Jenny Odell

"When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as...doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process"--

How to Do Nothing

Laura

Gregor Gross

Pola Schwöbel

Claudine

Look back in memory and consider… how many have robbed you of life when yo not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!

I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression-including the right not to express oneself and its deliberately addictive features. 

It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live. 

Living between the mountains and this hyper accelerated, entrepreneurial culture, I can't help but ask the question: What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?

Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive. 

From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.

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