Photo courtesy: Charles J Sharp / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
One of my favorite essays of all time is Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness. Russell, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician and logician, author of numerous potboilers to explain and demystify politics, philosophy and psychology and a tireless campaigner for world peace up until his death at age 97 led a life that could hardly be described as idle. In the essay, Russell begins by admitting that his own drive to work largely emerged from the Victorian virtue of industry instilled in him and that his adult opinions on the matter completely contradict this conditioning. Russell contends (perhaps astonishingly, as it was put to print in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression):
“A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”
Russell’s argument held that modern economies were so over-efficient at production that a large number of people were already made “idle” through unemployment with no means to enjoy that freedom at the same time a large number of people were overworked with no time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. If I might indulge you with an extended passage from the essay:
“Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”
If we merely planned the economy a little more wisely, Russell contended, reduced individual working hours and better shared the duties of labor, then all workers could better fulfill their potentials and enjoy their brief lives with extended periods of leisure. In short, we achieved a level of economic efficiency by the early 20th century that, with proper planning, could guarantee all not just a modicum of material comfort but also personal fulfillment. Almost 100 years of technological advancement later, we should all be appalled that we are still working 40+ hours a week and not basking in the liberation of our waking hours thanks to efficient computers, hi-speed internet connections, and automation. No doubt there are many factors which might explain the persistence of this mass compulsion to work ourselves to death, but the same indoctrination that toil is the highest virtue is just as prevalent in the West (particularly in the more conservative parts of the U.S.A.) as it was in Russell’s 1870s childhood.
As you can probably tell, I wish I could just write about Bertrand Russell and his iconoclastic opinions on the cult of work. Instead, it pains me to say, I am forced to write about the much more inferior work that inspired me to take this trip down memory lane about how much I love Bertrand Russell. The unfortunate truth is that despite the similar sounding title, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, this 2019 book by Jenny Odell does not resemble Russell’s charming little polemic in the slightest. How to Do Nothing is a muddled, obfuscatory mess on what is arguably one of the most important questions in the world today: How can individuals carve out the space to do nothing and just be in a world that insidiously requires us to stay “plugged in” at all times, bombards us with digital stimuli and stokes the fires of division by encouraging hot takes instead of nuanced reflection.
These are certainly the questions that you, the person who likely picked up this book because it teased information about “resisting the attention economy,” expected to be discussed at length on its pages. How foolish of you to think that discussion of anything pertaining to social media would take up more than 10% of a book about the “attention economy.” It’s your fault for picking up this book and not expecting lengthy passages about types of birds, artists you’ve never heard of, the under appreciated charms of Oakland, CA and all sorts of mental masturbation about “I-it/I-thou.”
Ok - so I didn’t like reading this book. Which is actually quite rare for me, because usually I give up on books if they bore me and I vet them pretty closely to begin with to make sure that I will find them enjoyable to read, even if I don’t agree with the author. And the thing is - I probably do agree with Odell about many things but I would never be able to say for sure, given the book’s needlessly opaque prose. The book’s style is, to me, embarrassingly bad. It’s bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Parody of college art professor being out of touch with reality bad. But is it even parody if Jenny Odell actually is a Stanford professor of art? We’re told that the book is intentionally written to be more like a journey, a long afternoon walk and chat that is just trying to get us thinking and not actually lay our concrete plans. I don’t know about you, but most walk and chats I have are in serious need of a little more citation and the authoritarian hand of a good copyeditor. I could say the same thing about this book. And maybe I’m just old fashioned and out of touch with what is expected in academic disciplines outside of history, but writing an extremely earnest and academic book from the first person perspective is a recipe for coming across as unbelievably self-indulgent. What can I say, I might be on the left wing of the political spectrum but I’m a reactionary dinosaur when it comes to how I want books to be written.
