She actually wants her readers to engage more thoughtfully with technology, look at the world more mindfully, and espouse a program of environmental conservation. “The fact that the ‘nothing’ that I propose is only nothing from the point of view of capitalist productivity explains the irony that a book called How to Do Nothing is in some ways also a plan of action,” Odell writes in the introduction, boldly acknowledging her radical agenda. Reading Odell’s new book, it doesn’t take long for the writer to admit that she’s not advocating indolence at all. Last but not least, Odell’s also an avid birdwatcher. She’s written for publications including the New York Times and McSweeney’s, and she’s still promoting her book. Since 2013, she’s taught courses on internet art at Stanford University. As an artist, she’s exhibited in China, the United States, France, and Dubai. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.Jenny Odell, the artist who wrote the hit book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), has in fact done quite a lot.
But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.
I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression-including the right not to express oneself-and its deliberately addictive features. Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. After all, there are forms of technology-from tools that let us observe the natural world to decentralized, noncommercial social networks-that might situate us more fully in the present.
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