
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

The second tool that doing nothing offers us is a sharpened ability to listen.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
voluntate, studio, disciplina.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
a form of political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Look back in memory and consider…how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
It obstructs collective attention because students are either locked in isolated struggles with their own limits, or worse, actively pitted against each other.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once
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When Samuel Gompers, who led the labor group that organized this particular iteration of the eight-hour movement, gave an address titled “What Does Labor Want?” the answer he arrived at was, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.”12 And to me it seems significant that it’s not eight hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “eight hours o
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It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow.