How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

She writes, “Proponents of the ‘agency’ side in the agency vs. structure debate claim that instead of focusing on the problem of how to make persuasion more ethical, we should focus on empowering people to have more self control” (that’s me!).

It was this scene that made clear for me the connection between attention, perception, bias, and will.

In effect, the opposite of a racist view is Buber’s “I-Thou” perception, which assiduously refuses to let the other collapse into any one instrumental category. Recall that Buber refuses to see the tree as image, species, or relationship of numbers. Instead “thou” has the same depth as I.

Seeing this way means foregoing all of the many easier and more habitual ways to “see,” and as such, it is a fragile state re...

While I am all for legal restrictions on addictive technology, I also want to see what’s possible when we take up William James’s challenge and bring attention back, over and over again, to an idea “held steadily before the mind until it fills the mind.” I am personally unsatisfied with untrained attention, which flickers from one new thing to the next, not only because it is a shallow experience, or because it is an expression of habit rather than will, but because it gives me less access to my own human experience.

To me, the only habit worth “designing for” is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing, and that is what artists, writers, and musicians help us to do.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

When the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.

Again I searched my memory, where it showed up only once.

Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along.

In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic.

Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away—all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Realities are, after all, inhabitable.

There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than “you” can keep track of—thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream. –GARY SNYDER, THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD1

Just as earthquakes remind us that we live on floating plates, once I’d been confronted with the fragility of another person’s life, I was momentarily unable to see anything as given.

All I could see was that all of us here were alive, and that was a miracle.

But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.

For many people, myself included, public transportation is the last non-transactional space in which we are regularly thrown together with a diverse set of strangers, all of whom have different destinations for different reasons.

Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.

communication requires us to care enough to make the effort.

was helpful because I was nearby. Neighborhoods can be networks of support in situations both banal and extreme. Let’s not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors.

This explains why, when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don’t know is talking to something else I don’t know, through me. For a person invested in a stable and bounded ego, this kind of acknowledgment would be a death wish. But personally, having given up on the idea of an atomic self, I find it to be the surest indicator that I’m alive.

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.

this man had achieved the strange feat of going somewhere without actually going anywhere.

The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.

Recall that in “Solitude and Leadership,” William Deresiewicz warns that one needs to remove herself in order to be able to think critically.

I think there is an important distinction to make between isolating oneself versus removing oneself from the clamor and undue influence of public opinion.

After all, it is public opinion that social media exploits, and public opinion that has no patience for ambiguity, context, or breaks with tradition.

Public opinion is not looking to change or to be challenged; it is what wants a band to keep making songs exactly like the hit they once had. Conversations, whethe...

Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering.

She adds that “[a]s our human dominance has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”

Eventually, to behold is to become beholden to.

survival is beholden not to efficient exploitation but to the maintenance of a delicate web of relationships.

attention may be the last resource we have to withhold,

the physical world is our last common reference point.

I found myself amazed at how it never stopped moving: the river was always coming from somewhere and always going somewhere too. There was nothing stable about this “body” of water.

An ecological understanding allows us to identify “things”—rain, cloud, river—at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates.

Things like the American obsession with individualism, customized filter bubbles, and personal branding—anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching—does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed.

A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there is no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support—nor to notice that all the non-“productive” life-forms have fled.

So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid to waste. –HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “WALKING”

Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.

Scrolling through the feed, I can’t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn’t make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.

Vox and other outlets have been quick to identify these experiences as examples of what technology and social-media scholar danah boyd would call “context collapse.”

People read a tweet or a headline, react, and click a button—thousands and millions of times over in a matter of days. I can’t help but liken the angry collective tweet storms to watching a flood erode a landscape with no ground-cover plants to slow it down. The natural processes of context and attention are lost. But from the point of view of Twitter’s financial model, the storm is nothing but a bounteous uptick in engagement.

To this I would add the inability to publicly change our minds, i.e., to express different selves over time. This is one of the things I find the most absurd about our current social media, since it’s completely normal and human to change our minds, even about big things. Think about it: Would you want to be friends with someone who never changed their mind about anything?

“You have one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He added that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”8 Imagine what Audre Lorde, with all her different selves, would have to say to him.

Barassi’s interviewees repeatedly expressed that “social media were not a space for political discussion and elaboration, because the communication was too fast, too quick, and too short.” One activist complains specifically that there’s no time to “contextualize [ideas] for people” since “we need time and space to do that.”10 Barassi writes that the needed context often shows up in less instantaneous channels, such as activist magazines or in-person group discussion.

Whether the dialogue I want is with myself, a friend, or a group of people committed to the same cause as I am, there are concrete conditions for dialogue. Without space and time, these dialogues will not only die, they will never be born in the first place.

I worry about what this means, long term, for our propensity to seek out context, or our ability to understand context at all. Given that all of the issues that face us demand an understanding of complexity, interrelationship, and nuance, the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill.