How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapter 5-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “Anatomy of a Refusal”

This chapter begins with a description of a piece of performance art by the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala. She posed as a new employee at the accounting firm Deloitte and proceeded to rattle her colleagues by sitting and staring in her cubicle or riding the elevators up and down to nowhere. When asked about it, she said she was thinking. Her purpose was to point out that veering from a norm causes discomfort in people because it exposes the fact that the norm is but “a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives” (67).

Odell then goes back in time to ancient Greece to talk about another disrupter of norms, Diogenes. He poked fun at conventions by acting in ways that seemed bizarre, living in a tub and walking around during the day with a lamp, supposedly in search of an honest man. Diogenes disavowed the absurdity of everyday life, but he didn’t withdraw from it, remaining in society even as people around him found his actions odd. Odell calls this occupying the “third space,” that is, not going along with everyone but also not withdrawing, instead staying in society and doing things differently.

Another famous disrupter of norms—or “refusenik”—was a fictional one depicted by Herman Melville in the 19th-century short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In the story, Bartleby is hired as a clerk by a Wall Street lawyer. At first, all goes well as he performs his duties as expected. Then one day he states he “would prefer not to” when asked to do something. This becomes his mantra for everything—never rejecting requests outright with “no” but qualifying it by stating his refusal as a preference. The lawyer doesn’t know what to do about this and is driven fairly mad by Bartleby.

A reference in the story to Cicero makes Odell ponder his writing on free will. Unlike others cited earlier, Cicero thought that free will was not somehow predetermined. While he allowed for the influences of external factors, he argued that people have true agency through “will, desire, and training”—or “voluntate, studio, disciplina” in Latin (72). It’s precisely this internal discipline, Odell argues, that makes our culture respect its refuseniks. She gives an example of this in performance artist Tehching Hsieh, whose work includes locking himself in a cage in his studio for a year with strict limits on what he allowed himself to do. By removing all but the essential behaviors, his art calls attention to how people spend their time, usually filling it up with activities.

This leads Odell to a discussion of Henry David Thoreau, who likewise experimented with living simply and eschewing many of society’s conventions, as detailed in his book Walden. In the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau “sought a third space outside of a question that otherwise seemed given” (74). He spent time in jail for refusing to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican War and the institution of slavery. The law he broke in not paying taxes was created, he said, by people so deeply in the midst of things that they cannot see clearly. One needs a higher moral vantage point to get a sense of the truth. By publishing his essay, Thoreau hoped to get more people to see things from this perspective. Odell concludes that such collective action creates a “third space” of “refusal, boycott, and sabotage” that gains the attention of the public (77).

An example of collective action of this kind took place in Oakland, along the Embarcadero waterfront where the author used to take her lunch breaks on one of her jobs. Longshoremen used to work there loading and unloading ships docked at the piers. In 1934, they went on strike to protest their working conditions, including poor pay, unpredictable shifts, and ever-increasing pressure to work faster (even in dangerous conditions). Individually, they had no power, but they began to organize under the International Longshoremen’s Association. Working together, they remained steadfast, even when management tried various tactics to break them. Violence from these tactics, in which police killed two people, led to a general strike in support of the longshoremen.

Odell details the discipline and attention it took for the workers to align themselves toward a single goal and hold the line against management. This takes another level of concentration beyond an individual’s actions, which Odell explores in the rest of the chapter. Collective action is harder because every individual has a different threshold of what he or she can risk in participating in acts of refusal. Fear and financial vulnerability make people less likely to act, and these have only gotten worse for workers in the decades since the longshoreman strike. Institutional support has waned as unions have been weakened by more recent laws. Today, even students, who historically have been politically active because they had little to lose, are more focused on work and feel vulnerable. They have little margin for error as they constantly build their resumes, afraid of being left behind their peers if they step off the treadmill.

Odell concludes by applying all this to rejecting the attention economy. Simple individual actions like quitting Facebook aren’t enough because they do nothing to change the underlying system causing the problem. What’s more, as she argues earlier, withdrawing is not enough. Instead, she wants to see people take back their attention from the likes of social media and redirect it—together—toward building something positive.

Chapter 4 Summary: “Exercises in Attention”

As the title of this chapter suggests, here Odell reviews ways to increase our attention and to recognize everything right in front of us that we are missing. She begins with her hometown of Cupertino, headquarters of Apple Computers. Growing up there, she thought it was rather bland and soulless, with no central “Main Street” area and an overabundance of shopping centers. She realizes now, after working on her attention skills, there was more to it than met the eye.

As an artist, Odell is naturally drawn to things that catch our attention visually. When she learned of artist David Hockney’s work, she found herself fascinated for how it disrupts the viewer’s vision and reconstitutes it from a different perspective. She is most interested in his work consisting of photographs of a single scene taken from various vantage points. For example, in one piece, he depicts a Scrabble game, with a group of photographs showing the hands of the player whose point of view it is, others showing the Scrabble board itself, and still more facing forward and sideways to the various other players as well as a cat perched on the table.

In this multi-photo arrangement, Hockney overcomes what he thinks is the inadequacy of still photography: The reality we create in our minds consists of blending together many visual scenes rather than the single “definitive” snapshot that photography usually presents. The resulting overlap, repetition, and slightly “off” nature of Hockney’s work jars the viewer’s sight line enough to force them to see things from a different angle or notice things they might otherwise overlook.

