Top Quotes: “How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy” — Jenny Odell
Introduction
“Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. On a cliff overlooking the sea, 45 minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests into an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward.”
“One of our most famous observers, John Muir, worked as a supervisor and sometimes-inventor in a wagon wheel factory before becoming the naturalist that we know him as. (I suspect that he was a man concerned with productivity, since one of his inventions was a study desk that was also an alarm clock and timer, which would open up books for an allotted amount of time, close them, and then open the next book.) Muir had already developed a love of botany, but it was being temporarily blinded by an eye accident that made him re-evaluate his priorities. The accident confined him to a darkened room for six weeks, during which he was unsure whether he’d ever see again.
The 1916 edition of The Writings of John Muir is divided into two parts, one before the accident and one after, each with its own intro by William Frederic Bade. In the second intro, Bade write that this period of reflection convinced Muir that ‘life was too brief and uncertain, and time too precious, to waste upon belts and saws; that while he was pottering in a wagon factory God was making a world; and he determined that, if his eyesight was spared, he would devote the remainder of his life to a study of the process.’ Muir himself said, ‘This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields.’”
“The labor movement had its own song:
We mean to make things over;
we’re tired of toil for naught
but bare enough to live on:
never an hour for thought.
We want to feel the sunshine;
we want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure that God has willed it,
and we mean to have eight hours.
We’re summoning our forces
from shipyard, shop and mill
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
eight hours for what we will!
Here, I’m struck by the types of things associated with the category ‘what we will’: rest, thought, flowers, sunshine. These are bodily, human things.”
“One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After The Future, the Marxist theorist Franco Berardi ties the defeat of the labor movements in the 80s to the rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, ‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.
The way that Berardi describes labor will sound as familiar to anyone concerned with their personal brand as it will any Uber driver, content moderator, hard-up freelancer, aspiring YouTube star, or adjunct professor who drives to three campuses in one week:
In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine…The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary.
The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries — eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will — so that we are left with 24 potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.
In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’ It provides no return on investment; it’s simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from ‘what we will.’”
“My apartment has a balcony, so I started leaving a few peanuts out on it for the crows. For a long time the peanuts just stayed there and I felt like a crazy person. And then once in a while I’d notice that one was gone, but I couldn’t be sure who took it. Then a couple times I saw a crow come by and swipe one, but it wouldn’t stay. And this went on for a while until finally they began hanging out on a telephone wire nearby. One started coming every day around the time that I eat breakfast, sitting exactly where I could see it from the kitchen table, and it would caw to make me come out on the balcony with a peanut. Then one day it brought its kid, which I knew was its kid because the big one would groom the smaller one and because the smaller one had an undeveloped, chicken-like squawk. I named them Crow and Crowson.
I soon discovered that Crow and Crowson preferred it when I threw peanuts off the balcony so they could do fancy dives off the telephone line. They’d do twists, barrel rolls, and loops, which I made slow-motion videos of with the obsessiveness of a proud parent. Sometimes they wouldn’t want any more peanuts and would just sit there and stare at me. One time Crowson followed me halfway down the street. And frankly, I spent a lot of time staring back at them, to the point that I wondered what the neighbors might think.”
“The second tool that doing nothing offers us is a sharpened ability to listen. I’ve already mentioned Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in the broader sense of understanding one another. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural surroundings, put it, ‘Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.’”
“In the environment of our online platforms, ‘that which cannot be verbalized’ is figured as excess or incompatible, although every in-person encounter teaches us the importance of nonverbal expressions of the body, not to mention the very matter-of-fact presence of the body in front of me.
But beyond self-care and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”
Gardens, Communes, & Private Islands
“The school of Epicrus sought to free its students not only from their own desires but from the fear associated with superstitions and myths. Teaching incorporated empirical science for the express purpose of dispelling anxieties about mythical gods and monsters who were thought to control things like the weather — or, for that matter, one’s fortune in life. In that sense, the school’s purpose might have been similar not only to Camp Grounded but to any addiction recovery center. At the school of Epicurus, students were being ‘treated’ for runaway desire, endless worry, and irrational beliefs.
Epicurus’ garden was different from other schools in important ways. Since only an individual could decide whether he’d been ‘cured,’ the atmosphere was noncompetitive, and students graded themselves. And while shunning one type of community, the school of Epicurus actively constructed another one: The Garden was the only school to admit non-Greeks, slaves, and women (including professional courtesans). Admission was free. Noting that, for most of human history, schooling has been a privilege restricted by class, Richard Hibler writes:
Nothing was traditional about the Garden in comparison with most schools of the time. For instance, anyone with the zeal for learning how to live the life of refined pleasure was welcomed. The brotherhood was open to all sexes, nationalities, and races; the wealthy and the poor sat side by side next to ‘barbarians’ such as slaves and non-Greeks. Women, who openly flaunted hte fact that they were once prostitutes, assembled and joined men of all ages in the quest for Epicurean happiness.”
“Those who fled to the [1960s] communes took a particularly ahistorical view of time; the communes were relatively unaware of the history of utopian experiments — maybe even Epicurus’ garden school. But this is perhaps to be expected from anyone desperately seeking a complete break from everything. Houriet writes that those who fled ‘had no time to assess the historical parallels or to make careful plans for the future…Their flight was desperate.’ After all, this wasn’t the 1960s; it was the Age of Aquarius, an exist from time and a chance to start from scratch:
Somewhere in the line of history, civilization had made a wrong turn, a detour that had led into a cul-de-sac. The only way, they felt, was to drop out and go all the way back to the beginning, to the primal source of consciousness, the true basis of culture: the land.
“Much as they wanted to break with capitalist society, those who escaped from it sometimes carried its influences within themselves, like ineradicable contagions. Writing about a communal house in Philadelphia in 1971, Michael Weiss says that all eight members of the group were ‘more or less anti-capitalist’ and hoped the commune would offer an alternative in the form of equal wealth distribution. But because some of the members made so much more than others, they agreed to a compromise: each person would contribute half, not all, of their earnings to the house fund. Even so, Weiss writes that any conversations about money were marked by ‘defensiveness, self-righteousness, inexperience with money sharing, and the fear of having to relinquish one’s most cherished comforts and pleasures for the sake of group unity.’ In his commune, the first ‘money crisis’ ends up not being a shortage, but hurt feelings when one of the wealthier members comes home with a sixty-dollar coat. The coat sets off a long house meeting about class consciousness, which, like many of the other meetings, is ultimately left unresolved.
Other ghosts of the ‘straight’ world complicated the communes’ dreams of radicality. Like the hippie movement they came from, commune members were mostly middle-class and college-educated — a far cry from Epicurus’ radically reconsituted student body. They were overwhelmingly white; several times in Getting Back Together, Houriet mentions talking to ‘the only black’ in a commune, and he describes a strangely tense scene between a Twin Oaks community member and a local black family. The rural setting sometimes created ‘a natural impetus to revert to traditional roles: Women stay inside, cook, and look after the children, while men plow, chop, and build roads’. In What The Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm, Stephen Diamond states it outright: ‘None of the men ever washes dishes or hardly cooks.’ A spatial move to the country, or into an isolated communal house, did not always equal a move out of ingrained ideologies.”
“It wasn’t just internal politics that troubled the communes; they were also fleeing national politics and the media. The experience of Michael Weiss, from the commune that argued over the expensive coat, is especially telling. Weiss had been a journalist for the Baltimore News-American, where the task of covering politics had given him an increasingly cynical view of politicians. In 1968, he’d flown around the country with Spiro Agnew during his campaign to be Nixon’s VP, watching with horror ‘how [Agnew] self-righteously pandered to the fright of decent people who were baffled by the complications of the world.’ Although Weiss believed that Agnew was a truly dangerous man (‘an unimaginative pedant with a lust for power’), he wrote a long analysis of the campaign in which he endeavored to remain objective. The piece ran one edition before being killed by the managing editor for the Hearst-owned paper, who called it biased.”
“In 2008, Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman founded the nonprofit the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to establish autonomous island communities in international waters. For Silicon Valley investor and libertarian Peter Thiel, who supported the project early on, the prospect of a brand-new floating colony in a place outside the law was interesting indeed. In his 2009 essay ‘The Education of a Libertarian,’ Thiel echoes Skinner’s conclusion that the future requires a total escape from politics. Having decided that ‘democracy and freedom are incompatible,’ Thiel’s gesture toward some other option that’s somehow not totalitarian is either naive or disingenuous.
Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.
For Thiel, only the sea, outer space, and cyberspace can provide this ‘new space.’ 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 tech. But it’s hard not to infer that the result in this case would be a technocratic dictatorship under the Seasteading Institute. After all, the masses do not interest Thiel, for whom ‘the fate of the world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
“Thiel backed out of the Seasteading Institute because he decided the plans for island nations were unrealistic — amazingly, not in terms of politics. ‘They’re not quite feasible from an engineering perspective,’ he told The New York Times.”
“To stand apart is to take the view of the outside without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the commune that sought to break with historical time, this ‘other world’ is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it’s a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.
Both apart from and responsible to the present, we might allow ourselves to sense the faint outline of an Epicurean good life free from ‘myths and superstitions’ like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, climate change denial, and other fears with no basis in reality. This is no idle exercise.”
