How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

Reality is blobby. It refuses to be systematized. 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.

Would you want to be friends with someone who never changed their mind about anything?

What if we spent that energy instead on saying the right things to the right people (or person) at the right time? What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return—and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended?

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.

“Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about.”