Anything but boring: A cultural criminological exploration of boredom

Abstract

There is perhaps no experience in late modernity more universal than boredom. This analysis therefore responds to Ferrell’s call to take boredom seriously in the study of crime and crime control. Our analysis of boredom draws from three separate qualitative analyses of police detectives, computer hackers, and prisoners serving life sentences to reveal boredom’s influence across the criminological spectrum. Drawing from cultural criminology, this study frames boredom as a social condition that works in a dialectic with excitement. It rests betwixt and between the nuances of everyday life and saturates the periphery of experience among the three groups studied. Boredom is thus described as an inseparable component of the dynamics of crime and crime control under late modernity.

Keywords

Boredom cultural criminology detectives hackers lifers

Introduction

Too much of nothing

Can turn a man into a liar

It can cause one man to sleep on nails

And another man to eat fire

(Bob Dylan, 1967/1970, The Basement Tapes)

“Boredom”, according to Toohey (2011: 1), “is one of the most unexpectedly common of all human emotions.” From the anguished whines of an adolescent to the daily struggle of cubicle-confined office drone, boredom is an affect or state interwoven into the fabric of everyday life (Ferrell, 2004). It appears chimeric, described simultaneously as an acute emotional experience and an existential state of disengagement, apathy, angst, and even nausea (Toohey, 2011). Many terms have been used to describe this malaise across history including tedium vitae, horror loci, acedia, melancholia, and ennui. Each captures boredom in a manner indicative of its historical context, adopting existential, religious, or even pathological connotations (Gardiner, 2012; Kearney, 2003; Martin et al., 2006; Musharbash, 2007; Toohey, 2011). For example, acedia or the “noonday demon” was thought to be “a state of apathy in the practice of virtue afflicting the clergy” during the Middle Ages, a period dominated by theocratic rule (Musharbash, 2007: 308). During the Renaissance, boredom was described as melancholia which was “associated with the disease of the black bile […] a biological fluid in the body with its corresponding ‘temperament’ or mental type’, usually linked to instability or insanity” (Kearny, 2003: 165). In this fashion, boredom is more than an affect linked to under-arousal; it is a social condition with a discourse firmly embedded in historical circumstance.

Contemporary notions of boredom have emerged during a period in western culture saturated with an unprecedented range of activities designed to engage and entertain. In a time when we should be so intensely aroused, why then are we so frequently bored? The answer is that boredom co-exists with stimulation in the dialectic of mass culture (Lefebvre, 1995). While production and consumption of entertainment and thrills have skyrocketed, so too has boredom seemingly deepened:

Boredom pervades the everyday operations of a rationalized social order. Even those avenues that promise an escape from the tedium of the everyday—televised entertainments, new music releases, theme parks and adventure tours—themselves quickly become routine, ultimately little more than predictable packages of commodified experience.

(Ferrell et al., 2015: 108)

Boredom is thus an inescapable component of contemporary existence, stitched into the very fabric of the social order. Even when surrounded by a litany of commodified distractions, boredom emerges in situations shaped by late modernity’s penchant for routinization, bureaucratization, and actuarialization (Ferrell, 2004; Gardiner, 2012; Spacks, 1995).

Describing boredom with precision is difficult as its “most defining feature from the available literature seems to be its definitional ambiguity” (Musharbash, 2007: 307). To some extent, boredom is a mercurial state that can manifest in a multitude of circumstances and its experience can be inconsistent:

There can be no reliable or categorical tenets of boredom. Subject matter may be too easy and therefore tedious, or may be too abstruse and consequently irksome […] Something or someone can trigger boredom: aversion to certain activity or people, inertia induced by the environment, fatigue brought on by dullness or exhaustion in one’s patience and/or fancy […] Subjects and objects lose their vigor and freshness; they no longer provoke or satiate. Boredom may last intermittently or what may feel like an eternity.

(Paliwoda, 2006: 3)

We argue that this definitional difficulty stems from the phenomenon’s interstitial nature. Boredom lurks in the periphery of excitement and engagement. Traditionally, the concept is thought of as a noxious affect. As will be argued here, however, boredom is also a social condition that saturates the spaces between emotions, perceptions, experience, culture, and structure. Boredom represents a kind of emptiness we struggle to fill. It creates opportunities for our imaginations to come alive and propels us toward other experiential possibilities. Boredom is thus difficult to define because it rests betwixt and between the nuances of everyday life; it can overtake us in moments of inactivity, repetition, and dullness and it can recede during instances of engaged action and interest. Never fully subsiding, however, it lurks in perpetuity even in moments of intense arousal. Boredom waits, threatening to overtake us as circumstances and experiences shift. As Lefebvre (1995: 194–195) proclaims, “how does it come about that when something is interesting, boredom is always lurking in the background? How incredibly swiftly does this one turn into the other!” A dialectical tension thus exists between boredom and arousal (Willis, 1977).

Boring, however, should be one of the last concepts affiliated with crime and criminal justice considering the wealth of related media, narratives, and myths about crime and punishment that pervade late modern society. Serial murder specials, procedural cop dramas, crime news, and other productions capture our imaginations. With such titillating subject matter, how could the “reality” of crime and criminal justice be anything short of exhilarating? Outside the funhouse mirrors of media and popular culture, illicit behavior and formal social control are often fraught with struggles and negotiations with situational boredom across the spectrum of crime and criminal justice. Numerous ethnographic accounts—such as Whyte’s (1943) Street Corner Society,¹ Willis’ (1977) Learning to Labor,² Goffman’s (2014) On the Run,³ and Holdaway’s (1983) Inside the British Police⁴—recognize the pervasiveness of boredom in the periphery of crime and crime control. Despite such (brief) acknowledgments, boredom is seldom considered as a phenomenon of criminological interest in and of itself. Instead the concept seems relegated to the periphery of academic attention.

The current analysis is thus a response to Ferrell’s (2004: 294) call for criminologists to “investigate the circumstances of collective boredom”. Much as he found an undercurrent of boredom throughout his own work, so too do we find boredom to be a unifying experience across seemingly disparate criminological populations: detectives; prisoners serving life sentences; and hackers. Because boredom links personal experience, cultural mediation, and structural circumstances, this analysis draws from cultural criminology—a theoretical tool kit designed to draw connections between these levels of analysis. Cultural criminology’s attunement to the “politics of meaning” (Ferrell, 2013: 257) is also vital for understanding boredom as the phenomenon rests uneasily between meaning and meaninglessness. Bengtsson (2012: 529, emphasis added) goes as far as to declare that “boredom opposes meaning”. Cultural criminology can therefore help us make sense of the collective circumstances of boredom experienced across the three populations explored in this study.

Boredom across the criminological spectrum

The authors of the current analysis convened while conducting separate qualitative examinations of the lived experiences of disparate criminological populations: detectives, hackers, and prison lifers. This conversation triggered a realization that a common theme permeated many of the experiences of the research participants across these projects: boredom. The current analysis thus combines observations from these three studies to explore the “certain vacant commonality” created by boredom (Ferrell, 2004: 294). For the study of detectives, data were gathered through a 21-month ethnography of two plain clothes street crime units in a large metropolitan police department.⁵ The ethnographic observations paid particularly close attention to the purpose, tactics, and culture related to illegal gun and narcotics search warrants. The analysis of hackers involves data from 15 months of ethnographic field research with a hacker group and their affiliates. Included are data from participant observation and 16 formal field interviews.⁶ Ethnographic content analysis of 10 years of the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly zine, one of the “first significant hacker publications” (Thomas, 2005: 604), also informs this inquiry. The examination of prison lifers was conducted by a research team over three-and-a-half years (2012 to 2015) which involved 96 interviews of administrators, staff, and inmates across five Midwestern correctional facilities. The results from prison lifers presented in this analysis were derived from an extended case study of 54 interviews with prisoners serving life sentences (20 or more years).⁷

A case of the blues: Detective work and boredom

Scholars have long noted police work is boring (Bayley, 1994; Reiner, 2000). The majority of the patrol officer’s time is rife tedium and mundanity, a reality at odds with the stereotypical “crime fighter” image that pervades officer and public expectations of the job (Waddington, 1999). Most prior examinations of boredom have focused on patrol officers and the negative consequences the phenomenon yields to these institutional actors (Barker, 1983; Phillips, 2015). This section, however, provides an ethnographic exploration of boredom in the lives of street-crime detectives tasked with “hunting” for illegal weapons, criminals with active warrants, and executing narcotic raids—persons who, if popular culture is to be believed, should seldom succumb to boredom.

For these detectives, the threat of boredom lingers in the periphery—something to be continually avoided and negotiated. Detectives thus find ways to stymy boredom and enliven their work. The warrant process, for example, provides a veritable smorgasbord of excitement for police. As one detective stated,

It is exciting to work a warrant from start to finish. You get to work confidential informants, set up buys, break through the door, and clearing a residence is a rush. You never know what you will come across inside a house. ⁸

Each step along the warrant process provides its own flashes of satisfaction and even spikes of adrenaline, particularly during the excitement of busting down doors as a pseudo-SWAT team while executing a narcotic search warrant. For these detectives, satisfaction is derived at least in part because such tasks are consistent with the crime fighter narratives that sustain their collective occupational identity (Herbert, 2001; Manning, 1980; Van Maanen, 1975).

In this capacity, detectives derive a sense of occupational meaning from such experiential highlights. These events, however, are flanked by boredom. The search warrant process only takes a few hours, but before the door is hit, detectives are involved in the mundane and menial tasks of conducting surveillance or writing the warrant. These tasks often require only one or two detectives, leaving the others in the unit to wait in anticipation of something to do. “I hate waiting to serve the warrant” a detective explained, “the closer we get to time the less freedom we have to do anything. Sarge wants us around in case we have to get eyes on the house.” Further, after the door is knocked down and the house secured, the officers then have to go through the routinized processing of the scene, such as waiting for a narcotics canine to search the residence to locate hidden drugs which can take up to 40 minutes.

