How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process.

What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest–destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.

In the face of the increasingly materialist and pragmatic orientation of our age…it would not be eccentric in the future to contemplate a society in which those who live for the pleasures of the mind will no longer have the right to demand their place in the sun. The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer…he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.

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. I want to trace a series of movements: 1) a dropping out, not dissimilar from the “dropping out” of the 1960s; 2) a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us; and 3) a movement downward into place. Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community.

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.

From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.

Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features.

What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.

It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal.

In an environment completely geared toward capitalist appropriation of even our smallest thoughts, doing this isn’t any less uncomfortable than wearing the wrong outfit to a place with a dress code. As I’ll show in various examples of past refusals-in-place, to remain in this state takes commitment, discipline, and will. 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.

it asks us to identify as citizens of the bioregion as much as (if not more than) the state.

I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another.

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.

how art can teach us new scales and tones of attention.

If we can use attention to inhabit a new plane of reality, it follows that we might meet each other there by paying attention to the same things and to each other.

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.

And most of all, I hope it can help people find ways of connecting that are substantive, sustaining, and absolutely unprofitable to corporations, whose metrics and algorithms have never belonged in the conversations we have about our thoughts, our feelings, and our survival.

I’ve also learned that patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.

there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.

We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

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

This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems like a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention.

So it’s interesting, and certainly troubling, to understand the decline in labor unions in the last several decades alongside a similar decline in the demarcation of public space.

One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.

this phenomenon—of work metastasizing throughout the rest of life

Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever. In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.”

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.”

hysteria

They don’t know what my work is, they don’t see progress—they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week.

It turns out that groundedness requires actual ground.

That’s a strategic function of nothing, and in that sense, you could file what I’ve said so far under the heading of self-care. But if you do, 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.”

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

“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”

Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening.

So connectivity is a share or, conversely, a trigger; sensitivity is an in-person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both.

As the body disappears, so does our ability to empathize.

BUT BEYOND SELF-CARE and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous.

“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.”

In other words, digital distraction was a bane not because it made people less productive but because it took them away from the one life they had to live. Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”

Epicurus found that the “trouble” of a troubled mind came from unnecessary mental baggage in the form of runaway desires, ambitions, ego, and fear.

“[t]he purest security is that which comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the many.”

what the school of Epicurus taught was that man actually needed very little to be happy, as long as he had recourse to reason and the ability to limit his desires.

“The disturbance of the soul cannot be ended nor true joy created either by the possession of the greatest wealth or by honour and respect in the eyes of the mob or by anything else that is associated with causes of unlimited desire.”

What the communes did have in common was a search for “the good life,” an experience of community opposed to the competitive and exploitative system they had rejected.

20 A spatial move to the country, or into an isolated communal house, did not always equal a move out of ingrained ideologies.

“the slipperiest decisions always involved reconciling privacy and communality, the individual and the house”21—in other words, the very fundamentals of governance.

Memory and horizontal alliances are two hallmarks of individuality.