This is, in effect, the movement the Buddha himself worked to create, some 2,500 years ago-not just before the dawn of social media and smartphones, but before books and paper. “I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention,” she explains. And that seems to be where her heart is anyway. Odell’s book is most powerful when she moves away from conspiracy theorizing and back toward the practical. (I see our devilishly distracting devices as a result of a series of unintended consequences rather than as evil plots.) Perhaps she finds her charge to be self-evidently true, but my own experience working at Facebook was largely otherwise.
She herself worked as an artist-in-residence at Facebook, the epicenter of social media, but if she collected any anecdotes there revealing such nefarious motives, she shares none of them in her book. “The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design,” she claims, although she offers no particular evidence that this is, in fact, the intention of the designers and engineers behind such platforms. Odell places more of the blame on technology and social media than I would. Why? How did we get to this place of maximum distraction?
She offers a much-needed critique of our modern, connected lives: “There is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning,” she proclaims early on, “and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever.” And yet, of course, so many of us do accept exactly that.
Her book is a call to arms against the myriad temptations of distraction. What unifies the bold (though occasionally meandering) prose is Odell’s refusal to surrender her attention to the highest bidder. The various chapters cover topics as diverse as bird-watching and context collapse, progressive politics and industrial design. The resulting volume is closer to a loosely connected collection of erudite essays than to a singular manifesto. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
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