“Most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the ‘wrong way’: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.”
Sustained Refusal
“Many people are familiar with Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher who lived in 4th century Athens and later Corinth, ‘the man who lived in a tub,’ scorning all material possessions except for a stick and a ragged cloth. Diogenes’ most notorious act was to roam through the city streets with a lantern, looking for an honest man; in paintings, he’s often shown with the lantern by his side, sulking inside a round terracotta tub while the life of the city goes on around him. Finding Diogenes lazing in the sun, Alexander the Great expressed his admiration and asked if there was anything Diogenes needed. Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my light.’
Plato’s designation of Diogenes as ‘Socrates gone mad’ wasn’t far off the mark. While he was in Athens, Diogenes had come under the influence of Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates. He was thus heir to a development in Greek thought that prized the capacity for individual reason over the hypocrisy of traditions and customs, even and especially if they were commonplace. But one of the differences between Socrates and Diogenes was that, while Socrates famously favored conversation, Diogenes practiced something closer to performance art. He lived his convictions out in the open and went to great lengths to shock people out of their habitual stupor, using a form of philosophy that was almost slapstick.
This meant consistently doing the opposite of what people expected. Diogenes thought every ‘sane’ person in the world was actually insane for heeding any of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption, and ignorance. Exhibiting something like an aesthetics of reversal, he would walk backward down the street and enter a theater only when people were leaving. Asked how he wanted to be buried, he answered: ‘Upside down. For soon down will be up.’ In the meantime, he would roll over hot sand in the summer, and hug statues covered with snow. Suspicious of abstractions and education that prepared young people for careers in a diseased world rather than show them how to live a good life, he was once seen gluing the pages of a book together for an entire afternoon. While many philosophers were ascetic, Diogenes made a show of even that. Once, seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and said, ‘A child has beaten me in the plainness of living.’ Another time, he loudly admired a mouse for its economy of living.
When Diogenes did conform, he did it ironically, employing what the 20th century conceptual artists the Yes Man have called ‘overidentification.’ In this case, refusal is (thinly) marked as disingenuous compliance:
When news came to the Corinthians that Philip and the Macedonians were approaching the city, the entire population became immersed in a flurry of activity, some making their weapons ready, or wheeling stones, or patching the fortifications, or strengthening a battlement, everyone making himself useful for the protection of the city. Diogenes, who had nothing to do and from whom no one was willing to ask anything, as soon as he noticed the bustle of those surrounding him, began at once to roll his tub up and down the Craneum with great energy. When asked why, his answer was, ‘Just to make myself look as busy as the rest of you.’
That Diogenes’ actions were in some ways prefigured performance art has not gone unnoticed by the contemporary art world. In a 1984 issue of Artforum, Thomas McEvilley presented some of Diogenes’ best ‘works’ in ‘Diogenes of Sinope: Selected Performance Pieces.’ McEvilley, as so many others throughout history have, admires Diogenes’ courage when it came to flouting customs so customary that they were not even spoken about. He writes, ‘[Diogenes’] general theme was the complete and immediate reversal of all familiar values, on the ground that they are automatizing forces which cloud more of life than they reveal.’”
“Every person who, by refusing or subverting an unspoken custom, reveals its often-fragile contours. For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives.”
“If we think about what it means to ‘concentrate’ or ‘pay attention’ at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside of the sphere of one’s attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with attention, it requires alignment for a ‘movement’ to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other.
I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies upon the individual capacity to ‘pay attention,’ then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act. The replacement of sensitivity with connectivity leads to a ‘social brain’ that ‘appears unable to recompose, to find common strategies of behavior, incapable of common narration and of solidarity.’
This ‘schizoid’ collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger. That’s bad news for a sustained refusal. While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse — not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed — means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed. In the history of activism, even things that seemed like reactions were often planned actions. Rosa Parks was ‘acting, not reacting’ when she refused to get up from her seat. She was already involved with activist orgs, having been trained at the Highlander Folk School, which produced many important figures in the movement. The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.”
“Differences in social and financial vulnerability explain why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students. James C. McMillan, an art professor at Bennett College who advised students when they participated in the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, said that black adults were ‘reluctant’ to ‘jeopardize any gains, economic and otherwise,’ but that the students ‘did not have that kind of an investment, that kind of economic status, and, therefore, were not vulnerable to the kinds of reprisals that could have occurred.’ Participating students were under the care of black colleges, not at the mercy of white employees. In contrast, McMillan says that working-class black residents who went so far as to express support for the students were threatened with violence and unemployment. For them, the margin was much smaller.
