How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

Redemption preserves itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe. –WALTER BENJAMIN

What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest–destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.

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.

propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community. From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.

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.

It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal.

Bioregionalism, whose tenets were articulated by the environmentalist Peter Berg in the 1970s, and which is widely visible in indigenous land practices, has to do with an awareness not only of the many life-forms of each place, but how they are interrelated, including with humans.

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.

I 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.1 He wrote that in 1985, but I could identify with the sentiment in 2016, almost to a painful degree.

Labyrinths function similarly to how they appear, enabling a sort of dense infolding of attention; through two-dimensional design alone, they make it possible not to walk straight through a space, nor to stand still, but something very well in between. I find myself gravitating toward these kinds of spaces—libraries, small museums, gardens, columbaria—because of the way they unfold secret and multifarious perspectives even within a fairly small area.

In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, “‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”14

To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”

In Becoming Animal, Abram writes that “all our technological utopias and dreams of machine-mediated immortality may fire our minds but they cannot feed our bodies.

Retreat and refusal are the precise moments in which the individual distinguishes herself from the mob, declining to buy a house and a car and conform to a stodgy, oppressive society where, as Diamond puts it, “there was always some Total Death Corporation job with your name on it.” But

In The Republic, the philosopher-king applies the ideas as the craftsman applies his rules and standards; he “makes” his City as the sculptor makes a statue; and in the final Platonic work these same ideas have even become laws which need only be executed.39 This substitution introduces a division between the expert/designer and the layman/executor, or “between those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know.”

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.

DELEUZE ONCE FOUND a handy formula for finding this space in one of our most famous tales of refusal: Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby, the clerk famous for repeating the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” uses a linguistic strategy to invalidate the requests of his boss. Not only does he not comply; he refuses the terms of the question itself. The fact that the story of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is so widely known speaks to its importance in the cultural imagination. The narrator, a comfortable Wall Street lawyer, hires a copyist named Bartleby, a mild man who performs his duties well enough until asked to check his own writing against an original. Without agitation, Bartleby says he would prefer not to, and from that point on continues to give the same answer when asked to perform a task. He eventually stops working, and then even moving; the lawyer finds that he’s taken up residence in his workspace. At a loss for what to do, the lawyer changes offices, but the next occupant is not so accommodating—he has Bartleby taken to jail. Just as the best part of The Trainee is the stunned Deloitte workers, my favorite parts of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” are the lawyer’s reactions, which so quickly progress from disbelief to despair.

Bartleby does not refuse to do anything. If Bartleby had said, “I will not,” his act of resistance would have merely negated the law. Having negated in relation to the law, this transgression would have perfectly fulfilled the law’s function.

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

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:

IN ESSENCE, WHAT I was encountering without yet knowing the name for it was bioregionalism. Similar to many indigenous cultures’ relationships to land, bioregionalism is first and foremost based on observation and recognition of what grows where, as well as an appreciation for the complex web of relationships among those actors. More than observation, it also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through observation of and responsibility to the local ecosystem.

the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill. Looking both to the troubling present and to successful actions in the past suggests that we will require new kinds of alliances and formations, which will further require periods both of solitude and of intense connection and communication. But how can we do that when our platforms for “connection” and expression detract from the attention to place and time that we need, simultaneously eroding the contexts that would allow new strategies to sharpen and flourish?

I THINK OFTEN about how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding. This is its own form of “research,” and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy.

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.”

I see little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought.

It’s a bit like falling in love—that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else’s, that you are no longer your own. But isn’t that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them.

In an essay called “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin wrote: The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress is this storm.4

What’s the opposite of Manifest Destiny? I think it would be something like the Angel of History. It’s a concept I call manifest dismantling. I imagine another painting, one where Manifest Destiny is trailed not by trains and ships but by manifest dismantling, a dark-robed woman who is busy undoing all of the damage wrought by Manifest Destiny, cleaning up her mess.

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 this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g., of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g., of dams). Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. 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.