How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.

Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic.

“resistance-in-place.” To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.

The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).

this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow.

how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder.

some of my most serious grievances with the attention economy, namely its reliance on fear and anxiety, and its concomitant logic that “disruption” is more productive than the work of maintenance—of keeping ourselves and others alive and well.

And I try to show how that creative space of refusal is threatened in a time of widespread economic precarity, when everyone from Amazon workers to college students see their margin of refusal shrinking, and the stakes for playing along growing. Thinking about what it takes to afford refusal, I suggest that learning to redirect and enlarge our attention may be the place to pry open the endless cycle between frightened, captive attention and economic insecurity.

the real irony is that in writing something by this title, I inadvertently radicalized myself by learning the importance of doing something. In my capacity as an artist, I have always thought about attention, but it’s only now that I fully understand where a life of sustained attention leads. In short, it leads to awareness, not only of how lucky I am to be alive, but to ongoing patterns of cultural and ecological devastation around me—and the inescapable part that I play in it, should I choose to recognize it or not. In other words, simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.

I hope that the figure of “doing nothing” in opposition to a productivity-obsessed environment can help restore individuals who can then help restore communities, human and beyond. And most of all, I hope it can help people find ways of connecting that are substantive, sustaining, and absolutely unprofitable to corporations, whose metrics and algorithms have never belonged in the conversations we have about our thoughts, our feelings, and our survival.

True public spaces, the most obvious examples being parks and libraries, are places for—and thus the spatial underpinnings of—“what we will.” A public, noncommercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay; the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.

happening: those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified—despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides.

Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.

time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from “what we will.”

Part of what’s so painful about this image is that we know how this story ends; yes, it did get easier to work. From anywhere. All the time! For an extreme example, look no further than Fiverr, a microtasking site where users sell various tasks—basically, units of their time—for five dollars each. Those tasks could be anything: copyediting, filming a video of themselves doing something of your choice, or pretending to be your girlfriend on Facebook. To me, Fiverr is the ultimate expression of Franco Berardi’s “fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor.”

in 2011, I’d managed not to get a phone with email yet, and with the introduction of this new workday, I put off getting one even longer. I knew exactly what would happen the minute I did: that every minute of every day I would in fact be answerable to someone, even if my leash was a lot longer.

To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever. In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.”

I WANT TO be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that “doing nothing”—in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen—entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully. On this level, the practice of doing nothing has several tools to offer us when it comes to resisting the attention economy.

The first tool has to do with repair. In such times as these, having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves—individually or collectively. There is a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. When overstimulation has become a fact of life, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.

Nomo.

Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This is an important distinction to make these days, when the phrase “self-care” is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming a cliché. As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (a book parodying goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-priced wellness empire), put it: self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

BUT BEYOND SELF-CARE and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

Ukeles’s interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.”

“If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?”51

They fail to attack the attention economy at its roots or challenge the basic building blocks of late capitalism: market fundamentalism, deregulation, and privatization. They reinforce neoliberal ideals, privileging the on-the-move individual whose time needs to be well spent—a neatly consumerist metaphor.62

A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.

Of course, attention has its own margins. As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin—even the tiniest one—to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.

“The composition stays the same and you just slowly go past a bush. There’s so much to look at that you don’t get bored. Everybody watches because there’s a lot to see. There’s a lot to look at.” Comparing it to TV, he says that “[i]f you show the world better, it’s more beautiful, a lot more beautiful. The process of looking is the beauty.”

When I talked to docents at the de Young about Seven Yorkshire Landscapes, they mentioned something interesting. Some museumgoers who had seen the piece came back to tell them that afterward everything outside had looked different from what they were used to. Specifically, the de Young is not far from the San Francisco Botanical Garden, and those who visited it directly afterward found that Hockney’s piece had trained them to look a certain way—a notably slow, broken-up luxuriating in textures. They saw the garden anew, in all its kaleidoscopic beauty.

actual looking was a skill and a conscious decision that people rarely practiced; there was “a lot to see” only if you were willing and able to see it.8 In this sense, what Hockney and countless other artists offer is a kind of attentional prosthesis. Such an offering assumes that the familiar and proximate environment is as deserving of this attention, if not more, than those hallowed objects we view in a museum.

how endlessly strange reality is when we look at it rather than through it.

These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long. It’s a lot like breathing. Some kind of attention will always be present, but when we take hold of it, we have the ability to consciously direct, expand, and contract it. I’m often surprised at how shallow both my attention and my breathing are by default. As much as breathing deeply and well requires training and reminders, all of the artworks I’ve described so far could be thought of as training apparatuses for attention. By inviting us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we’re used to, they teach us not only how to sustain attention but how to move it back and forth between different registers. As always, this is enjoyable in and of itself. But if we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear.

what I’ve experienced with other expansions of attention: they’re hard to reverse. When something goes from being an idea to a reality, you can’t easily force your perception back into the narrow container it came from.

In the long process of colonization, what has survived in spite of the disruption of native language is a particular way of perceiving the world.

Even though I know I am often getting an insufficient English (and written) version of them, I have long appreciated the way that indigenous stories animate the world. They are not only repositories of observations and analyses made over millennia, but also models of gratitude and stewardship. As it turns out, these stories kept their nonhuman actors alive not only in the human imagination, but literally in physical reality. Kimmerer writes about overseeing a study by her graduate student on the decline of sweetgrass, a plant traditionally harvested by Kimmerer’s ancestors and which figures in the Anishinaabe creation story. The study revealed that the sweetgrass was suffering not from over-harvesting but from under-harvesting. The species had co-evolved with specific indigenous harvesting practices, which in turn had specifically evolved to increase the success of the plant. A specific type of human attention, use, and stewardship had become environmental factors on which the plants depended on, and without these things, they’ve begun to disappear.

In Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, Chris J. Cuomo critiques the animal rights stance that proceeds solely from the logic that some animals are sentient and can feel pain, because it privileges sentience in an ecology that relies on both sentient and non-sentient beings. This privileging, she writes, “comes out of the assumption that human beings are paradigmatic ethical objects, and that other life-forms are valuable only in so far as they are seen as similar to humans.”

an article on the front page of a local newspaper about an “atmospheric river” that would be arriving from the Philippines. I had never heard the term, and when I looked it up, I learned that atmospheric rivers are temporary narrow regions in the atmosphere that transport moisture from the tropics, in this case to the West Coast (the most well-known being the Pineapple Express). As the river makes landfall, its water vapor cools and falls in the form of rain. Atmospheric rivers are hundreds of miles wide and can carry many times the amount of water as the Mississippi River. I was surprised to find that California gets 30–50 percent of its rainfall from atmospheric river events.

I’m struck by a detail that Schulman recounts about her building, where she finds that “the ‘old’ tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways.” Despite entreaties from the older tenants, “the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest” Schulman struggles to account for this “weird passivity that accompanies gentrification.”

I would venture that the newer tenants, though they were troubled by the conditions, ran up against the wall of individualism. Once they understood that something was not just their problem but a collective problem, requiring collective action and identification with a community to be solved, it was preferable to them to just drop it. That is, even rats and dark hallways were not too high a price to pay for the ability to keep the doors of the self shut to outsiders, to change, and to the possibility of a new kind of identity.