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How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy Paperback – Import, 29 December 2020
Jenny Odell
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Print length256 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherMelville House
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Publication date29 December 2020
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Dimensions14 x 1.78 x 20.88 cm
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ISBN-101612198554
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ISBN-13978-1612198552
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Product description
Review
"How to Do Nothing is genuinely instructive, elaborating a practical philosophy to help us slow down and temporarily sidestep the forces aligned against both our mental health and long-term human survival. You can knock the hustle — and you should."—Akiva Gottlieb, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"Approachable and incisive. . . . The book is clearly the work of a socially conscious artist and writer who considers careful attention to the rich variety of the world an antidote to the addictive products and platforms that technology provides. . . . [Odell] sails with capable ease between the Scylla and Charybdis of subjectivity and arid theory with the relatable humanity of her vision."—Nicholas Cannariato, THE WASHINGTON POST
"The sentiment behind How to Do Nothing is one of defiance.”—Casey Schwartz, THE NEW YORK TIMES
"An erudite and thoughtful narrative about the importance of interiority and taking time to pay close attention to the spaces around us."—Annie Vainshtein, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"An eloquent argument against the cult of efficiency, and I felt both consoled and invigorated by it."—Jennifer Szalai, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"The path to freedom lies within the covers of this book."—Lauren Goode, WIRED
"How to Do Nothing mimics the experience of walking with a perceptive and sensitive friend, the kind of person who makes you feel, in your bones, that it’s a miraculous gift to be alive."—Katie Bloom, THE SEATTLE TIMES
"Odell’s great strength as a writer is her ability to convey art’s unique power without overestimating or misstating its social impact. . . . Ultimately, what sets her book apart from self-help is not a less quixotic set of demands but a more life-affirming endgame."—Megan Marz, THE BAFFLER
"Thoughtful, compelling, and practical."—Clay Skipper, GQ
“This is a potentially subversive book. Affirming that we should take more time offline for nurturing our own thoughts (and so our own being) does not sound that new, but here it is so gracefully articulated in irresistible arguments.”—Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural
"Jenny Odell’s brilliant How to Do Nothing is the book we all need to read now. With wonderful precision, passion, and artfulness, Odell finds the language to meet this cultural moment. She has written a joyful manifesto about resistance that is also an eccentric and practical handbook on how to reclaim your colonized and monetized attention."—Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others
“Self-help for the collectively minded, How to Do Nothing is as thoughtful and morally serious as it is fun to read. This book will change how you see the world.”—Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days
“Your chaotic, fraught internal weather isn't an accident, it's a business-model, and while 'thoughtful resistance' isn't 'productive,' Odell proves that it is utterly necessary.”—Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Walkaway
“In a media and tech ecosystem simultaneously obsessed with "digital detox" and building personal brands, How to Do Nothing is a breath of fresh air grounding readers in the complex, interdependent actual ecosystems of the physical world. Jenny Odell writes with remarkable clarity and compassion. Each chapter reads like going on a fascinating walk through a park in conversation with an old friend (who happens to also be able to tell you about every single bird in the park, which is awesome). It's a book I already know I'll be returning to and referencing for a long time.”—Ingrid Burrington, author of Networks of New York
“In How to do Nothing Jenny Odell breaks through the invisible yoke that binds 21st century first-worlders to our app-driven devices. With a thoughtful look at the attention economy, Odell’s book is a self-help guide for re-learning how to look at the world. The book braids threads of ancient philosophy together with contemporary visual and technological culture, and weaves an original route to re-wilding the mind. Wide-ranging and erudite, this book is also entertaining, and brings the reader along with enthusiasm to Odell's philosophy of “manifest dismantling.” —Megan Prelinger, author of Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age
"Odell introduces the idea that within our world there are endless other worlds; many of the alternatives sound much better. We need only pay attention."—VICE'S Broadly
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 2 The Impossibility of Retreat
A lot of people withdraw from society, as an experiment…So I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you’re supposed to do is stay in the midst of life.
–AGNES MARTIN
If doing nothing requires space and time away from the unforgiving landscape of productivity, we might be tempted to conclude that the answer is to turn our backs to the world, temporarily or for good. But this response would be shortsighted. All too often, things like digital detox retreats are marketed as a kind of “life hack” for increasing productivity upon our return to work. And the impulse to say goodbye to it all, permanently, doesn’t just neglect our responsibility to the world that we live in; it is largely unfeasible, and for good reason.
Last summer, I accidentally staged my own digital detox retreat. I was on a solitary trip to the Sierra Nevada to work on a project about the Mokelumne River, and the cabin I had booked had no cell reception and no Wi-Fi. Because I hadn’t expected this to be the case, I was also unprepared: I hadn’t told people I would be offline for the next few days, hadn’t answered important emails, hadn’t downloaded music. Alone in the cabin, it took me about twenty minutes to stop freaking out about how abruptly disconnected I felt.
