How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“On a collective level, the stakes are higher. We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process. In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other.”

Moving from the plight of the individual to those of a community, state, and country, Odell notes that the lack of time for deep thought and conversation will be detrimental collectively since we face so many serious issues. We’ve lost the personal connections necessary for the give and take required to find complex solutions to the existential issues of our time. Already here in the Introduction she uses the word “context,” something she notes later is needed to restore meaningful communication.

“I am not anti-technology. After all, there are forms of technology—from tools that let us observe the natural world to decentralized, noncommercial social networks—that might situate us more fully in the present. Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express 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. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.”

With a title like How to Do Nothing, one might think this is a book written by a Luddite about dropping out altogether. It isn’t, and the author wants readers to know that up front, stating that there are positive uses of technology that help build the kind of lifestyle she advocates. The apparent contradiction between the title and this statement adds a bit of cognitive dissonance that impels the reader to continue reading to resolve. The quotation also helps clarify from the start the precise aspect of technology that Odell takes issue with.

“What amazed and humbled me about bird-watching was the way it changed the granularity of my perception, which had been pretty ‘low-res.’ At first, I just noticed birdsong more. Of course it had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time. And then, one by one, I started learning each song and associating it with a bird, so that now when I walk into the Rose Garden, I inadvertently acknowledge them in my head as though they were people: ‘Hi, raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch, towhee, hawk, nuthatch…’ and so on. The sounds have become so familiar to me that I no longer strain to identify them; they register instead like speech.”

Bird-watching plays a large role in the book, as it does in Odell’s life, and this passage about her doing it in the Rose Garden near her home illustrates how an “unplugged” behavior can help strengthen our attention. This helps formulate the idea that “doing nothing” when putting down our phones is actually helpful in doing something useful. While Odell doesn’t see withdrawing from society as a permanent solution, she does think it beneficial for periods at a time. This is not like the idea of a “digital detox” designed to help one return refreshed so as to improve productivity. Instead, the idea is to use the time to concentrate on the alternative ways we want to be in the world.

“This got me thinking that perhaps the granularity of attention we achieve outward also extends inward, so that as the perceptual details of our environment unfold in surprising ways, so too do our own intricacies and contradictions. My dad said that leaving the confined context of a job made him understand himself not in relation to that world, but just to the world, and forever after that, things that happened at work only seemed like one small part of something much larger.”

This passage is a companion to the previous one. It refers to a time in her father’s life when he quit his job for a couple of years, living on money he had saved up. He spent the time doing activities he enjoyed and thinking about his life and career. He ended up returning to his previous job with a different perspective, progressing from technician to engineer. While the previous passage about bird-watching involved honing one’s attention to the external world while “on break” from society, this has to do with one’s interior world. Thus, giving ourselves such a break helps us better understand both our surroundings and ourselves.

“In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’ It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from ‘what we will.’”

This quotation crystalizes what the attention economy does to distort our use of time. It monetizes even our free time by mining our data, manipulating what we do and how we do it. This coopting of leisure time runs counter to the idea of “what we will,” a slogan Odell picks up from the 19th-century labor movement’s campaign for an eight-hour work day. (The idea was to have three equal parts to a day, for work, sleep, and leisure—the last described as “what we will.”) Note, too, the connection Odell makes between the effect on free time and the reduction in public spaces. Her full argument becomes taking back our free time and using it to focus on physical spaces in the form of our local communities.

“But beyond self-care and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. 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.”

Part of the author’s argument in the book is that our ideas of productivity and growth have gotten out of control. One side of the harm the attention economy causes comes from this: We feel a need to be constantly productive and not waste even a minute. By growing our social media profiles—or our “personal brand”—we must always be active. Even something like the number of “likes” to a post incorporates the idea of constant growth. Not so fast, says the author. Care and maintenance are equally important behaviors, which she explains in more depth in later chapters.

“First, as relatively recent versions of this experiment, the communes exemplify the problems with any imagined escape from the media and effects of capitalist society, including the role of privilege. Second, they show how easily an imagined apolitical “blank slate” leads to a technocratic solution where design has replaced politics, ironically presaging the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley’s tech moguls. Lastly, their wish to break with society and the media—proceeding from feelings I can sympathize with—ultimately reminds me not only of the impossibility of such a break, but of my responsibility to that same society. This reminder paves the way for a form of political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind.”

