It’s, oddly, an extremely romantic book, regardless of the number of times the author is obligated to mention Mark Zuckerberg.
“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.” The business model of platforms like this - which rely on advertising and clicks and “engagement” as defined by simple data points, not by genuine feeling or the messy work of thought - has created what she calls an “arms race of urgency,” which “abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think.” What if social media were a public utility - one you used for your own purposes and left alone otherwise? What if there were no profit incentive to trap you in a loop of seductive, brightly colored apps? “The villain here is not necessarily the internet, or even the idea of social media,” she writes. What if social media were a public utility - one you used for your own purposes and left alone otherwise?
She doesn’t even want to get rid of social media, just redo it. They’re purportedly about wellness, but they’re tinged with the stink of capitalist always-on hustle culture. The goal of those projects, she argues, is to guide you into repurposing your time in a way that’s productive. Odell’s proposed course of action doesn’t have much use for the now-trendy “Time Well Spent” movement (which relies on more tech to solve the problem of too much tech) or apps that inform you when you’ve wasted too much of your day on social media, or any solution proposed by the same Silicon Valley wunderkinds who profited from getting us into this mess. It’s not exactly a guide to doing nothing more like a suggestion that you could refuse to do some of the things that fracture your attention - reading every push notification that crosses your phone screen, watching 500 Instagram stories between every basic task - and protect your mind from becoming slippery and splintered. What can you do? To hear most people tell it, you can either succumb to using Facebook and Instagram for hours a day, every single day, or you can delete the apps and throw your phone into the ocean.Īrtist and writer Jenny Odell proposes a third choice: to “participate, but not as asked.” Her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is out April 9 through Melville House it’s adapted from a talk she gave in 2017 at the Minneapolis art and technology conference Eyeo.
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