How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

  It would be possible for this encounter not to last if the constancy of external constraints did not maintain it in a constant state in the face of the temptation of dispersion, did not literally impose its law of proximity without asking men for their opinion; their society thus emerges behind their backs, so to speak, and their history emerges as the dorsal, unconscious constitution of this society.4

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  THE DAY AFTER I saw Blindspotting at the theater near my apartment, I was walking around Lake Merritt, thinking about the role I might be playing in gentrification by having moved to the place I did, when I did. As if on cue, a group of local elementary school children came up to me, each holding a clipboard, and announced in a businesslike fashion that they were doing a project about Oakland and wanted to ask me some questions. The first one was seemingly straightforward: “How long have you been part of this community?”

  Actually, it wasn’t straightforward at all. Even as I answered, “Two years,” I was asking myself what it meant to be part of a community, versus just living somewhere. Sure, I had grown up in the Bay Area, and I felt that I was part of a community—of Bay Area artists and writers, as well as people in other cities who I was connected to via social media—but this community? What, if anything, had I contributed to the place where I now lived—besides rent, and maybe the one article I had written for Sierra Magazine on the local night herons?

  Their other questions were similarly fraught for me, mostly because after that first question, I felt I had no right to be answering the rest. What did I appreciate the most about Oakland? The diversity. (“Of people?” one kid quickly asked.) What would I like to see more of in Oakland? More funding for public libraries and parks. What did I think was the biggest challenge facing Oakland? Fumbling a little, I said something about how “different groups of people should talk to each other more.”

  The kid in front looked up from his clipboard, scrutinizing me. “So would you say…care?” he asked.

  I suggested “communication,” but days later, his clarification stayed with me. After all, communication requires us to care enough to make the effort. I thought about how it’s possible to move to a place without caring about who or what is already there (or what was there before), interested in the neighborhood only insofar as it allows one to maintain your existing or ideal lifestyle and social ties. Like Buber’s “I-It” relationship, a newcomer might only register other people and things in the neighborhood to the extent that they seem in some way useful, imagining the remainder as (at best) inert matter or (at worst) a nuisance or inefficiency.

  Compared to the algorithms that recommend friends to us based on instrumental qualities—things we like, things we’ve bought, friends in common—geographical proximity is different, placing us near people we have no “obvious” instrumental reason to care about, who are neither family nor friends (nor, sometimes, even potential friends). I want to propose several reasons we should not only register, but care about and co-inhabit a reality with, the people who live around us being left out of our filter bubbles. And of course, I mean not only social media bubbles, but the filters we create with our own perception and non-perception, involving the kind of attention (or lack thereof) that I’ve described so far.

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  THE MOST OBVIOUS answer is that we should care about those around us because we are beholden to each other in a practical sense. This is where I would place my encounter with the woman having a seizure: I was helpful because I was nearby. Neighborhoods can be networks of support in situations both banal and extreme. Let’s not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors. This is also a good place to return to Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise in Hell, in which ad hoc networks of support were erected in the wake of disaster by neighbors who may never have had the occasion to meet each other. Not only did these neighbors organize and provide each other with food, water, shelter, medical aid, and moral support—often crossing social boundaries or upending norms in order to do so—but these local, flexible, and rhizomatic networks often got the job done better, or at least faster, than the more institutional aid that followed.

  But Solnit’s book is almost more useful as an illustration of a second reason to care about those around us, which is that an “I-It” world without “Thous” is an impoverished and lonely place to live. Solnit repeatedly finds survivors who recount the exhilaration of commingling with their neighbors and finding common purpose, making clear the necessity of emotional sustenance as much as material sustenance. As a poet who lived through the 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua tells her:

  All of a sudden you went from being in your house the night before, going to bed alone in your own little world to being thrown out on the street and mingling with neighbors you might not have said hello to very much or whatever and getting attached to those people, minding them, helping, trying to see what you could do for one another, talking about how you felt.5

  In fact, I have experienced this sudden transformation, although thankfully not because of a disaster. My boyfriend and I live in a large apartment complex that’s next to the house of a family of four, and when we’re sitting on our balcony and they’re sitting on their porch, we can easily see each other. The sound of the man listening to dad rock while weeding, or the outbursts of the two young sons (such as fart noises followed by cackling), became comforting background noise for us. But we didn’t learn each other’s names for two years, and we may not have chatted at all if it hadn’t been for the neighborliness of Paul, the dad.

