How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, show us a new way to connect with our environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world.
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.
This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, show us a new way to connect with our environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world.
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.
This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, show us a new way to connect with our environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world.
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenny Odell is an artist and writer who teaches at Stanford and has been an artist-in-residence at places like the San Francisco dump, Facebook, the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s, among others. She lives in Oakland.