Hitting the door is the fun part, but then we have to wait for the canine to search the house and then we search the house. It’s a downer. Waiting for the dog and searching the house is boring. Doing this two or three times a week gets old real fast.

The fall-out from serving the warrant leaves the detectives waylaid by the tedium that follows an intense adrenaline rush, yet the detectives gladly take the boredom over responding to calls for service.

The detectives rarely complain about the periods of downtime involved in their jobs. Instead, they seem to recognize these pockets of occupational inactivity as part of the process. Much as Cohen (1955) once described subcultures as providing solutions to problems faced by populations, police subculture appears to provide a litany of tools detectives can use to manage the boredom waiting in the wings. For example, detectives may repel tedium through storytelling—recounting tales of busts-gone-by, departmental gossip, and lurid events—as well as humor (Waddington, 1999). Further, the ubiquity of smartphones allows detectives to check fantasy sports rosters, play games, and/or watch YouTube videos to stave off the looming specter of boredom. Warrant work is particularly desired as “warrants provide a lot of freedom” to control how one spends their downtime. After making entry during a search warrant, a detective was asked how they fend off the tedium involved in waiting around, to which he replied,

They are still paying us to sit around, ain’t they? Sitting here reading the news [has ESPN pulled up on his phone] is better than being on a detail. Plus, the boss can’t say I’m not working because I am here, right?

Despite the mundanity of waiting, the detective is able to dictate how he manages the periods of downtime—to fend off monotony in the manner of his choosing.

In fact, detectives have learned to manage and resist organizational demands that may limit leisurely downtime. They may bristle against the intervention of command staff dictating how, where, and when they will work. In an era of micro-management (Shane, 2010), the detectives embrace occupational autonomy to control their time—finding more entertaining and engaging alternative activities between bouts of “real” detective work:

I arrive at the station at 4 p.m. to start my observations, and the detectives are already heading out. Usually, the detectives spend the first couple hours of their shift filling out paperwork or socializing at the office, so their rush to leave catches me off-guard. I ask where everyone is going and a detective explains, “we have a warrant we will do later, but for now a couple of the guys are going to play softball, one is going home to eat dinner with this family, and we are going to hang out here for a while and then grab dinner when they get done playing [softball]”.

Thus the detectives push away managerial restrictions so they can control their downtime. They have learned to control their boredom by finding leisure in their work day (Lefebvre, 1995). The detectives are required to meet the growing needs and production of the organization in the forms of arrests and seizures, yet are obstructed by procedural rules and organizational support systems. Boredom emerges from the disparity between what detective work promises (real crime fighting) and delivers (periods of boredom). The detectives learn strategies to control their downtime so they can pepper their work with leisure between the thrilling parts of their labor. In other words, supervisory attempts to further routinize and bureaucratize the policing occupation meet resistance as these factors may crush the ability of officers to control their time in a manner that wards off the tediousness of their job.

Downtime itself, therefore, does not seem to be a particular problem for detectives as long as they control how such time is managed. Dullness can be fended off for detectives engaged in warrant work through regaling narratives, telling sordid jokes, carrying on conversing, or fiddling with hand-held devices. Directed patrol, however, limits their ability to incorporate leisure activities into the work day. At this point, routine threatens to devolve into boredom. For these detectives, the exciting components of their job constitutes “real” detective work and provides them with the meaning to sustain their occupational identity. They prefer the autonomy to negotiate the downtime, which is potentially rife with boredom, as they wish through leisure activities. Thus occupational demands appear valued only to the extent they are antithetical to boredom.

Hacking boredom

Transitioning from the most visible agents of crime control—the police, particularly detectives—this analysis now turns to subcultural actors mired in the nexus of high-technology, deviance, and crime control within late modernity: hackers. Hacking is a transgressive form of technological/computational artisanal labor, or as Steinmetz (2015b: 141, emphasis in original) states, “hacking is craft(y)”. Hacking is a playful, creative, and sometimes deleterious approach to technology with little regard for intended uses and expected results. Hacking spans across an array of activities and interests including free and open source software programming, hardware hacking, network administration, network intrusions, malware construction, data exfiltration, among others (though most criminological research seems content to only acknowledge the potentially illicit components of hacking) (Coleman, 2013; Jordan, 2008; Levy, 1984). Despite the lurid depictions riddled throughout popular culture, hacking is often not as exciting as one might believe. Hackers are frequently bored (Schell and Holt, 2010). Most research has a preoccupation with hackers’ drive for engagement and excitement. Little attention, however, has been paid to the often mundane and tedious elements of the hacking experience. Boredom can be found throughout the myriad interests and activities within the hacker community. Using insights gleaned from the ethnographic study of hackers, this section articulates how both excitement and boredom are interwoven into the process of hacking.

