The key ideas

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Jenny Odell, 2019

You pick up your phone for five minutes, and half an hour later cannot remember where the time went. Oakland artist Jenny Odell explains why this reflects an entire economy trading in our attention rather than weak willpower. Her answer is to learn to do nothing instead of abandoning everything: step aside, listen, and notice the place and people around you.

Who it is for

For anyone more exhausted by the news feed than by work, who wants to reclaim their time and attention without escaping to the woods.

Nothing is harder than doing nothing.

A rose garden instead of the news feed

Imagine an ordinary evening. You pick up your phone for five minutes of rest, and half an hour later you are still scrolling. News, other people’s holidays, arguments in comments. You feel more tired rather than less and cannot see where the time meant for rest has gone.

Artist Jenny Odell lives in Oakland, near Silicon Valley, and grew up in Cupertino, where Apple’s campus now stands. After the 2016 election, when the news became an unbroken stream of anxiety, she began visiting a city rose garden almost daily. She says this was no deliberate decision: she was drawn there like a deer to salt. The garden was built in the 1930s by people given government work during the Great Depression. There Odell wrote the talk that later became this book.

The book opens: “Nothing is harder than doing nothing.” Odell does not urge quitting your job and moving to the woods. For her, doing nothing is not laziness but a way out of a system that measures everything by productivity, allowing you to notice what was always nearby: the place where you live, surrounding birds and people, your own thoughts. Odell calls the book activism disguised as self-help.

Ahead are a tree saved by its uselessness, a clerk who politely refused work, crows recognizing human faces, and an artist who shook hands with eight and a half thousand sanitation workers. We begin with where our hours go.

Our free hours have long been for sale

In 1886, American workers fought for an eight-hour working day. Odell quotes their whole slogan: eight hours for work, eight for rest, and eight for what we will. The third part strikes her. The workers did not write “study” or “leisure.” They left the time undefined, and that was its value: nobody had the right to decide for them how it would be spent.

Today, Odell believes, almost nothing remains of that third eight-hour stretch. We have twenty-four hours a day, any of which can be turned into someone’s money. Social media and apps profit from how many minutes we spend there and are designed to increase those minutes. This is the attention economy: a market selling your gaze rather than an object.

There is a second loss. Odell calls it context collapse. In life, you speak differently to your mother, friend, and boss. In the feed, they merge into one audience, while news of war sits between a joke and an advertisement. It resembles a room with ten radios playing at once. Each communicates something individually, but together they become noise in which even your own thoughts are hard to hear.

It is easy to conclude that personal weakness is the problem. Odell disagrees. The trouble is an environment deliberately built to hold attention as long as possible rather than a lack of willpower. The answer therefore cannot be reduced to “pull yourself together.”

The first step following from her argument is simple: see again which hours are truly yours. Recall yesterday evening and honestly ask what portion the feed chose for you. This is not change yet, but reclaiming the third eight-hour stretch begins with that question.

Read in Livria

About the author

Jenny Odell is an American artist and writer from Oakland who taught art at Stanford University.

All books by this author: Jenny Odell

Terms from the book

  • Great Depression
  • Epicurus
  • Melville
  • Wall Street
  • Bartleby
  • Zhuangzi
  • Attention economy
  • Oakland
  • Silicon Valley: The area south of San Francisco containing the headquarters of major technology companies.
  • Cupertino: A city in Silicon Valley where Apple has its headquarters and Odell grew up.
  • Context collapse: The mixing of different audiences and subjects into one social media stream, where a person addresses everyone at once.
  • Redwood: An evergreen conifer from the California coast, among the tallest trees on Earth.
  • Digital detox: A break during which you give up your phone, the internet, and social media.
  • Communes: Communities where people live together and share a household according to their own rules.
  • Diogenes: An ancient Greek philosopher of the fourth century BCE, known for living in a clay barrel and openly scorning conventions.
  • Oliveros: Pauline Oliveros, an American composer who created the practice of deep listening.
  • Deep listening: Pauline Oliveros’s practice of carefully listening to all sounds around and within yourself.
  • Cage: John Cage, a twentieth-century American composer who brought silence and the chance sounds of the surrounding world into music.
  • Crowson: The name Odell gave a young crow, the offspring of a crow she knew.
  • Night heron: A stocky, short-necked bird that hunts at dusk.
  • Bioregionalism: An outlook defining a place through nature, water, plants, and animals rather than administrative borders.
  • Calabazas: A creek in Silicon Valley running through Cupertino.
  • iNaturalist: A free app that helps identify a plant or animal from a photograph.
  • Ukeles: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an American artist known for work about the labor that sustains life in cities and homes.

All terms

Similar books