How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I 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. Thinking about what it would mean to submit to such a process, becoming a more and more reified version of “myself,” I’m reminded of the way Thoreau described unthinking people in “Civil Disobedience”: as basically dead before their time. If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I’ll find it—imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self—I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living.