How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

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.

Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.

ultimately, in owning the means of production by which we communicate.19

forming any idea requires a combination of privacy and sharing.

“The only indispensable factor in the generation of power is the living together of people,” Arendt writes.

“Only where men live so close together that the potentialities for action are always present can power remain with them.”

have thrown away my lantern, and I can see the dark.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

The One-Straw Revolution.

Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.’”

Dissolving the nature/culture distinction, Purdy suggests that in the Anthropocene, we should figure nature not as separate, but as a partner in collaboration.

understanding that pain comes not from one part of the body but from systemic imbalance.

In describing the grounds of possibility from which this book grew, I will first say that I live and work on the land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, and that their graciousness in sharing their culture with the public has been an inspiration to me.