Everything Will Be Fine – Working Anxiety

The military-industrial-research complex of the last century has relied on the faith in the digital as a deus ex machina to miraculously resolve our insurmountable anxieties.

At the same time, the digital has by now become the established ground zero for apocalyptic futures. And paradoxically, the digital has been—again—presented as the solution to both these anxieties; digitally mediated violence is believed to be resolved by producing more digital structures and practices.

This capacity of the digital to generate, perform, mitigate, and resolve anxieties truly produces its own cybernetic feedback loop. This techno-centrism often glosses over the often-underprivileged bodies, the “undercommons,” that bear the burden of experiencing and servicing anxiety in the post-democratic age. Drawing from postcolonial locations, gendered sites, and other political contexts, this workshop will look at three kinds of post-digital bodies marked by gender, sexuality, race, and political identification, in order to produce new vocabularies, visions, and practices for engaging with and working out the anxieties of the digital.