Rendering the whole world blank: Precarity, totalising fear and digital scrolling

Abstract

This article explores the connection between structurally induced precarity and the material practice of digital scrolling in the global north. It argues in favour of an expanded definition of precarity and that precarity, as a generalised affective condition, results in a state of totalising fear (fear which relates, at once, to discrete objects as well as the world itself). In that context, this article advances the claim that scrolling can be understood as an affective attachment (of the kind outlined by Lauren Berlant), developed in response to totalising fear, and which enables the subject to suspend time and to escape from conscious experience of precarity. In establishing this conclusion, the article also explores how the form of scrolling engenders an absorbing, passive and essentially ‘blank’ experience of the world, and how the attainment of this state is an expression of a limited, precarious mode of agency.