Here Odell makes her case that simply dropping out of society and looking for an alternative lifestyle in a utopian setting is not the answer. She’s all for taking a break temporarily from the attention economy but believes it is not a long-term solution. Her main issue is that it often hands over individual agency to another person or to some controlling entity. Engaging in politics is, to Odell, a vital aspect of human existence, and giving it up is a deal-breaker for her regarding this option.

“But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. 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.”

The idea of “standing apart” is Odell’s alternative to dropping out or withdrawing from society. They are similar in that both reject society as it is presented to us, but standing apart involves remaining within society to, in effect, fight the good fight. The phrase “meet others in the common space of refusal” represents the political aspect that is missing in so many utopian ventures. Staying to participate in the “wrong way” is to define this participation on one’s own terms, choosing how to use one’s agency for improving society.

“But beyond showing that refusal is possible—highlighting the ‘cracks’ in the crushingly habitual—Diogenes also has much to teach us about how to refuse. It’s important to note that, faced with the unrelenting hypocrisy of society, Diogenes did not flee to the mountains (like some philosophers) or kill himself (like still other philosophers). In other words, he neither assimilated to nor fully exited society; instead he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal. As Navia describes it, he felt it was his duty to stand as a living refusal in a backward world.”

In the third chapter, Odell expands on the idea of “standing apart” (from Chapter 2) by examining historical precedents for it. One comes from the philosopher Diogenes in ancient Greece, who protested what he disliked in society by remaining in it and acting as gadfly. He did not withdraw, but neither did he fully participate; instead, he carved out a “third space” in which he was in society but doing his own thing on his own terms.

“Thoreau, too, sought a third space outside of a question that otherwise seemed given. Disillusioned by the country’s treatment of slavery and its openly imperialist war with Mexico, the question for Thoreau was not which way to vote but whether to vote—or to do something else entirely. In ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,’ that ‘something else’ is refusing to pay taxes to a system that Thoreau could no longer abide. While he understood that technically this meant breaking the law, Thoreau stood outside the question and judged the law itself: ‘If [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law,’ he wrote. ‘Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.’”

This is a more recent example of someone “standing apart” and creating a “third space” for themselves. Henry David Thoreau is perhaps best known for his book Walden, about living alone on Walden Pond, which might imply he advocated withdrawing and isolating from society. However, his actions described in the quotation above show that he also remained in society and sought to live on his own terms. By tracing this behavior from ancient Greece (in the previous quotation) to 19th-century Massachusetts, Odell shows there is a precedence for this idea of a “third space”—one she hopes to continue into the 21st century.

“If we think about what it means to ‘concentrate’ or ‘pay attention’ at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. 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. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a ‘movement’ to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other.”

Here the author begins to formulate her method for how to implement the idea of standing apart. By removing our attention from the distractions of the attention economy, we can redirect it to other areas we find meaningful. The significant thing is that we do this together with like-minded individuals. Note that Odell writes it is not a “top-down” process, as opposed to utopian schemes like that depicted in Walden Two. Her idea of “mutual agreement among individuals” foreshadows the discussion of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship later in the book.

“This leads into a second reason to leave behind the coordinates of what we habitually notice: doing so allows one to transcend the self. Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.”

This quotation comes from the chapter about how to exercise one’s attention once it is wrested back from purveyors of the attention economy. Odell discusses the benefits of exercising our attention and how it opens up new aspects of the world that are often overlooked. Through this, it allows us to let go of the self a bit and recognize people and things outside of ourselves as equal, multidimensional entities. This fluid nature of the idea of the self is one of Odell’s main themes in the book.

“These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long. It’s a lot like breathing. Some kind of attention will always be present, but when we take hold of it, we have the ability to consciously direct, expand, and contract it. I’m often surprised at how shallow both my attention and my breathing are by default. As much as breathing deeply and well requires training and reminders, all of the artworks I’ve described so far could be thought of as training apparatuses for attention. By inviting us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we’re used to, they teach us not only how to sustain attention but how to move it back and forth between different registers. As always, this is enjoyable in and of itself. But if we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear.”

This passage refers to the author’s viewing of modern paintings at the San Francisco MOMA, especially Blue Green Black Red by Ellsworth Kelly. When Odell first saw this painting, she was tempted to brush it off quickly, thinking the large panels of four solid colors didn’t have much to say to her. As she looked at it longer, however, the colors came alive in a palpable way. This taught her not just the importance of paying close attention but of the time involved with that. Time is something we don’t often have in abundance in the attention economy, but it is vital to truly seeing and understanding. This was one of Odell’s lessons in exercising attention.

