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A review by sarahglen
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
4.0
If you're trying to rethink how you show up in your communities, this book is for you. A heady, expansive collection of research and lived experiences, Odell's writing helps us think about "context collection in the face on context collapse."
Excerpts of note:
— "What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?"
— "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. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. 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."
—> In what ways do I identify as a citizen of the bioregion? "Capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another." More than observation, [bioregionalism] also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through observation of and responsibility to the local ecosystem.
"That creative space of refusal is threatened in a time of widespread economic precarity, when everyone from Amazon workers to college students see their margin of refusal shrinking, and the stakes for playing along growing. Thinking about what it takes to afford refusal, I suggest that learning to redirect and enlarge our attention may be the place to pry open the endless cycle between frightened, captive attention and economic insecurity."
—> How might we replace "the violence of 'context collapse' online with a kind of 'context collection'?
Ch. 1) "I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force, I'm lumpy and porous, I'm an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I'm different one day to the next. I hear, see and smell things in a world where others also hear, see and smell me."
Ch. 2) "I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends." - Smiley Poswolsky
"We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back where we are needed."
Ch. 3) Like Zhuang Zhou before him, Diogenes thought every 'sane' person in the world was actually insane for heeding and of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption and ignorance."
"By refusing or subverting an unspoken custom, we reveal it's often-fragile contours. For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives."
"In a situation that would have us answer yes or no (on its terms), it takes work, and will, to keep answering something else."
"Like Plato with his allegory of the cave, Thoreau imagines truth as dependent on perspective. 'Statesman and legislators, standing so completely within the institution never distinctly and nakedly behold it.'"
"If we think about what it means to 'concentrate' or 'pay attention' at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a movement to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other.
I draw connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It's not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it's true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to 'pay attention,' then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can't concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can't think and act."
—> Did you know that Rosa Parks and her family were nearly ruined by her arrest? "She was unable to find full employment for 10 years after the boycott, lost weight and had to be hospitalized with ulcers, and experienced 'acute financial hardships' that went unaddressed until the militant trade unionists of a small branch of the NAACP forced the national organization to help her out."
"Of course, attention has its own margins. As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that's part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it's even more important for anyone who does have a margin — even the tiniest one — to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open up bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should."
Ch. 4) "the relationship between representation and perception"
"Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding — seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions — and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known."
"If we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear."
"It would not have been the same if I had gone to Calabazas Creek alone. The moment that Josh and I combined the fragments in our memories into the same body of water, the creek came not just to individual attention but to collective attention. It becomes part of a shared reality, a reference point outside of each of us. Picking our way over the riprap in this sunken, otherwise-unnoticed pathway — attending to the creek with the presence of our bodies — we were also rendering a version of the world in which the creek does appear, alongside its tributaries and its mountain and all the things growing and swimming within in. Realities are, after all, inhabitable. If we can render a new reality together — with attention — perhaps we can meet each other there."
Ch. 5) "The day after I saw Blindspotting at the theater near my apartment, I was walking around Lake Merritt, thinking about the role I might be playing in gentrification by having moved to the place I did, when I did. As if on cue, a group of local elementary school children came up to me, each holding a clipboard, and announced in a businesslike fashion that they were doing a project about Oakland and wanted to ask me some questions. The first one was seemingly straight forward: 'How long have you been part of this community?
Actually, it wasn't straightforward at all. Even as I answered, 'Two years," I was asking myself what it meant to be part of a community, versus just living somewhere. Sure, I had grown up in the Bay Area, and I felt that I was part of a community — of Bay Area artists and writers, as well as people in other cities who I was connected to via social media — but this community? What, if anything, had I contributed to the place where I now lived — besides rent, and maybe the one article I had written for Sierra Magazine on the local night herons?
Their other questions were similarly fraught for me, mostly because after that first question, I felt I had no right to be answering the rest. What did I appreciate the most about Oakland? The diversity. ("Of people?" on kid quickly asked.) What would I like to see more of in Oakland? More funding for public libraries and parks. What did I think was the biggest challenge facing Oakland? Fumbling a little, I said something about how 'different groups of people should talk to each other more.'
The kid in front looked up from his clipboard, scrutinizing me. 'So would you say you... care?' he asked.
I suggested communication, but days later, his clarification stayed with me. After all, communication requires us to care enough to make the effort. I thought about how it's possible to move to a place without caring about who or what is already there (or what was there before), interested in the neighborhood only insofar as it allows one to maintain your existing or ideal lifestyle and social ties. Like Buber's 'I-It' relationship, a newcomer might only register other people and things in the neighborhood to the extent that they seem in some way useful, imagining the remainders as (at best) inert matter or (at worst) a nuisance or inefficiency.
Compared to the algorithms that recommend friends to us based on instrumental qualities — things we like, things we've bought, friends in common — geographical proximity is different, placing us near people we have no obvious instrumental reason to care about, who are neither family nor friends (nor, sometimes, even potential friends). I want to propose several reasons we should not only register, but care about and co-inhabit a reality with, the people who live around us being left out of our filter bubbles, but the filters we create with our own perception and non-perception, involving the kind of attention (or lack thereof) that I've described so far.
The most obvious answer is that we should care about those around us because we are beholden to each other in a practical sense. This is where I would place my encounter with the woman having a seizure: I was helpful because I was nearby. Neighborhoods can be networks of support in situations both banal and extreme. Let's not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors. This is also a good place to return to Rebecca Solnit's Paradise in Hell, in which ad hoc networks of support were erected in the wake of disaster by neighbors who may never have had the occasion to meet each other. Not only did these neighbors organize and provide each other with food, water, shelter, medical aid and moral support — often crossing social boundaries or upending norms in order to do so — but these local, flexible and rhizomatic networks often get the job done better, or at least faster, than the more institutional aid that followed... the exhilaration of commingling with their neighbors and finding common purpose.
expansions of attention: they're hard to reverse. when something goes from being an idea to a reality, you can't easily force your perception back into the narrow container it came from
extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, i worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and brandied identities, we are also running the rick of never being surprised, challenged or changed — never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.
what's especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate, defensible, and capable of efficiency' is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person; it's that it's based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. although i can understand it as the logical outcome of a very human craving for stability and categories, i also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces outside this imagined 'self': fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality. it's also about control, since if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence (the mythology that attends gentrification). But whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. the only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not.
Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering.
"Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening." — Åudre Lorde,
"Despite entreaties from the older tenants, 'the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest... this weird passivity that accompanies gentrification" — Sarah Schulman
for successful targeted maneuvers, there always seems to be a strategic alternating between openness and closure.
Given that all of the issues that face us demand an understanding of complexity, interrelationship and nuance, the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill.
COMMUNITY MEMORY project — read: free; write:$0.25
context collection in the face of context collapse
"where we show up for each other [in person] and say, 'i am here fighting for this with you.'"
"Developing a sense of place both enables attention and requires it. That is, if we want to relearn how to care about each other, we will also have to relearn how to care about place."
Illustrating the "Long Lost Oakland" map required T.L. Simons to "medicate on a series of obliterations: of the burial sites of the Ohlone people, of the mass transit Key System that was later replaced by highways, and of the shoreline of marshes and tidal estuaries now reshaped for the demands of the global economy.
"Wherever we are, and whatever privilege we may or may not enjoy, there is probably some thread we can afford to be pulling on."
Excerpts of note:
— "What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?"
— "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. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. 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."
—> In what ways do I identify as a citizen of the bioregion? "Capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another." More than observation, [bioregionalism] also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through observation of and responsibility to the local ecosystem.
"That creative space of refusal is threatened in a time of widespread economic precarity, when everyone from Amazon workers to college students see their margin of refusal shrinking, and the stakes for playing along growing. Thinking about what it takes to afford refusal, I suggest that learning to redirect and enlarge our attention may be the place to pry open the endless cycle between frightened, captive attention and economic insecurity."
—> How might we replace "the violence of 'context collapse' online with a kind of 'context collection'?
Ch. 1) "I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force, I'm lumpy and porous, I'm an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I'm different one day to the next. I hear, see and smell things in a world where others also hear, see and smell me."
Ch. 2) "I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends." - Smiley Poswolsky
"We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back where we are needed."
Ch. 3) Like Zhuang Zhou before him, Diogenes thought every 'sane' person in the world was actually insane for heeding and of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption and ignorance."
"By refusing or subverting an unspoken custom, we reveal it's often-fragile contours. For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives."
"In a situation that would have us answer yes or no (on its terms), it takes work, and will, to keep answering something else."
"Like Plato with his allegory of the cave, Thoreau imagines truth as dependent on perspective. 'Statesman and legislators, standing so completely within the institution never distinctly and nakedly behold it.'"
"If we think about what it means to 'concentrate' or 'pay attention' at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a movement to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other.
I draw connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It's not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it's true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to 'pay attention,' then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can't concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can't think and act."
—> Did you know that Rosa Parks and her family were nearly ruined by her arrest? "She was unable to find full employment for 10 years after the boycott, lost weight and had to be hospitalized with ulcers, and experienced 'acute financial hardships' that went unaddressed until the militant trade unionists of a small branch of the NAACP forced the national organization to help her out."
"Of course, attention has its own margins. As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that's part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it's even more important for anyone who does have a margin — even the tiniest one — to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open up bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should."
Ch. 4) "the relationship between representation and perception"
"Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding — seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions — and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known."
"If we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear."
