jenny odell how to do nothing resisting the attention economy

It's a scam that moves both wealth and joy off of our balance sheets and onto the balance sheets of the super-rich. Odell links this to neoliberal capitalism, and the requirement that each of us be a hustling entrepreneur, which, in turn, is a way for capital to shift risk onto labor. * The rise of 'productivity' as a measure of the quality of life is incredibly destructive, and it obliterates everything inside and outside of us that make us happy, because sleep and love and laughter and beauty are not 'productive.' With that in mind, the broad strokes of her book are that:

Odell's central thesis is hard to pin down part of her subject-matter here is that really important ideas don't neatly distill down to short, punchy summaries or slogans - instead, they occupy a kind of irreducible, liminal complexity that has to be lived as much as discussed.

In this conversation, Jenny and I discuss the difference between productivity and creativity, how artists orchestrate attention, the ideologies we use to value our time, what it means to do nothing, restoring context to our lives and words, why “groundedness requires actual ground,” lucid dreaming, the joys of bird watching, my difficulty appreciating conceptual art, her difficulty with meditation, and much more.Artist and writer Jenny Odell ( previously) is justifiably beloved for her pieces and installations that make us consider the economics and meanings of garbage, weird markets, and other 21st century plagues in her first book, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Odell draws on art criticism, indigenous practices, 'Deep Listening,' anti-capitalist theory, and psychology to make the case that the internal chaos we feel is no accident: it's the result of someone's business-model, and until we reject 'productivity' in favor of contemplation and deliberation, it will only get worse. And she’s a visual artist who has taught digital and physical design at Stanford since 2013, as well as done residencies at Facebook, San Francisco Recology, and the Internet Archive.Īll of which is to say she’s the perfect person to talk to about creativity and attention in a world designed to flatten both. Odell is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. “And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers.” “For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience,” writes Jenny Odell.

Jenny odell how to do nothing resisting the attention economy