How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

Like Frazier’s pastoral scene with which he wordlessly answers the accusation of fascism, Thiel’s “escape from politics” could never be anything more than an image that existed outside of time and reality. Preemptively calling it a “peaceful project” avoids the fact that regardless of how high-tech your society might be, “peace” is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered. Politics necessarily exist between even two individuals with free will; any attempt to reduce politics to design (Thiel’s “machinery of freedom”) is also an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings. So when Thiel writes of “new technologies that may create a new space for freedom,” I hear only an echo of Frazier: “Their behavior is determined, yet they’re free.”