SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019 | MOTHER JONES 57can the very online ever unplug? The
question has spawned a cottage indus-
try: everything from offline vacations
and “digital detox” apps to books about
how we might uncouple ourselves
from an economic order in which our
very attention is a commodity. Two
thoughtful offerings in the latter cat-
egory come from Oakland, California,
artist Jenny Odell, author of How to
Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention
Economy, and New Yorker writer Jia
Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Re-
flections on Self-Delusion (whose press
materials describe her as “what Susan
Sontag would have been like if she had
brain damage from the internet”).
Along with Ashley Feinberg, a reporter
for Slate and a twitchily funny Twitter
presence, Odell and Tolentino joined
Mother Jones in an online chat, con-
densed here, about how to reclaim
and retrain our attention in an econ-
omy built on capturing and manipu-
lating it. We talked over Slack, which
was a bit like holding a mindfulness
seminar on the infield of the Indy 500.
—Tommy Craggstommy craggs: Jenny, your book con-
cludes with a homily about “manifest
dismantling.” That’s your concept. It
isn’t just a matter of logging off; it’s an
ethic that requires a wholesale redefi-
nition of “progress.” How’s it work?
jenny odell: It has to do with rec-
ognizing the value of (and caring for)
what’s already here, rather than trying
to replace it or pursue “innovation”
for the sake of innovation. It’s basi-
cally the opposite of “disrupt.”
tc: You write about it as if it were a
physical ordeal, to be “trained” for,
with “exercises in attention.” What
sort of exercises do you mean?
jo: A lot of the examples I give for
re-training attention come from art.
There’s been a lot of talk about per-
suasive design [the practice of in-
fluencing human behavior through
screen elements such as notifica-
tions], whether designers should
be making “more ethical” persua-
sive design, i.e. persuading people to
spend their time “better” (read: more
productively). It just makes me sus-
picious. I would like to re-center thetraining of attention in the individual.
jia tolentino: I’ve implicitly been
trying to retrain my attention for a
few years now: putting social media
blockers on my phone, making sure
I read a paper book at night, no noti-
fications, etc. But it has been helpful
over the last year to really bathe in the
desperation of why and to replace it
with an idea of what you could ac-
tively pay attention to instead—an
idea of what it feels like to sustain
those shifts rather than just to effi-
ciently slot them in.
tc: You both seem to conceive of
attention-economy self-care in the
Audre Lorde sense of self-care—
politically engaged, an assertion of
the value of the self, that sort of thing.
jo: Yeah, self-care that actually con-
tains reflection and the capacity for
surprise, versus the sort of “digital
detox in order to perform better.”
jt: I’d been thinking of the attention
training as a sort of a common-sense
tool to function, which was OK but
not the shift I needed, because all
of my life is already set up aroundARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO QUIT?
How to get offline, do more “good nothing,” and preserve your sanity
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