Tag: attention

How to Do Nothing

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell book cover.

My attention is important to me, and I’ve been writing and reading a lot this year about ways to navigate a world that is increasingly filled with traps designed to capture, monetize, and waste my curiosity. Earlier this spring, I came across Jenny Odell’s artist talk “How to Do Nothing”, given at EYEO in 2017, and I have been eagerly anticipating her full-length book expanding some of the ideas she shared in her talk. It’s here, and I finished it this week.

How to Do Nothing is anchored by the ideas Odell shares in her artist talk: that grounding oneself in specific real places and paying attention to their physical, geographic, ecological, historical, and social characteristics is an act of anti-capitalist refusal against the various social media and big data businesses who monetize our attention and behaviors. In her book, she expands her scope to consider other questions: How much of a real possibility is it to opt-out of digital connectedness, and would that be a good thing anyway? Does the act of refusing to follow directions have any power or meaning beyond our individual choice? How, specifically, does one “grounding oneself”? How are the attention economy and the fiction of independence linked? Can we change how we think about production to include not just making something that wasn’t there before, but maintaining something that was there before, or even removing something to make room for something else that hasn’t had any room to develop?

These are wonderful, rich questions, and one of the real pleasures of this book is that Odell draws on so many different ways to contextualize these questions. Odell draws on sociology and economics to explain shifts in how jobs are structured, and history and journalism to bring context to the history of the East Bay places that she spends time in. There’s a little smattering of philosophy and theory, which I am a little allergic to so I was happy there wasn’t too much of it. But where Odell really shines for me are in her close readings (and connecting to the other ideas in her book) of conceptual art pieces, the life of Diogenes the Cynic, John Cage’s sound pieces, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and David Hockney’s polaroid collage pieces.

Maybe these are ideas that you could find in other books, off the top of my head I’m thinking of Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants, or Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. One thing that sets this book apart is Odell’s fierce resistance to framing her argument around “productivity.” This is not a book that argues that changing your frame of attention is going to make you better at your job, or faster at creating career ideas, or anything of the sort—in that respect, she is the anti-Cal Newport (who I respect a lot also, but I think his idea that we can all just be “winners” by becoming more productive is a bit shallow by ducking systemic questions). The other thing that sets her apart is a fierce, humanistic commitment to encouraging us to think in terms of ecosystems and social systems in which no individual is completely apart. I look forward to some of these most delicate and precious ideas continuing to move through my brain.

I loved this book. Read it and try something different.

Other perspectives I liked

  • Cory Doctorow, praises the book but thinks her central argument will continue to get sharper over time.
  • Terri Windling: an artist’s perspective.
  • Haley Haltom: a perspective from someone who spent a year sailing around the world.
Matthew EilarLeave a comment

It’s important to me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go.

Jenny Odell How to Do Nothing

doing nothing

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Today was a good day, and one of the good things in it is that I came across this wonderful piece of writing called How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell. It’s a Medium post based on a speech she gave that she has expanded out into a book, which I immediately put a library hold on. It weaves together so many of the things I’ve been thinking about this year: how do we decide what is worth paying attention to, why do we all feel unbalanced by the internet and what has changed, how to communicate through the internet without being on the internet. The single, electrifying thought that Odell expands upon is this:

The function of nothing here, of saying nothing, is that it’s a precursor to something, to having something to say. “Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb

Oh, I am so resistant to this idea.

There are some plants that only start to continue growing when old, dead matter is cut away. I am in a growth phase right now, and for every new idea tried, for every moment of understanding, there is also deep regret and loss for old ideas that I was just wrong about. One identity that I’m trying to let go of is as an “information junkie,” this persona who is curious and creative and constantly hungry for new information and stimulus. As a kid, I was always bored. I felt cut off from the information and cultural pathways that other people had access to because it was pre-broadband (if you were born after Google, pre-internet) and our household didn’t have a television set. Not even for VHS tapes. I went away to school in 9th grade, and one of the most precious freedoms I gained was internet access, and nothing was ever the same again, really. Since then, as each social network has been founded and attention has been fragmented and collated and monetized and optimized, there has only ever been the direction of more and more stimulation, more and more information. And over time, I think it’s drowned out my own thoughts.

Here’s the part that hurts, and here’s where the regret comes in: I thought that my ability to process and assimilate information was a rare gift. I thought that my peers who didn’t have the patience or stamina to sit down and power through a book, or the adults who didn’t seem to be in touch with news of the world or politics, or busy adults who didn’t have much time to read—all of these people deserved compassion, but they did not have the gift I had. In humble honesty, I thought that this made me better than other people. What I have to confront now is that other people may have just chosen to strike a different balance between what they give attention to in the wider world/culture, and what they give attention to in their own life.

This may seem like a small things, but there are implications that I’m very sensitive to. One is: if this is simply a different balance point struck, how satisfied am I with mine? Right now I am very unhappy with that balance—the stimulus I get from the internet and social media is addicting but makes me feel bad. Another is: if I have staked my identity on being a big brain, and the internet is a construct where the mind has complete dominance over body, what does it mean about me that I am washing out of being Extremely Online? Was I an animal the whole time, did I have bodily needs that a brain in a jar doesn’t have. Of course I was. A bleaker question: what did I miss out on while I was ignoring those needs?

Jenny Odell speaks to this, too:

What is missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality is any regard, any place, for the human animal, situated as she is in time and in a physical environment with other human and nonhuman entities. It turns out that groundedness requires actual groundedness, in the ground.

[…]

 This is real. The living, breathing bodies in this room are real. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force. I’m lumpy, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, I see, and I smell things that hear, see, and smell me. And it can take a break to remember that, a break to do nothing, to listen, to remember what we are and where we are.

We have powerful forces that keep us from attending to the “soft animal of our body”: social platforms that don’t exist in real space and need our constant engagement with them to operate; our primate brain’s fear that if we don’t keep posting and ❤️ing, the troop will move on without us; and even our survival instinct:

In a situation where every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a 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 is simply too expensive.

This is the biggest fear that I’m working through right now, as I’m changing my habits to incorporate more silence, more time for synthesis rather than stimulus. There’s an image I return to over and over again: the wonderful shapes in smoke after you blow out a candle. Move or talk too much, or if the room is too busy or drafty, and the smoke will just be blown around. But in stillness, in silence, the smoke makes wonderful patterns as it follows minute eddies of air. When I choose silence on a walk over browsing twitter as I walk, or listening to a podcast or music, I fear that I will become bored and it will have been a “waste of time.” An even deeper fear is that I will end up tuning into my own thoughts, and there will be nothing there.

But, of course, there always is something to be found there, if we’re brave enough to be patient. I hope. And if that turns out not to be the case, then I will set this idea down and try the next thing, which is all we ever can do anyway.

drawing of a candle with smoke


the three part test

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I am not a lawyer, but there was a time when I wanted to be one, or admired them or something. It might have been the John Grisham thrillers, which are written for (as well as many other groups of people) 13 year old boys and men who think they totally could have been a lawyer. If it wasn’t them, it was probably The West Wing, which is written for 16 year old boys and men who think they totally could have been president.

If I’m really telling the truth, I have to confess that lawyers were the closest thing I could find in real life to the magic wielding characters I loved in fantasy stories. Like wizards, lawyers come in (lawful) good, evil, neutral alignments, memorize incantations in Latin, and the old ones get to wear robes. Is a trial a metaphor for combat, or is combat a metaphor for a trial?

One of the things I like most from legal culture is the idea of the legal test. From the Wikipedia:

Legal tests are often formulated from the logical analysis of a judicial decision or a court order where it appears that a finder of fact or the court made a particular decision after contemplating a well-defined set of circumstances. It is assumed that evaluating any given set of circumstances under a legal test will lead to an unambiguous and repeatable result.

Legal tests, Wikipedia

I love a well-constructed test. At their best, they are a way to cut through all of the distractions, all the stray bits of context that we think are important, in order to get to the really meaningful questions. I’ve been developing a test for myself to help me evaluate my media choices. I call it “Matt’s Three-Part Test for Deciding Whether To Hit Play Next Episode or Get The Fuck Out Now.” Here are the three questions:

  1. How does this make me feel?
  2. How active do I have to be to engage with it?
  3. How does this change my behavior?

Let’s look at a couple of test cases:

  • An episode of Fresh Air about the Muller investigation makes me feel anxious and bad, I listen to it passively, and after I finish the episode it makes me so angry that I go out and send bad and boring tweets, like Donald Trump himself is reading my Twitter feed and he just hadn’t heard from me before deciding to resign.
  • The new season of Queer Eye makes me feel human and connected, when I watch it it makes me think deeply about my own life, and after I finish watching it it gives me motivation to connect with people I love.
  • Reading a genre book from a genre that pushes my buttons—maybe a steamy gay romance or a sci-fi novel or a mystery—makes me feel entertained and relaxed. It might be empty entertainment, but afterwards I feel rested and refreshed.

The wild thing is that sometimes we do choose to read/watch/listen to the thing that makes us feel bad, that doesn’t stimulate us, and that makes us act shitty afterwards. Some social media communities are nothing but toxic circle jerks of feel-bad propaganda, and that includes groups that I feel a closeness to and groups that I feel un-included from. There are times when I feel like using the test—insulating myself from information that makes me feel bad—feels like a real first-world luxury. It seems cruel to decide I don’t want to engage with something upsetting when it’s related to an issue that could use attention. When I’m on the fence, I add this additional question:

  • Right now, does the media I am accessing make me feel empowered to attend to the problems that exist in the spheres where I have influence, or does it make me feel disempowered like my choices don’t matter any nothing can ever get better?

