jenny odell how to do nothing resisting the attention economy

Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. By resisting the popular impulse to use Trump as the nucleus of any theorizing about our present moment, Odell is able to outline a much bolder proposition for political resistance.In a world where our every minute is captured, optimised or appropriated, How to Do Nothing offers a much-needed action plan for slowing down and living more responsively.Ī Barack Obama favourite book of the year 2019Ī galvanising critique of the forces vying for our attention – and our personal information – that redefines what we think of as productivity and reveals what we’ve been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world.

Amid the book’s roughly 200 pages, many will be pleased to find, she devotes hardly any space to familiar refrains about the relentless news cycle in the Trump era. Odell takes several approaches to her argument for such a mass movement, threading ruminations on urban theory, technodeterminism, personal experience, and Marxist thought throughout. luckily, Odell knows it’s both tired and banal to devote a book to urging readers to do so. The way to achieve this, she says, is to grow comfortable doing nothing. Instead, she proposes a collective shifting of attention that results in a more considered awareness of how we relate to the physical world, to others, and to ourselves. If Jenny Odell.were a different writer and a different thinker, she’d take the route many others have and tell you the solution to these anxieties is to unplug.

And yet Odell’s book.has the potential to improve a reader’s behavior. She lives an artistic life, one that lends itself wonderfully to aesthetic expression but is less useful in the political realm. Though she acknowledges that she’s lucky to be able to exercise the freedom to while away the hours in her favorite rose garden or to go bird-watching, Odell seems to disregard just how individualistic her strategies are. But her book is least convincing when she suggests that meaningful political change would follow if the strategies she has adopted were taken up en masse.

She has a knack for evoking the malaise that comes from feeling surrounded by online things. Then, summoning the ideas of others, she goes on to construct a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto. Odell’s first collage (or maybe it’s a compost heap) of ideas about detaching from life online, built out of scraps collected from artists, writers, critics and philosophers.

Jenny odell how to do nothing resisting the attention economy