Early labor movements focused on reclaiming workers’ time from their employers and fighting for clear demarcations between work and life. By resisting the popular impulse to use Trump as the nucleus of any theorizing about our present moment, Odell is able to outline a much bolder proposition for political resistance.Īt the basis of this proposition is an argument for the value of time. Amid the book’s roughly 200 pages, many will be pleased to find, she devotes hardly any space to familiar refrains about the relentless news cycle in the Trump era or “the Trump era” itself, which makes the book feel like its own refreshing escape from the demands on our attention. In How to Do Nothing, Odell takes several approaches to her argument for such a mass movement, threading ruminations on urban theory, technodeterminism, personal experience, and Marxist thought throughout. She writes: “I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to redirect it again, together.” Doing nothing, as she defines it, demands much more of us, and promises a much larger pay-off. Under these conditions, deleting Facebook seems like a laughably small gesture luckily, Odell knows it’s both tired and banal to devote a book to urging readers to do so. Meanwhile, capitalism demands that we constantly produce, a mandate that forces each of us, to varying extents, to budget our time and limits what we can spend it on. Rather, it’s hard because we are ruled by the attention economy, the capitalist apparatus that competes for, buys, and sells our attention-usually in quite literal ways, such as when apps are designed to keep users on them for as long as possible to attract advertisers. She acknowledges that it can be difficult to do these things, and not just because browsing Instagram may seem to some like more fun than passing time on a bench in a rose garden, or because our brains are “broken,” as we like to say on Twitter. For Odell, “nothing” largely consists of observing birds from her apartment window and sitting in the Morcom Amphitheatre of Roses in Oakland, California. “Nothing” isn’t truly nothing-it includes any activity whose value doesn’t depend on its ability to generate capital. The way to achieve this, she says, is to grow comfortable doing nothing.
Instead, she proposes a collective shifting of attention that results in a more considered awareness of how we relate to the physical world, to others, and to ourselves.
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