There are two types of emotional experiences produced by hacking useful for overcoming boredom and frustration. The first emotional experience is familiar to many scholars of hacking: thrills. While curiosity and interest may be enough to get involved and persist in a project, many young technological enthusiasts may also seek to overcome boredom through thrill-seeking and trickster-ish technological antics (Nikitina, 2012). One can understand the appeal—the seduction—of hacking for relatively young tech-enthusiasts. One hacker compared the experience of engaging in illicit hacking to the practice of urban exploration and stated that thrills “kind of first got me interested in this sort of thing. Because there’s an adrenaline rush to knowing you are somewhere you shouldn’t be.”

Such thrill-seeking behavior has similarly manifested in “lulz”: a “spirited but often malevolent brand of humor etymologically derived from lol” (Coleman, 2014: 4). Lulzy behavior can include activities ranging from website defacement to SWATing (the act of falsely reporting criminal activity to have a SWAT team delivered to a victim). These acts may result in the humorous delight and thrills for themselves and/or others in their social groups. For some, seeking the “lulz” may be enough for them to escape the mundanity of middle-class adolescence rife with leisure time and boredom. Although working with technology may be tedious and irritating, some neophyte hackers find thrills in hacking by using pre-made scripts and tools to deface websites, conducting denial of service attacks, and circumventing various security protocols, among other things. The deviant and/or risky nature of lulzy activities often provides a rush.

Persons who use computer technologies for the purposes of “lulz” are often pejoratively referred to as “script kiddies” or “skiddies”—relatively young and unskilled computer enthusiasts who engage in thrill-seeking and sometimes destructive behavior. For skiddies and related groups, the rush of norm and/or rule violation provides a reward for (and a temporary escape from) the tedium and frustration that often accompanies technological work. That is not to say such an emotional payoff is exclusively the domain of immature neophytes—skilled and seasoned hackers can be effective pursuers of lulz as well.

Some hackers, however, find satisfaction in the process of hacking rather than its titillating ends. Hacking, among other characteristics, is about problem-solving. Mulling over a problem—like repurposing an old industrial machine, finding a backdoor through a security system, or solving a complex programming conundrum—often involves trial-and-error practices and routinized experimentation. Here, boredom waits patiently, poised to overtake the situation. As one hacker stated, “sure, some of it can be automated, some of it can be scripted, but a lot of it is just really tedious and repetitive”. Failure to resolve the issue over time transforms boredom into frustration. One interviewee explained that “trying to figure out how something works and not getting the right answer is a little bit like being tortured”. If the experience is so tedious and frustrating, then why do so many hackers continue? Because for the dedicated and persistent hacker there is the potentially rewarding sensation of flow behind every effort.

Flow is an emotional state where time expands, external stimuli drift away, and workers lose themselves in their activities resulting in a sensationally rewarding experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Hayward, 2004). Importantly, the experience of flow is more likely to occur in someone skilled in an area—the more skill developed, the more likely flow is to occur in activities as broad as piano playing and scuba diving. One interviewee, drawing from the vocabulary of positive psychology, frames his hacking experience in the language of flow:

You start off with the flow of, like, designing it and just doing it and sometimes you’re up till six in the morning, seven in the morning doing that kind of stuff and writing code or hacking something and, you know, it’s just… you lose track of time… and it has its downfall and you’re like… it has consequences of, like, “I’m lacking sleep and I need to sleep.” Right? Your brain can only go so far ahead. But in that moment, it’s just… It’s one of the most rewarding feelings you can have.

Flow offers an escape from boredom, particularly as it transforms our perception of time: “boredom hinges on a transformation in our experience of time” (Gardiner, 2012: 41). When a person is unstimulated, they are all too aware of their bodily self and temporality. If a person is being challenged (but the task is not overly difficult) and they possess sufficient skill, then they can lose themselves in flow—awareness of time and space dissipate (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi, 1988).

In this manner, hacking may be rife with tasks that would bore many but, to the relatively skilled hacker, create a sense of satisfaction modifying the experience. Meaning can be extracted from the seemingly routine and mundane, as Sennett (2008: 175) explains:

We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labor, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it’s nothing like this […] The substance of the routine may change, metamorphose, improve, but the emotional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again.

Direct work with technology shapes perceptions and experiences in this manner. What was once uninteresting finds meaning as long as the activity continues to challenge and provide new problems to solve. The process of solving these problems may be routine, but the experience is satisfying. Without these elements, routine quickly devolves into boredom. In both thrills and flow, boredom is a lurking threat to experience. Hackers actively maneuver themselves in such a way as to rise above boredom, much like a person cast to sea must find ways to keep their head above water.

Doing time: Prisoners and boredom

Boredom is not typically the first concept associated with police officers or hackers. This section, however, addresses a group heavily linked to tedium in the public imagination: prisoners. As previously mentioned, lack of stimulation elongates perceptions of time. While time may be compressed through engagement and pontification on a problem, others may escape into their thoughts as a way to insulate their psyche from the toxic experience of boredom. Finding ways to escape downtime and a lack of engagement, however, become a new challenge entirely under prolonged confinement, like that experienced by the incarcerated. For those facing long stretches behind bars, time management takes on an entirely different meaning, perhaps toward prisonization. Boredom is so intimately woven into the fabric of prison life that when lifers were asked to convey prison in five words, boredom—in some form or fashion—was the most frequently occurring descriptor. As one participant stated, “prison is about control. It’s monotonous, tedious, structured, and full of pettiness—in other words, a constant routine.” Terms like “lonely”, “isolated”, and “depressing” were also among the top 10 most frequently used terms—experiences at least partially related to boredom.

When asked to describe the most difficult parts of the prison experience, tales of boredom were constant. As one longtime inmate explains:

Well, the hardest thing about being here, to me, is the walk and get my chow. Walkin’ to the chow hall, yeah. Anything else, ain’t nothing. Bored. Real bored. I mean, there just ain’t no activity. I go to yard, work out, I mean, get out of the yard, come on back in to the same thing I seen when I went out in the yard. Ain’t nothin’ changed. Same drama goin’ on in the pod.⁹

Similarly, another lifer conveyed a sense of sameness in prison by referencing the movie Groundhog Day (a reference made by three other lifers in their accounts as well):

Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. Wake up at six o’clock, you know, that’s what he does. Out here, we wake up at five-forty-five, every day, every day’s the same thing. Get up, go eat, wait to go to work at six-forty-five, go to work, come back at two, two-ten, lay down, take a nap, go eat, come back, wait ‘til they call yard, go work out. Every day’s the same.

The monotony of the prison routine can easily become noxious for mind, body, and spirit. Inmates must therefore learn to cope, to “do their own time”. Irwin (1970) presents five strategies for “doing time” and minimizing suffering while incarcerated:

(1) avoid trouble; (2) find activities which occupy their time; (3) secure a few luxuries; (4) with the exception of a few complete isolates, form friendships with small groups of other convicts, and; (5) do what they think is necessary to get out as soon as possible.

(Irwin, 1970: 69)

While some of the strategies discussed by Irwin (1970) are to minimize sanctions and other repercussions from rule violations or slighting fellow convicts, some also help stave away boredom behind bars and enhance the odds of timely release (and an escape from the constant struggle against boredom).¹⁰

Prisoners must learn to do their time—to manage to mitigate (or at least temper) the strain of ennui. This process, however, is intensely personal in character. As one participant stated, “[d]oing your own time basically means to me, mind your own business—don’t worry about me. I’m not worried about you. You do your thing.” The lifer then warned, with a sense of foreboding, that doing one’s time should avoid getting other people into trouble. In other words, inmates should avoid dragging others down as they struggle to cope with odious time.

Despite such prison wisdom, some inmates may lash out in potentially destructive ways as a result of boredom. One inmate describes how such outbursts can manifest:

I mean, I tried meditation. Did that for years, but after a while, I mean, everything is gonna get boring and so you just, you come up with different aspects. Sometimes you find yourself, I don’t know, sometimes de-evolving. You know, findin’ yourself in just some asshole state of mind for years, where you just pick on people, you fight, you, you know, extort child molesters, you, I mean, just the bad stuff.

When asked further about why people may engage in these sorts of behaviors, he explained:

Yeah. I mean, ’cause most people, they don’t want to be bored. They don’t want to be in here. You know, and if they make somebody else suffer and ease their pain or their boredom then they do it. You know, you have a tendency not to, I mean, ’cause nobody else thinks of us as individuals or people, you know, the guards don’t, you know, staff, whatever. So, then you have a tendency to stop thinkin’ of yourself as that way.

Prisons are organized to manage routine, which encourages boredom by design. Persons must learn coping strategies to stave off such tedium, which may range from minding one’s own business to regressing to “some asshole state of mind”. Each of these strategies, however, involves filling an experiential void left by routine, where boredom quietly and sardonically waits.

Prisons are total institutions designed for population management through confinement and routine (Goffman, 1961). Such solitude was historically a mechanism to encourage reflection and penitence. Though the religious connotations of such punishment have faded, the material, social, and experiential deprivations of prison persist. These circumstances are petri dishes for boredom. As such, many actions behind these fences, walls, and concertina wire are directly or indirectly responses to ever-present threat of institutionally imposed (even mandated) boredom.

On boredom

As demonstrated throughout these three accounts, boredom is rife throughout crime and crime control. From detectives managing downtime through leisure, to hackers searching for thrills and flow, to prisoners doing their time, boredom skulks around the periphery of experience. Boredom casts life in relief; it “calibrates, second by awful second, the experience of drudgery in the late-modern world” (Ferrell et al., 2015: 108) and fills the gullies between the comings and goings of everyday life. As an interstitial phenomenon, boredom presents a kind of meaninglessness that encroaches upon understanding and experience. It presents a void from which we retreat. These experiential gulfs are structured under the conditions of late modernity including its penchant for commodified spectacles, “bureaucratic rationalization, efficiency, routinization, regulation”, and “standardization” (Ferrell, 2004: 290).

