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How to Do Nothing (Book)
Odell's 2019 New York Times bestseller — originally a 2017 EYEO talk — that reframed the refusal of engagement from passive disconnection into an active political and ecological practice.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy grew out of Odell's 2017 EYEO festival talk. The book's central argument is that the deliberate practice of non-productive attention is the most radical act available in a culture that equates human worth with output. Odell develops this through chapters on the history of refusal movements, the ecology of her Oakland neighborhood, the practice of bird-watching as an exercise in receptive attention, the attention economy's specific techniques of capture, and the distinction between withdrawal (which she rejects as a privileged fantasy) and refusal-in-place (which she endorses as a practice available within ordinary life). The book's significance lies less in any single claim than in its tone — the refusal to offer productivity solutions, its insistence that the reader sit with the discomfort of the argument, its modeling of the attention it advocates.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book arrived at a specific cultural moment — 2019, the