How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

After all, it is public opinion that social media exploits, and public opinion that has no patience for ambiguity, context, or breaks with tradition.

When I moved the focus of my attention, those signals that had been traveling into my head were finally granted admission into conscious perception.

By contrast, at its most successful, an algorithmic “honing in” would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why. It

I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.

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 prod

It’s a cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight.

When overstimulation has become a fact of life, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left.

it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.