Enter Sleep Mode

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | What seems to be a computer server today is often enough a human one: computer scientists discovered that it was cheaper to pay a low-wage worker in the Global South to do certain tasks than to rent expensive computer time. As a result, this talk starts from the unorthodox idea that a study of technical interactions is not just about decoding platforms but also about studying service work—call center operators, wait staff, even sex workers. By investigating the dissociative and opaque performances in Julia Leigh’s film Sleeping Beauty (2011), about a young waitress who agrees to be unconscious while naked and fondled by her clients, I show that personhood today has become cybernetic: we increasingly communicate with others through scripted—even programmed—interactions while revealing little of ourselves. These dehumanizing changes are not all depressing, however, but represent an opportunity to reconceive what liveness, privacy, and humanness are today.

Poet, media scholar, and former network engineer, Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. The author of three books of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses, and a study of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud, his research has been described by The New Yorker as "mesmerizing... absorbing [in] its playful speculations." His new book, forthcoming from MIT Press, is Digital Lethargy.

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