How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

My attention is important to me, and I've been writing and reading a lot this year about ways to navigate a world that is increasingly filled with traps designed to capture, monetize, and waste my curiosity. Earlier this spring, I came across Jenny Odell's artist talk “How to Do Nothing”, given at EYEO in 2017, and I have been eagerly anticipating her full-length book expanding some of the ideas she shared in her talk. It's here, and I finished it this week.

How to Do Nothing is anchored by the ideas Odell shares in her artist talk: that grounding oneself in specific real places and paying attention to their physical, geographic, ecological, historical, and social characteristics is an act of anti-capitalist refusal against the various social media and big data businesses who monetize our attention and behaviors. In her book, she expands her scope to consider other questions: How much of a real possibility is it to opt-out of digital connectedness, and would that be a good thing anyway? Does the act of refusing to follow directions have any power or meaning beyond our individual choice? How, specifically, does one “grounding oneself”? How are the attention economy and the fiction of independence linked? Can we change how we think about production to include not just making something that wasn't there before, but maintaining something that was there before, or even removing something to make room for something else that hasn't had any room to develop?

These are wonderful, rich questions, and one of the real pleasures of this book is that Odell draws on so many different ways to contextualize these questions. Odell draws on sociology and economics to explain shifts in how jobs are structured, and history and journalism to bring context to the history of the East Bay places that she spends time in. There's a little smattering of philosophy and theory, which I am a little allergic to so I was happy there wasn't too much of it. But where Odell really shines for me are in her close readings (and connecting to the other ideas in her book) of conceptual art pieces, the life of Diogenes the Cynic, John Cage's sound pieces, Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and David Hockney's Polaroid collage pieces.

Maybe these are ideas that you could find in other books, off the top of my head I'm thinking of Cal Newport's Deep Work, Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, or Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. One thing that sets this book apart is Odell's fierce resistance to framing her argument around “productivity.” This is not a book that argues that changing your frame of attention is going to make you better at your job, or faster at creating career ideas, or anything of the sort—in that respect, she is the anti-Cal Newport (who I respect a lot also, but I think his idea that we can all just be “winners” by becoming more productive is a bit shallow by ducking systemic questions). The other thing that sets her apart is a fierce, humanistic commitment to encouraging us to think in terms of ecosystems and social systems in which no individual is completely apart. I look forward to some of these most delicate and precious ideas continuing to move through my brain.

I loved this book. Read it and try something different.

I was drawn into this book, as I assume many will be, by the title; we live in a time that celebrates and rewards untenable levels of productivity (think: Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, that guy you know from college who works as a data scientist and is a published poet and travels the world taking photos for National Geographic in his “spare time”). To not spend every moment of the day working towards some sort of meaningful or profit-driven goal is to waste time, and to waste time is to be a failure, and to be a failure is to be a loser, and left behind. I may be exaggerating but what I'm saying is our work days have grown to far surpass the standard 40-hour work week AND we're expected to have all sorts of “productive” hobbies to boot.

Odell's book is a treatise on how the attention economy is damaging our environment, our sense of self and ability to connect with others, and ultimately our ability to be the best version of ourselves/the most genuinely productive we can be. But don't let that make you think this is some kind of self-help book, for it certainly is not. If anything, it's a bit of a meandering, academic, artful piece of writing that never quite crystallizes into a clear thesis (such that when trying to describe it to friends afterwards, I sound a bit confused, or perhaps just vapid). But to follow a clear structure, to sit neatly between defined lines of an argument, would almost be antithetical to the author's desire to inhabit spaces that are “blobby” and resist clear definition.

That being said, I think I would boil this down as follows:
A) the majority of us participating in the attention economy (i.e. social media, digital devices, mass media) feel the crushing expectations of productivity, the addictive natures of technology, the emotional detachment of the digital world, and the resulting negativity spiral B) to resist this economy as a means of healing what can start to feel like a sickness, our instinct is to retreat entirely – be that via deleting social media, silent retreats (cough Jared Leto), long hiking trips in remote mountains, or even dreams of leaving it altogether to live alone in a remote cabin in the woods or join a counter-culture commune but that C) retreating doesn't fix much, now does it? so D) to live most purposefully we must find ways to participate purposefully in the attention economy: engaging critically with content by contextualizing, slowing down the pace of information to avoid reacting purely based on emotions or immediate reactions, paying attention to the physical world around us – people, plant life, sounds, smells, art, architecture.... and being open to what we can learn from those people/things to continuously contextualize and recontextualize.

Even in writing I struggle to concisely capture her argument without dumbing it down. Regardless, this book has is well-written and full of interesting ties to philosophy, history, literature, flora and fauna, and – of particular interest to me – modern art/performance art. So if any of those things and a bit of a scholarly ramble tickles your fancy, I say pick it up and give it a read.

Reads as MFA thesis-cum-journal and contains many (too many?) interesting historical and philisophical references — like Epicurus and his garden school and the rise and fall of 1960s communes — but ultimately lacks structure. Using Odell's own phrase to describe the talk that spurred the book, it's “weird and blobby and hard to define.”