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.”

4.5 Stars. A magnificent book, with many insightful things to say about social media, technology, society and the environment. At once a polemic and a serious work of social thought, my only concern with this book is that it was occasionally too wide in scope, straying from the original conceit of a criticism of technology, but perhaps I need to read it closer. Definitely deserves a reread in a year or two. A book I will be thinking a lot about in the coming months.

This book is a deeply personal proposal of a better way to manage our attention. It proposes finding a third-way of refusal in place to say “I would rather not” to following the defaults that our built into to so much of how we collectively use technology. It speaks to building stronger communities, and focusing on becoming more attune to the bioregion we each live in. The book challenges the popular notion of constant productivity, with looking for a humane and sane way to organize ourselves around the temporal and contextual information instead of the global overload. Odell weaves her personal experiences, with the history and setting of San Francisco Bay which I particularly enjoyed, and learnt more history of the place we're living. I've read a more manuals of managing personal technology use (Deep Work, Make Time) but actually enjoyed more this meandering exploration of how we choose, or not, to focus out attention on the people and world that surrounds us.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this book, it felt more like an inspirational piece than something to truly help you resist the attention economy. Still I found it interesting in some parts, but found a lot of platitudes in it too.

It felt very "artsy" with a lot of new year vibes but gave some (even few) interesting advices on how to approach our world, our relationship to others and to our environment.

The migrating birds return each year, for now anyway, and I have not yet been reduced to an algorithm

As others have said, this can be a tough read mostly because the author's writing is rather academic and not really what you'd expect from a book with this title. But it's a fascinating meditation on the attention economy and how to slow down, and will definitely be something I continue to think about it. 

A review on the back of the book likened the writing to having a thoughtful friend's opinion and insight into a number of issues. I fully agree. I would have never thought of so directly connecting the worlds of tech to nature and simply being. Thoroughly recommend to anyone for whom the description speaks to them at all.

I decided to reread this book to help me overcome some feelings of “need” to produce. After rereading, I read some of the reviews of this book as being ‘mislabeled', and I found the inspiration to write a review for anyone who would like a different perspective on whether this book has been ‘mislabeled'.

The premise of Odell's novel is to find the joy in doing nothing, in taking life slowly, in #NOMO (necessity of missing out). She quotes Audre Lorde's self-care as “ caring for myself is not self-indulgent, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Odell writes to convince us and remind of the importance of self-preservation, time away, taking our 8 hrs to work, 8 hrs to rest, 8 hrs to do what we will instead of putting that time towards something like Facebook, Instagram, our brand that primarily serve to make money (and not usually for ourselves).

I suspect that the people upset with this book are exactly the people need this book the most. I imagine those readers picked up this book hoping for the quick fix that Odell is really specifically writing against. It is a book that requires deep listening and forces you to take the time to contemplate rather than produce. By the end of this book, one feels both inspired to tackle modern day issues and to take the time to pay attention to the community around them and make change as opposed to their Facebook pages, Twitter feed, and Goodreads followers.

I definitely thought this was going to be a book about putting your phone down and doing hobbies/self-care. That's only a small portion of it. It's about so much more: noticing and listening to the environment, questioning the status quo of productivity and “hustle culture,” and challenging systems of oppression and power. I read this at an interesting time having finished Braiding Sweetgrass a month or so ago - the author talks a lot about the book - and watching Everything, Everywhere All at Once. These three pieces work so well together and have given me a lot to think about meaning and value.

I loved it so much and recommend it to anyone who is a human.

This book was not what I was expecting based on the title. Definitely not instructive or a How To. It's very heady and academic which is I enjoyed for awhile, but really struggled to get through in the end. I kind of wish she just wrote a birdwatching book and wove in the “attention economy” parts as an indirect theme.

I learned some stuff, enjoyed some of it. I'd recommend it if you're feeling patient.

Putting this aside for now. I keep thinking, “Well that was a lot of words not saying much.” I'm half-way through it so maybe it'll add up to something. So far it reads like an all-over-the-map academic hippy manifesto without benefit of an editor. I'll probably be accused of “not getting it” and so be it.

I've been feeling more and more anxious about the state of the world through the social medias. I thought this was a nice take on giving ourselves space to reflect and engage for those of us who will probably never delete our facebooks or twitter accounts. It doesn't give answers so much as acknowledge the problems in a way I thought was thoughtful and reflective.

I loved this activist, anti-capitalist book wrapped in a disarming, self-help floral cover. It's consolidating a lot of what I've been reading lately that's been a reaction to our always online hustle culture.

Time is money and it's gone well beyond #girlbossing, the grind, and side hustles — expanding the boundaries of our work life. It's the fact that for many of us, every waking moment sees us building our personal brands, submitting our leisure time for numerical evaluation via likes, comments and views. We're constantly checking in on our performance and monitoring the value of our personal brand. Even self-care is framed in terms of returning to work replenished, to optimize ourselves to do more.

It's not like stepping away is going to be easy. History is scattered with the remains of those that felt they could escape the grind. Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Odell has us consider the work of maintenance, disrupting the attention economy and escaping its pervasive framework. To listen, reflect, heal, and repair ourselves. Stupidity is never blind or mute. Maybe holster that hot take, touch grass, and do the work of doing nothing.