How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
by Jenny Odell
First reviewed June 2019
This book made me feel better about moving away from NYC. We got mugged two months after moving to SF, and my subsequent eye damage made doing things in out new city even more challenging. I learned a lot about San Francisco, and about how I wanted to spend my time.
I probably saw it at Booksmith on Haight; How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is the first top-to-bottom Bay Area book that I’ve picked up, the type of book that makes me feel lucky to live under its auspices. I spent a beautiful day at Glen Canyon Park—one of only two open channel creeks in San Francisco!—and I would not have known of it without Do Nothing:
When I lived in San Francisco, my usual trail in Glen Canyon Park was named after the “Gum Tree Girls,” three women who kept freeways from being built through the canyon, one of the only places in San Francisco where Islais Creek runs aboveground in its natural state. Park don’t just give us the space to “do nothing” and inhabit different scales of attention. Their very existence, especially in the midst of a city or on the former sites of extraction, embodies resistance.
Reading this book gave me the same feelings as The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and it healed a wound I feared had spread when I tore myself out of the gravity well of New York Literature; I could still read a text and integrate into my own real life.
This awakened sense of bookstore bioregionalism parallels the progression within Do Nothing from noticing birdsong in a forest to being able to distinguish the singer; an invisible-made-visible for the web of literary and cultural creations within one’s place. I am so grateful to have seen the book, because I love its style: of yanking quotes and building textual awareness; of commingling location with experience and thoughts with actions; of supporting research with speculative synthesis. An example—In two quick paragraphs, the author cited a source, referenced personal experience, and harked back to an prior literary touchstone:
[from Digital Detox: Big Tech’s Phony Crisis of Conscience]: “They fail to attack the attention economy at its roots or challenge the basic building blocks of late capitalism: market fundamentalism, deregulation, and privatization. The reinforce neoliberal ideals, privileging the on-the-move individual whose time needs to be well-spent—a neatly consumerist metaphor.”
For my part, I, too, will remain unimpressed until the social media technology we use is noncommercial. But while commercial social networks reign supreme, let’s remember that a real refusal, like Bartleby’s answer, refuses the terms of the question itself.
I particularly love any reference to Bartleby, The Scrivener, though I always related more to the narrator, “...one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds.” Not exactly the heart of the story— a heart still relevant in all cultural works—but the mind clamps onto strange things sometimes.
Like it did for the story of the Ming Vase from Colour: A Natural History of the Palette. There, the author realized—thanks to her knowledge of historic trade sanctions and mineral resource locales—that she could closely estimate the date centuries-old Chinese pottery was created based on its color. To her, a decontextualized museum piece fans out to encompass the political will and regional structures of Xuande-era cobalt commerce. She sees the threads of history that tie the world together. Just so, the author of Do Nothing can name the bird from the unseen noise from the trees; the lives and meaning of the songbirds of the Bay Area spread out before her, a known network rather than yet another unrecognized noise in the chaos of the world.
But for every action, there is an opposite reaction:
Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we’re assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can’t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn’t make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.
The modern decontextualized object is a tweet, a post, a photo. These things are easy to admire for their beauty or cleverness, yet they are artifacts pinned under glass. To recontextualize them into the world—to date the vase or name the bird—requires reflecting on, rather then refreshing, the page.
The riptides of the attention economy are strong enough to yank down anyone who wades into the waters. I am not safe and clean on the shore: I love to write these reviews, like to know people read them, recognize I launch for free what used to be paid labor into the stream of commerce. What I want isn’t a life of technological hermitage but one of acknowledgement: recognition that speed and volume cannot replace depth. If I hear a hundred birdsongs a day but remember not a single thing beyond that I hit my hundred-bird goal, what joy is there in making sure I hear a hundred and five tomorrow?
The opening of the book serves as a fitting close for a review:
Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive….I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized.
I love that this book takes you where it wants and lets you decide if you want to follow.