How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

The introduction presents the key issue the author takes up in the book, one that she deems a dilemma for us all: how to turn away from the “attention economy.” Though she never defines that term in the book, she did give this definition in an interview: “any model where the goal for a company is to just get more attention, whether that’s more engagement, more time spent on a site, just more ‘eyeballs’” (“Jenny Odell with Austin Jenkins: Reclaiming Our Attention in an Age of Distraction.” YouTube, uploaded by Town Hall Seattle, 1 Nov. 2019). It’s meant to be addicting and leads to burnout and malaise in people. More and more it seems that our ability to opt out and “do nothing” seems at risk.

Odell quotes from older texts at the outset to show that this is not a new phenomenon. Yet today’s world only intensifies the problem because of the ubiquity of the internet via cellphones. She proposes a threefold solution of dropping out of the attention economy, becoming more involved with people directly around us (a “lateral” move), and engaging in a stewardship of our locales—what she calls “a movement downward into place” (xi).