How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

Incidentally, this points to another way in which attention brings us outside the self: it’s not just the other that becomes real to us, but our attention itself that becomes palpable. Thrown back on ourselves by a “wall” and not a window, we can also begin to see ourselves seeing.

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

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.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.22

When we remember that hundreds of engineers and designers predict and plan for our every move on these platforms, it seems more justified to shift the focus of the discussion towards ethical persuasion.

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.

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.

the urban experience is a state of tension maintained against the instinct to disperse:

When something goes from being an idea to a reality, you can’t easily force your perception back into the narrow container it came from.

And if we’re able to leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can’t yet see, we can also acknowledge that we are each a confluence of forces that exceed our own understanding. 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.

question, “So what was your inspiration for this?” Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering. By extension, thought doesn’t occur somehow inside of me, but between what I perceive as me and not-me.

reminds us that—while it’s useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud—when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a “cloud.”

Resisting definition like headwaters resist pinpointing, we emerge from moment to moment, just as our relationships do, our communities do, our politics do.

Bioregionalism teaches us of emergence, interdependence, and the impossibility of absolute boundaries. As physical beings, we are literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally determined by our contexts.

A 2011 study that boyd conducted with Alice E. Marwick found that Twitter users who had built the most successful personal brands did so by recognizing the fact that they no longer really knew who their audience was. To tweet was to throw a message into a void that could include close friends, family, potential employers, and (as recent events have shown us) sworn enemies.

Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.9

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.

Only afterward did I question why I assume social media needs to feel like a Wall Street trading floor.

Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You thought about the call you needed to make, you went to the phone made the call, and then you walked away. If you decided you had something more to say, you called back later. Not only that, the interaction was with the one other person you had decided to contact. Even calling someone to chat aimlessly had more intention than many of the ways I communicate now.

If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.

For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.

That’s why, when I worry about the estuary’s diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity—about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use.

Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation.

But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction.

Dissolving the nature/culture distinction, Purdy suggests that in the Anthropocene, we should figure nature not as separate, but as a partner in collaboration.

the pitfalls of the attention economy can’t just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques; they also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race.

In every moment of history, something was trying to happen, like two ends of something striving to meet each other.

Now the pelicans were flying plentifully past me, so close that I could see their faces, greeting me one at a time with their joyous six-foot-wide wingspans.

Standing perpendicular to the earth, not pitching forward, not falling back, I asked how I could possibly express my gratitude for the unlikely spectacle of the pelicans. The answer was nothing. Just watch.