Institutional support can go a long way toward allowing individuals to ‘afford’ to refuse. During the sit-ins, faculty at black colleges offered advice, the NAACP provided legal support, and other orgs offered nonviolence training workshops. Perhaps just as important, the Bennett administration made it clear to their students that they wouldn’t be penalized for their participation in the sit-ins. Dr. Willa Player, the president of Bennett, said at the time that ‘the students were carrying out the tenets of what a liberal arts education was all about, so they should be allowed to continue.’”
“Today, subjection to a ruthless capitalist framework seems almost natural. In his 2006 book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob S. Hacker describes a new ‘contract’ that formed between companies and employees in the absence of regulation from the government in the 70s and 80s.
The essence of the new contract was the idea that workers should be constantly pitted against what economists call the ‘spot market’ for labor — the amount that they could command at a particular moment given particular skills and the particular contours of the economy at that time.
The contract is markedly different from the old one, in which companies and employees’ fates rose and fell together, like a marriage. He quotes an employee memo from the CEO of GE in the 80s: ‘If loyalty means that this company will ignore poor performance, then loyalty is off the table.’ In the global ‘spot market,’ companies are driven only by the need to remain competitive, passing the task on to individuals to remain competitive as producing bodies.”
“In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris takes us through the ruthless professionalization of childhood and education. Harris writes that ‘if enough of us start living this way, then staying up late isn’t just about pursuing an advantage, it’s about not being made vulnerable.’ A millennial himself, he describes the shifting of risk onto students as potential employees, who must fashion themselves to be always on, readily available, and highly productive ‘entrepreneurs’ finding ‘innovative’ ways to forego sleep and other needs. Students duly and expertly carry out complicated maneuvers in which one misstep — whether that’s getting a B or getting arrested for attending a protest — might have untenable lifelong consequences.
In the context of attention, I’d further venture that this fear renders young people less able to concentrate individually or collectively. An atomized and competitive atmosphere obstructs individual attention because everything else disappears in a fearful and myopic battle for stability. It obstructs collective attention because students are either locked in isolated struggles with their own limits, or worse, actively pitted against each other. In Kids These Days, Harris is well aware of the implications of precarity for any kind of organizing among millennials: ‘If we’re built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers — and we are — then we’re hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses.”
“There are many ‘systemic abuses’ to be refused at the moment, but I propose that one great place to start is the abuse of our attention. That’s because attention undergirds every other kind of meaningful refusal: it allows us to reach Thoreau’s higher perspective, and forms the basis of a disciplined collective attention that we see in successful strikes and boycotts whose laser-like focus withstood all attempts to disassemble them. But in today’s mediascape, it’s hard to imagine what refusal looks like on the level of attention.”
“I want to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. 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 direct it again, together.
Occupying the ‘third space’ within the attention economy is important because in a time of shrinking margins, when not only students but everyone else has ‘put the petal to the metal,’ and cannot afford other kinds of refusal, attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw. In a cycle where both financially driven platforms and overall precarity close down the space of attention — the very attention needed to resist this onslaught, which then pushes further — it may be only in the space of our own minds that some of us can begin to pull apart the links.”
Attention has its own margins. There’s a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. 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.”
Rendering
“No one I met seemed to particularly identify with Cupertino more than any other place, because, I thought, there simply wasn’t anything to identify with. There wasn’t even a clear beginning or ending in Cupertino; instead, you simply kept driving until at some arbitrary point you were now in Campbell, now in Los Gatos, now in Saratoga. In excess of normall teenage angst, I was desperate for something (anything!) to latch onto, to be interested in. But Cupertino was featureless. It’s perhaps telling that when I meet other people who grew up in Cupertino, the one thing we have to bond over is an empty husk of consumer culture: Vallco Fashion Park, a defunct and almost entirely empty 90s-era mall.
What I lacked was context: anything to tie my experience to this place and not that place, this time and not that time. I might as well have been living in a simulation. But now I see that I was looking at Cupertino all wrong.”
“There are more reasons to deepen attention than simply resisting the attention economy. Those reasons have to do with the very real ways in which attention — what we pay attention to and what we do not — renders our reality in a very serious sense.”
“We draw conclusions based on our past experiences and assumptions. In her piece on the Prejudice Lab, Nordell speaks with Evelyn Carter, a social psychologist at UCLA, who tells her that ‘people in the majority and the minority often see two different realities’ based on what they do and do not notice. For example, ‘white people…might only hear a racist remark, while people of color might register subtler actions, like someone scooting away slightly on a bus.’”
“Most of us have experienced changes in rendering: you notice something once (or someone points it out to you) and then begin noticing it everywhere. As a simplistic example, my attention now ‘renders’ to me a world more full of birds than before I was an avid bird-watcher. Visitors to the de Young had their attention remapped by David Hockney to include small details, rich colors, and kaleidoscopic arrangements; the John Cage performance remapped my attention to include sound beyond melodic music. When the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.
As I disengaged the map of my attention from the destructive news cycle and rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing. At first this meant choosing certain things to look at; I also pored over guides and used the iNaturalist app to identify species of plants I’d walked right by my entire life. As a result, more and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. I began to notice animal communities, plant communities, animal-plant communities; mountain ranges, fault lines, watersheds. It was a familiar feeling of disorientation, realized in a different arena. Once again, I was met with the uncanny knowledge that these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality.”
“Interestingly, my experience suggests that while it initially takes effort to notice something new, over time a change happens that is irreversible. Redwoods, oaks, and blackberry shrubs will never again be ‘a bunch of green.’ A towhee will never simply be ‘a bird’ to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And it follows that this place can no longer be any place.”
“Recognizing the creek unfolded a whole topography of what I had not noticed. Where was Calabazas Creek going? The Bay obviously, but I’d never made that connection in my mind. Where was it coming from? Table Mountain, something I had looked at every day but only now learned the name of! I’d complained about Cupertino being so flat; what if I’d known that that was because, for millions of years, that entire part of the Bay Area was an inland sea, and after that marshland? How was it possible for me to know the names of cities like Los Gatos, Saratoga, and Almaden, but not notice that they lay in a distinct curve — a curve defined by the nearby mountains, Loma Prieta, Mt. Umunhum, Mt. McPherson? How could I have not noticed the shape of the place I lived?”
“Long before cars drove from Whole Foods to the Apple campus, the creek moved water from Table Mountain to the San Francisco Bay. It continues to do this just as it always has, and whether I or any other humans care to notice. But when we do notice, like all things we give our sustained attention to, the creek begins to reveal its significance. Unlike the manufactured Main Street Cupertino, it is not there because someone put it there; it’s not there to be productive; it’s not there as an amenity. It’s witness to a watershed that precedes us. In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation — a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews — but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chtonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away — all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.
It would not have been the same if I had gone to Calabazas Creek alone. The moment that Josh and I combined the fragments in our memories into the same body of water, the creek came not just to individual attention but to collective attention. It became part of a shared reality, a reference point outside of each of us. Picking our way over the riprap in this sunken, otherwise-unnoticed pathway — attending to the creek with the presence of our bodies — we were also rendering a version of the world in which the creek does appear, alongside its tributaries and its mountain and all the things growing and swimming within it.
Realities are, after all, inhabitable. If we can render a new reality together — with attention — perhaps we can meet each other there.”
“You might find yourself at the ‘hideously, flourescently lit’ grocery store full of annoying people after a long day of work and a horrible traffic jam. In that moment, you have a choice of how to perceive the situation and the people in it. As it turns out, that choice is basically one of attention:
If I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?
This makes room for the possibility that the guy in the Hummer who just cut you off is maybe trying to rush his child to the hospital — ‘and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way.’ or that the woman in front of you who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered ‘default-setting’ whose only option is to see people as inert beings who are in the way.”
“Communication requires us to care enough to make the effort. I thought about how it’s possible to move to a place without caring about who or what is already there (or what was there before), interested in the neighborhood only insofar as it allows one to maintain your existing or ideal lifestyle and social ties. Like Buber’s ‘I-It’ relationship, a newcomer might register other people and things in the neighborhood to the extent that they seem in some way useful, imagining the reminder as (at best) inert matter or (at worst) a nuisance or efficiency.”
“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. It certainly makes sense from a business point of view. 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 and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: ‘I like this’ and ‘I don’t like this,’ with little room for ambiguity or contradiction.
Thinking about what it would mean to submit to such a process, becoming a more and more reified version of ‘myself,’ I’m reminded of the way Thoreau described unthinking people in ‘Civil Disobedience’: as basically dead before their time. 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 myself — 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 the same page over and over again, you’d put the book down.
Extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed — never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege. That’s not to say we have nothing to gain from those we have many things in common with (on paper). But if we don’t expand our attention outside of that sliver, we live in an ‘I-It’ world where nothing has meaning outside of its value and relation to us. And we’re less prone to the encounters with those who turn us upside down and reorganize our universe — those who stand to change us significantly, should we allow it.”
“What’s especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate, defensible, and capable of ‘efficiency’ is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person, it’s that it’s based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. Although I can understand it as the logical outcome of a very human craving for stability and categories, I also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces inside and outside this imagined ‘self’: fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality. It’s also about control, since if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we must further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence (the mythology that attends gentrification). But whether we’re the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to imagine this reality or not.”
