How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

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.

the “third space”—not of retreat, but of refusal, boycott, and sabotage—can become a spectacle of noncompliance that registers on the larger scale of the public.

Things look different from up there, which explains why Thoreau’s world, like that of Diogenes and Zhuang Zhou, is full of reversals.

to fill their lives with meaning. He was earnestly interested in the opposite: What would happen if he emptied everything out? His search for this answer occasioned the experiment’s many harsh “controls”—for it to work, it needed to be pure.

It’s uncomfortable to assert one’s will against custom and inclination, but that’s what makes it admirable.

Discipline and sheer force of will explain much of why we valorize our culture’s refuseniks.

Bartleby does not refuse to do anything. If Bartleby had said, “I will not,” his act of resistance would have merely negated the law.

Bartleby’s next-level refusal: he not only will not do what he is asked, he answers in a way that negates the terms of the question.

So to a question like “Will you or will you not participate as asked?” Diogenes would have answered something else entirely: “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.”