How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers.

A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive. —

weekend retreat or a mere treatise on creativity. 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.

oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.

entrepreneurial culture, I can’t help but ask the question: What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?

provides me with an image of “resistance-in-place.” To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.

It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.

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. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).

Thinking about what it takes to afford refusal, I suggest that learning to redirect and enlarge our attention may be the place to pry open the endless cycle between frightened, captive attention and economic insecurity.

Ultimately, 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.

escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.

recognized the feeling in a passage from Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations: 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.

distinguished between listening and hearing: “To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”

Sometimes that’s occasioned by something terrible, like illness or loss, and sometimes it’s voluntary, but regardless, that pause in time is often the only thing that can precipitate change on a certain scale.

Because it interfaces between the theme park and the actual city, CityWalk exists somewhere in between, almost like a movie set, where visitors can consume the supposed diversity of an urban environment while enjoying a feeling of safety that results from its actual homogeneity.

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

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.”

It is this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happen online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time.

“Direct sensuous reality,” writes Abram, “in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.”21

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

Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality.

was fascinated with how inert my phone appeared as an object; it was no longer a portal to a thousand other places, a machine charged with dread and potentiality, or even a communication device. It was just a black metal rectangle, lying there as silently and matter-of-factly as a sweater or a book. Its only use was as a flashlight and a timer.

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.

Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they possess, but only lament what they cannot have.

Articulating a form of happiness called ataraxia (loosely, “absence of trouble”), Epicurus found that the “trouble” of a troubled mind came from unnecessary mental baggage in the form of runaway desires, ambitions, ego, and fear.

In 1968, he’d flown around the country with Spiro Agnew during his campaign to be Nixon’s vice president, watching with horror “how [Agnew] self-righteously pandered to the fright of decent people who were baffled by the complications of the world.”

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.

There is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in this world. And yet, amid the debris of the present, escape beckons. To me, at least, the stories of the 1960s communes exert as strong an allure as they ever did, especially now.

The Hauptstrom that occurs in the space between art and life is helpful for understanding the most important and obvious legacy of the communes: even if only briefly, they opened up new perspectives on the society they had left.

Just as I need someone to observe things about myself or my writing that I can’t see, mainstream society needs the perspective of its outsiders and recluses to illuminate problems and alternatives that aren’t visible from the inside.

Understanding the impossibility of a once-and-for-all exit—for most of us, anyway—sets the stage for a different kind of retreat, or refusal-in-place,

Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement.

Some hybrid reaction is needed. We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed.

Both apart from and responsible to the present, we might allow ourselves to sense the faint outline of an Epicurean good life free from “myths and superstitions” like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, climate change denial, and other fears with no basis in reality.

This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.

X Sent: February 27 2008 00:16

For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives.

So to a question like “Will you or will you not participate as asked?” Diogenes would have answered something else entirely: “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.”

In “Cicero’s Treatment of the Free Will Problem,” Margaret Y. Henry writes: Cicero is far from denying the law of causality. He freely admits that antecedent and natural causes give men a tendency in one direction or another. But he insists that men are nevertheless free to perform specific acts independent of such tendencies and even in defiance of them…Thus a man may build a character quite at variance with his natural disposition.22

But these natural faults they uprooted and wholly overcame by will, desire, and training (voluntate, studio, disciplina).”23

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. He was earnestly interested in the opposite: What would happen if he emptied everything out?

To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action.

This “schizoid” collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger.

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.

When almost everything and every kind of service can be outsourced, white-collar workers find themselves toeing the line, too.

Portwood-Stacer’s interviews also show that “the personal or political decision not to participate in Facebook may be interpreted [by friends] as a social decision not to interact with them,” or worse, as “holier-than-thou internet asceticism.”

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.

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.

Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves.