How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return—and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended?

It may be that refusal is only available as a tactic to people who already possess a great deal of social capital, people whose social standing will endure without Facebook and people whose livelihoods don’t require them to be constantly plugged in and reachable…These are people who have what [Kathleen] Noonan (2011) calls “the power to switch off.

What’s the opposite of Manifest Destiny? I think it would be something like the Angel of History. It’s a concept I call manifest dismantling. I imagine another painting, one where Manifest Destiny is trailed not by trains and ships but by manifest dismantling, a dark-robed woman who is busy undoing all of the damage wrought by Manifest Destiny, cle

If critical distance is what we’re after, I think there is an important distinction to make between isolating oneself versus removing oneself from the clamor and undue influence of public opinion. After all, it is public opinion that social media exploits, and public opinion that has no patience for ambiguity, context, or breaks with tradition. Pub

“people in the majority and the minority often see two different realities” based on what they do and do not notice.

An ecological understanding allows us to identify “things”—rain, cloud, river—at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground

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

First, instantaneous communication threatens visibility and comprehension because it creates an information overload

to acknowledge that there’s something I didn’t know I liked is to be surprised not only by the song but by myself.