How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

we need distance and time to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all.

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

a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship.

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.

communication requires us to care enough to make the effort.

I would venture that the newer tenants, though they were troubled by the conditions, ran up against the wall of individualism. Once they understood that something was not just their problem but a collective problem, requiring collective action and identification with a community to be solved, it was preferable to them to just drop it. That is, even

I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.

Unlike the dams that interrupt a river’s flow, these barriers are not concrete: they are mental structures, and they can be dismantled through practices of attention. When we take an instrumental or even algorithmic view of friendship and recognition, or fortify the imagined bastion of the self against change, or even just fail to see that we affec