How to Do Nothing (Book)

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.