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How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by [Jenny Odell]

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Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy Kindle Edition

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** A New York Times Bestseller **

"A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review

One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019"

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library

Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year

In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives.

Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.

Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.

Length: 241 pages	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled	Page Flip: Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"She struck a hopeful nerve of possibility that I hadn’t felt in a long time."—Jia Tolentino, THE NEW YORKER

"How to Do Nothing is genuinely instructive, elaborating a practical philosophy to help us slow down and temporarily sidestep the forces aligned against both our mental health and long-term human survival. You can knock the hustle — and you should."—Akiva Gottlieb, LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Approachable and incisive. . . . The book is clearly the work of a socially conscious artist and writer who considers careful attention to the rich variety of the world an antidote to the addictive products and platforms that technology provides. . . . [Odell] sails with capable ease between the Scylla and Charybdis of subjectivity and arid theory with the relatable humanity of her vision."—Nicholas Cannariato, THE WASHINGTON POST

"The sentiment behind How to Do Nothing is one of defiance.”—Casey Schwartz, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"An erudite and thoughtful narrative about the importance of interiority and taking time to pay close attention to the spaces around us."—Annie Vainshtein, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"An eloquent argument against the cult of efficiency, and I felt both consoled and invigorated by it."—Jennifer Szalai, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"The path to freedom lies within the covers of this book."—Lauren Goode, WIRED

"How to Do Nothing mimics the experience of walking with a perceptive and sensitive friend, the kind of person who makes you feel, in your bones, that it’s a miraculous gift to be alive."—Katie Bloom, THE SEATTLE TIMES

"Odell’s great strength as a writer is her ability to convey art’s unique power without overestimating or misstating its social impact. . . . Ultimately, what sets her book apart from self-help is not a less quixotic set of demands but a more life-affirming endgame."—Megan Marz, THE BAFFLER

"Thoughtful, compelling, and practical."—Clay Skipper, GQ

"Jenny Odell’s brilliant How to Do Nothing is the book we all need to read now. With wonderful precision, passion, and artfulness, Odell finds the language to meet this cultural moment. She has written a joyful manifesto about resistance that is also an eccentric and practical handbook on how to reclaim your colonized and monetized attention."—Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others

“Self-help for the collectively minded, How to Do Nothing is as thoughtful and morally serious as it is fun to read. This book will change how you see the world.”—Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days

“Your chaotic, fraught internal weather isn't an accident, it's a business-model, and while 'thoughtful resistance' isn't 'productive,' Odell proves that it is utterly necessary.”—Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Walkaway

“In a media and tech ecosystem simultaneously obsessed with "digital detox" and building personal brands, How to Do Nothing is a breath of fresh air grounding readers in the complex, interdependent actual ecosystems of the physical world. Jenny Odell writes with remarkable clarity and compassion. Each chapter reads like going on a fascinating walk through a park in conversation with an old friend (who happens to also be able to tell you about every single bird in the park, which is awesome). It's a book I already know I'll be returning to and referencing for a long time.”—Ingrid Burrington, author of Networks of New York

“In How to do Nothing Jenny Odell breaks through the invisible yoke that binds 21st century first-worlders to our app-driven devices. With a thoughtful look at the attention economy, Odell’s book is a self-help guide for re-learning how to look at the world. The book braids threads of ancient philosophy together with contemporary visual and technological culture, and weaves an original route to re-wilding the mind. Wide-ranging and erudite, this book is also entertaining, and brings the reader along with enthusiasm to Odell's philosophy of “manifest dismantling.” —Megan Prelinger, author of Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age

"Odell introduces the idea that within our world there are endless other worlds; many of the alternatives sound much better. We need only pay attention."—VICE'S Broadly

About the Author

Jenny Odell is an artist and writer who teaches at Stanford and has been an artist-in-residence at places like the San Francisco dump, Facebook, the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s, among others. She lives in Oakland. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Chapter 2 The Impossibility of Retreat

A lot of people withdraw from society, as an experiment…So I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you’re supposed to do is stay in the midst of life.

–AGNES MARTIN

If doing nothing requires space and time away from the unforgiving landscape of productivity, we might be tempted to conclude that the answer is to turn our backs to the world, temporarily or for good. But this response would be shortsighted. All too often, things like digital detox retreats are marketed as a kind of “life hack” for increasing productivity upon our return to work. And the impulse to say goodbye to it all, permanently, doesn’t just neglect our responsibility to the world that we live in; it is largely unfeasible, and for good reason.

Last summer, I accidentally staged my own digital detox retreat. I was on a solitary trip to the Sierra Nevada to work on a project about the Mokelumne River, and the cabin I had booked had no cell reception and no Wi-Fi. Because I hadn’t expected this to be the case, I was also unprepared: I hadn’t told people I would be offline for the next few days, hadn’t answered important emails, hadn’t downloaded music. Alone in the cabin, it took me about twenty minutes to stop freaking out about how abruptly disconnected I felt.