"It would not have been the same if I had gone to Calabazas Creek alone. The moment that Josh and I combined the fragments in our memories into the same body of water, the creek came not just to individual attention but to collective attention. It becomes part of a shared reality, a reference point outside of each of us. Picking our way over the riprap in this sunken, otherwise-unnoticed pathway — attending to the creek with the presence of our bodies — we were also rendering a version of the world in which the creek does appear, alongside its tributaries and its mountain and all the things growing and swimming within in. Realities are, after all, inhabitable. If we can render a new reality together — with attention — perhaps we can meet each other there."
Ch. 5) "The day after I saw Blindspotting at the theater near my apartment, I was walking around Lake Merritt, thinking about the role I might be playing in gentrification by having moved to the place I did, when I did. As if on cue, a group of local elementary school children came up to me, each holding a clipboard, and announced in a businesslike fashion that they were doing a project about Oakland and wanted to ask me some questions. The first one was seemingly straight forward: 'How long have you been part of this community?
Actually, it wasn't straightforward at all. Even as I answered, 'Two years," I was asking myself what it meant to be part of a community, versus just living somewhere. Sure, I had grown up in the Bay Area, and I felt that I was part of a community — of Bay Area artists and writers, as well as people in other cities who I was connected to via social media — but this community? What, if anything, had I contributed to the place where I now lived — besides rent, and maybe the one article I had written for Sierra Magazine on the local night herons?
Their other questions were similarly fraught for me, mostly because after that first question, I felt I had no right to be answering the rest. What did I appreciate the most about Oakland? The diversity. ("Of people?" on kid quickly asked.) What would I like to see more of in Oakland? More funding for public libraries and parks. What did I think was the biggest challenge facing Oakland? Fumbling a little, I said something about how 'different groups of people should talk to each other more.'
The kid in front looked up from his clipboard, scrutinizing me. 'So would you say you... care?' he asked.
I suggested communication, but days later, his clarification stayed with me. After all, communication requires us to care enough to make the effort. I thought about how it's possible to move to a place without caring about who or what is already there (or what was there before), interested in the neighborhood only insofar as it allows one to maintain your existing or ideal lifestyle and social ties. Like Buber's 'I-It' relationship, a newcomer might only register other people and things in the neighborhood to the extent that they seem in some way useful, imagining the remainders as (at best) inert matter or (at worst) a nuisance or inefficiency.
Compared to the algorithms that recommend friends to us based on instrumental qualities — things we like, things we've bought, friends in common — geographical proximity is different, placing us near people we have no obvious instrumental reason to care about, who are neither family nor friends (nor, sometimes, even potential friends). I want to propose several reasons we should not only register, but care about and co-inhabit a reality with, the people who live around us being left out of our filter bubbles, but the filters we create with our own perception and non-perception, involving the kind of attention (or lack thereof) that I've described so far.
The most obvious answer is that we should care about those around us because we are beholden to each other in a practical sense. This is where I would place my encounter with the woman having a seizure: I was helpful because I was nearby. Neighborhoods can be networks of support in situations both banal and extreme. Let's not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors. This is also a good place to return to Rebecca Solnit's Paradise in Hell, in which ad hoc networks of support were erected in the wake of disaster by neighbors who may never have had the occasion to meet each other. Not only did these neighbors organize and provide each other with food, water, shelter, medical aid and moral support — often crossing social boundaries or upending norms in order to do so — but these local, flexible and rhizomatic networks often get the job done better, or at least faster, than the more institutional aid that followed... the exhilaration of commingling with their neighbors and finding common purpose.
expansions of attention: they're hard to reverse. when something goes from being an idea to a reality, you can't easily force your perception back into the narrow container it came from
extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, i worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and brandied identities, we are also running the rick of never being surprised, challenged or changed — never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.
what's especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate, defensible, and capable of efficiency' is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person; it's that it's based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. although i can understand it as the logical outcome of a very human craving for stability and categories, i also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces outside this imagined 'self': fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality. it's also about control, since if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence (the mythology that attends gentrification). But whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. the only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not.
Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering.
"Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening." — Åudre Lorde,
"Despite entreaties from the older tenants, 'the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest... this weird passivity that accompanies gentrification" — Sarah Schulman
for successful targeted maneuvers, there always seems to be a strategic alternating between openness and closure.
Given that all of the issues that face us demand an understanding of complexity, interrelationship and nuance, the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill.
COMMUNITY MEMORY project — read: free; write:$0.25
context collection in the face of context collapse
"where we show up for each other [in person] and say, 'i am here fighting for this with you.'"
"Developing a sense of place both enables attention and requires it. That is, if we want to relearn how to care about each other, we will also have to relearn how to care about place."
Illustrating the "Long Lost Oakland" map required T.L. Simons to "medicate on a series of obliterations: of the burial sites of the Ohlone people, of the mass transit Key System that was later replaced by highways, and of the shoreline of marshes and tidal estuaries now reshaped for the demands of the global economy.
"Wherever we are, and whatever privilege we may or may not enjoy, there is probably some thread we can afford to be pulling on."