But after that brief spell of panic, I was surprised to find how quickly I stopped caring. Not only that, I was fascinated with how inert my phone appeared as an object; it was no longer a portal to a thousand other places, a machine charged with dread and potentiality, or even a communication device. It was just a black metal rectangle, lying there as silently and matter-of-factly as a sweater or a book. Its only use was as a flashlight and a timer. With newfound peace of mind, I worked on my project unperturbed by the information and interruptions that would have otherwise lit up that tiny screen every few minutes. To be sure, it gave me a valuable new perspective on how I use technology. But as easy as it was to romanticize giving everything up and living like a hermit in this isolated cabin, I knew I eventually needed to return home, where the world waited and the real work remained to be done.
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Product details
- Publisher : Melville House (29 December 2020)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1612198554
- ISBN-13 : 978-1612198552
- Item Weight : 266 g
- Dimensions : 14 x 1.78 x 20.88 cm
- Country of Origin : USA
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Best Sellers Rank:
#229,618 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #948 in Environment & Nature
- #1,589 in Sociology (Books)
- #7,986 in Politics
- Customer Reviews:
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It's not about how to shut yourself off from society and live as a hermit. It's not a bunch of shallow hand-wringing about social media and "kids these days." It's not even a detox or retreat guide. How To Do Nothing is a careful, well-researched look at how we choose to engage with our world and with each other, so that we can find ways to restore nuance, context and a sense of belonging. To do this, Odell investigates everything from history and politics to literature, art, sociology, even bird watching.
Though this book is written in a slightly academic style and the reader may benefit from some knowledge of critical methods or modern philosophy, it's so honest that I believe it would resonate strongly with anyone. I have personally taken a lot from this book and have been thinking about it for weeks since I read it.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 May 2019
It's not about how to shut yourself off from society and live as a hermit. It's not a bunch of shallow hand-wringing about social media and "kids these days." It's not even a detox or retreat guide. How To Do Nothing is a careful, well-researched look at how we choose to engage with our world and with each other, so that we can find ways to restore nuance, context and a sense of belonging. To do this, Odell investigates everything from history and politics to literature, art, sociology, even bird watching.
Though this book is written in a slightly academic style and the reader may benefit from some knowledge of critical methods or modern philosophy, it's so honest that I believe it would resonate strongly with anyone. I have personally taken a lot from this book and have been thinking about it for weeks since I read it.


I think one can relate more to the book (and some of the examples) if one is familiar with California.
The work was a little contradictory at times about our relationship with our ‘app-driven devices’. And, I found a mention of the author ‘killing time’ simply bizarre given the underlying emphasis on what might be seen as ‘mindfulness’.
Perhaps this was just a figure of speech? That said, I did find the author’s prose style rather clumsy at times. Is this because she writes in American English and I’m a British English writer? Or it might be generational?
I’ve got a background in computing going back to the late 1960s, and was involved with AI work in the mid 1980s. Even then, some of the problematic aspects of technology were evident - if only in embryo.
Jenny Odell offers lots of suggestions for resisting but I see little evidence that her impassioned pleas will have much impact on most of those trapped in the ‘Attention Economy’. If one does want to resist (perhaps even ‘drop out’ to some degree) opportunities to do so seem very dependant on how much personal autonomy one enjoys. This is, to be fair, something she recognises.
The one, overwhelming depressing aspect of the book is the assertion that there’s ‘hundreds of designers and engineers predict(ing) and plan(planing) for our every move on these platforms’. In other words, getting us to ‘click’ for reasons that are essentially about generating income for these corporations.
In a world facing a myriad of problems from climate change to a global refugee crisis, it’s more than a pity that these talented people can’t find something more constructive to do with their time and energy.

That is the crux of Odell’s book. We should look up, look up, and look around from our daily routine engrossed at work and around our computers and cellphones. It is a book that nudges us to appreciate the diversity around us that we ignore because we are always in a hurry, and locked in by our routines, too pre-occupied with an ultimate objective – getting that promotion, securing a deal, inventing the product we dreamt about, and so on.
Odell tells us plenty of nice stories of how life can be enjoyed, and in the process, learn not just to appreciate nature, but how we can do our part to preserve it. We learn the joy of actually noticing not just the birds in our garden or neighbourhood, but the different songs they make, and their habits. Odell has a way of spinning such stories that not only inspires ‘aha’ moments, but actually, creates lots of warm feelings about our surroundings and ourselves.
The CD version is well produced and read by Rebecca Gibel over 8 hours. Very clear production, and Gibel has a warm and soothing way of reading.

