How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

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.

ongoing distinction I’ll make between 1) escaping “the world” (or even just other people) entirely and 2) remaining in place while escaping the framework of the attention economy and an over-reliance on a filtered public opinion.

“I would prefer not to,” I look to the history of refusal for responses that protest the terms of the question itself.

to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

“To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”

With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time.

“What Does Labor Want?” the answer he arrived at was, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.”

In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.”

Berardi, contrasting modern-day Italy with the political agitations of the 1970s, says the regime he inhabits “is not founded on the repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. On the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous.” Instances of censorship, he says, “are rather marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention, combined with the occupation of the sources of information by the head of the company.”

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.”21

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, in which Rebecca Solnit dispenses

political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind.

the age-old temptation to substitute design for the political process.

“peace” is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered.

“his mind stripped of the world,”

complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently.

Thoreau stood outside the question and judged the law itself: “If [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law,” he wrote. “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may.”

it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention,” then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act. In

The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.

Refusal requires a degree of latitude—a margin—enjoyed at the level of the individual (being able to personally afford the consequences) and at the level of society (whose legal attitude toward noncompliance may vary).

FOR THOSE WHO have ever enjoyed any kind of margin, it seems to have been shrinking for a long time now.

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.

to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating,

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.

But an actual painting, as opposed to a picture, confronts us in physical space:

we can also begin to see ourselves seeing.

“inattentional blindness.”

actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same

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.

making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.”

“Proponents of the ‘agency’ side in the agency vs. structure debate claim that instead of focusing on the problem of how to make persuasion more ethical, we should focus on empowering people to have more self control” (that’s

Portraying the problem as one in which we just need to be more mindful of our interaction with apps can be likened to saying we need to be more mindful of our behavior while interacting with the artificial intelligence algorithms that beat us at chess; equally sophisticated algorithms beat us at the attention game all the time.

We might extrapolate from this to conclude that deeper, hardier, more nuanced forms of attention are less susceptible to appropriation, because discipline and vigilance inhere within them.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

We’re all here together, AND WE DON’T KNOW WHY.

Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.”

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

This explains why, when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don’t know is talking to something else I don’t know, through me.

had gone somewhere without going anywhere.

“Cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind”

Kimmerer, as both an Anishinaabe woman and a classically trained scientist, allows in Braiding Sweetgrass that the right kind of scientific gaze can be part of rebuilding the relationships with land that we lost, or rather pushed out, beginning in the eighteenth century.

Aldo Leopold’s observation that “you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.”

If what I’ve said about the ecology of the self is true, then it may only be among the most elaborate web of the nonhuman that we can most fully experience our own humanity.

ALL OF THAT said, the reason I suggest the bioregion as a meeting grounds for our attention is not simply because it would address species loneliness, or because it enriches the human experience, or even because I believe our physical survival may depend on it. I value bioregionalism for the even more basic reason that, just as attention may be the last resource we have to withhold, the physical world is our last common reference

The borders of bioregions are not only impossible to define; they are permeable.

found myself amazed at how it never stopped moving: the river was always coming from somewhere and always going somewhere too. There was nothing stable about this “body” of water.

My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition.

Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.