That usually tells me whether I should take on the one more upsetting thing, or whether I should take care of myself so that I can win the battles I am actually in.

How do you decide what to let into your brain?

|twenty↫twelve|

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
Downtown Portland in late January twilight.

I have published a new post five times this month, which is probably as much as the last three years. It’s on purpose. Sometime around 2012 or 2013, my habits of mind changed, and not for the better. A lot of things in my life have gotten better, and I would never in a million years choose to go back, but I feel less in control over the information that goes in and what I do with it than ever. That’s what I would like to go back to.

mind-spirit-body

Although I am not Christian anymore, the spirituality of my childhood is still there, even as negative space. The trinity can be a lot of things, but the god in three persons can be a metaphor for ourselves as minds/intellects, bodies/animals, spirits/life-forces. One of the beautiful things about being human is that we all relate to these parts of ourselves differently.

I am someone that is very rooted in the spirit, roots too much of my ego in having a sharp mind, and struggles a lot with being a body. This shows up in so many different ways: I rarely, no matter how old I was, had a sense of wanting to go to sleep when day was done. I always fought exhaustion until I was overpowered. I was a very well-behaved child because I was so good at sitting still and repressing the body’s natural urge to move. I made it to my early 20’s until it became clear to me that I had to try and develop a different kind of sensitivity to the soft animal of my body or I was going to dissociate myself into an early death.

This is a very woo-woo way of getting to this: I worry about the body a lot, I don’t worry about my mind as much.

From the vantage of early 2019, though, something is not right with the mind either. I do a lot of shallow reading, and less and less challenging deep reading. I have to go to a theater to watch a movie, I won’t pay attention at home. I have access to hundreds of hours of streaming video or music or games or reading material, and two times out of three when I sit down to watch something I scroll through the menu for 20 minutes before giving up and shutting it off.

I’m living life like I’m in a waiting room 10 minutes before a doctor’s appointment. (Spoiler alert, that doctor’s appointment is death!)

This sounds very despairing, and I really don’t mean it to be. But I do want to exercise some control over all this, and that means time traveling a little bit to a time when this part of my life was a little better balanced and seeing if there are some different choices I could have made. Not all of the choices are going to be different. I’ve fantasized about going back to a dumbphone, but that’s not a real option. I really loved the era where I lovingly tended to an iTunes library, but a lot of that was sustained by piracy and even though the economics of streaming is precarious, I can’t imagine restricting what I listen to to albums I pay for.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

  • Exercise choice whenever possible. Don’t let recommendation engines take over the drivers seat. Choose something to listen to or watch before opening up the streaming app.
  • Demand more of what gets my attention. Renting four movies or going to the wonderful second-run theaters in my neighborhood costs about as much as a streaming service subscription, but they get to be exactly the movies I want to watch.
  • Write, and let the writing be messy and unfinished and unpolished and bad in every way writing can be bad.
  • Go for dessert first. Get really good at listening to what thing feels shiny and is calling out.
  • Take my own responses seriously.

I was listening to a beautiful On Being interview with the poet Mary Oliver, who died last week. Mary said that she knew from a young age that she wanted to be a poet, and that meant she also knew that she wasn’t going to have a life where she had the nice things, the nice family portrait with Junior with the straight teeth. And it was a little kick in the gut for me, because it reminded me that if it’s true that I am chasing a different kind of lifestyle, the lifestyle described by Heather Havrilesky as:

…lean[ing] into reality–the dirt and grime of survival, the sullen, grim folds of the psyche, the exquisite disappointments, the sour churn of rage, the smog of lust, the petty, uneven, disquieted moments that fall in between. The artist embraces ugliness and beauty with equal passion. The artist knows that this process is always, by its nature, inefficient. It is a slow effort without any promise of a concrete, external reward.

which is such a headfucking difficult thing to put into practice because the mean little bureaucrat in my soul that manages survival says that there’s no time or resources for inefficiency, and I hunger so deeply for those external rewards. But I can feel the undertow pulling on my attention, constantly dragging it away from what is meaningful and what needs attending. So I’m following the instructions you would give to someone swimming in waters where there are rip tides:

DON’T FIGHT THE CURRENT. SWIM OUT OF THE CURRENT, THEN TO SHORE. IF YOU CAN’T ESCAPE, FLOAT. IF YOU NEED HELP, CALL FOR ASSISTANCE.