Jenny Odell

writer · 4 mentions across 1 reading

In this course

Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based artist and activist whose concept of "doing nothing" frames attention and withdrawal from exploitative systems as forms of political resistance, making her a key figure in debates about how to reclaim agency within networked culture. The course readings use her work critically—examining both her proposal to "remain in place" and reinfuse attention with intention, and the limits of this approach when confronted with actual technological transformation and the persistent impossibility of true retreat from interconnected systems. Her explicit cautioning against escapism positions her as useful for thinking through the tensions between individual resistance and collective entanglement that define contemporary AI culture and algorithmic mediation.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Nadia Asparouhova

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading

I first encountered attention activism when I read Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing, less than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Odell, an artist and activist based in Oakland, California, frames “doing nothing” as an act of p…Nevertheless, I find myself somewhat dissatisfied with the solutions offered by the attention activists, who tell us to “remain in place” as a means of reclaiming our attention, but in a way that seems disconnected from our responsibilities…But the future that followed didn’t quite look the way Odell envisioned, in which we “reinfus[ed] our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.”[47] The reemergence of the private online web was not a mere revers…

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