Sublime

The Bureau of Suspended Objects was really just an excuse for me to stare at the amazing things in the dump—a Nintendo Power Glove, a jumble of bicentennial-edition 7UP cans, a bank ledger from 1906—and to give each object the attention it was due. This near-paralyzing fascination with one’s subject is something I’ve termed the “observational

For my purposes, the attention economy is as simple as the buying and selling of attention. There’s the micro, literal version of that, which is “engagement,” a measure of how much time someone spends in an app and how much they engage with it. But I think a broader definition of the attention economy is kind of like — as I personally experience

The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer…he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.

Jenny Odell. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House. 2019.