We’re under constant assault by connectivity, receptivity, the tyranny of the now. Illustration by Miguel Gallardo

On November 16, 1924, Siegfried Kracauer, a luminary in the literary world of the Weimar Republic, published a feisty essay in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Trained as an architect, Kracauer was an acute observer of modernity and its impact on life in the city. He followed in the footsteps of his onetime teacher Georg Simmel, the sociologist whose 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” argued that overstimulated urban dwellers were prone to develop a “blasé attitude,” a coping mechanism that blunted their ability to react to new sensations. Kracauer’s concerns went beyond that. “People today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored,” he wrote in the Zeitung. The bourgeoisie “are pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually they no longer know where their head is.”

Life in the modern city, with its cheap and ubiquitous entertainment, was partly to blame. The glow of street advertising hijacked people’s spirits with the promise of cheap liquor and cigarettes, while movie theatres created the illusion of “a life that belongs to no one and exhausts everyone.” Radio listeners were in a state of “permanent receptivity, constantly pregnant with London, the Eiffel Tower, and Berlin,” their souls “badgered by the news hounds” so that “soon no one can tell anymore who is the hunter and who is the hunted.” The disorienting experience, Kracauer complained, is like “one of those dreams provoked by an empty stomach”:

A tiny ball rolls toward you from very far away, expands into a close-up, and finally roars right over you. You can neither stop it nor escape it, but lie there chained, a helpless little doll swept away by the giant colossus in whose ambit it expires. Flight is impossible. Should the Chinese imbroglio be tactfully disembroiled, one is sure to be harried by an American boxing match. . . . All the world-historical events on this planet—not only the current ones but also past events, whose love of life knows no shame—have only one desire: to set up a rendezvous wherever they suppose us to be present. But the masters are not to be found in their quarters. They’ve gone on a trip and cannot be located, having long since ceded the empty chambers to the “surprise party” that occupies the rooms, pretending to be the masters.

Kracauer’s remedy was simple: “extraordinary, radical boredom” could reunite us with our heads. “On a sunny afternoon when everyone is outside, one would do best to hang about in the train station or, better yet, stay at home, draw the curtains, and surrender oneself to one’s boredom on the sofa,” he wrote. Only then could one flirt with ridiculous, embarrassing, unscripted ideas, achieving a “kind of bliss that is almost unearthly.” He went on, “Eventually one becomes content to do nothing other than be with oneself, without knowing what one actually should be doing.” A popular slogan of the 1968 generation was “Boredom is counter-revolutionary”; Kracauer would have disagreed. For him, radical boredom wasn’t an excuse for Oblomovian indolence or passivity. Instead, it was inherently political, allowing us to peek at a different temporal universe, to develop alternative explanations of our predicaments, and even to dare to dream of different futures.

These days, “the state of permanent receptivity” has become the birthright of anyone with a smartphone. We are under constant assault by “interestingness,” as new-media aficionados—“curators,” they call themselves—prowl for bizarre factoids and quaint cartoons. The anti-boredom lobby has all but established its headquarters in Silicon Valley: cue Facebook’s celebration of a “more connected” world, or Apple’s reassurances that its latest gadget could do everything “twice as fast.” Google is so boredom-averse that it seems to change its logo every day.

“Now you’re never lonely, because your friends are always reachable,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, declared, a few years ago. “You’re never bored, because there’s infinite streams of information and entertainment.” In his book “The New Digital Age,” he writes that those “feeling bored” can always turn on the “holograph box and visit Carnival in Rio.” But the ultimate anti-boredom device is Google Glass, a pair of “smart” spectacles that can overlay infinite streams of information on anything in our visual field. Google Now, another flagship service, wants to hijack the “now” by analyzing everything we’ve done in the past to predict what we might be doing in the future.

Kracauer’s recipe for boredom—draw the curtains and get to know your sofa—doesn’t work in the heavily mediated homes of today. Try the sofa experiment with Kinect, the Xbox, and the Roku player by your side. Meanwhile, “the bored at work network”—as Jonah Peretti, a founder of BuzzFeed, once described the millions of people who are making his site’s stories go viral—toils to push the latest meme into your inbox. The world outside offers no relief. Your leisurely walk to the train station might be an even greater amusement trap, what with the glowing billboards that recognize your face, news feeds that beam on giant screens above your head, and smart gadgets that inform you when they detect the latest deals from shops and restaurants nearby. (Yes, Google has an app for that: it’s called Field Trip.)

Information overload can bore us as easily as information underload. But this form of boredom, mediated boredom, doesn’t provide time to think; it just produces a craving for more information in order to suppress it. Dave Eggers ruminates on this odd modern condition in his latest novel, “The Circle.” It’s a campus novel of sorts—there are even dorms—only, the campus here belongs to an eponymous Facebook-like technology giant. The Circle’s employees are drowning in unceasing and utterly trivial updates delivered to them on a rapidly proliferating number of screens, but they still insist on ever higher dosage. The Circle’s founder sounds like a character in a Kracauer feuilleton: his college nickname was “Niagara,” for his ideas “come like that, a million flowing out of his head, every second of every day, never-ending and overwhelming.”