So, can “doing nothing” be an act of resistance when the world demands constant productivity? Ms. (Unless perhaps you write a book about it.) When you pause life to do the “nothing” of watching birds off your porch, no one makes any money off that. Every time you pull to refresh Twitter, your attention is part of a capitalist exchange. What she is critiquing is the addictive and invasive aspects of social media and technology in particular. Looking at or creating art can be nothing. This is no small problem when our attention is owned by corporations through our phones.Ī warning: To properly read this book, we must set aside the knee-jerk argument against her definition of “nothing.” The nothing she wants us to do is not the absence of activity, but a redirection of time, energy and focus toward things that cannot be monetized. And she believes that this examination of our attention is essential because through our attention, we create our reality. Odell gathers together her examination of attention using sources ranging from Diogenes to Donna Haraway, from communes to the compositions of John Cage.
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