just around the globe but back in time, start­ing in the year 19,000 B.C. and end­ing in pro­jec­tions of a future in which ring seas swal­low much of Ams­ter­dam, Mia­mi, and New Orleans. The most impor­tant stop in the mid­dle is the Age of Enlight­en­ment and the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of the 17th through the 19th cen­tu­ry, when sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy rose to promi­nence and brought about  an unprece­dent­ed human flour­ish­ing — with cli­mat­ic con­se­quences that have begun to make them­selves known, albeit not with absolute cer­tain­ty. But as Hal­lo­ran sees it, “uncer­tain­ty, the very thing that clouds our view, also frees us to con­struct pos­si­ble answers.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Invisible People: Watch Poignant Mini-Documentaries Where Homeless People Tell Their Stories

in Current Affairs, Life, Politics | April 30th, 2021

Over the past year, the sto­ry of evic­tions dur­ing COVID has often risen above the muck. It’s made head­lines in major news­pa­pers and TIME mag­a­zine, and received seri­ous atten­tion from the gov­ern­ment, with stop-gap evic­tion mora­to­ri­ums put in effect and renewed sev­er­al times, and like­ly due to be renewed again. Stop­ping evic­tions is not enough. “For many land­lords,” notes the Unit­ed Way, “the order cre­at­ed a finan­cial bur­den of hous­ing renters with no pay­ments,” and with­out income, they have no way to pay. But these mea­sures have kept many thou­sands of vul­ner­a­ble adults and chil­dren from expe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness.

And yet mora­to­ri­ums aside, the num­ber of peo­ple los­ing their homes is on the rise dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, with a dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on Black, Lat­inx, and Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties, and shel­ters have been forced to close or low­er capac­i­ty. Fram­ing increas­ing home­lessnes sole­ly as a cri­sis dri­ven by the virus miss­es the fact that it has been grow­ing since 2016, though it is down from pre-2007 lev­els. “Even before the cur­rent health/economic cri­sis,” notes a Home­less­ness Research Insti­tute report, “the old­er adult home­less pop­u­la­tion was pro­ject­ed to trend upwards until 2030.”

Indeed, home­less­ness has seemed like a sad, inevitable fact of Amer­i­can life for decades. Rather than accept the sit­u­a­tion, orga­ni­za­tions like Invis­i­ble Peo­ple have worked to end it. “The first step to solv­ing home­less­ness,” they write, “is acknowl­edg­ing that its vic­tims are peo­ple. Reg­u­lar peo­ple. Fathers. Moth­ers. Vet­er­ans. Whole fam­i­lies. Folks who fell on hard times and lost their core foun­da­tion of being human — their homes.” No one asks to be in the sit­u­a­tion, and the longer a per­son goes unhoused, the hard­er it is for them to rebuild their lives.

Invis­i­ble Peo­ple offers action steps and pub­lish­es well-researched jour­nal­ism on the prob­lems, and solu­tions, for the mil­lions of peo­ple expe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness at any giv­en time. But as their name sug­gests, their pri­ma­ry aim is to make the lives of unhoused peo­ple vis­i­ble to those of us who tend to walk right by them in our haste. We can feel over­whelmed by the intractable scale of the prob­lem, which tends to turn indi­vid­u­als into sta­tis­tics. Invis­i­ble Peo­ple asks us to “change the sto­ry,” and to start by approach­ing home­less­ness one per­son, or one fam­i­ly, at a time.

Invis­i­ble Peo­ple was found­ed in Los Ange­les by Mark Hor­vath, a for­mer TV exec­u­tive who became home­less after drug and alco­hol addic­tion in 1995. After recov­er­ing, he lost his home again dur­ing the 2008 Reces­sion. Hor­vath began inter­view­ing peo­ple he met on the streets of L.A. and post­ing the videos to YouTube and Twit­ter. Soon, the project became a glob­al one, incor­po­rat­ed as a non-prof­it, and Hor­vath has trav­eled across the U.S. and to Cana­da, Peru, and the UK to inter­view peo­ple liv­ing with­out homes.