Bioregionalism
“In the long process of colonization, what has survived in spite of the disruption of native language is a particular way of perceiving the world. For example, my aunt once, when we were looking at what was left of Mt. St. Helens, commented in English, ‘Poor thing.’ Later, I realized that she spoke of the mountain as a person.”
“Kimmerer writes about overseeing a study by her grad student on the decline of sweetgrass, a plant traditionally harvested by Kimmerer’s ancestors and which figures in the Anishinaabe creation story. The study revealed that the sweetgrass was suffering not from over-harvesting but from under-harvesting. The species had co-evolved with specific indigenous harvesting practices, which in turn had specifically evolved to increase the success of the plant. A specific type of human attention, use, and stewardship had become environmental factors on which the plants depended on, and without these things, they’ve begun to disappear.
The sweetgrass study suggests that the plants were dying from none other than a lack of attention. And in a world where our survival is absolutely bound up with the survival of the ecologies in which we are embedded, it becomes clear that reciprocal attention is what ensures our survival as well. While this kind of attention to the living world certainly involves reverence, it’s something very different from fawning over cuteness or beauty or appreciating nonhuman entities as intelligent or even sentient. (What’s less cute or sentient than intestinal bacteria? Yet we rely on it.)”
“The reason I suggest the bioregion as a meeting grounds for our attention is not simply because it would address species loneliness, or because it enriches the human experience, or even because I believe our physical survival may depend on it. I value bioregionalism for the even more basic reason that, just as attention may be the last resource we have to withhold, the physical world is our last common reference point. At least until everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses 24/7, you cannot opt out of an awareness of physical reality. The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliche of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.”
“Today, when we are threatened not only with biological desertification but cultural desertification, we have so much to learn from the basics of ecology. A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there’s no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support — nor to notice that all the non-‘productive’ life-forms have fled. Meanwhile, countless examples from history and ecological science teach us that a diverse community with a complex web of interdependencies is not only richer but more resistant to takeover. I picture the difference between a permaculture farm and a commerical corn farm that could be devastated by a single parasite.”
“Unlike the dams that interrupt a river’s flow, these barriers are not concrete: they are mental structures, and they can be dismantled through practices of attention. When we take an instrumental or even algorithmic view of friendship and recognition, or fortify the imagined bastion of the self against change, or even just fail to see that we affect and are affected by others (even and especially those we do not see) — then we unnaturally corral our attention to others and to the places we inhabit together. It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.
Bioregionalism teaches us of emergence, interdependence, and the impossibility of absolute boundaries. As physical beings, we are literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally determined by our contexts. If we can embrace that, then we can begin to appreciate our and others’ identities as the emergent and fluid wonders that they are. Most of all, we can open ourselves to those new and previously unimaginable ideas that may arise from our combination, like the lightning that happens between an evanescent cloud and the ever-shifting ground.”
“The experience of research is exactly opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online. When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding info that doesn’t immediately present itself. You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons. The very structure of the library as an example of noncommercial and non-‘productive’ space so often under threat of closure, allows for browsing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information — provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it’s even about — are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment. Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it’s me who’s being researched.”
“I would be surprised if anyone who bought this book actually wants to do nothing. Only the most nihilist and coldhearted of us feels that there is nothing to be done. The overwhelming anxiety that I feel in the face of the attention economy doesn’t just have to do with its mechanics and effects, but also with a recognition of, and anguish over, the very real social and environmental injustice that provides the material for that same economy. But I feel my sense of responsibility frustrated. It’s a cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight.
This is where I think the idea of ‘doing nothing’ can be of the most help. For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.
When I try to imagine a sane social network it is a space of appearance: a hybrid of mediated and in-person encounters, of hours-long walks with a friend, of phone conversations, of closed group chats, of town halls. It would allow true conviviality — the dinners and gatherings and celebrations that give us the emotional sustenance we need, and where we show up for each other in person and say, ‘I am here fighting for this with you.’ It would make use of non-corporate, decentralized networking technology, both to include those for whom in-person interaction is difficult and to create nodes of support in different cities when staying in one place is increasingly an economic privilege.
This social network would have no reason to keep us from ‘logging off.’ It would respect our need for solitude as much as the fact that we are humans with bodies that exist in physical space and must still encounter each other there. It would rebuild the context we have lost. Most of all, this social network would rehabilitate the role of time and location in our everyday consciousness. It would offer the places where we are right now as the incubation spaces for the empathy, responsibility, and political innovation that can be useful not just here, but everywhere.”
