How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy QUOTES

1 " Given that all of the issues that face us demand and understanding of complexity, interrelationship, and nuance, the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

2 " Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

3 " What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return-and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

4 " It’s a bit like falling in love -- that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else’s, that you are no longer your own. But isn’t that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is much more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming, or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with theses ‘strangers’, not just now, but for life. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

5 " Extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

6 " We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

7 " I will participate, but not as asked, "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

8 " My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

9 " Given how poorly art survives in a system that only values the bottom line, the stakes are cultural as well. What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest-destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

10 " Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

11 " But beyond self-care and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and are as productive in the same way. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

12 " To resist in place is to make oneself into a swap that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, frame of reference in which value is deterred 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 nonberbal communication , and of the mere experience of life as the highest goals. 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. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

13 " In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away—all just on the other side of the chain-link fence. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

14 " I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

15 " In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

16 " 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. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

17 " To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is that you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world, but the channels through which you encounter it day-to-day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the communes that sought to break with historical time, this “other world” is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

18 " 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. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

19 " I want to be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that “doing nothing”—in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen—entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully. On this level, the practice of doing nothing has several tools to offer us when it comes to resisting the attention economy.

The first tool has to do with repair. In such times as these, having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves—individually or collectively. There is a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

20 " One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention. To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here. "

― Jenny Odell , How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy