How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

This last chapter is about context and why it is necessary for deep thought. As Odell explains, context has two aspects: physical and temporal. Once again, she uses bird-watching as an example. Like most people, when she first started the focus was on simply which birds she could identify, using a book’s checklist as a guide. As she progressed, however, she noticed that some birds were more likely to be found in certain places and that time of year also played a role in sightings.

The author compares this to her Twitter feed, listing a sampling of content from a day in 2018. It was a jumble of information with no connections. Some media critics call this “context collapse,” which has been put to use by propagandists and alt-right personalities to spread rumors and attack people. Odell explains how old tweets are dug up to embarrass perceived enemies. These tweets in isolation lack the original context in which they were presented, and with the speed of social media, any attempt to explain them is drowned out by the ensuing outrage.

First Odell addresses the spatial dimension of this lack of context, with an example from the 1985 book No Sense of Place by Joshua Meyrowitz. In it, Meyrowitz discusses taking a summer trip as a young man, writing that he had different versions of it he told his friends, parents, and professors in order to highlight various aspects for each audience. He compares that to a hypothetical scenario in which all those groups threw him a surprise party upon his return. If asked to tell about his trip there, he might have offended some people if he didn’t water the story down to appeal to all groups. This, he says, is like being in a house with no rooms or walls—everything is open to everyone. On the other hand, rooms give us context for our interactions. Odell writes that activists need these spatial contexts to be effective, noting that the different groups Martin Luther King, Jr. used in planning protests ranged in size from just one person to public meetings at a church. Each was necessary in planning for the next, as well as what to present publicly.

Odell then reviews the context collapse of social media in terms of time, what she calls “an analogous collapse into a permanent instantaneity” (163). The immediate nature of such communication means one is bombarded and overloaded with information that allows no time for contextualization/explanation. In terms of political activism, this creates weak ties among participants. This also affects people on an individual level, as making sense of one’s social media feed becomes virtually impossible.

Finally, context can also be missing on a larger scale—the community level—when history is left out. Odell writes, “I wonder what it would be like to experience a social network that was completely grounded in space and time, something you had to travel to in order to use, that worked slowly” (166). In California’s Bay Area, such a network existed in the early 1970s, called Community Memory. Computer terminals were set up in public spots in Berkeley and San Francisco. The intent was to act like bulletin boards in places like cafés and supermarkets, where people could post messages. The public could read messages on the computers for free and post their own for 25 cents. Because the terminals were not connected, the posts reflected each location, providing spatial context to the communication.

Odell discusses some present-day platforms that have similarities to Community Memory. One is Nextdoor, which is specific to local neighborhoods. However, taken as an aggregate, it’s very similar to platforms like Facebook that collect data for advertising. Another is Mastadon, which uses open-source software and local servers to create what they call “instances” (localized networks). It gives users more control over who sees individual messages, and all the data remains on users’ computers. Others, like mesh networks and Patchwork, focus even more on local communities and have sparse interfaces, allowing you to collect your thoughts to post without being constantly bombarded by other messages.

All this leads Odell to conclude that we should spend more time in conversation with specific people in specific contexts rather than blasting out social media message into a context-less void. Here she notes the importance of what Hannah Arendt called the “space of appearance,” which refers to any instance where people interact meaningfully with each other. Odell compares it to Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, except on an aggregate level. Examples are the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and the activism of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after the mass shooting there in 2018. She describes how the latter began with students gathering at the house of Cameron Kasky, one of the survivors, where they planned everything together in one physical space with everyone contributing what they felt they could.

Developing a relationship with local places both heightens one’s attention and requires its application. Public spaces like parks must be preserved for people to meet face to face, and we need to be aware of their histories to understand the local context. Learning about natural spaces shows us how intertwined we are with them, that our fate is bound together with that of such spaces and every living thing in them. Odell ends the chapter in this vein, noting that she’s paid less attention to her phone recently because she pays more attention to places. As a hypothetical example, she imagines a tech conference in a new city, during which the place calls to her and she escapes the conference to roam and acquaint herself with the location and wonder about its history. Missing most of the conference would no longer feel like an omission and the alternative would seem a good use of her time and attention.

Once you care about and pay attention to place, Odell writes, you’ll notice destruction to a greater extent than progress. She describes a walking tour of Oakland that she recently went on that pointed out the loss of habitat, burial sites of the Ohlone people who are indigenous to the area, historic buildings, and other things. Ironically, the idea of progress has long meant destruction, as shown in the 19th-century painting called American Progress. A large figure of a white woman with blonde hair floats over a Western landscape. The right half shows European settlers moving west, cultivating the land, establishing railroads, and taming nature; the left half shows Indigenous Americans being driven from the land and wild animals scattering in all directions. This is the very picture of the idea of Manifest Destiny.

Odell, on the other hand, envisions a reverse process she calls “manifest dismantling,” in which the land is restored and cared for. Such a process took place in 2015, when the San Clemente Dam in California was destroyed. Originally built to provide water to a residential development, the dam prevented steelhead trout from going upstream to spawn and almost led to their extinction. The river was rerouted and structured in such a way to allow the trout to migrate, and then the dam was dismantled in place. This process of remedying the harmful effects of past “progress,” is part of Odell’s vision for proper stewardship of the land. Another example she gives is Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, who gave up modern methods of farming in favor of a stewardship approach of letting crops grow as they would in nature. Here she quotes environmentalist Aldo Leopold, who wrote that we must go “from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (192).

There is not a “one size fits all” roadmap for how to go about this. Odell notes the privileges some people have compared to others. Wealthier people have more access to parks and green spaces, and many tech executives limit the screen time of their children. These two examples alone show that some people have more resources for resisting the attention economy, but Odell urges everyone to take whatever action they can given what’s feasible for them—no matter how small. It builds on itself, and “dismantling” does take place.

The book ends with the author’s description of the area around her studio in West Oakland, near the city’s port. Before being built up, it was once a wetland, and more recently the city built a lagoon and beach to help revive the local shorebirds. Odell lists some of the birds there, including the brown pelican, whose numbers plummeted from the use of the pesticide DDT until it was banned. The birds have existed for millions of years, and in that reclaimed habitat these symbols of survival prove what manifest dismantling can do.