jenny odell how to do nothing resisting the attention economy

A capitalist, Western notion of profit and efficiency has stamped out other, more salutary and less linear measures of time, she argues, as she draws passionately if vaguely on Indigenous conceptions of time. She charts how clocks emerged as “tools of domination”: the standardization of time by church bells, then by the nineteenth-century railroads the colonial mission of using labor as a “civilizing” force and the ways that time has been progressively commodified and disciplined, from the factories of the early twentieth century to the floors of contemporary Amazon warehouses. She wrote this book to save her life, she explains, as she struggled to understand why the world came to be organized for profit and not for human or ecological thriving.

In “Saving Time,” with moss as muse, Odell deepens her approach and amplifies her pitch. It was the prelude to enlarging one’s notion of community and our obligations to it. Looking up, looking around is the “seed of responsibility,” she argued. Here was a multidisciplinary artist for whom the Internet was a native landscape now she was teaching herself to see her surroundings, to notice more-more birds, more flowers-and claiming far-reaching consequences for simple acts of awareness. Although a glut of books on attention were vying for our own, hers stood out-not for the originality of its argument, I suspect, but for the sincerity of her persona on the page. Her previous book, “ How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” (2019), became a surprise best-seller, raising an alarm about how social media had fractured our capacity for deep focus and corralled us into relentless self-optimization. Odell’s work has a knack for finding the right conditions and anchoring itself in them. It is the kind that waits for the right conditions, that holds always the ability to begin something new.” “Not the monolithic, empty substance imagined to wash over each of us alone, but the kind that starts and stops, bubbles up, collects in the cracks, and folds into mountains. “It has been a reminder of time,” she writes about her unlikely companion. For the next three years, she and the moss shared air and sunlight as she wrote at the kitchen table, the rhizoids that grabbed at the soil taking root in her imagination. The moss spores arrived in the spring that Odell began working on her book “ Saving Time” (Random House). Silently, it began making a home in the cool damp of Jenny Odell’s kitchen, in a pig-shaped planter. The intruder entered not through the door but through the window.

Jenny odell how to do nothing resisting the attention economy