| title | How to Do Nothing |
|---|---|
| author | Jenny Odell |
| year | 2019 |
| isbn | 9781612197494 |
the following are my notes on how to do nothing. this is not a summary. instead, these are the ideas that are new to me or that caught my eye
- ix - "nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought"
- ix - much of what gives life meaning happens in "off time" that mechanistic view seeks to eliminate
- xi - book for "any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized"
- xi - "Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community."
- xii - commercial social media has "incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction"
- xxii - "simple awareness is the seed of responsibility"
- 5 - "existing things infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make" - totally agree, real life is super neat, think that's why I love candid photos of real places, nathan for you, how to w/ john wilson
- 7 - deep listening meant to create "heightened sense of receptivity" -> sounds like stephen shore how to see video
- 12 - "just becaus ethis right is denied to many people doesn't make it any less of a right or any less important"
- 13 - eight hours to do what we will: leisure might be there, but best way to "descibe that period is to refuse to define it"
- 18 - berardi on lack of repression in italy: "relies on proliferation of chatter , the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous", censorship marginal compared to "immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention"
- 34 - digital distraction not bad b/c productivity hit, but bc it wastes your life
- 38 - "they show how easily and imagined apolitical 'blank slate' leads to a technocratic solution where design has replaced politics"
- 42 - hardest decisions in commune about privacy, individual vs house, that is, "the very fundamentals of governance"
- 42 - commune member: "the tyranny of everyone doing their own thing"
- 48 - skinner "proposed avoiding politics altogether" and said we should just design culture
- 49 - "the locus of power is carefully hidden in Thiel's language, either disappearing into the passive voice or being associated with abstractions like design or technology"
- 52 - arendt: unpredictability + plurality of agents mean politics gotta happen and design won't suffice
- 52 - "Politics necessarily exist between two individuals with free will; any attemt to reduce politics to design (Thiel's 'machinery of freedom') is also an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings"
- 55 - epicurus used his garden to publish writings of the school, showed care for outside world
- 55 - experiments in retreating only valuable in exchange with outside world
- 55 - leguin: "The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only and adventurer"
- 68 - on diogenes: "he neither assimilated to nor fully exited society; instead he lived in the midst of it, in a permanent state of refusal"
- 70 - bartleby's "I would prefer not to" -> "he not only will not do what he is asked, he answers in a way that negates the terms of his question"
- 76 - thoreau hoped if enough individuals exercised moral judgement instead of just playing the game, the game might change. individual -> collective
- 77 - collective alignment emerges from individual self-discipline -> cause spectacle of noncompliance that registers at public scale
- 82 - refusal isn't a reaction, it's a decision that requires commitment
- 83 - students often front line of refusal - black students were advised + aided by profs, were under care of college, not at mercy of white employer
- 91 - tanner on digital detox: "They reinforce neoliberal ideals, privileging the on-the-move individual whose time needs to be well spent - a neatly consumerist metaphor."
- 93 - modernity is demanding, so "attention may be the last resource we have to withdraw"
- 94 - economy takes for granted attention being uniform
- 94 - not everyone can opt out, so "This is why it's even more important for anyone who does have a margin - even the tiniest one - to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should."
- 98 - hockney on picasso: "To him, cubism was quite simple: three noses meant you looked at it three times"
- 101 - hockney: looking a skill, people rarely practice
- 104 - attention + curiosity lets us avoid instrumental understanding, seeing people one-dimensionally / as product of function -> consider deepth of their existence
- 107 - being that cannot be understood / interpreted, only perceived -> demands constant attention, ongoing state of encounter
- 108 - what you see depends on how you look and for how long
- 110 - lots of stuff we see gets processed out unconsciously, only with attention is there perception
- 113 - william james + von helmholtz: no sustained attention, just successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing
- 116 - odell on vivrekar: some argue that "we should focus on empowering people to have more self control (that's me!)" - vivrekar says persuasion a given, all we can do is redirect it
- 117 - "What does persuasive design look like when someone else tries to bring out my 'aspirational self,' and does it for profit? Help!"
- 118 - vivrekar assumes shallow types of attention that can be directed w/ bad or good aims; "We might extrapolate from this to conclude that deeper, hardier, more nuanced forms of attention are less susceptible to appropriation, because discipline and vigilance inhere within them."
