Where are you right now? In your bed? At your desk? In your room? Where do you keep all your stuff? Do you watch TikToks in your bed? How much is your rent? Do you have a chill landlord? Do your parents pay for part of your rent? How many times did you move? Can we hang out in your room? Can your roommates hear us rn?
My bedroom has always been a significant space to me. When I was a kid and lived with my parents, my bedroom was a space for privacy and experimentation, for play and dreams, something a little bit sacred. But as I got older and dreamt about moving out, I became occupied with visions of my own apartment, and eventually my own house with a garden and a driveway and maybe even a shed. But as domestic pessimism set in, I abandoned these ideas altogether, instead, I started thinking about the spaces I do inhabit, the space that is mine. So where am I now? I managed to move out but I don’t have my own place, I’m living in an increasingly common domestic reality: with roommates in a shared household. If you’re reading this in an apartment you are most likely also sharing it with roommates, maybe even with your parents (proto-roommates). At least in the country where I live, this tends to be the case. At first it was only in your early twenties, then your late twenties, and more recently it has become normal to live with roommates into your early thirties. Either way, not much changed since I was a kid: the bedroom is still a special place. But the bedroom itself has changed, its spatial limitations in physical space are conversely overcome by the spatial limitlessness of cyberspace, and its presumed slowness is overhauled by the rapidity of computational temporalities. With a computer or a phone, the bedroom becomes a portal as much as it is a safe space, it becomes as vast as it is cozy.
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Through networked technologies and digital culture, the bedroom was culturally revitalized, spawning several figures and characters: the NEET, the incel, the femcel, the keyboard warrior, the basement dweller, the gamer, the crypto bro, the hustlepreneur, etc. These figures spend as much time as possible in their bedroom, enabled by their devices which grant them access to online subcultures, decentralized communities, digital markets, and entertainment. The NEET is a particularly fascinating figure; the acronym, which stands for ‘Not in Education, Employment, or Training’, became popularized on 4chan in the 2010s and was used self-referentially in various forums following its emergence. Its correlation with 4chan made a lot of sense: the only way one could truly be chronically online was if they didn’t go to school or have a job. But NEET’s don’t only exist as imagined characters, they inhabit physical spaces, mainly their bedrooms, occupying the desk which hosts their computer setup.
The bedroom also became more significant in the age of neoliberal-policy induced precariousness. We are, more often than not, banished to small rooms with – if you’re lucky – a queen sized bed in which we can fantasize about one day having more than just that room. As the number of roommates increases proportionally to the decrease of square meters and our peers move back into their parents’ places, our domestic realities become typified by the bedroom: the one space which still feels truly like our own. The bedroom becomes an autonomous zone within the shared household, and even then it's a precarious one. Evictions, shitty contracts (or no contracts at all), a lack of registration, increasing rent, all threaten the autonomy of that zone. Particularly in the Netherlands, which is where I live, recent political discourse centers the housing crisis as one of the most urgent issues to be addressed. And as the feeling of seemingly eternal precarity and roommates sinks in, our bedrooms become layered with new meaning. It therefore comes as no surprise that the convergence of what I will call bedroom culture and digital culture naturally leads to gooncaves and battlestations; to new ways of existing in our rooms. The NEET’s existence, in particular, also emerges in reaction to precariousness. Through networked technologies we enter alternative worlds and temporarily escape precarity – maybe we even overcome precarity all together.
Keeping this in mind, it makes sense that popular culture reflects the renewed significance of the bedroom. With it being widely referenced in contemporary art, music, and literature. Take Tracey Emin’s sculptural installation My Bed (1998), Clairo’s song Pretty Girl (2017) and Ottessa Moshfegh’s book My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), for example. All three works address the bedroom as a cultural phenomenon, both as a space and as a concept. Clairo captured a particularly significant cultural moment in her DIY music video for her song Pretty Girl: the soft light of the bedroom after dark, the slightly fuzzy and grainy texture of a 2015 macbook webcam, and the wired earphones; a perfect collage of what it felt like to be an upper middle class teenager in the late 2010s. She tapped into a socioeconomic and cultural feeling with her song, something which strongly resonated with people. Ben Mora’s show Interior Motives also explores the correlation between the aesthetics of one's bedroom and their identity. Moshfegh’s book, similarly to Emin’s work, gestures at a femcel or NEET identity – a politics of withdrawal where one spends as much possible time in their bedroom, becoming completely unproductive (bedrotting). In My Year of Rest and Relaxation—and for NEET’s more broadly—the bedroom becomes a stage where unproductivity and refusal are performed.
But perhaps the moment when the bedroom became inaugurated as the final destination for zillenials was during the pandemic. Whereas NEET’s and incels had been heavily stigmatized for living out of their bedrooms, the pandemic radically reconfigured the bedroom as an acceptable space to spend all your time in, a space where you could eat, sleep, work, and relax. In fact, you had no choice. This created a kind of perfect storm: most western countries were already deep into two decades of neoliberal governance and deteriorating welfare states, combined with a grotesquely privatized housing market which rendered even the idea of home ownership unrealistic for a lot of people. Mainstream culture caught up with the NEET’s and the incels, spending all day in your bedroom was even encouraged. The pandemic pushed us to the point of no return: the bedroom is the best we’re gonna get.
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Politics of Refusal
There is a productive dichotomy which takes place in the bedroom: on the one hand, it can become an aspirational space, a makeshift office, maybe even a headquarters; a space in which we can exercise entrepreneurship. Think of the trader, the crypto bro, the grifter giving you financial advice via webcam, the sex worker, the streamer. The bedroom is fertile ground for the grindset, the place where hustlepreneurs are born. Through networked technologies the lines between the bedroom as a leisurely space and as a productive space become blurred. There are several examples of ways in which a computer and a bedroom can be utilized to make money: people build crypto mines, click farms, or even rent out the computational power of their home computer setups to companies. Others buy a webcam or use their built-in one to stream themselves while playing video games or performing sex work. This reflects Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s ideas about the proliferation of semiocapitalism (or cognitive capitalism), which depends on networked technologies to maximize labor and data extraction from so-called cognitariats. Our devices serve as tethers which keep us connected to globalized technocapitalism at all waking moments (even sleeping moments, if we take devices such as smart-beds into consideration). As we voluntarily embed these devices into our lived environments, we also open the door to big tech and the totalizing force of networked capitalism. Through technology, the bedroom can become a space for labor and surveillance, it can even start to resemble a factory.
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On the other end of the spectrum, the NEET spends all their time in their room being intentionally unproductive; they principally reject productivity, embracing welfare or living with their parents. Their attitude is exemplified by the terminology used to refer to their self-proclaimed adversaries: ‘wagecucks’, ‘wageslaves’, ‘jobcels’ or simply ‘wagies’, which all refer to people in employment (in the form of wage labor). In the NEET’s world, employed people are victims of the system (in other words: capitalism, although not much critical theory makes the rounds in NEET circles). The NEET instead sees themselves as gaming the system; they are proudly on welfare and live with their parents, saving and receiving as much money as possible in exchange for absolutely nothing. This lifestyle allows them to spend as much time as possible doing what they like, whether that’s gaming, jerking off, or spending all day on discord. Unintentionally, they actually perform a radical politics: namely the politics of withdrawal and refusal, which refer to the rejection of capitalism’s labor-productivity imperative. (Although it could be argued that NEET’s become laborers through the semiocapitalist invasion of personal time and space, they nonetheless gesture at the refusal of work through the rejection of wage labor). The NEET is visually almost always depicted as pepe, whereas the wagie is a frequently seen as a seething or tired wojak in a McDonald’s uniform:
The figure of the NEET is culturally derived from the Japanese term Hikikomori, which refers to people who live a hermit-esque lifestyle, isolating themselves and generally behaving anti-socially. It should also be mentioned that NEET’s, although generally associated with 4chan due to the use of its visual language (pepe’s, wojaks, etc.), actually also operate outside of 4chan's usual ideological frameworks. On the NEET subreddit, members recount feelings of failure and hopelessness, mental health struggles, difficult family situations, and other systematic issues as reasons for their NEETdom. Whereas the subreddit also has its fair share of nihilist conspiracy theory, the latter category of NEET should not be dismissed or automatically grouped together with 4chan’s genre of pessimistic NEETs. Similarly to the supposed adversaries of the hustlepreneur, the NEETs main adversary seems to be ‘society’ or societal expectations, which essentially read as internalized pressures to be productive—capitalism’s central imperative. Most NEETs also see wage labor as exploitative and unfair (rightfully so), and thereby gesture at a basic tenet of capitalist critique. What I’m trying to say is that there seems to be a radical politics nestled somewhere in NEETsphere. One only needs to scroll through the NEET subreddit to realize this, as it contains a myriad of posts about wage labor being exploitative, class consciousness, internalized guilt for being unproductive, exhaustion after finally getting a job, precariousness, etc. You can’t tell me that these posts are not gesturing at radical, post-capitalist and post-scarcity sentiments.
The incel wiki mentions the NEET army, described as:
“a fictitious army of real-world NEETs. Some NEETs from these countries dress up in fake military gear and do parades or non-violent public stunts. N.E.E.T. = Not Employement Embattled Team It's an organization present worldwide... This army aims to fight against work and its exhausting tasks, they are there to rest and leave this active society where exhaustion is too present. Their common enemy, the "W.O.R.K organization", which is also present in many states, fights against them and aims to find people who do not work enough to force them to return to the world of exhaustion and fatigue.”
Similarly to the hustlepreneur, the NEET depends on networked technology, but not to make money; rather, they use it to escape their financial limitations and restricted lifestyle by becoming room-bound hermits who spend all their time online, slipping into unrestricted cyberspace. Whereas the hustlepreneur attempts to overcome precarity by using their devices and the internet as productive tools, the NEET uses these same devices to simply avoid and ignore precarity all together, wallowing in naivety. The NEET subreddit explicitly lists “no daytrading/crypto posting.” as one of its rules, for example. The NEET is the anti-hero to the hustlepreneur; the anti-entrepreneur.
Agential Panic
It should be mentioned that there are some NEETs who engage in online ways of making money, namely stock or crypto trading, as well as NEETs who live off inheritances and other forms of generational wealth (i.e. their parents paying for their lives), but these NEETs are anomalies in the overall community. Nonetheless, the hustlepreneurs and NEETs share a common enemy—precarity—which they approach from different angles. Precariousness, as a condition, engenders deep feelings of insecurity and shakiness, a perceived loss of the agency and autonomy we feel entitled to. The agency over an object or a space, such as through ownership—of a home or otherwise—no longer feels feasible. Rather, ownership is purposely prevented through models of rentiership, proprietary softwares, and increasing prices, resulting in skewed dynamics of agency and ownership. Alongside the absence of a welfare state which previously would have guaranteed (collective) ownership or at least fair rentiership, this has lead to an era where (young) people feel as though they can never exercise full ownership or agency over significant aspects of their material realities. Precariousness therefore produces agential panic through the perceived or felt loss of agency. If you can’t own a house, you might as well be in charge of the one space which feels as though it truly belongs to you: your bedroom.