Odell once had a similar experience with sound. She attended a performance composed by John Cage, whose work interrupts our usual way of taking in music by incorporating everyday sounds and forcing the audience to “hear” them differently. Afterward, as she walked down the street to catch a ride home, she was attuned to sounds all around her. As she notes, it wasn’t just hearing them in a new way but hearing them, period. They had always been there before, but she hadn’t noticed, and it changed how she paid attention to sounds thereafter.

This kind of experience can be thrilling but also disconcerting, a bit like Alice in Wonderland. We do it out of curiosity and because it can take us out of the “self,” becoming more integrated into our surroundings. Odell relates the latter to the famous work by philosopher Martin Buber, I and Thou. Buber divides seeing into two types, “I-It” and “I-Thou.” The first always places the self at center and all others (things and people) are refracted through the lens of the self. With “I-Thou,” however, the other is given equal standing with the self, seen in all its fullness and complexity. Buber even allows for this in nonhuman things, such as a tree.

Such an “I-Thou” perspective was part of the abstract art produced in America in the mid-20th century. Odell describes her experience in a museum coming across the painting Blue Green Black Red by Ellsworth Kelly. At first, she just glanced at it somewhat dismissively as simply four separate rows of the colors in the title. Then as she got closer the colors seemed to come alive as the blue “vibrated and seemed to push and pull my vision in different directions” (108). It was, she writes, almost a “physical reaction.” She spent some time looking at each of the four colors and realized what this focus and duration could teach us about really paying attention to things.

Returning to the idea of discipline in terms of attention noted in the previous chapter, Odell quotes William James, who wrote that attention on one thing requires will in order to be sustained and not be distracted by something else. She then reviews the master’s thesis of Stanford student Devangi Vivrekar, which deals with the way social media companies utilize behavioral science techniques used by advertising agencies as persuasive design elements. Vivrekar concludes that in the face of the computing power of algorithms, we are essentially powerless to resist. Her solution would be to use the same techniques to promote positive behaviors, saying there is a place for companies to make a profit while doing good. Odell disagrees with this approach, noting the similarity to Walden Two, in which some entity decides on behaviors for the rest of us. It removes agency and presents limited dimensions to choose from. Instead, she finds Buber’s “I-Thou” approach better because it allows for an infinite and undefined completeness in both ourselves and others we encounter.

She still wants to use attention training to create a positive alternative to the attention economy—not just exercise willpower to avoid it. After the John Cage performance, as she paid more attention to her surroundings, she came to realize that she was advocating something called “bioregionalism.” Broadly speaking, it is a way of engaging deeply in the immediate area one lives in, not unlike how Indigenous peoples did before the coming of Europeans. One knows the land and everything living on it, as well as how they all interact; situating oneself within this bioregion is an “I-Thou” exercise that requires paying attention.

Odell ends the chapter by completing the story of her hometown. After coming across a map of Cupertino from the 1950s, she compares it to the current Google Maps to look up landmarks of her life. She sees what existed before the development of residences and shopping centers. Vague memories of the natural world come to her out of her childhood as she remembers a creek near her school. With a childhood friend, she goes in search of the creek to explore. It was a moment like coming out of the John Cage concert: Everything was there all along, but she was just now seeing it for the first time. She writes, “If we can render a new reality together—with attention—perhaps we can meet each other there” (126).

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

These two chapters deal with disengaging from the attention economy and developing techniques for heightening our attention. First, Odell deals with disengaging by relying, again, on concrete examples mixed with philosophy. Because she has rejected the idea of pushing back against social media simply by withdrawing, she presents a kind of in-between type of refusal to go along—what she calls occupying the “third space.” With her examples from history and literature, she explains how people can carve out spaces of their own making. Bartleby makes the perfect example here because, as Odell writes, “he not only will not do what he is asked, he answers in a way that negates the terms of the question” (70-71). This is what gets his employer so flummoxed—Bartleby won’t say yes, and he won’t say no. It’s like he’s speaking a foreign language.

This concept of a “third space” is not an easy one to understand, and the author does a good job of making it concrete with examples like Bartleby and the opening anecdote regarding the artist Pilvi Takala. Like Bartleby, Takala confuses her coworkers by not “speaking” the same language of the workforce, if you will. This is what makes the “third space” so powerful and a better option than simply withdrawing from society. In the latter scenario, things go humming right along, and the protestor who removes herself is not really missed. By sticking around, however, and playing the part of a Bartleby or a Diogenes, she can make people around her pause and notice the cognitive dissonance between expected norms and alternative behavior. At the very least, it gets people’s attention.

This attention is the focus of Chapter 4, as Odell wants her fellow refuseniks to train their attention, to get it in peak form, to apply it toward meaningful ends rather than have it hijacked by social media. Using examples from art, her expertise, Odell shows how this training can happen. Her knowledge of and experience in the field serve her well here, as one of the purposes of art is to push boundaries and change people’s frame of reference. Artists and musicians like David Hockney and John Cage certainly do that, jolting observers’ expectations and perceptions. Indeed, docents at a museum exhibiting some of Hockney’s work told Odell that some visitors looked at the world with new eyes afterward. A group of them had visited a nearby botanical garden, returning to the museum to inform the docents that Hockney’s work had taught them to look at things differently, and the garden had a more kaleidoscopic look than previously.

All this leads to two of Odell’s themes: humans and nature, and the nature of the self. Odell wants us to put our newfound attention to good use as stewards of the land. We need to see our communities in all their complexity, no longer overlooking what has always been there “unseen” to us. As we focus our attention on these spaces, we encounter other life-forms and come to recognize their equal standing with us. Thus, Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship is formed, allowing us to properly care for places as good stewards of the land and everything in it.