“Lastly, there is attention itself, which this approach also takes for granted. It assumes not only that our attention will always be captured, but that our attention remains the same throughout. I described in the previous chapter how the attention economy targets our attention as if it were an undifferentiated and interchangeable currency; the ‘ethical persuasion’ approach is no exception. When we think about the different kinds of attention we are actually capable of—the pinnacle being the kind that William James describes, if we only have the discipline—it becomes clear that most forms of persuasive design (whether nefarious or ‘empowering’) assume a rather shallow form of attention. We might extrapolate from this to conclude that deeper, hardier, more nuanced forms of attention are less susceptible to appropriation, because discipline and vigilance inhere within them.”

While discussing how to exercise attention, Odell examines the idea of levels of attention. This is something else that the attention economy flattens into a single dimension since it assumes that all attention is equal. Persuasive design techniques work on this assumption. Some people who agree with Odell about the harmful effects of social media even see persuasive design as too strong to oppose, and thus we should use it for positive ends. Odell rejects this idea as being too similar to the prospect of top-down design as depicted in Walden Two. More important, however, is that she rejects the idea of persuasive design as being all powerful. Attention is not all the same—i.e., shallow—and deeper attention can withstand the lures of persuasive design.

“Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along. Between, under, and amid all these things wound this entity that was older than I was, older than Cupertino. It represented a kind of primordial movement, even if its course had been altered by engineering in the nineteenth century. Long before cars drove from Whole Foods to the Apple campus, the creek moved water from Table Mountain to the San Francisco Bay. It continues to do this just as it always has, and whether I or any other humans care to notice. But when we do notice, like all things we give our sustained attention to, the creek begins to reveal its significance. Unlike the manufactured Main Street Cupertino, it is not there because someone put it there; it is not there to be productive; it is not there as an amenity. It is witness to a watershed that precedes us. 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.”

This passage notes what can be learned when we regain and retrain our attention and apply it to our local surroundings. Like in other examples Odell gives, this process opens our eyes to what was always there. The place described in the passage is the author’s hometown of Cupertino, California, but the same idea applies everywhere. Part of Odell’s argument in the book is that we all should reconnect in a deep way with the bioregion in which we live, and this passage illustrates some of the benefits of doing so.

“When we arrived back to our apartment, it felt different to me—less like the center of things. Instead the street was full of such ‘centers,’ and each one contained other lives, other rooms, other people turning in for the night and worrying their own worries for the next day. Of course I had already accepted all of this in an abstract sense, but it wasn’t felt. And as silly as this story may sound to anyone who is used to knowing their neighbors, I find it worthwhile to recount because it bears out what I’ve experienced with other expansions of attention: they’re hard to reverse. 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.”

This quotation is about Odell’s visit to the apartment of her neighbor Paul. They had known each other for a while, just from living next door to each other, when one day he invited her and her boyfriend to dinner with his family. She describes the experience as being familiar and different at the same time. The view of the street, for example, was almost the same as the view from her apartment, yet there were slight differences. It was these slight shifts in perspective that let her temporarily experience the reality of another person. This reminded her that she was not the center of everything; there were many different centers occupied by each person. Her anecdote illustrates well Martin Buber’s idea of an “I-Thou” relationship.

“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. Cognitive scientists Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch back up this intuition with fascinating scientific studies in The Embodied Mind, a book that draws comparisons between modern cognitive science and ancient Buddhist principles. Using examples like the coevolution of vision with certain colors that occur in nature, they fundamentally complicate the idea that perception merely gives information about what’s ‘out there.’ As they put it, ‘Cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind.’

When we recognize the ecological nature not only of biotic communities but of culture, selfhood, and even thought—that indeed, consciousness itself arises from the intersection between what’s ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (troubling the distinction thereof)—it’s not just the boundary between self and other that falls away. We’re in a position to see past another supposedly insurmountable barrier: the one between the human and the nonhuman.”

This passage speaks to one of the book’s themes: the nature of the self. Odell presents research here to support her idea that the self may not be such a distinct entity as long thought. She argues instead that the self may be influenced by relationships and its environment. This reduces the distance between ourselves and others (even nonhuman things) such that we can better recognize we are just one part of the web of life—not the center of it. The result, Odell hopes, is a renewed emphasis on place and taking care of the bioregions in which we live.