The feelings of lost agency aren’t only the result of neoliberal economic policies, however, they also emerge from our computational conditions. Jernej Markelej and Daniel de Zeeuw discuss this in their paper on agency panic, where they attribute the concept, derived from Timothy Melley, to have emerged from the “liberal-humanist conception of the self as autonomous, self-determined, and [as a] rational agent.”1Markelj, J., and D. de Zeeuw. Caught in the Loops of Digital Agency Panic : On NPCs and Internet Addicts. 2023 Markelej and de Zeeuw position this concept in our contemporary computational landscape, wherein our lives are increasingly governed by blackboxed computational systems while we, conversely, are “interpellated as autonomous users.” This contradictory position is what leads to feelings of anxiety and panic. It comes as no surprise, then, that we seek narratives which re-stabilize our existence and affirm our agency. In digital contexts, this is often in the form of conspiracy theory; grand narratives in which we are being undermined and our adversaries are concretely identified (meaning that we have scapegoats). Whether it’s the neo-marxist elite, LGBTQ+ rights movements, or lizard people, these forces are out to get us. When an enemy is concretized, so are strategies of resistance, and these strategies often start with individual autonomy. Whether it’s working out and eating raw meat, trading and mining crypto, or making your bed and tidying your room, these gestures attempt to reclaim individual agency (often framed as escaping the Matrix by conspiracists). This is also why these individual liberty gestures often emerge from the manosphere (most NEETs are men), there is a mythologized 'masculine' ideal of self-governance and personal liberty through individualized spaces, take r/malelivingspace for example. Ultimately, these are reactions to the feelings of precarity and vulnerability; they are reductionist strategies and frameworks which reject victimhood and embrace a form of heroic agency. There’s something poetic about a person who feels like the world is out to get them simply picks up their agency where they have full control—their bedrooms and their bodies. These gestures also reinforce the anthropocentric view of the world which we stubbornly maintain even as we’re caught up in a complex technological assemblage which increasingly undermines and negates the conception of ourselves as autonomous, self-determined individuals. It would be more liberating to embrace agency as something relational, but our understanding agency is still largely grounded in a highly anthropocentric, individualized, libertarian framework, an attitude which is exemplified by the hustlepreneur, and subverted by the NEET.
The NEET and Hustlepreneur Dichotomy
There is a productive dichotomy which takes place in the bedroom: the NEET and the hustlepreneur neatly fit into this framework of agential panic, both figures address precarity in their respective attempts to overcome it. The hustlepreneur exercises agency by transforming their bedroom into an office or factory, rather than engaging in wage-labor, they ‘escape the matrix’ by taking matters into their own hands; by ‘becoming their own boss’ and ‘financial freedom’. This leads to a cycle of grifting the promise of autonomy and agency (repackaged as ‘financial independence’ or ‘financial freedom’) to others in a sad cycle of so-called entrepreneurship, usually operating out of their bedroom or DIY office. If you look at finance grifters online, they often film their promotional content out of their car or their home office; individualized spaces which they have full control over. These spatial contexts are not coincidental, rather, the car is often a central symbol for libertarian idealism and their notion of ‘freedom’ (as well as a status symbol, of course) and the home office demonstrates that they are ‘free’ to stay at home instead of being office-bound. The NEET, on the other hand, accepts the perceived impossibility of financial independence, choosing to wallow in their self-pity and embracing social welfare as a source of income (also known as ‘NEETbux’). If they can’t escape the matrix, they might as well be happy in it. This is also observed by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi when discussing Japanese Hikikomori, he states: “[this] behaviour might appear to many young people as an effective way to avoid the effects of suffering, compulsion, self-violence and humiliation that [semiocapitalist] competition brings about” going on to state that, in his personal interactions with Hikikomori in Japan, “they are acutely conscious that only by extricating themselves from the routine of daily life could their personal autonomy be preserved.”2Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso, 2015
Sticking with the hustlepreneur-NEET dichotomy a little longer, we can also explore both the concepts of hopium and copium through these figures. Both words are portmanteaus of the word ‘opium’, the former using ‘hope’ and the latter using ‘cope’. To conflate a word with opium implies that it sedates its user, that it soothes their qualms, and eliminates pain. It most likely also references Marx’s seminal quote “religion is the opiate of the masses” (already gesturing at the metaphorical definition of ‘copium’, i.e. religion as something to help the masses cope). According to Know Your Meme, hopium is a “fictional drug to help one stay hopeful in stressful times” and is derived from “stock market investors to describe market investors who hold on to failing investments out of false hope, and more recently by Bitcoin investors in a similar way.” The correlation between investors and hopium is no coincidence, as their identity is underscored by hope: hope in markets, financial freedom, hope in escaping.
