Review: How to Do Nothing

[Jenny Odell. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn NY: Melville House Publishing, 2019.]

A very thoughtful, very well-written book by an artist who lives in California's Bay Area. A self-proclaimed "field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy" (xi) that is "not anti-technology" but that is "obviously anti-capiatlist" (xii). A book about why we might want to resist the latest generation of encroachment by capitalist logics into our lives and selves via profit-driven tech platforms that are part of a broader set of social relations, and more importantly how we might go about doing that. Not, it emphasizes, by something as simple as 'going off Facebook' or strategic social media fasts – there may be times and places where refusal might look like this sort of thing, but moralistic withdrawal won't transform these logics any more than 'dropping out' to set up communes on the land did in the 1960s. Instead, the book traces one particular logic of refusal that is less about the sort of individualistic shifts in consumption that so often fill books on this sort of topic and more about practices of refusal-in-place – not about seeking purity by not consuming X, but about experimenting with what can be gained by cultivating new practices of attention that follow logics other than the overriding capitalist imperatives of productivity and efficiency.

To the possible frustration of some readers, this is not a how-to – but it doesn't neglect the inevitable desire by readers to figure out what to do in the face of it all, either. It stays connected to the level of lived experience. It never abandons the individual for the kind of disembodied analysis you might find, say, in a traditional political economy take on the same topic. But it does this while maintaining a deeply social analysis that it refuses to collapse into the individual. So it leaves you saying, "Yes, but what exactly should I do with this?", but it gives you a basis to start productively figuring that out for yourself – it just doesn't pretend it can answer it for you.

The particular approach that the author comes up with and explores in depth focuses on cultivating kinds of attention that are grounded in place. Summarizing it like that doesn't really do it justice, because it is not just some randomly chosen not-social-media focus of attention, but rather is very much a product of thinking through the character of the logics being resisted and what kinds of logics might present possibilities for different, more liveable worlds. It explicitly tries to learn from Indigenous relationships to place. It explores what tech-mediated relating and social media might look like if it was not driven by the needs of capital. It, in short, opens up fields of possibility for individual and collective exploration.

I really liked this book and it gave me lots to think about both in terms of my own practices and, in a different way, in terms of my own current book project. I do wish that it had spent more time in what you might call the middle ground, talking about different partial, compromised, imperfect, but useful modes of refusal. I mean, I think all of us have a lot to learn from the approach that it follows and from the author's own experiments, but more attention to what might be helpful to people put together and situated in other ways would, I think, strengthen the book – make it a bit more directly useful, perhaps, while still not collapsing it into the fiction of individualistic self-help.

Excellent read and highly recommended.