How to Map Nothing

Undergirding the geographies of suspension were networks in furious motion, continual overstimulation, and exhaustive exertion.

embodied mapping can offer insight into “desire lines,” all those paths people carve through the city that might not align with official transit routes and pedestrian conduits.

It might seem that anyone who could disregard all this labor and expertise and affective engagement and see nothingness is alarmingly self-absorbed and willfully oblivious, but we have to admit that essential systems — our public infrastructures and networks of care — are often designed to fade into the background.

In How to Do Nothing (Jenny Odell) made the case for retreat or refusal as an act of resistance to capitalist productivity and commodified attention. She laid out a plan for “hold[ing] open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it.”

Consider some of those dispatches from the Great Pause: What if we took each sourdough selfie, each Zoom class, each Peloton ride, each Netflix binge and mapped the ecology of resources and services that have made it possible for some of us? And at the same time impossible for others? Our Everlane austerity, lo-fi authenticity, and seamless connect... See more

It’s all too easy to overlook the rush of activity that enables privileged retreat; the Othered precarity that ensures our security; the tangle of urban, regional, national, and global socio-technical networks that support our local stasis — unless we are ourselves a node within those essential systems, or unless we experience the repercussions of ... See more

maps can serve as “tools for social transformation”; that they can “produce worlds instead of simply reflecting them.”

nothingness is a matter of aesthetics; it’s the appearance of asceticism, the stylized performance of retreat — Kinfolking, urban-lumberjacking, “upstating.”

Social media, mainstream news, and an explosion of Substack newsletters often painted pictures of cities quelled and hibernating, in some ways diminished, and of urbanites either turned inward toward self-betterment, or outward, toward their local communities or country homes.