Copium, on the other hand, is the drug of choice for the NEET, a [metaphorical] substance that helps people deal with stress and other negative emotions, specifically dealing with the soothing of loss. In the NEETs case, loss of agency, of autonomy, and of respect. Let me explain: as outlined, NEETs not only experience a loss of agency and autonomy through their entanglement in planetary computational systems and neoliberal-policy induced precarity, but they are also othered by ‘normies’. NEETdom is heavily associated with shame; being laughed at when applying for jobs, feeling like parasites, often sharing qualities with incels—such as being unable to take part in romantic relationships or social life more broadly—the NEET entry on the incel wiki states: “One would expect a large number of male NEETs to also be incel (NEETcel), due to female economic and educational hypergamy and the overlap between NEETdom and mental illnesses that generally hamper male sexual success (such as social anxiety and autism).”3https://incels.wiki/w/NEET NEETs feel othered by society and simultaneously other ‘normies’ and position themselves as enlightened, occupying an awkward position. But NEETs are othered differently than incels: whereas incels feel othered due to sexual/romantic inadequacies, NEETs are othered due to their inability to be productive members of society (and often also due to feeling socially/romantically/sexually inept, leading to the creation of the term NEETcel). This oscillating attitude of NEETs, which moves from confident and enlightened to insecure and ashamed, results in a craving for copium, something which soothes this unstable position, and this is no secret, just take a look at the r/NEET subreddits results for the keyword ‘cope’:
Although NEETs differ from the Japanese Hikikomori because NEETs are technically capable of going outside and engaging with their hobbies outside of their rooms (something Hikikomori’s are unable to do due to mental health), they still predominantly occupy their bedroom (or apartment if they’re lucky). They also rely largely on their access to networked technologies for social contact and entertainment as they feel othered by ‘normie’ society, hence banishing them to the spaces which house their desktop setups. Staying inside on your computer all day is a sort of meta-cope, and grants them access to other forms of copium. When life becomes a cycle of disaster, crisis, decline, and doom, retracting oneself into NEETdom is the ultimate coping mechanism. And so there’s an acute awareness of being copium addicts, like terminal patients on life-support, many NEETs simply exist, often describing feelings of doom and anguish induced by their societal position. And their copium comes in many forms, from cultural consumption (listening to music, reading books, watching movies) to actual drugs, porn, and masturbation; similarly to the gooner, the NEET embraces copium with open arms, using it to persevere through their existence.
Their copium is also directly correlated to platform logics, as many NEETs describe one of their main copes being the consumption of content, ranging from porn to shortform vertical videos. Similarly to the gooner, they attempt to achieve a numbing/euphoric/flow state through the uninterrupted consumption of content, copium kills time. But the emergence of NEETs can also be articulated through the financial deterritorialization catalyzed by post-Fordism, wherein the relationship between labor and value has been obscured beyond recognition. As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi puts it, post-Fordist, semiocapitalism is categorized by “competition, [which] is all about subduing, cheating, predating. Blaming the victims is part of the game: you are guilty of your inability to subdue, to cheat and to plunder, therefore you will be submitted to the blackmail of debt and to the tyranny of austerity.”4Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso, 2015 Financial capitalism profits from doom, and therefore incentivizes it—it actively produces nihilism, and so NEETs naturally appear, sometimes as hopeful postcapitalists, but mostly as doomer nihilists. When the world is a sinking ship, the best thing to do is to get comfy in your room while you’re hooked up to copium.
