How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

  the felicity of Diogenes life, which he seems to have credited to his own wisdom, was largely due to favoring circumstances over which he had no control. Greece has a mild and equable climate which favors life in the open; the governments of Corinth and Athens were liberal to aliens and vagrants, and the Greeks of that period seem to have been generous to beggars.42

  For his part, Thoreau writes to us from outside of jail because, he reveals at one point, someone quickly paid the tax for him. Bartleby has no such recourse, and his fate is telling: he dies in prison.

  Differences in social and financial vulnerability explain why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students. James C. McMillan, an art professor at Bennett College who advised students when they participated in the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, said that black adults were “reluctant” to “jeopardize any gains, economic and otherwise,” but that the students “did not have that kind of an investment, that kind of economic status, and, therefore, were not vulnerable to the kind of reprisals that could have occurred.”43 Participating students were under the care of black colleges, not at the mercy of white employers. In contrast, McMillan says that working-class black residents who went so far as to express support for the students were threatened with violence and unemployment. For them, the margin was much smaller.

  Institutional support can go a long way toward allowing individuals to “afford” to refuse. During the sit-ins, faculty at black colleges offered advice, the NAACP provided legal support, and other organizations offered nonviolence training workshops. Perhaps just as important, the Bennett administration made it clear to their students that they wouldn’t be penalized for their participation in the sit-ins. Dr. Willa B. Player, the president of Bennett, said at the time that “the students were carrying out the tenets of what a liberal arts education was all about, so they should be allowed to continue.”44 (For a more recent example of administrative support, see MIT’s 2018 announcement that they would not turn away accepted high school students who had been arrested for participating in the Parkland, Florida, protests against gun violence.45)

  Acts of collective refusal are obviously more “costly” for participants if they’re considered illegal. Unions, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, provided the formal protection needed for striking workers to participate in a strike, and those protections in turn were codified into law (for a time, anyway). In his book on the San Francisco General Strike, Selvin describes the futility of individual acts of refusal before the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act guaranteed the right to join trade unions:

  In a free labor market, of course, the longshoreman or seaman was free to accept the shipowner’s offer or leave it; in practical terms, standing alone, without resources, living on the edge of subsistence, the longshoreman or seaman was powerless to resist.46

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  FOR THOSE WHO have ever enjoyed any kind of margin, it seems to have been shrinking for a long time now. Although they might have little else in common with a longshoreman in the 1930s, many modern workers might relate to the longshoremen’s schedule, as it was described by Frank P. Foisie, later the leader of the Waterfront Employers Association:

  [Their labor] suffers the full brunt of a depression, the slack of seasons, and in addition must deal with fluctuations daily and hourly peculiar to itself. Discharging and loading vessels is subject to the variables of uncertain arrival of ships, diverse cargoes, good, bad, and ordinary equipment, regrouping of men and different employers; and is at the mercy of the elements of time, tide, and weather…Hiring is by the hour, not the day, and never steadily.47

  Before the unions, the longshoremen’s experience of time was completely beholden to the ups and downs of capital. While the 1932 law enabled union organizing, the tides had already begun to turn against organized labor with the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, which among other things prohibited the coordination of strike efforts among different unions.

  Today, subjection to a ruthless capitalist framework seems almost natural. In his 2006 book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob S. Hacker describes a “new contract” that formed between companies and employees in the absence of regulation from the government in the 1970s and ’80s:

  The essence of the new contract was the idea that workers should be constantly pitted against what economists call the “spot market” for labor—the amount that they could command at a particular moment given particular skills and the particular contours of the economy at that time.48

  The contract is markedly different from the old one, in which companies and employees’ fates rose and fell together, like a marriage. He quotes an employee memo from the CEO of General Electric in the 1980s: “If loyalty means that this company will ignore poor performance, then loyalty is off the table.”49 In the global “spot market,” companies are driven only by the need to remain competitive, passing the task on to individuals to remain competitive as producing bodies.

  This “new contract,” alongside other missing forms of government protection, closes the margin for refusal and leads to a life lived in economic fear. When Hacker describes the new situation faced by those for whom precarity was not already a matter of course, the margin has eroded completely: “Americans increasingly find themselves on an economic tightrope, without an adequate safety net if—as is ever more likely—they lose their footing.”50 Any argument about mindfulness or attention must address this reality. It’s hard for me to imagine, for example, suggesting “doing nothing” to anyone who Barbara Ehrenreich meets while working at low-wage jobs for her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. Ehrenreich and her coworkers are too busy with the impossible puzzle of making ends (money, time, and the limits of the human body) meet. Even if one solved this puzzle, the question would remain for Ehrenreich: “If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?”51

  When almost everything and every kind of service can be outsourced, white-collar workers find themselves toeing the line, too. In The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse observes among white-collar workers the same attitude as Selvin’s longshoremen (“you would just simply be fired”):

