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.

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.

But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.

What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.

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.

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).

Bioregionalism, whose tenets were articulated by the environmentalist Peter Berg in the 1970s, and which is widely visible in indigenous land practices, has to do with an awareness not only of the many life-forms of each place, but how they are interrelated, including with humans.

Our “citizenship” in a bioregion means not only familiarity with the local ecology but a commitment to stewarding it together.

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.

Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.

I use the lens of the human bodily need for spatial and temporal context to understand the violence of “context collapse” online and propose a kind of “context collection” in its place.

simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.

“To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”

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.

To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there.

“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”

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.

Understanding the impossibility of a once-and-for-all exit—for most of us, anyway—sets the stage for a different kind of retreat, or refusal-in-place,

Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement.

we absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to.

We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed.

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left.

To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.

But successful collective refusals enact a second-order level of discipline and training, in which individuals align with each other to form flexible structures of agreement that can hold open the space of refusal.

A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.

While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse—not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed—means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed.

meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.

Institutional support can go a long way toward allowing individuals to “afford” to refuse.

An atomized and competitive atmosphere obstructs individual attention because everything else disappears in a fearful and myopic battle for stability.

It may be that refusal is only available as a tactic to people who already possess a great deal of social capital,

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.

IF ATTENTION AND will are so closely linked, then we have even more reason to worry about an entire economy and information ecosystem preying on our attention.

To me, the only habit worth “designing for” is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing, and that is what artists, writers, and musicians help us to do.

Similar to many indigenous cultures’ relationships to land, bioregionalism is first and foremost based on observation and recognition of what grows where, as well as an appreciation for the complex web of relationships among those actors.

In these ways, bioregionalism is not just a science, but a model for community.

It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.

Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.

First, instantaneous communication threatens visibility and comprehension because it creates an information overload whose pace is impossible to keep up with.

Second, the immediacy of social media closes down the time needed for “political elaboration.”

Lastly, immediacy challenges political activism because it creates “weak ties.”

I think often about what an online network that attends to the spatiotemporal character of our experience as humans—animals who have evolved to learn things in space and time—would look like. I perform a reverse of Meyrowitz’s thought experiment, rebuilding the walls. I wonder what it would be like to experience a social network that was completely grounded in space and time, something you had to travel to in order to use, that worked slowly.

But that variance is based on personal customization, which is motivated by advertising and the desire to increase your engagement. Variance among the Community Memory terminals, on the other hand, was based entirely on geographical location.

For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.