‘How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy’, by Jenny Odell.
What’s it about:
This book gives insight into our ‘always on‘ society – how it has come about and what we need to do to take conscious action to take care of our over-stimulated brains.
What Lynn learned:
I learned about the ‘The Useless Tree’ and fell in love with the concept. This tree appeared worthless to loggers, hence they left it alone and it survived way longer than all the others. To be useless was a survival strategy.
‘Doing nothing’ is not a weekend retreat, or an alternative way of life – but a ‘third way’ of ‘refusal in place’ (p. 69).
Our attention has a connection to removing our biases. Without a conscious effort, we act on our historic biases; therefore, if one is used to challenging biases, we can take a similar commitment to actively using our attention to cultivate a discerning life. To change our minds takes ongoing effort.
The notification icons are designed to upset our need for order, so when we see the red icon we have the drive to set it in order, hence our attention flows there.
Personal branding and social media runs the risk of a race to the mediocre bottom where we have mass produced likeable content that is favoured by the algorithm and does not challenge our thinking.
Fave quotes:
‘we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time-zones or our sleep cycles’ (p. 15)
‘It’s uncomfortable to assert one’s will against custom and inclination, but that’s what makes it admirable’ (p. 73)
‘What is needed, then, is not a ‘once-and-for-all’ type of quitting but ongoing training; the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity’ ( p . 93)
‘I want to propose several reasons we should not only register, but care about and co-inhabit a reality with, the people who live around us being left out our filter bubbles’ ( p. 133)
‘Do-nothing farming recognized that there was a natural intelligence at work in the land, and therefore the most intelligent thing for the farmer to do was to interfere as little as possible’ (p. 194)
‘the Facebook engineer who created the ‘like’ button, had a parental-control feature set up on his phone by an assistant, to keep him from downloading apps’ (p. 198)
Why relevant right now:
Because we all are ‘too busy’ and need to take a conscious effort to stop, lest we collapse into further stress and anxiety #Doom
Interest factor: 4.5/5
Coffee table cred: 4/5
Ignorance of external world while reading: 4/5
Book cover design: 4/5
Help the existential crisis: 5/5