“Developing a sense of place both enables attention and requires it. That is, if we want to relearn how to care about each other, we will also have to relearn how to care about place. This kind of care stems from the responsible attention that Kimmerer shows us in Braiding Sweetgrass, which beyond affecting us by determining what we see, materially affects the very subjects of our gaze.”
“I grew up thinking that parks were somehow just ‘leftover’ spaces, but I’ve learned that the story of any park or preserve is absolutely one of ‘redemption preserving itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.’ So many parks had to be actively defended from a never-ending onslaught of private ownership and development, and many contain the names of enterprising individuals who fought to establish them. For example, when I lived in SF, my usual trail in Glen Canyon Park was named after the ‘Gum Tree Girls,’ three women who kept freeways from being built through the canyon, one of the only places in SF where Islais Creek runs aboveground in its natural state. Parks don’t just give us the space to ‘do nothing’ and inhabit different scales of attention. Their very existence, especially in the midst of a city or on the former sites of extraction, embodies resistance.”
“I find that I’m looking at my phone less these days. It’s not because I went to an expensive digital detox retreat, or because I deleted any apps from my phone, or anything like that. I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing that I couldn’t turn away. That’s the other thing that happens when you fall in love. Friends complain that you’re not present or that you have your head in the clouds; companies dealing in the attention economy might say the same thing about me, with my head lost in the trees, the birds, even the weeds growing in the sidewalk.
If I had to give you an image of how I feel about the attention economy now, as opposed to 2017, I’d ask you to imagine a tech conference. Like so many conferences, it would be in another city. The subject of this conference would be persuasive design, with talks by the likes of the Time Well Spent people, about how horrible the attention economy is and how we can design our way around it and optimize our lives for something better. Initially, I’d find these talks very interesting, and I’d learn a lot about how I’m being manipulated by Facebook and Twitter. I would be shocked and angry. I would spend all day thinking about it.
But then, maybe on the 2nd or 3rd day, you would see me get up and go outside to get some fresh air. Then I’d wander a little bit farther, to the nearest park. Then — and I know this because it happens to me often — I’d hear a bird and go looking for it. If I found it, I would want to know what it was, and in order to look that up later I’d need to know not only what it looks like, but what it was doing, how it sounded, what it looked like when it flew…I’d have to look at the tree it was in.
I’d look at all the trees, all the plants, trying to notice patterns. I’d look at who was in the park, and who wasn’t. I would want to be able to explain these patterns. I would wonder who first lived in what is now this city, and who lived here afterward before they got pushed out too. I would ask what this park almost got turned into and who stopped that from happening, who I have to thank. I would try to get a sense of the shape of the land — where am I in relation to the hills and the bodies of water? Really, these are all forms of the same question. They are ways of asking: Where and when am I, and how do I know that?
Before long, the conference would be over, and I would have missed most of it. A lot of things would have happened there that are important and useful. For my part, I wouldn’t have much to show for my ‘time well spent’ — no pithy lines to tweet, no new connections, no new followers. I might only tell one or two other people about my observations and the things I learned. Otherwise, I’d simply store them away, like seeds that might grow some other day if I’m lucky.
Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die — I would know that I spent that day on Earth. In moments like this, even the question itself of the attention economy fades away. If you asked me to answer it, I might say — without lifting my eyes from the things growing and creeping along the ground — ‘I would prefer not to.’”
“Manifest dismantling was hard at work in 2015, during the largest dam removal in California history. On the Carmel River, the concrete San Clemente Dam had been built in 1921 by a real estate company in the Monterey Peninsula in order to provide water to a growing number of Monterey residents. But by the 1940s, it had filled up with so much sediment that another larger dam was built upstream. In the 90s, the San Clemente Dam was declared not only useless but seismically unsafe due to its proximity to a fault line. An earthquake might not have sent only water but 2.5 million cubic yards of accumulated sediment into the towns downstream.
The dam was a problem for more than just humans. Steelhead trout, which live in the ocean but must travel upstream each year to spawn, found the dam’s fish ladder impassable; even if they made it, returning to the ocean meant facing the lethal hundred-foot drop on the way back. One local fisherman compared the dam to ‘shutting the door on their bedroom.’ And the effects extended downstream: the dam withheld the debris essential for creating the small pools and hidden areas that trout need to survive — either to rest while swimming upstream, or to live for the first few years before heading to the ocean for the first time. In other words, the river’s loss of complexity spelled death for the steelhead. What had once been trout runs in the thousands had dwindled to 249 in 2013.