- 120 - "Significantly, these encounters are not optimized to 'empower' us by making us happier or more productive"
- 121 - william james: "My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those iteams which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos."
- 137 - on spotify recs: "By contrast, at its most successful, an algorithmic 'honing in' would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why ... When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to 'be yourself,' what it really means is 'be more yourself,' where 'yourself' is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to"
- 138 - "If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I'll find it - imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self - I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living. After all, if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading that same page over and over again, you would put the book down." -> completely disagree. if there's beauty in it, it's totally fine. good even. utterly unrelatable
- 139 - newcomers were "not only uninterested in learning anything about the incredibly dynamic place they had moved to, but ignorant of their role in destroying that dynamism"
- 139 - tragic thing about mind that views itself as separate, defensible, capable of efficiency is that it's based on fallacy of self being separate from others + the world
- 142 - "there is an important distinction to make between isolating oneself versus removing oneself from the clamor and undue influence of public opinion"
- 144 - someone asks author if using app to id plants alienated her from landscape, but she said it was needed as crutch to help her ignorance -> first step in seeing individual plants and not "greenery"
- 145 - "Eventually, to behold is to become beholden to"
- 151 - reality is blobby, refuses systematization, so american obsession with individualism, personal branding, competition, striving does violence to human society
- 154 - attention forms ground for ethics bc we choose who we see / hear
- 156 - she calls crow swarms "Crow Burning Man" -> gotta steal that
- 161 - meyrowitz: public by default means two possiblities: either offend somebody or be so bland you won't offend anyone
- 162 - can't strategize what to say wrt who is present online
- 163 - public by default means it's harder to change your mind
- 164 - barassi quoting ecological activist: "Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues."
- 165 - barassi quoting again: "So technologies have made people come together but what made the movement so powerful was the physical space, the process of discussion, and reflection and the availability of the people to sit down and discuss without the pressure of time"
- 177 - when you can choose your audience, a third space -> "In this form of encounter, neither I nor anyone else has to waste time or energy on wrangling context, or packaging our messages for the lowest common denominator of public opinion. We gather, we say what we mean, and then we act."
- 179 - meet with a core like montgomery bus boycott, decide how to speak to public at large, make those decisions behind closed doors
- 181 - to prevent context collapse, need physical spaces to meet
- 184 - stopped looking at phone as much these days -> "I stopped looking at my phone becuase I was looking at something else, something so absorbing I couldn't turn away."
- 199 - techies banning tech for kids: "In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention: privileged spaces where some (but not others) can enjoy the fruits of contemplation and the diversification of attention."
- 199 - we can try to stop addictive nature of tech + also labor, women, racism, indigenous, parks, habitat restoration
- 201 - walter benjamin: history has elements of what we need to solve these problems, -> dig up this impulse, make past live in present, do it justice
- ix - robert louis stevenson 1877 on busyness
- ix - seneca on the shortness of life
- 5 - steinbeck cannery row
- 14 - franco berardi after the future
- 20 - jennifer ackerman the genius of birds
- 25 - mierle laderman ukeles maintenance artist
- 35 - epicurus
- 36 - democritus
- 36 - pyrrho
- 49 - hannah arendt 1958 the human condition
- 53 - palais ideal rock structure by mailman
- 58 - thomas merton contemplation in a world of action
- 76 - thoreau in prison
- 84 - san francisco general strike
- 85 - jacob s hacker the great risk shift: the new economic insecurity and the decline of the american dream
- 91 - grafton tanner digital detox: big tech's phony crisis of conscience
- 99 - hockney pearlblossom highway 11th-18th april 1986
- 103 - eran kolirin the exchange
- 114 - james williams practical ethics blog
- 139 - sarah schulman the gentrification of the mind witness to a lost imagination
- 142 - eleanor rosch the embodied mind
- 160 - joshua meyrowitz no sense of place the impact of electronic media on social behavior
- 163 - veronica barassi social media immediacy and the time for democracy
- 166 - community memory website
- 171 - oliver leistert the revolution will not be liked
- 187 - walter benjamin on the concept of history
- 190 - san clemente dam
- 192 - one-straw revolution
- 195 - jedediah purdy after nature: a politics for the anthropocene