How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

the students “did not have that kind of an investment, that kind of economic status, and, therefore, were not vulnerable to the kind of reprisals that could have occurred.”

(For a more recent example of administrative support, see MIT’s 2018 announcement that they would not turn away accepted high school students who had been arrested for participating in the Parkland, Florida, protests against gun violence.45)

an employee memo from the CEO of General Electric in the 1980s: “If loyalty means that this company will ignore poor performance, then loyalty is off the table.”49

It’s hard for me to imagine, for example, suggesting “doing nothing” to anyone who Barbara Ehrenreich meets while working at low-wage jobs for her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

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

“Stanford duck syndrome.” This phrase, which imagines students as placid-seeming ducks paddling strenuously beneath the water, is essentially a joke about isolated struggle in an atmosphere obsessed with performance.

We subliminally equate feeling burned out to being a good student.

students aren’t workaholics for the sake of it; the workaholism is driven by a very real fear of very real consequences that exist both within and outside of school.

the overarching issue of economic precarity that awaits the student—and indeed has already reached less privileged students who must work in addition to studying.

the fear of ending up outside a shrinking pool of security.

it’s an awareness of the cold hard truth that every minute counts toward the project of gainful employment.

the shifting of risk onto students as potential employees, who must fashion themselves to be always on, readily available, and highly productive “entrepreneurs” finding “innovative” ways to forego sleep and other needs.

this fear renders young people less able to concentrate individually or collectively. An atomized and competitive atmosphere obstructs individual attention because everything else disappears in a fearful and myopic battle for stability.

locked in isolated struggles with their own limits, or worse, actively pitted against each other.

Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related.

decision not to participate in Facebook may be interpreted [by friends] as a social decision not to interact with them,” or worse, as “holier-than-thou internet asceticism.”

refusal is only available as a tactic to people who already possess a great deal of social capital, people whose social standing will endure without Facebook and people whose livelihoods don’t require them to be constantly plugged in and reachable…These

“the power to switch off.”61

Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention.

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.

a mass movement of attention:

our attention itself that becomes palpable.

These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long.

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.

a choice, one made against the “default setting,” speaks to the relationship between discipline, will, and attention

people must be “forced to have encounters that last: forced by a force superior to them.”

the urban experience is a state of tension maintained against the instinct to disperse:

communication requires us to care enough to make the effort.

we are beholden to each other in a practical sense.

in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors.

the experience made me realize how similar the life situations of most of my friends are, and how little time I spend in the amazing bizarro world of kids.

to acknowledge that there’s something I didn’t know I liked is to be surprised not only by the song but by myself.

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.

If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I’ll find it—imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self—I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living.

But whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not.

Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering.

I looked over at my neighbor, the song sparrow, and thought about how just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known its name, might not have even known it was a sparrow, might not have even seen it at all.

we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us.13

the way that indigenous stories animate the world.

models of gratitude and stewardship.

bioregion as a meeting grounds for our attention

Things like the American obsession with individualism, customized filter bubbles, and personal branding—anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching—does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed.

“Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic,”

Difference is strength, a prerequisite for creativity that allows individual growth and communal political innovation.

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.

When we take an instrumental or even algorithmic view of friendship and recognition, or fortify the imagined bastion of the self against change, or even just fail to see that we affect and are affected by others (even and especially those we do not see)—then we unnaturally corral our attention to others and to the places we inhabit together.

In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.

Bioregionalism teaches us of emergence, interdependence, and the impossibility of absolute boundaries.

suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally d...

we can open ourselves to those new and previously unimaginable ideas that may arise from our combination, like the lightning that happens between an evanescent cloud and the ever-shifting ground.