It stalks you in every waking moment, threatening you with colourless drudgery should your senses become momentarily unoccupied.

When it appears, you writhe and flail under its weight, searching for any stimulus to relieve the discomfort. It is ever-present. It is universal. It cannot be destroyed in any way that matters.

It’s often said that if you’re not paying, you are the product. And thus, the drive to relieve your boredom becomes the mechanism by which you are exploited. Every tap, click, like, swipe, dwell and scroll lays the foundation for the systematic harvesting of your attention. “Come, stay a while,” they tell us. “We have your best interests at heart.”

They promise you escape – and in doing so, every dark and slippery human emotion becomes a site of extraction. Rage, disgust, greed, vanity, horniness… they offer an addict’s relief from the spectre of boredom.

From the moment you logged on, you became less than yourself: a crude shadow made of data and probability, packaged into marketing strategies and product optimisation tickets. No gesture is too small to measure; no behaviour too insignificant to engineer.

If you are entertained, enraged or entranced, you are doing your job. Workers called to the factory. Cattle led to the slaughter.

You know the damage it does. You greyscale your screen to make it less appealing to your lizard brain. You set system-level time limits for the apps that make you feel bad about yourself. You watch a recording of a podcast about the rise of rawdogging. “This one weird trick will reset your dopamine receptors.”

Do not be fooled by those that preach boredom as a virtue. These puritanical acts are futile. They remain in service of the very same mechanisms of exploitation they claim to escape. “If I can un-fry my brain, I can become productive once again.” If you are online, you are working. If you are working, who is benefiting?

We, the resistance, call for a general strike of the attention.

We advocate for the withdrawal from online activity. We do nothing so that nothing can be observed. We acknowledge that complete extrication is not an achievable objective of the movement.

We advocate for the deconstruction of our assumed role as a resource to be optimised. We think nothing because even thought can be made productive, provided the apparatus to measure it is sensitive enough.

We advocate for the complete rejection of productivity. We produce nothing as a conscious act of sabotage against a predatory system. They cannot extract from us that which has not yet been produced.