How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.

impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.

THE FACT THAT the “nothing” that I propose is only nothing from the point of view of capitalist productivity explains the irony that a book called How to Do Nothing is in some ways also a plan of action.

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.

the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.

frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship.

embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas:

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).

Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom?

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.

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.

the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention.

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

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that

we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.”

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

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.

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.

I am interested in a disciplined deepening of attention.

don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction.

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. That’s not to say we have nothing to gain from those we have many things in common with (on paper). But if we don’t expand our attention outside of that sliver, we live in an “I-It” world where nothing has meaning outside of its value and relation to us. And we’re less prone to the encounters with those who turn us upside down and reorganize our universe—those

one of the reasons artists so hate the interview question, “So what was your inspiration for this?” Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering.

Surprisingly, it was this experience, and not a study on how Facebook makes us depressed, that helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally.