How to Do Nothing
Resisting the Attention Economy
Jenny Odell (2019)
Chapters 1–2
I. Orienting
Who is Jenny Odell and what is this project?
Jenny Odell
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Artist and writer; teaches at Stanford (Art & Art History)
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Artist-in-residence at: the San Francisco dump, Facebook, the Internet Archive, the SF Planning Department
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MFA in design and technology
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Based in Oakland, California
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The book grew out of a 2017 keynote at the EYEO conference (art + technology), written in the aftermath of the 2016 election
What the Book Is
A case for redirecting attention
Odell is interested in:
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The colonization of time by capitalist productivity
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How the attention economy extracts value from our perception
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What art, ecology, and place can teach us about resisting that extraction
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The difference between retreat and refusal-in-place
What the Book Is Not
A “digital detox” manual
Odell is not telling you to delete your apps and go live in the woods.
An apolitical project
She is explicit: the book was conceived in response to the 2016 election. Doing nothing is framed as a political act.
The Political Stakes
Odell insists that reclaiming attention is not a personal wellness project but a precondition for political life:
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If you cannot sustain attention, you cannot understand complexity
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If your perception is colonized by algorithmic feeds, your capacity for judgment erodes
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The attention economy doesn’t just waste your time it degrades your capacity for citizenship
This connects directly to Franco Berardi (After the Future): labor has been broken into parcels of nervous energy.
II. Chapter 1
”The Case for Nothing”
The Rose Garden
Odell grounds the entire book in a specific place: the Amphitheatre of Roses in Oakland, California.
Why does this matter?
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She wrote the original keynote there — the book began as situated thinking
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The garden is public, not enclosed, not hostile.
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It is a space that exists outside the logic of productivity
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It demands nothing from you
Art as Attention Practice
Odell introduces three art projects that model what “doing nothing” looks like:
Scott Polach, Applause Encouraged (2015)
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Guests at Cabrillo National Monument, San Diego
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Cordoned-off area, no phones, 45 minutes watching the sunset
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When it ended, they applauded
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Framing something already available as an event worth sustained attention
Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening
Odell draws on the composer Pauline Oliveros(1932–2016), who developed the practice of Deep Listening at UC San Diego in the 1970s, during the Vietnam War.
Deep Listening is “listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing.”
Oliveros distinguished between:
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Hearing: the physical capacity for perception
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Listening: giving attention to what is perceived
Odell’s claim: our culture trains us to judge quickly rather than observe openly. Deep Listening reverses this.
Bird-Watching as Method
Odell discovered that she had been practicing something like Deep Listening through bird-watching (or as she prefers: “bird noticing”).
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Patience: attention without a deadline
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Context-sensitivity: you learn species by habitat, season, behavior
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De-centering the self: “I began to wonder what these birds see when they look at me”
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You become aware of yourself as one animal among others
The Problem: Why “Nothing” Is Hard
Why can’t we just… do this?
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Franco Berardi: the gig economy has made all time potentially monetizable — “time is money” is no longer a metaphor but a lived condition
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The attention economy doesn’t just compete for your attention — it reshapes what attention feels like
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Social media rewards shallow, reactive engagement
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The result: a “colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency”
Doing nothing is hard because the infrastructure of daily life is designed to make it feel like waste
Think about this:
When was the last time you sustained attention on something for 45 minutes — with no phone, no goal, no product?
What made it possible? What made it difficult?
III. Chapter 2
”The Impossibility of Retreat”
The Temptation
If the attention economy is this bad, why not just leave?
Odell traces this impulse across a long history:
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Ancient Greek philosophers (Epicurus)
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The commune movement of the 1960s
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B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two
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Thomas Merton’s monastic retreat
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Contemporary “digital detox” retreats
The 1960s Communes:
Odell identifies three structural problems with the commune experiments:
### 1. The Problem of Privilege
Dropping out requires resources. Who gets to retreat? The communes were overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and voluntarily opting out of a system that was still working for them.
2. The Problem of the “Blank Slate”
Communes imagined they could start from scratch — but you can’t evacuate politics from human interaction. Where there are free agents, there is negotiation, conflict, power.
3. The Problem of Design Replacing Politics
The attempt to engineer a perfect society ends up suppressing the very freedom it claims to enable.
B.F. Skinner and Walden Two (1948)
Skinner’s novel imagines a utopian community designed on principles of behavioral engineering.
Odell’s reading:
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The community’s founder insists that residents are both “determined” and “free”
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The utopia works by eliminating the unpredictability of genuine human interaction
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Skinner replaces politics with design
From Skinner to Thiel
Odell draws an explicit line from Walden Two to contemporary tech libertarianism:
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Peter Thiel’s seasteading project: floating sovereign communities outside national jurisdiction
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Thiel called it a “peaceful project” and an “escape from politics”
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But as Odell argues: peace is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents
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Any attempt to reduce politics to design is also an attempt to reduce people to machines
Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition) underlies this: politics exists between people with free will. You cannot engineer it away without destroying what makes human life distinctly human.
Thomas Merton: The Return
Thomas Merton (1915–1968): Trappist monk, author of The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), who withdrew from the world in the 1940s — then changed his mind.
Merton’s famous epiphany, on a street corner in Louisville:
He was “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”
What “Nothing” Becomes When It’s Made Productive
The wellness industry and corporate culture have learned to recuperate doing nothing:
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Meditation apps (Headspace, Calm) that package attention as a subscription product
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Corporate mindfulness programs that aim to make workers more productive
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“Digital detox” retreats that cost thousands of dollars — then send you back to the same system
“Standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal.”
This is the thesis crystallized:
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Don’t drop out. Refuse from where you stand.
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Find others who are also refusing.
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Build alternative forms of attention and community within existing structures — not outside them.
IV. Synthesis & Discussion
The Argument So Far
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The attention economy has colonized our time and perception (Introduction + Ch. 1)
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Art, ecology, and situated practice offer models of sustained, non-productive attention (Ch. 1)
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The impulse to retreat entirely is understandable but structurally doomed (Ch. 2)
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What’s needed is not escape but refusal-in-place: staying in the world while refusing its dominant logic (Ch. 2)
Discussion Questions
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Odell argues that doing nothing is a political act. Do you buy this? What distinguishes “political refusal” from simple laziness or disengagement?
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Think about the commune failure modes (privilege, blank-slate thinking, design replacing politics). Do you see any of these patterns in current tech culture — apps, platforms, AI?
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Odell says the goal is “refusal-in-place.” What would that look like for you, concretely, this week?