How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

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.

A fun and interesting read. Definitely not a scientific investigation into the pitfalls of the attention economy nor a self-help book guiding you through the 8 steps to reconnect with the physical world. This book is more of a collection of thoughts that'd typically be shared while meandering through the woods over a series of hikes.

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.

Read this immediately after [b:Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion 43126457 Trick Mirror Reflections on Self-Delusion Jia Tolentino https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1544069605l/43126457.SY75.jpg 66925717], and boy, what a contrast. Jenny writes with actual substance, and while her prognosis of the world is still (imo realistically) grim, her musings include some cause for hope and action. I thought this book threaded the needle of being both academic-adjacent and accessible rather well. At each moment where I began to roll my eyes at Odell's privilege, she headed me off at the pass and addressed it. A good read, recommend.

3.5

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.

Feels like it was written just for me.

Half self-indulgent, self-congratulating faff, half possibly-life-changing insight.

Odell at one point mentions writing the book in Oakland in 2018, and it's like... “don't worry, we can tell.”

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.

super thought provoking and interesting

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.