How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

“Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it.

I find myself gravitating toward these kinds of spaces—libraries, small museums, gardens, columbaria—because of the way they unfold secret and multifarious perspectives even within a fairly small area.

But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and just because this right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important.

“eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will.”

the decline in labor unions in the last several decades alongside a similar decline in the demarcation of public space.

a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.

The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries—eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will—so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.

we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.

“This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in [Fiverr’s promotional] video.”17

work metastasizing throughout the rest of life—isn’t

This constant connection—and the difficulty of maintaining any kind of silence or interiority—is already a problem, but after the 2016 election it seemed to take on new dimensions.

I know that in the months after the election, a lot of people found themselves searching for this thing called “truth,” but what I also felt to be missing was just reality, something I could point to after all of this and say, This is really real.

only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.”

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.

the phrase “self-care” is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming a cliché.

the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening.

Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous—and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time.

ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.

So connectivity is a share or, conversely, a trigger; sensitivity is an in-person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both. Obviously, online platforms favor connectivity, not simply by virtue of being online, but also arguably for profit, since the difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time, and time is money. Again, too expensive.

the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth.

the unruly, indescribable detail of the real.

the unforgiving landscape of productivity,

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.

Merton reflects on the relationship between contemplation of the spiritual and participation in the worldly, two things the Church had long articulated as opposites.

despair, the very stuff the attention economy runs on.

one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves.

the storm is co-created.

It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger.

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving,

At their loftiest, such refusals can signify the individual capacity for self-directed action against the abiding flow; at the very least, they interrupt the monotony of the everyday.

Diogenes thought every “sane” person in the world was actually insane for heeding any of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption, and ignorance.

an aesthetics of reversal,

he neither assimilated to nor fully exited society; instead he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal.

Not only does he not comply; he refuses the terms of the question itself.

why the lawyer wishes that Bartleby would just outright refuse so that they could at least do battle on the same plane:

to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own.

“carve[s] out a kind of foreign language within language, to make the whole confront silence, make it topple into silence.”20

If we believed that everything were merely a product of fate or disposition, Cicero reasons, no one would be accountable for anything and therefore there could be no justice.

The longer Tom Green lies on the sidewalk, the more awkward (both physically and socially) it is for him to stay there, yet he remains. It was probably this kind of social stamina that Diogenes had in mind when he said he would only accept disciples who were willing to carry a large fish or piece of cheese in public.

SOUGHT a third space outside of a question that otherwise seemed given.

not which way to vote but whether to vote—or

“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

As for Plato, for whom the escapee from the cave suffers and must be “dragged” into the light, Thoreau’s ascent is no Sunday stroll in the park.

I used to take long lunch breaks as a small, selfish act of resistance.

IF WE THINK about what it means to “concentrate” or “pay attention” at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing.

thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention.

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

some can more easily afford to refuse than others.

Differences in social and financial vulnerability explain why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students.