Battlestations
For both the hustlepreneur and the NEET, bedrooms become headquarters and desktops become battlestations; they rely on their bedrooms and their desktop setups for feelings of agency and autonomy. Nick Vyssotsky’s Display of Commodity Accessories (Zack’s Room) and Mining Meaning (Quest for Validation) are artworks which cleverly explore the feelings of agential panic through simulating the spaces in which both the NEET or incel and the hustling crypto bro attempt to reclaim and exercise their lost agency. New media, as opposed to legacy media, allows for autonomy and agency to be exercised through usership. Traditional forms of media have a unilateral dynamic with whoever is interacting with them. You are simply viewing and consuming – you are a spectator instead of a user. New media instead allows and encourages responsiveness, and is fundamentally underpinned by a bilateral dynamic between user and device. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun cleverly put it, networked devices mark the difference “between the empowered user and the couch potato”5Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy. “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 28, no. 6, 2011, pp. 91–112, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411418490.. Users have responsibility, their interaction with their device relies on their input, and responsibility is empowering insofar as it hinges on the agency and autonomy of the responsible. Furthermore, as users we can customize platforms, are under the impression that we choose what we consume, we are supposedly in charge. Particularly in the case of the NEET, who relinquishes all IRL (or AFK) responsibilities, their onlineness most likely stabilizes the shakiness induced by a complete lack of responsibility in the ‘real world’.
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The word battlestation is therefore particularly revealing; referring to expanded and elaborate desktop setups that often feature multiple screens, a custom-built computer, an expensive keyboard, and a comfortable desk chair, the term became heavily associated with chronically online individuals. Taken from the concept of a centralized space from which (semi-)remote warfare can be conducted, it implies total control. The battlestation is the space where high ranking military officials can strategize and assess the battlefield. It provides oversight and the possibility for decision making so that the enemy can be dominated from a tactical position. The overlap between the term as it's used in warfare and to describe elaborate desk setups uncovers that those who sit at the desk and operate the battlestation similarly seek control and oversight, or in other words, a form of agency. The aforementioned notions of exercising agency through new media are therefore facilitated by the battlestation. New media requires input and interaction which are mediated by devices, and these devices become our agential tools. They require movement; typing, moving a mouse, clicking and scrolling. There is a very concrete transmutation of physical movement into digital action. The bedroom dweller has all their controls at the tip of their fingers when positioned at the battlestation, which is exactly why it's so empowering. If the internet is a kingdom, the gamer chair becomes a throne.
Seasoned soldiers of onlinedom will often have two or more monitors, signifying commitment to time spent in the digital. Similarly to the term battlestation, the computer screen finds its origins in the military, and so it also reproduces the same military gestures emerging from desktop battlestations: oversight and control. The early radar sweep technology, whose contemporary counterpart is found in software offerings provided by companies like Palantir and Anduril, illustrates this logic. The myriad of actions enabled by network technologies would be useless if not for the screen, and it is through the screen that the digital becomes interpretable and can be acted upon. Screens flatten and condense things – originally space, now vast amounts of data – they are essential in the transition from machine-legibility to human-legibility. Human-legibility, in turn, leads to human-action; computer screens don’t simply represent things, they present them in order to be acted upon or to be acted with. The screen thereby facilitates the exercise of human agency and control, something which is underscored by its military origins. For the NEET or the hustlepreneur, screens and computers are modes of empowerment and control. It’s no coincidence that the crypto traders desk and the PC gamer setup resemble the control rooms of drone operators.
The desire for agency and autonomy which is achieved through a battlestation can be expanded to the bedroom in general, which is most likely where the battlestation is positioned anyway. In a way, we all address our feelings of agential panic through careful curation of our rooms and desks. Our bedroom becomes a battlestation in and of itself. Reflected by the ubiquity of people accessorizing their bedrooms to the point of becoming mini houses (think piss-bottles, mini fridges, desks, couches, TV’s, etc.), we create mini-realities, our own little worlds in which we decide and we have control. In doing so, our bedrooms begin to resemble war-rooms, places of control, places to lock in.
Ruben Stoffelen (1999) is an Amsterdam based writer and independent researcher who holds a research master degree in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and is working at the Institute of Network Cultures. His research ranges from networked subcultures and visual culture to infrastructure and the built environment, whilst underscoring digital culture and agency.
This text is an updated and expanded version of a text that was originally written for Brouwnian Movement, where it was designed by Klaudia Orczykowska (orczi96) to be read as a long, single scroll. The original form of this text can be read here.