Jenny Odell
Photo Credit: Ryan Meyer
We were excited to speak to Jenny Odell, art educator and author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy on a call last week. Her New York Times Best Seller made waves in 2019—the year in hindsight where productivity as the ultimate arbiter of self-worth hit its peak. While we are still glued to our phones and stymied by techno-capitalist machines day in and day out, it appears that one positive attribute of 2020 was that we were all forced to reevaluate how we define personal success and what is truly valuable: i.e. health, friends, family—and yes, of course money. But what How to Do Nothing explores is not the need for the absence of capitalism, but a recognition of how the most insidious features of technology in coordination with capitalistic forces are diverting our attention away from the things that create a meaningful existence for ourselves on a local, ecological, and spiritual level.
While we’re all guilty of doomscrolling and watching for the next political shitstorm, it’s nice to be reminded that if we’re lucky enough to have the time to hit pause, we can always redirect our attention to literally anything that makes us feel a bit more alive—even if it appears to the productivity-programmed eye as “nothing.”
As someone who wrote a book partly about being mindful of our relationship with technology, have you found yourself succumbing to the pitfalls of incessant scrolling during the pandemic?
Yeah, definitely there have been moments of that. It’s like a pendulum, you swing back and forth. One of the things I am trying to suggest in the book is that it’s not going to be a once and for all epiphany you have one day and then you never participate in the attention economy again. The reality of living in the world is that it’s going to be this constant negotiation. In either case, wherever you are on that pendulum swing, it’s just about trying to have awareness and an ability to watch yourself and your thoughts and the way that you’re engaging with these platforms. It’s really the only thing you can do. One thing that I understand better now than when I wrote the book is that these times of doomscrolling are so specifically tied to feelings of fear and danger. Since writing the book that dynamic is much more familiar to me and it’s clearer when it’s happening to me and easier to get out of.
Also, since we’ve never experienced a global pandemic in our lifetime, the level of isolation mixed with the urgency of needing to know what’s happening next is brand new in itself.
In my experience, there is not a lot of precedent for the background radiation of fear and absurdity. For me, some of it has been recognizing the size of the thing that you’re up against and not trivializing it. It is scary. The fear makes sense. That’s not going to change. Where I still feel I can exercise some agency is what I choose to do with those feelings and where I take them. It’s helpful to step away and observe yourself and act like a fly on the wall. Imagine those moments when you’re doomscrolling and sitting in some horrible posture in the corner of your apartment. Just picture yourself as a fly on the wall seeing yourself doing that. That’s already a step away from being so absorbed in it.
You write in the book, “What the tastes of neoliberal techno-manifest destiny and Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic or less than obvious. Such nothings cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated and provide no deliverables.” That had me thinking about the selling of simplified concepts in the news. This obviously started at the dawn of consumerism, but curious when you really saw this shift as mentioned above.
The attention economy is heavily associated with social media, but it actually goes back to the entire history of advertising. As long as there have been representations of reality, those representations have never been reality. There’s always some selection going on. One group of people is always going to be pulling out details and communicating in some way to other people and that’s inherent to the nature of communication and news. And then you get something like social media which hyper-accelerates that process and also accentuates the worst aspects of it.
Anyone who is on social media has at least a vague sense that there are structural aspects of these platforms that are encouraging its addictive nature and speeding it along. But for me so much has to do with the pacing on social media and the relationship of that to patience and context. I was looking at Twitter this morning and I saw this tweet statement that read like a headline you would see in the news. It had hundreds of thousands of likes, but there was no source. And I’m not saying that person was lying, but it took me this extra beat before scrolling on to be like ‘wait, some part of my brain just uncritically accepted that information because it gels what I think is happening based on the people that I follow,’ but don’t we have a basic responsibility to cite a URL attached to a significant statement? And that’s one tiny example of things that are happening and are encouraged. Clearly that person got a ton of engagement from that statement and was riding on current feelings of fear and anxiety.
There is this implicit pressure on social media to respond in great haste and often before it’s even possible to process the event being commented on. In addition, most people’s responses to whatever is going on in the world feels like echoes of other people’s responses. What are your thoughts on this phenomenon?
I definitely agree. It is something that I think about a lot and it’s curious that not just writers and news commentators have a take on something, but everyone somehow feels like they have an obligation to post some kind of acknowledgment or reaction to an event. And I don’t think that’s always bad, but for example my Twitter account is very weird; if you go look at it right now you’ll see I’ve been posting kind of silly things and part of it is because I don’t want to add more material to that reactionary shitstorm. I already know, I’m already concerned, I’ve read the news, I’m aware of what’s going on. I don’t need to add to that for myself and for other people purely in the emotional register. But it’s also morbidly fascinating to me how habitual what forms of expression or opinions become habitual on social media. As a result of that sometimes the possibility of simply not engaging or not adding is obscured. You forget that you don’t have to do that.
Totally. It also feels like this acknowledgment of or comment on a current event often acts as a siren of social validation within peer groups, because a lot of the people who probably follow you--unless you’re a huge celebrity--already share the same values as you. So it’s interesting to see people feeling the need to virtue signal within friend groups or professional networks.
It is really strange and it seems exhausting. My ways of engaging with social media are pretty strange--as you may guess from the book. I rarely look at Instagram, but the few times I scroll through the main feed recently I’m just like ‘oh my god, this is exhausting.’ And these are people that I know! I just want to let them know “It’s okay, I’m aware of your politics.” It seems like this ongoing need to externalize and position oneself is probably not great for longer-term processing and learning about the deep history of things that informs what’s happening right now.
In the book you say, “We all have to reexamine our relationship between attention span and the speed of information exchange.” We regretfully didn’t make it to the end, but do you touch upon the dopamine feedback loops and the addictive nature of it?
I don’t really address that in the book; I leave that more to people writing about persuasive design. I talk about how these apps are designed to make them more addictive, but I don’t go into the science. In the book I was more interested in this parallel where you can tell someone to stop paying attention to something, but at a certain point you have to give them something else to give their attention to--similar to breaking any habit. I was talking to a friend about the phenomenon of waking up and doomscrolling in bed, which I have done over the year. But I was telling him that you need to have some kind of alternative that provides some type of reward. So he started doing those delightful Yoga with Adrienne videos.
The book itself is quite self indulgent; it’s about me having this love affair with local ecology and ultimately that was the thing that gave me perspective and drew me far away enough to look back and see how I had been engaging with technology; which doesn’t dilute the elements of addictive design. But I’m coming from the perspective of an artist interested in art that shows you some new dimension of reality that is seductive and absorbing.
You don’t seem like someone who would be comfortable with building a “personal brand,” but in order to sell a book these days, you have to. How did you deal with those conflicting forces within yourself?
I am a very private person and my impulse as a person is to not become a commodified public figure. I think this is probably true of other writers where you just have to make a compromise that you’ll do a certain amount of publicity and no more. I’m not going to have a super hyper-developed Instagram profile with different groups of stories and branded infographics. But I’m trying to exercise choice within the latitude that I do have with the necessities of publicity and just trying to keep a clear boundary with my public world and my private world, which can feel complicated especially now that everything happens at home.
Have you been working on anything the past year? Or have you been focusing on teaching, observing and birdwatching for the most part?
All of the above! I am working on another book and at this point I’m realizing the book will have been written during a pandemic and I know there will be a person whose like “Oh, the person who wrote a book about how to do nothing finished writing a book during a pandemic,” but it’s a book about time and the origins of time as money. It’s an attempt to address a missing piece of How to Do Nothing which is that I don’t adequately address what the book says to someone who doesn’t have the time to do nothing, and that’s been a thorn in my side ever since I’ve published it. I’m also teaching and walking around and thinking. It’s been really strange because one of the things I wanted to talk about was different lenses for perceiving time and thinking about what time is. I started writing the proposal before the pandemic, so it’s added this interesting dimension of trying to defamiliarize how we think about time. I’m hoping that it will make readers more receptive to this idea that the way that we ordinarily reckon time within capitalism is really narrow and specific.