How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

Eric Holmen, the Senior Vice President of Urban Airship, a company on whom “[e]very day, marketers and developers depend on…to deliver one billion mobile moments that inspire interest and drive action.” Holmen sees big bucks in authenticity: People increasingly want to spend time well, not spend more of it…If it’s our shallowest self which is reflected to us every time we open Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, the best business opportunity around might be to begin to cater for our aspirational selves.26

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.

As I disengaged the map of my attention from the destructive news cycle and rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing.

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 WILD

We’re all here together, AND WE DON’T KNOW WHY.

A GROCERY STORE full of strangers has a similar effect in David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, titled “This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.” Wallace gives the students what is basically a brutal description of adult life, in which you find yourself at the “hideously, fluorescently lit” grocery store full of annoying people after a long day of work and a horrible traffic jam. In that moment, you have a choice of how to perceive the situation and the people in it. As it turns out, that choice is basically one of attention: if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?2

But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

Never even when the four walls of one’s own room in a new city shall close around us again shall we sense the old lonesomeness shutting us off from our neighbors. Never again shall we feel singled out by fate for the hardships and ill luck that’s going. And that is the sweetness and the gladness of the earthquake and the fire. Not of bravery nor of strength, nor of a new city, but of a new inclusiveness. The joy in the other fellow.

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.

Thoreau described unthinking people in “Civil Disobedience”: as basically dead before their time.

To live without encountering plurality, both within oneself and without, brings about a phenomenon that Sarah Schulman describes in her book The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.

What’s especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate, defensible, and capable of “efficiency” is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person; it’s that it’s based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world.

Alan Watts once called the sensation of an ego a hallucination, “a completely false conception of ourselves as an ego inside a bag of skin.”8 Learning

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. 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”

“When you enter an environment where there are birds, insects or animals, they are listening to you completely. You are received. Your presence may be the difference between life and death for the creatures of the environment. Listening is survival!”

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.”

Marwick and boyd describe how context collapse creates a “lowest-common-denominator philosophy of sharing [that] limits users to topics that are safe for all possible readers.”

“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.

As Oliver Leistert puts it in “The Revolution Will Not Be Liked,” for social media companies, “the public sphere is an historically elapsed phase from the twentieth century they now exploit for their own interests by simulating it.”

When I try to imagine a sane social network it is a space of appearance: a hybrid of mediated and in-person encounters, of hours-long walks with a friend, of phone conversations, of closed group chats, of town halls. It would allow true conviviality—the dinners and gatherings and celebrations that give us the emotional sustenance we need, and where we show up for each other in person and say, “I am here fighting for this with you.” It would make use of non-corporate, decentralized networking technology, both to include those for whom in-person interaction is difficult and to create nodes of support in different cities when staying in one place is increasingly an economic privilege.

I find Donna J. Haraway’s term for this era even more useful. She calls it the Chthulucene, in which “the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.” In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway writes, “One way to live and die well as mortal critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and re-composition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.”

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. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct.

This is something like a goal without telos, a view toward the future that doesn’t resolve in a point but rather circles back toward itself in a constant renegotiation. The idea of an aimless aim, or a project with no goal, might sound familiar. Indeed, it sounds a bit like our old friend, the useless tree—who “achieves” nothing but witness, shelter, and unlikely endurance.