For instance, detectives seek out those escapades promised to them by popular culture and barroom stories. The prospect that the next car stop or search warrant will bring forth a foot chase, a large seizure, or a fight is always on the detectives’ minds. Detective work promises escape from calls for service and getting stuck on a “bullshit run”. As one detective explained, “we get to run to all of the good calls”. Detectives pursue what Lefebvre (1995) would call the style of life. Contemporary police practices pervert the style of real detective work, yet simultaneously promise it. The detectives seek out moments of “real” crime fighting through proactive patrols, stop-and-frisks, and search warrants. In the intervening moments, where boredom percolates, officers resist administrative attempts to further routinize their occupation, choosing instead to fill these periods with leisure activities away from managerial control. In this capacity, boredom is a product of alienation wrought by organizational demands and micro-management stemming from bureaucratization. These detectives struggle to find occupational meaning in their labor suspended in tension between expectation and reality.

For hackers, the sameness of middle-class late modern existence makes technological prestidigitation alluring and the pursuit of lulz enticing, particularly in a time when institutions seem to increasingly demand routine predictability. In 1986, “The hacker manifesto” was published—a renowned proclamation of hacker sensibilities against the sterility of late modern education. In this piece, a hacker named The Mentor (1986) states:

We’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

He further describes computers as a remedy to the dilution of contemporary schooling:

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me… or feels threatened by me… or thinks I’m a smart ass… or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…

(The Mentor, 1986)

The computer is then described as an escape from institutional boredom: “and then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins”. The Mentor demonstrates that working with computers provides an escape from an inadequate educational apparatus. He is able to use the computer for study on his own terms—the computer becomes the replacement teacher. Though the rote tedium of coding, debugging, and exploiting perpetually threatens to engulf the hacker, work with computers moves autonomy into his/her hands and opens a space for them to accrue enough skill, lose themselves in the routine, and be creative. Meaning is found in the engagement and the accomplishment.

The conditions of routine and control are perhaps most pronounced behind prison walls. In these circumstances, prisoners’ entire lives become enveloped within a total institution, with only fleeting glimpses of the outside world. The wars on crime and drugs cascaded into a criminal justice apparatus the likes of which the world had never seen before with 612 per 100,000 persons in the USA currently behind bars (Carson, 2015). Prisoners, particularly lifers, are thus subjected to perhaps the biggest symptom of late modernity’s quest for control. Barely any aspect of their lives escapes some sort of institutional authority coalescing into monotony. Within these confines, prisoners express agency through boredom avoidance strategies as they negotiate these circumstances. Some may keep to themselves. Others may lash out and find trouble where they can through the cracks of the total institution. Many of these coping mechanisms are derived as a means to find meaning. Prisoners’ minds, for example, may drift in reflection on mistakes made and debts owed or to imagined futures beyond those walls in an attempt to lull the senses from the awareness of boredom. Thoughts may also turn in anger and dwell. In this capacity, boredom encourages a tacit or implicit search for meaning through measures including quests for redemption (Irwin, 2009) or even radicalization (Hamm, 2013). A phenomenological chasm is thus opened for contemplation on times gone by and present circumstances… or filled with negative emotions and destructive interactions. In an institution “dedicated to the enforcement of tedium” (Ferrell, 2004: 291), lifers must exercise what little control and agency they are afforded to “do their time” or else, as such a phrase implies, one’s time might do them.

Kierkegaard (1987: 285, emphasis added) states that “[t]he effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is not one of attraction but repulsion”. Katz (1988) argues that crime and deviance are similarly magical in that they are frequently seductive. Seduction, however, is dialectically intertwined with repulsion. Our argument is that boredom provides a negative space in experience and emotion that highlights the alluring qualities of crime and deviance. Breaking into a building to access a Cray supercomputer may be thrilling, as one hacker described in an interview, but such activities could become especially seductive when schools are blasé and routine and authority figures become increasingly risk averse—situations in which there is “just not much to do… you either got into drugs or you got into guns or you got into hacking”. In this manner, if the phenomenology of crime involves seductive elements, it stands to reason that repulsive aspects—like boredom—can similarly be at play.

Boredom is not only a repellant experience but it also opens moments where creativity can bloom. As Žižek (2014: 86) states:

Boredom creates the conditions for its own overcoming: boredom is a form of the reflected void, it signals that we have reflexively noted the limitation of what is given, of our situation. Therein also resides the link between boredom and creatio ex nihilo: boredom is the nihil out of which we create.

Whether finding ways to seize control of one’s time on the beat, crafting code, or negotiating a prison term, boredom appears to coexist with creative impulses as well. These activities may lead to transgressions against circumstance but may also be transformative, providing a space for creative exercises of agency within the confines of institutional and social constraints. Žižek (2014: 86) captures this possibility within boredom by stating that:

The boredom of living in a closed tribal society pushed humans into engaging in commerce, to develop classes and exploitation; the boredom of medieval stability and inertia pushed them towards capitalist modernization; bored with living on Earth, we built rockets and traveled into space; and today, in the developed consumerist societies, boredom is universalized, pushing us into buying new products over and over again.