“The implication is that the actual paradigmatic ethical object, if there is one, is the ecosystem itself. This echoes the conservationist Aldo Leopold’s observation that “you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.” Even if you cared only about human survival, you’d still have to acknowledge that this survival is beholden not to efficient exploitation but to the maintenance of a delicate web of relationships. Beyond the life of individual beings, there is the life of a place, and it depends on more than what we can see, more than just the charismatic animals or the iconic trees. While we may have fooled ourselves into thinking we can live cut off from that life, to do so is physically unsustainable, not to mention impoverished in still other ways. If what I’ve said about the ecology of the self is true, then it may only be among the most elaborate web of the nonhuman that we can most fully experience our own humanity.”

In this passage, Odell writes about the importance and indivisibility of place. As part of her thesis is for people to turn our attention from our electronic screens to the physical spaces in which we live, this makes a case for how interconnected we are with place, whether or not we recognize it. This holds true for all living things as well as the land itself. The last sentence shows that Odell believes that as humans we can only realize our full potential when immersed in the complex web of nonhuman things.

“So far, I’ve argued that practices of close attention can help us see into nuanced ecologies of being and identity. This kind of understanding has a few important requirements. First, it asks us to loosen our grip on the idea of discrete entities, simple origin stories, and neat A-to-B causalities. It also requires humility and openness, because to seek context is already to acknowledge that you don’t have the whole story. And perhaps most important, an ecological understanding takes time. Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.”

This passage opens Chapter 6, about the importance of context. The previous two chapters were about attention—how to exercise it and redirect it from the attention economy to the more meaningful things of place and ecology. Odell writes that context and attention are connected in that greater attention leads to greater context. This again shows the limits of the attention economy, which assumes no context and a simple, one-dimensional form of attention. What the author says in this chapter is that context is everything, and the way to find context is through stronger, deeper attention.

“It’s pretty intuitive that truly understanding something requires attention to its context. What I want to emphasize here is that the way this process happened for me with birds was spatial and temporal; the relationships and processes I observed were things adjacent in space and time. For me, a sensing being, things like habitat and season helped me make sense of the species I saw, why I was seeing them, what they were doing and why. Surprisingly, it was this experience, and not a study on how Facebook makes us depressed, that helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally.”

The author’s pastime of bird-watching plays an important role in her process of exercising attention and understanding the value of context. As she notes, it wasn’t just looking for birds in certain places, knowing that the place determined which birds she would see. She also came to realize that time played a part in determining this as well, as some birds would only be active during specific seasons. These contexts, she realized, were missing from social media, which contributed to its limitations.

“Just as activism requires strategic openness and closure, forming any idea requires a combination of privacy and sharing. But this restraint is difficult when it comes to commercial social media, whose persuasive design collapses context within our very thought processes themselves by assuming we should share our thoughts right now—indeed, that we have an obligation to form our thoughts in public! Though I acknowledge that some people enjoy sharing their process publicly, this is personally anathema to me as an artist. The choice—not of what to say (‘What’s on your mind?’) but whether and when to participate—doesn’t feel like it belongs to me when I use Facebook and Twitter.”

This quotation is part of the author’s argument of context being so important for meaningful endeavors. She refers to activism in the first sentence, something she writes extensively about, showing how the stages of effective political action require contextualization for proper strategizing and messaging. Here she extends that thought to claim that contextualization is really required for forming any idea, period. In other words, social media detracts from our process of forming meaningful thoughts, which is harmful both individually and collectively.

“Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die—I would know that I spent that day on Earth. In moments like this, even the question itself of the attention economy fades away. If you asked me to answer it, I might say—without lifting my eyes from the things growing and creeping along the ground—‘I would prefer not to.’”

This is the last paragraph of the main text (apart from the Conclusion). Odell has just described a hypothetical situation in which she attends a tech conference in a new city, something she’s done many times before. Only now, with her newfound attention to place, she envisions wandering off after a couple of days to a park. There she’d looks for birds and note the other visitors to the park, trying to discern a bit of its history. To her mind, she would be behaving productively on her terms, though others might think it a waste of time. By quoting Bartleby at the end, she’s placing herself in the long tradition of refuseniks occupying a “third space.”

“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.”

This passage illustrates the basis of Odell’s idea of “manifest dismantling.” The 19th-century philosophy of Manifest Destiny promulgated growth at all costs—growth itself being a good thing by definition at that time. Odell points out that it actually involved a good deal of what today would be seen as destruction. Because of this, she advocates reversing some of what was done as a way to restore the land and its ecology. One example she gives just before this passage is the dismantling of the San Clemente Dam in California in an effort to restore local trout populations.