To be honest, I don’t really feel like I can write a review of this book because there’s not a coherent thesis to be found - at least in the traditional sense of a thesis. The book is really more like a series of kinda-related, kinda-not vignettes that are obscured by a thick smog of academese sure to put Odell in the fast lane to tenure, while making average readers gag for air. Even if I strapped on my Ivory Tower-grade hazmat suit to dive back into the book to summarize in-depth, I think I would have a hard time, which makes me feel as if either I’m not as intelligent as I thought or Odell is too smart for her own good. But Obama liked it, so I guess it’s back to school I go.
Perhaps I am being extremely critical because I had been really looking forward to reading this book since I first heard about it earlier this year. It sounded right up my alley, as someone who truly believes in the Russellian idea that everyone already works too much and that we’re commanded to work even harder all the same. I believe very firmly that the point of life ought to be to give an ever wider pool of humans the ability to liberate themselves from drudgery and to “do nothing” so far as that means doing things that brings them enjoyment and not merely profit for some company. This is, indeed, Odell’s point, with an extra emphasis placed on social media, as in the past decade, the managing of one’s social media persona for the benefit of for-profit entities has become an added source of drudgery for the human race. At least, that’s what I would say to someone who really was pressing me to give a one sentence summary of this book. If that’s the case, I agree 100% with the spirit of the book but have big problems with its execution.
I can’t get past the fact that for a book that is purportedly based around the concept of the “Attention Economy,” Odell does a BIG nothing by not bothering to define what that even means. We all know what it means subjectively, but one of the reasons why conservatives have such an easy time dismissing critiques of capitalism is because the critiques too often reek of a lala land unsupported by fact. Alas, there’s almost nothing in this book that attempts to engage with the concept of “the economy” at all except as a slur. I get it, capitalism is an inherently flawed system and no one under the age of 35 would be caught dead claiming to be a ‘neoliberal,’ but this book treats these points of view as a priori facts without actually doing the bare minimum to define terms and support claims with evidence. If Odell had even begun with some sort of outline, some background, some framework, backed by research that shows the perniciousness of the attention economy on mental health, physical health, political discourse, sex and race relations, or literally anything else, I might have been able to forgive the other sins of intellectual self-stimulation that would follow. But Odell, I presume, doesn’t want to play on “their” terms - they, presumably being anyone who has taken ECON 101. What is the point of arguing against the “attention economy” if you can so easily ignore defining what the damn thing is in the first place?
If it seems like I’m dunking on this (likely) marginal figure of American academia, it’s only because I think this is such an important subject to do such a pisspoor job on. I cannot emphasize how much of my life I’ve wasted on social media platforms that I would contend have ultimately done more to harm my relationships than good. I find them soul-sucking exercises in vanity and self absorption and festering cauldrons of uninformed opinions and useless emoting into the void. And yet I, like billions of other users worldwide, cannot quite break free of their grasp and our lives are all the poorer for it. These platforms are literally making millions of average lives more miserable but this is not a book intended for the average person. It’s a book for people of a certain upper middle class persuasion who likely share the author’s particular political preferences for left wing politics and bioregionalism. The fact that Odell seems entirely obtuse to this fact is why this book is basically worth little more than the eye-popping photograph of roses on the cover. For an author who is allegedly “so concerned’ about the quality of life the average person leads, this book is eerily devoid of joy, even when Odell describes the things that purportedly bring her contentment in life.
I get that there’s a lot of things that make it hard to get jazzed up about life right now. The 21st Century is in innumerable ways, a goddamn mess. Yet if you’re an author of a book that is proposing some sort of “better way,” you’re doing yourself no favors by not engaging in questions of what brings the vast majority of people who do not share your point of view joy in life. I shudder to think of these people, whatever their current political outlook, exhausted by the onslaught of bullshit social media tells us to care about and the exploitation of our data by these corporations, picking up this book hoping for some guidance, some antidote, only to find a disjointed stream of consciousness punctuated by entirely unreadable block quotes from inaccessible social theorists and artists. We all deserve a better treatment of the questions Odell fails to properly engage with, especially in this moment when social distancing has made a mockery of traditional social relations and has forced us all to become even more enmeshed with data collecting technologies. The overlord of the “attention economy,” Mark Zuckerberg, is about as emotionless and out of touch with his humanity as one can get - we don’t need the same thing from the opposition.
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