The project, says Hor­vath is designed to fos­ter  “a con­ver­sa­tion about solu­tions to end home­less­ness [that] gives home­less peo­ple a chance to tell their own sto­ry.” Those sto­ries are mov­ing, human, unfor­get­table, and usu­al­ly not at all what you might expect. You can see some of them here, and many more at the Invis­i­ble Peo­ple YouTube chan­nel. Con­nect with the orga­ni­za­tion and find out what you can do here.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Design­er Cre­ates Origa­mi Card­board Tents to Shel­ter the Home­less from the Win­ter Cold

How Josephine Bak­er Went From Home­less Street Per­former to Inter­na­tion­al Super­star, French Resis­tance Fight­er & Civ­il Rights Hero

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Check Out Ties, Brief­cas­es & Hand­bags for Job Inter­views

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Mick Jagger Takes Shots at Conspiracy Theorists & Anti-Vaxxers in a New Song, “Eazy Sleazy” (with Dave Grohl on Drums, Bass & Guitar)

in Current Affairs, Music | April 13th, 2021

Fol­low along with the lyrics below, or in the video above.

W’e took it on the chin
The num­bers were so grim
Bossed around by pricks
Stiff­en upper lips
Pac­ing in the yard
You’re try­ing to take the mick
You must think i’m real­ly thick

Look­ing at the graphs with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass
Can­cel all the tours foot­balls fake applause
No more trav­el brochures
Vir­tu­al pre­mieres
Ive got noth­ing left to wear

Look­ing out from these prison walls
You got to rob peter if you’re pay­ing paul
But its easy easy everything’s gonna get real­ly freaky
Alright on the night
Soon it ll be be a mem­o­ry you’re try­ing to remem­ber to for­get

That’s a pret­ty mask
But nev­er take a chance tik tok stu­pid dance
Took a sam­ba class i land­ed on my ass
Try­ing to write a tune you bet­ter hook me up to zoom
See my pon­cey books teach myself to cook
Way too much tv its lobot­o­mis­ing me
Think ive put on weight
Ill have anoth­er drink then ill clean the kitchen sink

We escaped from the prison walls
Open the win­dows and open the doors
But its easy easy
Every­thing s gonna get real­ly freaky
Alright on the night
Its gonna be a gar­den of earth­ly delights
Easy sleazy its gonna be smooth and greasy
Yeah easy believe me
Itll only be a mem­o­ry you’re try­ing to remem­ber
To for­get

Shoot­ing the vac­cine bill gates is in my blood­stream
Its mind con­trol
The earth is flat and cold its nev­er warm­ing up
The arc­tics turned to slush
The sec­ond com­ings late
There’s aliens in the deep state

We’ll escape from these prison walls
Now were out of these prison walls
You got­ta pay peter if you’re rob­bing paul
But its easy easy every­thing s gonna be real­ly freaky
Alright on the night
Were all head­ed back to par­adise
Yeah easy believe me
It’ll be a mem­o­ry you’re try­ing to remem­ber to for­get
Easy cheesy every­one sing please please me
It’ll be a mem­o­ry you’re try­ing to remem­ber to for­get

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What Andrei Tarkovsky’s Most Notorious Scene Tells Us About Time During the Pandemic: A Video Essay

in Current Affairs, Film | March 31st, 2021

In his films, Andrei Tarkovsky shows us things no oth­er auteur does: an unbro­ken eight-minute shot, for exam­ple, of a man slow­ly walk­ing a lit can­dle across an emp­ty pool, start­ing over again when­ev­er the flame goes out. One of the best-known (or at least most often men­tioned) sequences in the Russ­ian mas­ter’s oeu­vre, it comes from Nos­tal­ghia, a late pic­ture made dur­ing his final, exiled years in Italy. Some cite it as an exam­ple of all that’s wrong with Tarkovsky’s cin­e­ma; oth­ers as an exam­ple of all that’s right with it. But both the crit­i­cism and the praise are root­ed in the direc­tor’s height­ened sen­si­tiv­i­ty to and delib­er­ate use of time — a resource about which we’ve all come to feel dif­fer­ent­ly after a year of glob­al pan­dem­ic.