The cheapest option was a basically a Band-Aid solution: a $49 million plan to add more concrete to the dam to stabilize it in the event of an earthquake. Instead California American Water, which owned the dam, partnered with various state and federal agencies to carry out an $84 million plan that not only removed the dam but included habitat restoration for the trout and the California red-legged frog, another threatened species. So much silt had accumulated behind the dam that before the agencies could remove it, they had to reroute the river around the old dam site, which would be used for sediment storage. Thus, the project involved not only tearing down a structure but building a riverbed from scratch. Drone footage of the new riverbed is surreal. The project engineers designed a series of cascading pools specifically to be trout-friendly, but without anything yet growing around the artificial banks, it looked like something from Minecraft.
Meanwhile, those hoping for a dramatic demolition of the dam were met with disappointment. Once the river had been successfully rerouted, six excavators and two 16,000-pound pneumatic hammers arrived and proceeded to slowly and arduously pick away at the concrete structure, turning it into dust bit by bit.”
“Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g. of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g. of dams). 19th century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction.
I am interested in manifest dismantling as a form of purposiveness bound up with remediation, something that requires us to give up the idea that progress can only face forward blindly. It provides a new direction for our work ethic. Remediation certainly takes the same amount of work: in this case, a dam that had taken three years to build took close to the same amount of time to remove. The word ‘innovation’ came up a lot in coverage of the San Clemente Dam removal, since it not only required significant design and engineering, but also unprecedented cooperation and consultation among engineers, scientists, lawyers, local agencies, state agencies, nonprofits, and members of the Ohlone Esselen tribe. Seen through the lens of manifest dismantling, tearing down the dam is indeed a creative act, one that does put something new in the world, even if it’s putting it back.”
“In 2002, writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry wrote the intro to an edition of the 1978 book The One-Straw Revolution. Its author, a Japanese farmer named Masanobu Fukuoka, experienced this Copernican shift when he invented what he called ‘do-nothing farming.’ Inspired by the productivity of an abandoned lot that he saw filled with grasses and weeds, Fukuoka figured out a method of farming that made use of existing relationships in the land. Instead of flooding fields and sowing rice in the spring, he scattered the seeds directly on the ground in the fall, as they would have fallen naturally. In place of conventional fertilizer, he grew a cover of green clover, and threw the leftover stalks back on top when he was done.
Fukuoka’s method required less labor, no machines, and no chemicals, but it took him decades to perfect and required extremely close attention. If everything was done at precisely the right time, the reward was unmistakable: not only was Fukuoka’s farm more productive and sustainable than neighboring farms, his method was able to remediate poor soils after a few seasons, creating farmable land on rocky outcrops and other inhospitable areas.
In his book, Fukuoka writes that ‘because the world is moving with such furious energy in the opposite direction, it may appear that I have fallen behind the times.’ Indeed, just as we associate innovation with the production of something new, we also associate an inventor with creating some new kind of design. But Fukuoka’s ‘design’ was more or less to remove the design altogether. This leads to the uncanny quality of manifest dismantling. As he writes: ‘That which was viewed as primitive and backward is now unexpectedly seen to be far ahead of modern science. This may seem strange at first, but I do not find it strange at all.’”
“Fukuoka sums up the epiphany as the ultimate expression of humility, echoing Zhuang Zhou when he writes: ‘Humanity knows nothing at all. There’s no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.’
It was only through this humility that Fukuoka was able to arrive at a new kind of ingenuity. 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. Of course, that didn’t mean not interfering at all. Fukuoka recalls the time he tried to let some orchard trees grow without pruning: the trees’ branches became intertwined and the orchard was attacked by insects. ‘This is abandonment, not ‘natural farming,’ he writes. Somewhere between over-engineering and abandonment, Fukuoka found the sweet spot by patiently listening and observing. His expertise lay in being a quiet and patient collaborator with the ecosystem he tended to.
Fukuoka’s stance is an example of something that Jedediah Purdy suggests in his book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthopocene. In each subsequent chapter, Purdy shows how the different views of nature throughout history have each corresponded to a set of political beliefs about value and subjecthood, being used to justify everything from hierarchical social orders and racism (‘everything in its place’) to an obsession with the productivity of industry. In each case, people and their governments conceived of nature as entirely separate from the human world, whether it was the idea of ‘natural capital’ or the pristine ‘backpackers’ nature.’
Dissolving the nature/culture distinction, Purdy suggests that in the Anthropocene, we should figure nature not as separate, but as a partner in collaboration. Like Fukuoka after his epiphany, humans might humbly take up their place as just one partner in ‘the necessary work of carrying on living’:
In this tradition and in modern ecology, there is potential to realize that work is not only industry, the productive action that transforms the world, but also reproduction, the work of remaking life with each year and generation. Seeing natures’ work in this light would align environmental politics with the key feminist insight that much socially necessary work is ignored or devalued as ‘caregiving,’ a gendered afterthought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality no shared life could do without it.”
