HOW TO DO NOTHING: RESISTING THE ATTENTION ECONOMY - JENNY ODELL

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  Another one printed off a pdf at work. Even before our libraries closed indefinitely the backlog for this title was in the hundreds. I think I was number 211 or something. For whatever reason this book really took off a few months ago, she got on NPR a few times, the ultimate kingmaker in the SPL ecosystem, and now since I’m trapped inside I decided to print it off and read it. I can see why it’s so popular. It’s anti-social media but written from inside the tech world (Odell has always written about and worked in the tech field), it’s environmentally conscious, it’s breezy chapters fly by. It touches on a lot of themes that I’ve been interested in for years and years. In highschool I was obsessed (to an extent I still am) with a book called “DOING NOTHING: A HISTORY OF LOAFER, LOUNGERS, SLACKERS AND BUMS which covers the same ground but is less polemic and more historical. They both cover the classics like Bartleby, Diogenes, etc. DOING NOTHING does a better job talking about the nuance of “doing nothing” and how people have used “doing nothing” to resist the darker aspects of progress.  It’s also, notably, pre-internet/attention economy, which Odell is focused on. Odell is from Cupertino (more on that later) and has worked at Facebook and spent her whole life, professional and otherwise, in the tech field. Or more specifically, the social/information tech world, which has blown up in the course of her lifetime. I’m less interested in the mechanics of how these apps are designed for maximum addictiveness, and frankly, less concerned with the sorts of rich-tech people who feel like they’re spending too much time online or on social media and want a way to reconnect with themselves. Odell does do a good job pointing out how much of the industry that has sprung up around helping people disconnect or to do a “tech-fast” is a capitalist trick to get more productivity when you, of course, return to work. The worst example of this is the trend to microdose LSD to be more creative at your job. Nothing is sadder to me than taking LSD to work more. And Odell is correct that the people who tell you how busy they are all the time inevitably have a bullshit job and are insanely tedious. BULLSHIT JOBS by Graeber actually gets at this dynamic better and is another book that HTDN is adjacent to but worse than. The most clarifying thing about the book to me was something Odell elided and overlooked. Since I was younger, but especially since moving to Seattle, I’ve been interested in bioregionalism. Seattle is located in Cascadia, the Amerikan biogregion with the biggest fanbase (and perhaps the only one with its own name), and I’m generally for any effort to break-up Amerika, but there was always something about the idea that bothered me and Odell helped me put her finger on it. She writes about how she lives in Oakland but is from Cupertino and allows the concept of bioregionalism to speak of herself as a “local” of the area. She makes a similar point when discussing the importance of knowing what tribal land you stand on (another Seattle specialty) since Cupertino and Oakland are again part of the same tribal lands. This sort of emphasis is interesting to consider but erases so much it comes off as YT nonsense. Oakland is truly West Coast Boston in terms of who they allow to be “from Oakland”. These issues are interesting and thorny and we’re going to have to solve them if we’re going to deal with the larger environmental issues that Odell wants to tackle, we can’t elide issues of class and race when we’re talking about them. It makes all of this seem more and more like a rich person problem which I don’t think is Odell intention. I just wish the book focused more on people more broadly, rather than just educated Bay-area YTs in the technology field. Also, it’s very strange that both Odell and Jon Franzen have both written about bird-watching as an emblematic activity for an engaged life. Nothing.