How to Do Nothing

I think this was a little more of a back-to-nature meditation than the blurb made it sound like, and it's pretty meandering. But the meandering feels appropriate, and Odell is a very engaging thinker, so it's enjoyable and engaging rather than just unsatisfying or unfocused. This resonated with a lot of stuff on my mind recently and I have a feeling I'm going to want to revisit it.

The main thesis is against consumerism, optimization, productivity and utility. Intentionally or not, my experience of the book embodied those principles: most of the times I was lost in thought or had already forgotten what the original argumentative line was; I was strolling around an unkept park of ideas. I wasn't expecting so much of the book to focus o the praise of specific artists, the blessings of bird watching, and Oakland.

A lot of the commentary is written like in-the-weeds literary criticism, which I think is a bit unapproachable for people not used to speaking in highly abstract concepts and so many analogies, metaphors and metonymies. Not a book for me, I guess maybe because I need some prior "manifest dismantling" of my ideals on how books ought to be written.

Very interesting book. It's not a self-help-grifty "run away from social media and generate more value for your boss" book as you might assume from the title--in fact, it challenges our deeply mistaken definitions of productivity and progress and shows how those ideas ultimately hurt us.

There were a lot of striking observations in this book: about productivity, algorithms, and particularly the natural world. My only complaint is that the section talking about art history felt a bit long and ramble-y and I don't get how it connects to the book's argument. Regardless, I plan to borrow and re-read this soon.

Very interesting book. It's not a self-help-grifty "run away from social media and generate more value for your boss" book as you might assume from the title--in fact, it challenges our deeply mistaken definitions of productivity and progress and shows how those ideas ultimately hurt us.

There were a lot of striking observations in this book: about productivity, algorithms, and particularly the natural world. My only complaint is that the section talking about art history felt a bit long and ramble-y and I don't get how it connects to the book's argument. Regardless, I plan to borrow and re-read this soon.

An artist's perspective on the commodification of attention and potential paths of resistance by seeking a deeper connection to the local environment.

Going into my reread list. There's a surprising amount of good history in here that I wasn't expecting.

In Overdue, Oliver (@aelaineo) mentions the vast destruction that social media has done to our connections with each other and information. While providing this diagnosis, Oliver mentioned Jenny Odell's (@the_jennitaur) How to Do Nothing, a glorious book.

I spend too much time on the Twitter and don't really have much to show for it. Odell urges us to replace our rather shallow connections with social media with a deeper connection to place and people.

Odell makes several main points in the book:

A) Doing "nothing" and refusing is a great form of life and resistance.
B) Reclaiming our attention is a way to do "nothing" in the attention economy.
C) Removing your attention requires you to have a place to put it. You can change your habits of attention with art, nature, and the community around you.
D) There are many ways to continue to use technology to connect but refuse the attention economy.
E) Once we have placed our attention on something else, we can actually do something good for our communities with it.
F) Manifest Deconstruction: as overturning the legacy of misguided thinking about the economy that has caused the problems we are facing now such as the issues that are intertwined and emerge within public space, environmental politics, class, and race
G) Context Collapse: the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context

All of that sounds obvious, but the way Odell delivers this information is compelling.

How to Do Nothing is worth your time.