How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

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.

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.

attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw.

In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary describes sleep as the last vestige of humanity that capitalism cannot appropriate (thus explaining its many assaults on sleep).

What the attention economy takes for granted is the quality of attention, because like all modern capitalist systems, it imagines its currency as uniform and interchangeable.

this process enriches not only our capacity to resist, but even more simply, our access to the one life we are given. It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.

that sense, Hockney was trying to use a camera to undo the very essence of how we traditionally understand photography, which is a static framing of certain elements in an instant of time.

To him, cubism was quite simple: three noses meant you looked at it three times.5 This comment attests to his preoccupation not just with the subject of depiction but with the relationship between representation and perception.

These disjunctures and discrepancies in size undermine any sense of continuity or punctum. Without the familiar framework of a consistent vanishing point, the eye roams across the scene, dwelling in small details and trying to add it all up. This process forces us to notice our own “construction” of every scene that we perceive as living beings in a living world. In other words, the piece is a collage not so much because Hockney had an aesthetic fondness for collage, but because something like collage is at the heart of the unstable and highly personal process of perception.

He mounted twelve cameras to the side of a car and drove slowly down different country roads in Yorkshire, near where he grew up. Each piece in Seven Yorkshire Landscapes is displayed as a three-by-six grid of screens displayed edge to edge. Because the field of view and zoom level of each camera is intentionally misaligned, the effect is like that of a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory Google Street View.

For him, 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.

Cage is most famous for 4′33″, a three-movement piece in which a pianist plays nothing. While that piece often gets written off as a conceptual art stunt, it’s actually quite profound: each time it’s performed, the ambient sound, including coughs, uncomfortable laughter, and chair scrapes, is what makes up the piece.

More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity—the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all. How was it, I wondered, that I could have lived in a city for four years already—even having walked down this street after a symphony performance so many times—and never have actually heard anything?

ANYONE WHO HAS experienced this unmooring knows that it can be equally exhilarating and disorienting.

Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.

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.

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.

The Prejudice Lab runs workshops at businesses and schools with the aim of showing people their own biases—in effect, to help learn how to see what they’re not seeing.

Nordell writes that while many other psychology experiments treat bias as a condition to be adjusted, Devine’s treats it as a behavior, aiming simply to “make unconscious patterns conscious and intentional.” In effect, the Prejudice Lab was the “attentional key” that brought racist thought and behavior to consciousness.

But the success of the intervention largely rests on the individual: “To [break a habit], Devine said, you have to be aware of it, motivated to change, and have a strategy for replacing it.”

An element of effort and straining exists in the word attention itself, which comes from Latin ad + tendere, “to stretch toward.” This relationship finds one of its most compelling expressions in William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology. Defining attention as the ability to hold something before the mind, James observes that the inclination of attention is toward fleetingness.

The Prejudice Lab had helped train her to catch it, though, and she could catch it again. Her commitment to do so demonstrates the vigilance at the core of sustained attention: Afterwards, I kept watching for that flutter, like a person with a net in hand waiting for a dragonfly. And I caught it, many times. Maybe this is the beginning of how my own prejudice ends. Watching for it. Catching it and holding it up to the light. Releasing it. Watching for it again.

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.

In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

This detailed vocabulary of persuasion and eagle-eyed attentiveness to its many forms aligns with my interest in “knowing your enemy” when it comes to the attention economy. For example, one could draw parallels between the Nudget system, which teaches users to see the ways in which they are being persuaded, and the Prejudice Lab, which shows participants how bias guides their behavior.

The idea that I’ve already lost the battle of attention doesn’t sit right with me, an agential being interested in gaining control of my attention rather than simply having it directed in ways that are deemed better for me.

While I am all for legal restrictions on addictive technology, I also want to see what’s possible when we take up William James’s challenge and bring attention back, over and over again, to an idea “held steadily before the mind until it fills the mind.”

I am personally unsatisfied with untrained attention, which flickers from one new thing to the next, not only because it is a shallow experience, or because it is an expression of habit rather than will, but because it gives me less access to my own human experience.

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

It’s in the realm of poetics that we learn how to encounter. Significantly, these encounters are not optimized to “empower” us by making us happier or more productive. In fact, they may actually completely unsettle the priorities of the productive self and even the boundaries between self and other.

Rather than providing us with drop-down menus, they confront us with serious questions, the answering of which may change us irreversibly.

the very real ways in which attention—what we pay attention to and what we do not—renders our reality in a very serious sense. From the same set of “data,” we draw conclusions based on our past experiences and assumptions.

Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word.

Most of us have experienced changes in rendering: you notice something once (or someone points it out to you) and then begin noticing it everywhere. As a simplistic example, my attention now “renders” to me a world more full of birds than before I was an avid bird-watcher.

When the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.

Once again, I was met with the uncanny knowledge that these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality.

Interestingly, my experience suggests that while it initially takes effort to notice something new, over time a change happens that is irreversible.

What, if anything, had I contributed to the place where I now lived—besides rent, and maybe the one article I had written for Sierra Magazine on the local night herons?

I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.

Schulman gives a firsthand account of what happened in 1980s New York, when the children of suburban families who had been part of post–World War II white flight filled the vacancies left by the dying, AIDS-affected queer community in places like the Lower East Side. Both in urban and psychological space, Schulman witnessed “the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones,” a process leading to a kind of social monoculture.

it’s based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. Although I can understand it as the logical outcome of a very human craving for stability and categories, I also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces inside and outside this imagined “self”: fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality.

Any loss of control is always scary, but to me, giving up on the idea of a false boundary makes sense not only conceptually but phenomenologically. That’s not to say there’s no such thing as a self, only that it’s hard to say where it begins and ends when you think about it for even a few moments.

There was life after the death of the ego.

Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering. By extension, thought doesn’t occur somehow inside of me, but between what I perceive as me and not-me.

She adds that “[a]s our human dominance has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”

At least until everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses 24/7, you cannot opt out of awareness of physical reality. The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.

A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there is no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support—nor to notice that all the non-“productive” life-forms have fled.

Meanwhile, countless examples from history and ecological science teach us that a diverse community with a complex web of interdependencies is not only richer but more resistant to takeover.

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.

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.