“Our sense of time dur­ing the pan­dem­ic was just as warped as our sense of space,” says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his new video essay above, a fol­low-up to his pre­vi­ous explo­ration of how lock­downs turned cities around the world into de Chiri­co paint­ings.

At first, “time felt simul­ta­ne­ous­ly slow and fast: hours dragged on at a snail’s pace, but weeks flew by. 2020 seemed end­less while it was hap­pen­ing, but in ret­ro­spect it feels brief, short­er than a nor­mal year.” But even under “nor­mal” con­di­tions, it holds true that “the more atten­tion we give to time, the slow­er it feels.” And when we think back to our past expe­ri­ences, “the more we can remem­ber in a giv­en peri­od expands our sense of its length.”

Watch­ing Nos­tal­ghia’s can­dle-in-the-pool scene, “you become aware of the odd encounter you’re hav­ing with time itself. You can feel the tex­ture of it, its pres­ence, as if time were not only a con­cept, but a sub­stance, stretch­ing out in front of you, expand­ing and con­tract­ing with every breath. It’s beyond inter­est, beyond bore­dom.” Unlike most film­mak­ers, Tarkovsky does­n’t manip­u­late time to keep us on a pre-laid emo­tion­al track, but to make us aware of our own move­ment through it. “It’ll be the same for the pan­dem­ic,” says Puschak. “There are some rhythms we’ll be eager to get back to, and oth­ers, now that we’ve expe­ri­enced their absence, we’ll be eager to leave behind.” Right now, we’d do well to ques­tion the new forms of nos­tal­gia that have beset us. Or we could use the time still on our hands to hold Tarkovsky ret­ro­spec­tives of our own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respect­ed Film­mak­er of All Time

The Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing: A Video Essay

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

Andrei Tarkovsky Answers the Essen­tial Ques­tions: What is Art & the Mean­ing of Life?

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine Is Streaming Free on YouTube

in Current Affairs, Film | March 28th, 2021

Ear­li­er this year, Michael Moore released the 2002 doc­u­men­tary Bowl­ing for Columbine on his offi­cial YouTube chan­nel. The win­ner of the Acad­e­my Award for Best Doc­u­men­tary Fea­ture, the film “set out to inves­ti­gate the long, often volatile love affair between Amer­i­cans and their firearms, uncov­er­ing the per­va­sive cul­ture of fear that keeps the nation locked and loaded.” Cri­te­ri­on goes on to write:

Equipped with a cam­era and a micro­phone, Moore fol­lows the trail of bul­lets from Lit­tle­ton, Col­orado, and Flint, Michi­gan, all the way to Kmart’s mid­west­ern head­quar­ters and NRA pres­i­dent Charl­ton Heston’s Bev­er­ly Hills man­sion, meet­ing shoot­ing sur­vivors, mili­tia mem­bers, mild-man­nered Cana­di­ans, and rock provo­ca­teur Mar­i­lyn Man­son along the way. An unprece­dent­ed pop­u­lar suc­cess that helped ush­er in a new era in doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing, the Oscar-win­ning Bowl­ing for Columbine is a rau­cous, impas­sioned, and still trag­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant jour­ney through the Amer­i­can psy­che.”

Near­ly two decades later–and right on the heels of two mas­sacres in Atlanta and Boulder–Moore’s film has unfor­tu­nate­ly not lost its rel­e­vance. You can watch it online, right above.

via NoFilm­School

Relat­ed Con­tent

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Michael Moore’s 13 Rules for Mak­ing Doc­u­men­taries — Real­ly Pow­er­ful & Enter­tain­ing Doc­u­men­taries

23 Car­toon­ists Unite to Demand Action to Reduce Gun Vio­lence: Watch the Result

When Archie Bunker’s Advice on Gun Con­trol Becomes Main­stream GOP Pol­i­cy (1972)