  Many workers fear pink slips so much that they are frightened to ask for raises or protest oppressive workloads. Globalization, including the recent rush to offshore hundreds of thousands of white-collar jobs, has increased such fears.52

  In 2016, the writer and blogger Talia Jane took the risk of protest and lost. She had been working as a customer-service representative at Yelp, but was having trouble making ends meet due to the high cost of living in the Bay Area. After writing an open letter to Yelp about her situation and asking for a living wage, she was fired, given $1,000 severance, and banned from returning. Yelp later raised its wages, though it denied that she had anything to do with it. Jane’s story became a touch point in the conversation about Millennials, making her something of a public figure. But in September 2018, she was still looking for meaningful work. About her nonexistent margin, Jane tweeted:

  i swear to god if i’m still making smoothies for a living 3 months from now i’m going to freakin…get up and keep going to work because i don’t have a safety net that affords me the ability to quit a fruitless, unfulfilling, stagnant job in pursuit of my dreams.53

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  WHEN I READ Selvin’s descriptions of the 1930s longshoremen before the strike, who lived unprotected from the vicissitudes of capital and “put up with round-the-clock shifts, cut short rest periods between jobs, and missed meal periods,” I’m reminded not only of today’s “new contract” and Talia Jane’s plight, but of a particular group of people: my students.

  Back in 2013, students in my first art classes at Stanford were surprised that I didn’t know about “Stanford duck syndrome.” This phrase, which imagines students as placid-seeming ducks paddli
ng strenuously beneath the water, is essentially a joke about isolated struggle in an atmosphere obsessed with performance. In “Duck syndrome and a culture of misery,” Stanford Daily writer Tiger Sun describes seeing a friend pull two consecutive all-nighters on her birthday weekend. Sun and his friends grow concerned when they notice her face is flushed, so they take her temperature: 102.1 degrees. But when they implore her to stop, she keeps working. Sun writes:

  It’s a testament to this toxic “grind or die” atmosphere at universities that, even in the face of major illness, we put the pedal to the metal and continue to drive our health off a cliff. It’s not like this is a conscious decision to be miserable, but sometimes it feels as if taking care of our own health is a guilty pleasure…We subliminally equate feeling burned out to being a good student.54

  He adds that even though Stanford emphasizes self-care in its new student orientation, “it seems to have been lost on everyone here.”

  One of the students’ outlets for this stress is a Facebook page for memes specific to Stanford (“Stanford Memes for Edgy Trees”), many of which are about anxiety, failure, and sleep deprivation. Like Tom Green lying down the sidewalk, they’re funny precisely because students otherwise consider admitting struggle—the furious paddling of the “Stanford duck”—to be taboo. The jokes have a rueful tone of resignation. When my students told me about the meme page, they echoed what students at other schools told New York Magazine about their meme pages: the jokes “come from a place of stress and anxiety”55 and the page provides a useful space to acknowledge those feelings.

  For that reason (and also because the memes are often really funny), I’m glad that “Stanford Memes for Edgy Trees” exists. But it also depresses me. However much the squeeze is humorously acknowledged, and however much Stanford or even the students among themselves might emphasize self-care, they’re running up against the same market demands haunting all of us. At least in my experience, students aren’t workaholics for the sake of it; the workaholism is driven by a very real fear of very real consequences that exist both within and outside of school. Blowing off steam by commenting “legit me” on a meme about sleep deprivation, or even allowing oneself a day off to catch up on sleep (!), can’t help with the overarching issue of economic precarity that awaits the student—and indeed has already reached less privileged students who must work in addition to studying. It does nothing about the specter of student debt, nor about the fear of ending up outside a shrinking pool of security.

  Indeed, many of the pages’ most cutting jokes attest to the students’ awareness of this. One Stanford meme uses a photo of Donald Trump talking to Mike Pence while gesturing toward a large empty space in front of them; Trump is tagged “my college,” Pence is tagged “me, after graduating college,” and the empty space is tagged “job prospects.”56 Another is a screenshot, mostly of a ceiling and part of someone’s head, with the Stanford University Snapchat geofilter and the caption: “I am surrounded by massive amounts of wealth in this pressure cooker of entrepreneurship and tech that satellites the rest of this endless suburbia where the middle class can’t find a one bedroom apartment.”57 On UC Berkeley’s meme page, someone has posted the “sold pupper dance video,” in which a small dog in a pet store paws adorably at a glass cage labeled “I am sold.” The caption: “when you get your summer internship and celebrate committing yourself to being yet another cog in the vast capitalist machine.”58

  Knowing this, I can forgive my students for getting frustrated that my art classes aren’t “practical” in any easily demonstrable sense. I’ve come to suspect that it’s not a lack of imagination on their parts. Rather, I’d venture that it’s an awareness of the cold hard truth that every minute counts toward the project of gainful employment. In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, in which Malcolm Harris takes us through the ruthless professionalization of childhood and education, Harris writes that “[i]f enough of us start living this way, then staying up late isn’t just about pursuing an advantage, it’s about not being made vulnerable.”59 A Millennial himself, he describes the shifting of risk onto students as potential employees, who must fashion themselves to be always on, readily available, and highly productive “entrepreneurs” finding “innovative” ways to forego sleep and other needs. Students duly and expertly carry out complicated maneuvers in which one misstep—whether that’s getting a B or getting arrested for attending a protest—might have untenable lifelong consequences.

  In the context of attention, I’d further venture that this fear renders young people less able to concentrate individually or collectively. An atomized and competitive atmosphere obstructs individual attention because everything else disappears in a fearful and myopic battle for stability. It obstructs collective attention because students are either locked in isolated struggles with their own limits, or worse, actively pitted against each other. In Kids These Days, Harris is well aware of the implications of precarity for any kind of organizing among Millennials: “If we’re built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers—and we are—then we’re hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses.”60

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  THERE ARE MANY “systemic abuses” to be refused at the moment, but I propose that one great place to start is the abuse of our attention. That’s because attention undergirds every other kind of meaningful refusal: it allows us to reach Thoreau’s higher perspective, and forms the basis of a disciplined collective attention that we see in successful strikes and boycotts whose laser-like focus withstood all the attempts to disassemble them. But in today’s mediascape, it’s hard to imagine what refusal looks like on the level of attention. For example, when I mention to anyone that I’m thinking about “resisting the attention economy,” their first response is “Cool, so, like, quitting Facebook?” (usually followed by musings on the impossibility of leaving Facebook).

  Let’s consider that option for a moment. If Facebook is such a big part of the attention economy problem, then surely quitting it is an appropriate “fuck you” to the whole thing. To me, though, this is fighting the battle on the wrong plane. In her 2012 paper, “Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention,” Laura Portwood-Stacer interviews people who quit Facebook for political reasons and finds that the meaning of these isolated actions is often lost on the Facebook friends left behind. Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related. Portwood-Stacer’s interviews also show that “the personal or political decision not to participate in Facebook may be interpreted [by friends] as a social decision not to interact with them,” or worse, as “holier-than-thou internet asceticism.” Most important, the decision to leave Facebook involves its own kind of “margin”:

  It may be that refusal is only available as a tactic to people who already possess a great deal of social capital, people whose social standing will endure without Facebook and people whose livelihoods don’t require them to be constantly plugged in and reachable…These are people who have what [Kathleen] Noonan (2011) calls “the power to switch off.”61

  Grafton Tanner makes a similar point in “Digital Detox: Big Tech’s Phony Crisis of Conscience,” a short piece on the repentant tech entrepreneurs who have realized just how addictive their technology is. Working via initiatives like Time Well Spent, an advocacy group that aims to curb the design of addictive technology, former Facebook president Sean Parker and ex-Google employees Tristan Harris and James Williams have become fervent opponents of the attention economy. But Tanner is unimpressed:

  They fail to attack the attention economy at its roots or challenge the basic building blocks of late capitalism: market fundamentalism, deregulation, and privatization. They reinforce neoliberal ideals, privileging the on-the-move
individual whose time needs to be well spent—a neatly consumerist metaphor.62

  For my part, I, too, will remain unimpressed until the social media technology we use is noncommercial. But while commercial social networks reign supreme, let’s remember that a real refusal, like Bartleby’s answer, refuses the terms of the question itself.

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  TO TRY TO imagine what the “third space” would actually look like in the attention economy, I’ll turn back to Diogenes, or rather the school of Cynicism he inspired. In sharp contrast to the modern meaning of the word cynicism, the Greek Cynics were earnestly invested in waking up the populace from a general stupor. They imagined this stupor as something called typhos, a word that also connotes fog, smoke, and storms—as in the word typhoon or tai fung in Cantonese, meaning “a great wind.”63

  A generation after Diogenes, a pupil of his named Crates wrote of an imaginary island called Pera (named after the leather wallet that Cynics counted among their few possessions) that is “surrounded but not affected” by this storm of confusion:

  Pera, so name we an island, girt around by the sea of Illusion,

  Glorious, fertile, and fair land unpolluted by evil.

  Here no trafficking knave makes fast his ships in the harbor,

  Here no tempter ensures the unwary with venal allurements.

  Onions and leeks and figs and crusts of bread are its produce.

  Never in turmoil of battle do warriors strive to possess it,

  Here there is respite and peace from the struggle for riches and honor.64

  Navia reminds us that the island is obviously more “an ideal state of mind than an actual place,” and that inhabitants of Pera, “contemplat[ing] the immensity of that ‘wine-colored sea of fog’ that surrounds their home,” spend their lives trying to bring others who are lost in typhos to their shore through the practice of philosophy. In other words, reaching Pera requires nothing more and nothing less than voluntate, studio, disciplina.