How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

part of what these escapes from politics are specifically avoiding is the “unpredictability” of “a plurality of agents.”

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.”

This question—of how versus whether—has to do with the attention economy insofar as it offers a useful attitude toward despair, the very stuff the attention economy runs on.

The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design.

You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”

The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how.

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day.

It was the image of utter inactivity that so galled Takala’s colleagues. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown,” they wrote, adding solemnly, “The potential of nothing is everything.

the reactions of others are what make such acts humorous and often legendary.

In the eighteenth century, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert wrote that “[e]very age…needs a Diogenes.”15 I would agree. We need a Diogenes not just for entertainment, nor just to show that there are alternatives, but because stories like his contribute to our vocabulary of refusal even centuries later.

But beyond showing that refusal is possible—highlighting the “cracks” in the crushingly habitual—Diogenes also has much to teach us about how to refuse. It’s important to note that, faced with the unrelenting hypocrisy of society, Diogenes did not flee to the mountains (like some philosophers) or kill himself (like still other philosophers). In other words, he neither assimilated to nor fully exited society; instead he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal. As Navia describes it, he felt it was his duty to stand as a living refusal in a backward world:

Bartleby, who remains maddeningly placid throughout the story, exposes and inhabits a space around the original question, undermining its authority.

Discipline and sheer force of will explain much of why we valorize our culture’s refuseniks.

It’s uncomfortable to assert one’s will against custom and inclination, but that’s what makes it admirable.

Hsieh, who was preoccupied with time and survival, described the process by which people fill up their time in an attempt to fill their lives with meaning.

“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

Like any expression of discontent, “Civil Disobedience” is already an attempt to seek out those who might harbor the same feelings.

IF WE THINK about what it means to “concentrate” or “pay attention” at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing.

I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If 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.

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.

“Americans increasingly find themselves on an economic tightrope, without an adequate safety net if—as is ever more likely—they lose their footing.”50 Any argument about mindfulness or attention must address this reality.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

“If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?”51

In The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse observes among white-collar workers the same attitude as Selvin’s longshoremen (“you would just simply be fired”):

It’s a testament to this toxic “grind or die” atmosphere at universities that, even in the face of major illness, we put the pedal to the metal and continue to drive our health off a cliff. It’s not like this is a conscious decision to be miserable, but sometimes it feels as if taking care of our own health is a guilty pleasure…We subliminally equate feeling burned out to being a good student.

But it also depresses me. However much the squeeze is humorously acknowledged, and however much Stanford or even the students among themselves might emphasize self-care, they’re running up against the same market demands haunting all of us. At least in my experience, students aren’t workaholics for the sake of it; the workaholism is driven by a very real fear of very real consequences that exist both within and outside of school.

In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, in which Malcolm Harris takes us through the ruthless professionalization of childhood and education, Harris writes that “[i]f enough of us start living this way, then staying up late isn’t just about pursuing an advantage, it’s about not being made vulnerable.”

A Millennial himself, he describes the shifting of risk onto students as potential employees, who must fashion themselves to be always on, readily available, and highly productive “entrepreneurs” finding “innovative” ways to forego sleep and other needs. Students duly and expertly carry out complicated maneuvers in which one misstep—whether that’s getting a B or getting arrested for attending a protest—might have untenable lifelong consequences.

An atomized and competitive atmosphere obstructs individual attention because everything else disappears in a fearful and myopic battle for stability.

“If we’re built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers—and we are—then we’re hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses.”

They fail to attack the attention economy at its roots or challenge the basic building blocks of late capitalism: market fundamentalism, deregulation, and privatization. They reinforce neoliberal ideals, privileging the on-the-move individual whose time needs to be well spent—a neatly consumerist metaphor.

For my part, I, too, will remain unimpressed until the social media technology we use is noncommercial.

In sharp contrast to the modern meaning of the word cynicism, the Greek Cynics were earnestly invested in waking up the populace from a general stupor.

A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. 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. We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. 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.

In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary describes sleep as the last vestige of humanity that capitalism cannot appropriate (thus explaining its many assaults on sleep).65

But besides showing us a possible way out of a bind, the process of training one’s own attention has something else to recommend it. If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them.

There wasn’t even a clear beginning or ending in Cupertino; instead, like Los Angeles, you simply kept driving until at some arbitrary point you were now in Campbell, now in Los Gatos, now in Saratoga. In excess of normal teenage angst, I was desperate for something (anything!) to latch onto, to be interested in. But Cupertino was featureless.

What I lacked was context: anything to tie my experience to this place and not that place, this time and not that time. I might as well have been living in a simulation. But now I see that I was looking at Cupertino all wrong.

Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known. Even morbid curiosity assumes there is something you haven’t seen that you’d like to see, creating a kind of pleasant sensation of unfinished-ness and of something just around the corner.

Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.

These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long. It’s a lot like breathing. Some kind of attention will always be present, but when we take hold of it, we have the ability to consciously direct, expand, and contract it.

I’m often surprised at how shallow both my attention and my breathing are by default.

In a Q&A on Reddit, Seitz noted that poor vision comes from a mix of two things: actual ocular impairments and brain-based impairments.

The researchers suggest that attention is “a key that unlocks the gate dividing unconscious perception…from conscious perception. Without this attentional key, there simply is no awareness of the stimulus.”17

“To [break a habit], Devine said, you have to be aware of it, motivated to change, and have a strategy for replacing it.”

IT’S HERE THAT I want to come back to the relationship between discipline and attention from the previous chapter. An element of effort and straining exists in the word attention itself, which comes from Latin ad + tendere, “to stretch toward.”

This relationship finds one of its most compelling expressions in William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology. Defining attention as the ability to hold something before the mind, James observes that the inclination of attention is toward fleetingness. He quotes the physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz, who had experimented on himself with various distractions: The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.19

Furthermore, if attention attaches to what is new, we must be finding ever newer angles on the object of our sustained attention—no small task. James thus makes explicit the role of will in attention: Though the spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept strained on that one object until at last it grows, so as to maintain itself before the kind with ease. This strain of attention is the fundamental act of will.20

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.”