But after that brief spell of panic, I was surprised to find how quickly I stopped caring. Not only that, I was fascinated with how inert my phone appeared as an object; it was no longer a portal to a thousand other places, a machine charged with dread and potentiality, or even a communication device. It was just a black metal rectangle, lying there as silently and matter-of-factly as a sweater or a book. Its only use was as a flashlight and a timer. With newfound peace of mind, I worked on my project unperturbed by the information and interruptions that would have otherwise lit up that tiny screen every few minutes. To be sure, it gave me a valuable new perspective on how I use technology. But as easy as it was to romanticize giving everything up and living like a hermit in this isolated cabin, I knew I eventually needed to return home, where the world waited and the real work remained to be done.

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Publication date : April 23, 2019
File size : 2581 KB
Print length : 241 pages
Publisher : Melville House (April 23, 2019)
Word Wise : Not Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
ASIN : B07FLNFRGK
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Language: : English
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #18,446 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3 in Information Technology
- #4 in Social Aspects of the Internet
- #7 in Conservation

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Top reviews from the United States

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Michael Johnson

Why and how you should regain your attention from our out of control society

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2019

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It seems like some of the negative reviews have an agenda to push, especially the one that only quotes from the first and last paragraphs of the book. I would guess that person did not even read the book. I enjoyed the thoughts from the author. It made me think of things differently. I appreciated the argument about valuing things that aren’t valued in money or measured in the economy. It argues that we need time to process our thoughts and not just thoughtlessly react to social media posts. It argues we need the ability to direct our conversations differently to different audiences rather than the one size fits all post of Facebook. It argues to get to know your neighborhood and local place. If you are sick of the continued outrage machines we have created in our national discussions, you may wish to read this. It is true the author is viewing life from inside a San Francisco cultural bubble but I still found resonance with main points while living in the Midwest U.S.

283 people found this helpful

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Dana K.

I would prefer not to.

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2019

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Not a self-help guide, but rather a fascinating collection of essays that critique the modern “attention economy,” where our time and attention is deemed useless if not spent in the pursuit of profit and “progress.” Odell deftly weaves historical, literary, and artistic references together (from Diogenes to Herman Melville to Tehching Hsieh) and covers a whole lot of ground in a book that in a lesser author’s hand could seem inconsistent. Instead, it’s like having a meandering conversation with a brilliant friend.

If you’re looking for a digital detox guide, go elsewhere (though she does spend time dismantling the very concept). If a capitalist critique (by a woman in academia, no less) gets your knickers in a twist, avoid. If you want some genuine inspiration as to how to exist, resist, and survive in the world as it is today, you won’t be disappointed.

231 people found this helpful

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Jeremy Hatch

Important and thoughtful book

Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2019

Excellent and thoughtful book, probably the best I’ve read on the topic of the attention economy precisely because Odell resists facile prescriptions and instead critiques the roots of the problems we are currently facing and which social media is exacerbating. In brief, these are alienation from our surroundings, alienation from our selves, and alienation from one another, brought about by capitalism and neoliberalism generally. But in detail she discusses and thinks about much more in these pages, and it stays close to lived experience. As well as demonstrating various ways of resisting without opting out. The fact that all this is lost on Sam the Eagle up there in his supposedly scathing review, I think, is another sign of its quality. Reading this book kept reminding me of no author more than Rebecca Solnit. I read it over a couple days and I’ll be reading it again, I think.

124 people found this helpful

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Liberal codswollop

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2019

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Zen master Dogen - perhaps "doing nothing's" greatest champion - once said that to study Zen is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to become one with the ten thousand thing." Ms. Odell seems incapable of the second directive. So much of "doing nothing", of real retreat, is characterized not by a separation of ourselves from the red dust of the world but rather from our own mental patterning. While Ms' Odell's book has some very interesting and helpful passages on physical removal, the vast majority of its pages suffers from interminable leftist screeds and neo-Marxist platitudes that Odell seems incapable or unwilling to put down. She is able to drop her phone, but not the ideas that keep her equally enthralled. Doing nothing, for Odell, seems little more than a way to rally the one's mental energies so as to mount a quixotic challenge against the patriarchy and all of the oppressive "isms" that are keeping us from our post capitalistic utopia.

For those truly interesting in learning how to do nothing, learn to pray, find a meditation teacher, or take a walk in the woods. Either will leave you recharged, open to new ideas, and feeling timeless and free. Sadly, Ms. Odell's book will leave you more tightly bound to the tyranny of our divisive age. The real practice of doing nothing is that of forgetting. It gives us the space to remember who we were before we knew.

67 people found this helpful

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SER

Genuinely— and not tritely—life changing

Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2019

Read this book and I dare you not to want Jenny Odell to become your new BFF.

How to Do Nothing is an amazing exploration of our current attention-competing, dizzying world of information overload—and it would be a fabulous book if it just stopped there. But Odell actually offers insights into how to fight this modern cacophony of too-muchedness, leaving us with an improbably optimistic and refreshing view on a decidedly 21st-century problem.

