How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognize that 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.

Look back in memory and consider…how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!3

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.

Doing nothing is hard.

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).

It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go.

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.

In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.

those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified—despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides.

Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.

The first tool has to do with repair. 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. There is a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. When overstimulation has become a fact of life, 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.

make it “self-care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

“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.

Ukeles’s interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.”

I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.

Felix and Dean noticed that “every restaurant, every bar, every cafe, every bus, every subway was filled with people looking at their screens.”

“I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”

the importance of having a close friend to have real and substantive conversations with. If critical distance is what we’re after, I think there is an important distinction to make between isolating oneself versus removing oneself from the clamor and undue influence of public opinion.

Learning the names of things was my first step in perceiving not just “land” or “greenery,” but living bodies instead. And, at least at home, it wasn’t as though I stopped paying attention once I learned their names. Instead I remained observant over the seasons, learning not just their names but what they did, or rather, who they were. And at some point, this led to something in excess of disinterested observation—not just with Crow and Crowson or the local night herons, but with everything, the plants and the rocks and the fungus. Eventually, to behold is to become beholden 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.

Mixed neighborhoods create public simultaneous thinking, many perspectives converging on the same moment at the same time, in front of each other. Many languages, many cultures, many racial and class experiences take place on the same block, in the same buildings. Homogenous neighborhoods erase this dynamic, and are much more vulnerable to enforcement of conformity.

I’m struck by a detail that Schulman recounts about her building, where she finds that “the ‘old’ tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways.” Despite entreaties from the older tenants, “the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest” Schulman struggles to account for this “weird passivity that accompanies gentrification.”21 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.

Bioregionalism teaches us of emergence, interdependence, and the impossibility of absolute boundaries. As physical beings, we are literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally determined by our contexts. If we can embrace that, then we can begin to appreciate our and others’ identities as the emergent and fluid wonders that they are. Most of all, 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.

Lastly, immediacy challenges political activism because it creates “weak ties.” Barassi’s research suggests that networks built on social media “are often based on a common reaction / emotion and not on a shared political project and neither on a shared understanding of social conflict.”

Thinking about the Ohlone shell mounds and about how all of the extinct species on my “Long Lost Oakland” map disappeared in the nineteenth century, I can’t help but read the white-robed woman in the painting as the harbinger of the cultural and ecological destruction. While the tiny beings below her run for their lives, she wears a strange and benevolent expression aimed not at them but at something else in the distance—the imagined target of progress. It’s only with her gaze fixed on this target that she can trample on hundreds of species and thousands of years’ worth of knowledge without ever breaking her pallid smile.

Sometimes boycotting the attention economy by withholding attention is the only action we can afford to take.