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What Are the Real Causes of Zoom Fatigue? And What Are the Possible Solutions?: New Research from Stanford Offers Answers

in Current Affairs, Health, Psychology, Stanford | March 2nd, 2021

The tech­nol­o­gy we put between our­selves and oth­ers tends to always cre­ate addi­tion­al strains on com­mu­ni­ca­tion, even as it enables near-con­stant, instant con­tact. When it comes to our now-pri­ma­ry mode of inter­act­ing — star­ing at each oth­er as talk­ing heads or Brady Bunch-style gal­leries — those stress­es have been iden­ti­fied by com­mu­ni­ca­tion experts as “Zoom fatigue,” now a sub­ject of study among psy­chol­o­gists who want to under­stand our always-con­nect­ed-but-most­ly-iso­lat­ed lives in the pan­dem­ic, and a top­ic for Today show seg­ments like the one above.

As Stan­ford researcher Jere­my Bailen­son vivid­ly explains to Today, Zoom fatigue refers to the burnout we expe­ri­ence from inter­act­ing with dozens of peo­ple for hours a day, months on end, through pret­ty much any video con­fer­enc­ing plat­form. (But, let’s face it, most­ly Zoom.) We may be famil­iar with the symp­toms already if we spend some part of our day on video calls or lessons. Zoom fatigue com­bines the prob­lems of over­work and tech­no­log­i­cal over­stim­u­la­tion with unique forms of social exhaus­tion that do not plague us in the office or the class­room.

Bailen­son, direc­tor of Stan­ford University’s Vir­tu­al Human Inter­ac­tion Lab, refers to this kind of burnout as “Non­ver­bal Over­load,” a col­lec­tion of “psy­cho­log­i­cal con­se­quences” from pro­longed peri­ods of dis­em­bod­ied con­ver­sa­tion. He has been study­ing vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion for two decades and began writ­ing about the cur­rent prob­lem in April of 2020 in a Wall Street Jour­nal op-ed that warned, “soft­ware like Zoom was designed to do online work, and the tools that increase pro­duc­tiv­i­ty weren’t meant to mim­ic nor­mal social inter­ac­tion.”

Now, in a new schol­ar­ly arti­cle pub­lished in the APA jour­nal Tech­nol­o­gy, Mind, and Behav­ior, Bailen­son elab­o­rates on the argu­ment with a focus on Zoom, not to “vil­i­fy the com­pa­ny,” he writes, but because “it has become the default plat­form for many in acad­e­mia” (and every­where else, per­haps its own form of exhaus­tion). The con­stituents of non­ver­bal over­load include gaz­ing into each oth­ers’ eyes at close prox­im­i­ty for long peri­ods of time, even when we aren’t speak­ing to each oth­er.

Any­one who speaks for a liv­ing under­stands the inten­si­ty of being stared at for hours at a time. Even when speak­ers see vir­tu­al faces instead of real ones, research has shown that being stared at while speak­ing caus­es phys­i­o­log­i­cal arousal (Takac et al., 2019). But Zoom’s inter­face design con­stant­ly beams faces to every­one, regard­less of who is speak­ing. From a per­cep­tu­al stand­point, Zoom effec­tive­ly trans­forms lis­ten­ers into speak­ers and smoth­ers every­one with eye gaze.

On Zoom, we also have to expend much more ener­gy to send and inter­pret non­ver­bal cues, and with­out the con­text of the room out­side the screen, we are more apt to mis­in­ter­pret them. Depend­ing on the size of our screen, we may be star­ing at each oth­er as larg­er-than-life talk­ing heads, a dis­ori­ent­ing expe­ri­ence for the brain and one that lends more impact to facial expres­sions than may be war­rant­ed, cre­at­ing a false sense of inti­ma­cy and urgency. “When someone’s face is that close to ours in real life,” writes Vig­nesh Ramachan­dran at Stan­ford News, “our brains inter­pret it as an intense sit­u­a­tion that is either going to lead to mat­ing or to con­flict.”

Unless we turn off the view of our­selves on the screen — which we gen­er­al­ly don’t do because we’re con­scious of being stared at — we are also essen­tial­ly sit­ting in front of a mir­ror while try­ing to focus on oth­ers. The con­stant self-eval­u­a­tion adds an addi­tion­al lay­er of stress and tax­es the brain’s resources. In face-to-face inter­ac­tions, we can let our eyes wan­der, even move around the room and do oth­er things while we talk to peo­ple. “There’s a grow­ing research now that says when peo­ple are mov­ing, they’re per­form­ing bet­ter cog­ni­tive­ly,” says Bailen­son. Zoom inter­ac­tions, con­verse­ly, can inhib­it move­ment for long peri­ods of time.

“Zoom fatigue” may not be as dire as it sounds, but rather the inevitable tri­als of a tran­si­tion­al peri­od, Bailen­son sug­gests. He offers solu­tions we can imple­ment now: using the “hide self-view” but­ton, mut­ing our video reg­u­lar­ly, set­ting up the tech­nol­o­gy so that we can fid­get, doo­dle, and get up and move around.… Not all of these are going to work for every­one — we are, after all, social­ized to sit and stare at each oth­er on Zoom; refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate might send unin­tend­ed mes­sages we would have to expend more ener­gy to cor­rect. Bailen­son fur­ther describes the phe­nom­e­non in the BBC Busi­ness Dai­ly pod­cast inter­view above.

“Video­con­fer­enc­ing is here to stay,” Bailen­son admits, and we’ll have to adapt. “As media psy­chol­o­gists it is our job,” he writes to his col­leagues in the new arti­cle, to help “users devel­op bet­ter use prac­tices” and help “tech­nol­o­gists build bet­ter inter­faces.” He most­ly leaves it to the tech­nol­o­gists to imag­ine what those are, though we our­selves have more con­trol over the plat­form than we col­lec­tive­ly acknowl­edge. Could we maybe admit, Bailen­son writes, that “per­haps a dri­ver of Zoom fatigue is sim­ply that we are tak­ing more meet­ings than we would be doing face-to-face”?

Read about the “Zoom Exhaus­tion & Fatigue Scale (ZEF Scale)” devel­oped by Bailen­son and his col­leagues at Stan­ford and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Gothen­burg here. Then take the sur­vey your­self, and see where you rank in the ZEF cat­e­gories of gen­er­al fatigue, visu­al fatigue, social fatigue, moti­va­tion­al fatigue, and emo­tion­al fatigue.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

In 1896, a French Car­toon­ist Pre­dict­ed Our Social­ly-Dis­tanced Zoom Hol­i­day Gath­er­ings

Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Releas­es Free Back­grounds for Vir­tu­al Meet­ings: Princess Mononoke, Spir­it­ed Away & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Why Putin Wants Alexei Navalny Dead

in Current Affairs | March 1st, 2021

From Vox: “In 2006, a lawyer named Alex­ei Naval­ny start­ed a blog where he wrote about cor­rup­tion in his home coun­try of Rus­sia. It’s the most promi­nent prob­lem under the regime of Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Rus­sia since 2000. Putin has sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly tak­en over the country’s inde­pen­dent media, oli­garchy, elec­tions, and laws to cement his own pow­er and wield cor­rup­tion to his advan­tage.

That’s what Naval­ny set out to expose. And in 2010, he pub­lished a ground­break­ing inves­ti­ga­tion into a state-owned trans­porta­tion com­pa­ny, Transneft, which was fun­nel­ing state mon­ey into the hands of its exec­u­tives. The post launched Naval­ny into pol­i­tics.

By 2016, he had become the face of Russia’s oppo­si­tion move­ment, run for may­or, and was run­ning for pres­i­dent against Putin him­self. Naval­ny was uni­fy­ing Russia’s oppo­si­tion like no politi­cian had before. That’s why the Krem­lin tried to kill him. Naval­ny sur­vived the assas­si­na­tion attempt, launch­ing a move­ment nev­er before seen in Rus­sia.”

To dive deep­er into why the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment wants Naval­ny dead, watch the Vox video above, then lis­ten to this infor­ma­tive report from the New York Times’ Dai­ly Pod­cast below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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