EVENT
EYEO Festival Talk (2017)
Odell's June 2017 talk at the EYEO festival in Minneapolis that launched the
How to Do Nothing framework and planted its central claim — that doing nothing is the most important thing one can do — before an audience of the designers and technologists most committed to doing things.
In June 2017,
Jenny Odell stood before an audience of designers, technologists, and artists at the EYEO festival in Minneapolis and delivered a forty-five-minute talk titled "How to Do Nothing." The talk's central claim was that sustained, deliberate, non-productive attention was the most radical act available in
the attention economy — more radical than any political gesture the platforms had yet provoked. The argument landed with unusual force partly because of its audience (the very people building the systems Odell was critiquing) and partly because of its tone (Odell refused to apologize for the provocation or soften it into a wellness recommendation). The talk went viral within the tech-adjacent intellectual world and became the seed from which the 2019 book grew. In retrospect, the 2017 EYEO talk marks a specific inflection point in the cultural conversation about attention and technology — the moment when a