I'm anxiously awaiting my nieces' and nephews' transitions into adulthood, so I an share this work with them. Because it's just that necessary.

103 people found this helpful

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G. R. Jack

The Right Book for Right Now

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2019

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How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell feels like the right book at the right time for me. I spend enough time online to worry about what it’s doing to my sense of self. “My experience,” as Odell writes, “is what I agree to attend to". So, when I scroll through my news and social media feeds, I not only get a nonsensical view of the world, but I further alienate myself from myself. Maybe this is why I feel so alone and depressed after spending too much time online. “Expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.” Odell’s solution isn’t to call for a digital detox, but rather to shift and deepen our attention to where it matters most: our actual (rather than online) communities. By paying deeper attention to the context of the people and places of our world, we can move from connectivity (something Facebook holds sacrosanct) to sensitivity, which “involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous.”

51 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Imogen

A breath of fresh air in a confusing world.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2019

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If you are starting to feel heavy under the weight of current politics, the rapid churn of social media, mental health, trolling, fake news and just the general sense that everything is somehow getting more intense, read this book.

It's not about how to shut yourself off from society and live as a hermit. It's not a bunch of shallow hand-wringing about social media and "kids these days." It's not even a detox or retreat guide. How To Do Nothing is a careful, well-researched look at how we choose to engage with our world and with each other, so that we can find ways to restore nuance, context and a sense of belonging. To do this, Odell investigates everything from history and politics to literature, art, sociology, even bird watching.

Though this book is written in a slightly academic style and the reader may benefit from some knowledge of critical methods or modern philosophy, it's so honest that I believe it would resonate strongly with anyone. I have personally taken a lot from this book and have been thinking about it for weeks since I read it.

30 people found this helpful

TheDude

Thought provoking - but ultimately futile?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

Full of stimulating ideas. I’ve passed it on to a friend who’s an executive coach.
I think one can relate more to the book (and some of the examples) if one is familiar with California.

The work was a little contradictory at times about our relationship with our ‘app-driven devices’. And, I found a mention of the author ‘killing time’ simply bizarre given the underlying emphasis on what might be seen as ‘mindfulness’.
Perhaps this was just a figure of speech? That said, I did find the author’s prose style rather clumsy at times. Is this because she writes in American English and I’m a British English writer? Or it might be generational?

I’ve got a background in computing going back to the late 1960s, and was involved with AI work in the mid 1980s. Even then, some of the problematic aspects of technology were evident - if only in embryo.
Jenny Odell offers lots of suggestions for resisting but I see little evidence that her impassioned pleas will have much impact on most of those trapped in the ‘Attention Economy’. If one does want to resist (perhaps even ‘drop out’ to some degree) opportunities to do so seem very dependant on how much personal autonomy one enjoys. This is, to be fair, something she recognises.

The one, overwhelming depressing aspect of the book is the assertion that there’s ‘hundreds of designers and engineers predict(ing) and plan(planing) for our every move on these platforms’. In other words, getting us to ‘click’ for reasons that are essentially about generating income for these corporations.
In a world facing a myriad of problems from climate change to a global refugee crisis, it’s more than a pity that these talented people can’t find something more constructive to do with their time and energy.

20 people found this helpful

Hande Z

Nothing is great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 13, 2020

Verified Purchase

What has Facebook, Twitter, and even WhatsApp, done to us? This book is a reminder that the view under the sea might be fantastic, but we need to come up for air; not just from time to time, but often. Doing nothing, as Odell tells us, is not just ‘doing nothing’. Michael Caine, in one of his own books, recalls a story in which he commented to the director that his role merely required him to ‘just stand there and do nothing’. “You’re not doing not nothing’ the director said, ‘You’re watching, and listening’.

That is the crux of Odell’s book. We should look up, look up, and look around from our daily routine engrossed at work and around our computers and cellphones. It is a book that nudges us to appreciate the diversity around us that we ignore because we are always in a hurry, and locked in by our routines, too pre-occupied with an ultimate objective – getting that promotion, securing a deal, inventing the product we dreamt about, and so on.

Odell tells us plenty of nice stories of how life can be enjoyed, and in the process, learn not just to appreciate nature, but how we can do our part to preserve it. We learn the joy of actually noticing not just the birds in our garden or neighbourhood, but the different songs they make, and their habits. Odell has a way of spinning such stories that not only inspires ‘aha’ moments, but actually, creates lots of warm feelings about our surroundings and ourselves.

The CD version is well produced and read by Rebecca Gibel over 8 hours. Very clear production, and Gibel has a warm and soothing way of reading.

2 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer

A powerful ode to the value of just watching

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2020

Verified Purchase

I didn't really know what to expect with this book but it emphasises the value of our attention and suggests that we turn it to the natural world and face to face encounters if we want to escape the dopamine of our devices. Great food for thought here.

2 people found this helpful

Doc

Slightly disorganized ramble

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 21, 2019

Verified Purchase

Some parts were interesting and informative, however, on the whole this book was a disorganized ramble. Disappointing.

3 people found this helpful