Thus at the individual level, boredom is simultaneously oppression and an opportunity. Collectively, boredom can be an engine of personal and social transformation.

A popular folk-theory of boredom exists—that delinquency is likely when juveniles have too much “time on their hands”—that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop”. Boredom, however, is more complex than a catalyst for some inherent tendency of humans toward avarice and impulse. Boredom does provide an impetus toward action but it does so by opening a space for imagining alternative possibilities in circumstance. Boredom thus “contains a sense of anticipation, even promise. […] Boredom reminds us of the paucity of the present and holds open the prospect of an as-yet undetermined future, and is thus resolutely utopian in its orientation” (Butler et al., 2011: 333). For instance, there is an underlying hope of a big score—a major bust—that pulls officers through the mundanity of proactive police work. For hackers, the prospect of a good laugh, the sensation of getting one over on someone, or the promise of flow orient them to an imagined future as they slough through the trials and tribulations of technological work. Prisoners may imagine possibilities outside the concrete walls, of what they will do with their time once they are free.

As articulated by cultural criminologist Majid Yar (2014), utopian thinking also invites cynical possibilities—imagined dystopias. Depending on how closely a person clings to hopefulness about their present situation, the mind may turn toward the void of meaning and wallow in pessimistic visions of the future. Certainly many prisoners have experienced dark thoughts as they stare vacantly at the ceiling of their cell at night. Hackers may curse and swear, declaring a task impossible. They may dwell on failures, feelings of inadequacy, and their future prospects as technologists. Cynicism may overtake a detective as their expectations of the job collide with the often tedious reality of routine police work. Boredom thus encourages a proliferation of imagined futures as the mind claws away from the sourness of boring situations.

In addition to utopian thinking, cultural criminologists have written in depth about a concept some would consider antithetical to boredom: edgework. Edgework involves explosive moments of adrenaline fueled activity that negotiates the boundaries between “order and chaos” as well as life and death (Lyng, 1990: 855). For these theorists, edgework can be a response to “the culture industry” that “endlessly promises satisfaction or excitement with its next mediated product, and endlessly fails to deliver on that promise” (Ferrell et al., 2015: 74). Certainly these incendiary moments constitute forms of tacit or explicit rebellion against such an order. As demonstrated in this study, however, aversions to socially and culturally produced circumstances of boredom can contribute to (appropriately enough) far more mundane acts of transgression and escapism. The inmate who participates in a prison riot may be lashing out against institutionally imposed boredom, but so too might the prisoner who smuggles contraband. Officers withdrawing from routine patrol to play games on a cellular phone is hardly thrilling police work—but it is a way to negotiate the boredom that can emerge from agency-mandated routine stops and small-time busts. Even hackers attempting to lose themselves in their work—regardless of the ends produced—can be seen as enmeshed in the collective circumstances of boredom wrought by a stripped down education system and a society increasingly circumscribing “approved” uses of technology (Doctorow, 2008; Lessig, 2004). In other words, we can see less exciting forms of crime and deviance linked to the same circumstances that contribute to spectacles of violence or the seemingly reckless displays of skill and bravado involved in edgework.

Much as edgework is “best understood as an approach to the boundary between order and disorder, form and formlessness” (Lyng, 1990: 858), boredom presents an experiential moment situated between the poles of seduction and repulsion, utopia and dystopia, deviance and conformity. As Kearney (2003: 176) explains, boredom or melancholia presents us with a choice to “succumb to our inner dark or turn it into a song. Self-destruction or self-creation. The black sun can swing either way.” Under the conditions of late modernity, however, when the scope of human activity is increasingly restricted through official mandate and seemingly every aspect of contemporary society rationalized and controlled, seemingly any attempt to escape boredom can be construed as deviant, delinquent, or criminal. Boredom is therefore not only an affect, but a site of conflict between (1) what is and what could be as well as (2) autonomy and power. Boredom therefore creates moments pregnant with the potential for transgression.

Conclusion: Too much of nothing

Despite depictions offered by cop dramas, hacker movies, and TV programs like Orange is the New Black, crime and crime control are boring more often than not. Perhaps this disjuncture can be understood as a result of the fact that in the late modernity consumer society, boredom is something to be avoided at all costs (both literally and metaphorically). As Ferrell (2004: 292) explains:

So, it seems, those caught under the crush of modern boredom can find little relief in work or in consumption—in fact, their boredom becomes all the more visceral, all the more unbearable, as the unrequited promises of mass-produced excitement accumulate, and the modernist ethos of meaningful work and democratic participation becomes just another cheap con. Closing in from all sides, the contradictions of modern boredom create a strain of Mertonian (1938) proportions, an existential disjunction between expectation and experience.

Perhaps, then, the gap between expectation and reality within late modernity conjures a particularly noxious and frustrating variant of boredom that can appear inescapable. Much of late modern life involves increasingly commodified avenues promising to mitigate monotony. These strategies seem perpetually doomed to fail or—at the very least—only provide a tenuous lifeline of meaning onto which we cling. Our lives thus seem structured by boredom and its avoidance. It is in this context that we can understand—even engage in a moment of verstehen—with the police officer scrounging for excitement on his beat, the hacker searching for meaning in the wires, or the prisoner engaging in subversions or lashing out at those around him/her (Ferrell, 1997).

The undulations of late modernity structure our conceptions of and interactions with boredom, even in crime and crime control. These moments are littered with perceived traps/obstacles between autonomy and leisure, reflection and anticipation, as well as engagement and apathy. Within prisons, for instance, boredom has been institutionalized by structured routine and political mandate. Tough on crime rhetoric and ideologies of retribution and penitence render prisons phenomenologically desolate places when they are not encouraging fear and anger. The tedium of police work manifests in a context where political demands restructure police work through proactive or zero-tolerance policies while popular culture promises occupations filled with adventure. The proliferation of high-technology and globalization create spaces for hackers to find meaning and excitement within the virtual confines of metal and plastic. While cultural criminology often revels in the exciting, the politics of meaning, transgression, and resistance are also rampant in the dull and mundane (Ferrell, 2004, 2013).

Thus, boredom—as a late modern condition—exists in the negative spaces of lived experience in which acceptable uses of time are increasingly circumscribed. Itpresents a form of turmoil for the individual, triggering resistance ranging from the mundane to the explosive. In our society, we are frequently told—in large glowing neon letters—that boredom is unacceptable and that we should consume approved strategies of boredom-abatement. At the same time, we are culturally discouraged from reflective and contemplative strategies for alleviating boredom. Instead, we should constantly seek pre-packaged entertainment (Ferrell et al., 2015). Methods of boredom aversion outside the mechanisms of consumption are frequently branded as “unsafe”, “reckless”, or even “criminal”. As such, ducking and diving the situational logics of tedium through the pursuit of meaningful activity or autonomy can result in micro-aggressions against the status quo. The management of monotony and avoidance strategies detailed in this analysis—like pursuing flow, developing techniques for doing one’s time, or circumventing managerial control—are ways to seize control of one’s time and potential in a society where these dimensions are increasingly pulled out of our control. Boredom is therefore a social condition linked intimately to struggles over autonomy and power.

With its focus on connecting the phenomenological to the structural, cultural criminology is uniquely equipped to deal with boredom as an interstitial social condition (Ferrell, 2004; Ferrell et al., 2015). Other criminological theories, however, have at least tangentially addressed boredom—in one form or another—including social bonds theory (Hirschi, 1969), bio-social theory (Raine, 2002), unstructured socializing (Siennick and Osgood, 2012), crime pattern theory (Brantingham and Brantingham, 2004), and developmental life course theory (Farrington, 1993). Considering the dialectical ubiquity of boredom in the foreground and background of crime and crime control, these theories do not do justice to the concept by failing to consider the situational, interstitial, cultural, and structural elements involved in boredom as a social condition. In this regard, cultural criminology is on the cutting edge.

Though we argue that cultural criminology is best suited to explore the dialectics of boredom, these theories should still be applauded for at least considering the implications of boredom. Indeed, other theories may be similarly enriched by providing at least a cursory contemplation of boredom. Agnew’s (1992) General Strain Theory, for instance, may consider boredom as a potentially noxious strain leading to frustration, irritation, or even anger—emotional catalysts for crime. Social learning theory could consider the role of boredom in providing negative reinforcements for conformity. Feminist criminologists could explicitly examine how criminogenic boredom and boredom avoidance strategies are structured and mediated by gender. Subcultural criminology—a major influence on cultural criminology—could examine boredom as a key problem for which solutions are provided by delinquent or illicit subcultures when legitimate methods (like media consumption) are either restricted or otherwise inadequate (Cohen, 1955). Relatedly, radical criminologists could further explore the link between political economy, routinization, rationalization, alienation, and boredom as a potentially criminogenic cocktail (Willis, 1977). The list goes on. While we echo Ferrell’s (2004) call for a cultural criminology attuned to the situational and structural dynamics of boredom, criminology as a whole stands to benefit from deep reflections on the dynamics and nuances of boredom and its intertwinement with crime and crime control. If nothing else, such consideration promises to be anything but boring.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Kenneth Tunnell for his comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Thanks are also given to Travis Linnemann for his insights. Edward LW Green would also like to extend his appreciation to Sue Williams and Will Chernoff for their efforts as part of the research team investigating the experiences of the incarcerated. Finally, thanks go to the reviewers for their time, effort, and constructive comments.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Kevin F Steinmetz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, Kansas State University, USA.

Brian P Schaefer is Assistant Professor at the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Indiana State University, USA.

Edward LW Green is Assistant Professor at the Criminal Justice Department, Roosevelt University, USA.

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