Citations:involution


 * 2021, Yi-Ling Liu, Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan, Wired.com (9 March 2021);
 * In many ways, we’ve become just like our devices—efficient, optimizable, operating faster than ever, caught in the endless churn of increasing productivity. But nobody knows to what end. Of course, this is happening everywhere, but in China the transformation has been faster, vaster, and more bewildering. There’s even a word for this sense of sped-up purposelessness today—an arcane, academic term that has exploded on Chinese social media and popped up in Chen’s speeches: involution. The opposite of evolution, a process of involution spirals in on itself, trapping its participants. Originally used by anthropologists to describe the dynamics that prevent agrarian societies from progressing, the term has become a shorthand used by people from all walks of life: tech workers clocking long hours at the office, delivery workers hustling from one gig to another, high school students toiling over college entrance exams.