  One day Paul invited us over for dinner. Because I hadn’t been in a neighbor’s home since I was a teenager, it was unexpectedly surreal to be inside the house that forms a permanent part of the view from our apartment. The interior of the house went from being an idea to a palpable reality. And just like their view of the street—similar to ours, but slightly different—our neighbors were people who we had no reason not to know, but who we probably wouldn’t have met in our usual circles, online or otherwise. That meant that there were things that we had to explain to each other that might have been taken for granted in our respective habitual contexts—and in these explanations we probably all saw ourselves from a new angle. For my part, the experience made me realize how similar the life situations of most of my friends are, and how little time I spend in the amazing bizarro world of kids.

  When we arrived back to our apartment, it felt different to me—less like the center of things. Instead the street was full of such “centers,” and each one contained other lives, other rooms, other people turning in for the night and worrying their own worries for the next day. Of course I had already accepted all of this in an abstract sense, but it wasn’t felt. And as silly as this story may sound to anyone who is used to knowing their neighbors, I find it worthwhile to recount because it bears out what I’ve experienced with other expansions of attention: they’re hard to reverse. When something goes from being an idea to a reality, you can’t easily force your perception back into the narrow container it came from.

  Just this one experience made me view my entire street, in fact every street, differently. There’s something of this shift in A Paradise Built in Hell. In the chapter on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, Solnit quotes Pauline Jacobson’s piece in the San Francisco Bulletin, called “How It Feels to Be a Refugee and Have Nothing in the World, by Pauline Jacobson, One of Them.” Jacobson describes this irreversible expansion of attention to the neighbors:

  Never even when the four walls of one’s own room in a new city shall close around us again shall we sense the old lonesomeness shutting us off from our neighbors. Never again shall we feel singled out by fate for the hardships and ill luck that’s going. And that is the sweetness and the gladness of the earthquake and the fire. Not of bravery nor of strength, nor of a new city, but of a new inclusiveness. The joy in the other fellow.6
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  This brings me to a final reason for the “care” that was suggested to me at Lake Merritt. Let’s say I decided to spend my entire life caring only about my family, current friends, and potential friends recommended to me by an algorithm—even or especially an impressive one which is often “right,” according to criteria like “people who are knowledgeable about my interests” or “people who in some way will help me advance along my career path” or even “people who have things I want.” Let’s further imagine that I only interacted with those friends in similarly “recommended” ways, like going to art openings, having conversations about art, or activities that start to sound more like networking. I’d venture that something would begin to happen to me and my social world that’s similar to what’s happened with the Discover Weekly playlist on my Spotify account.

  Over the years, the Spotify algorithms have correctly identified that I tend to like “chill” music of a certain BPM: smooth, inoffensive songs from the 1960s and ’70s, or more recent ones with washy synths, echo-y guitars, and vocals that are either passive or nonexistent. As I continue to listen to the playlist, dutifully saving the songs that I like, the weekly playlist begins to hone in, if not on an archetypal song, then an archetypal mix—we could call this “the Jenny mix”—and other potential mixes are measured for their likeness to whatever the current archetype is.

  But it also so happens that my car is from 2006 and has no auxiliary input—which means when I drive to Stanford twice a week, I listen to the radio. My presets are KKUP (Cupertino public radio), KALX (UC Berkeley college radio), KPOO (a San Francisco community station owned by Poor People’s Radio), KOSF (iHeart80s), KRBQ (“the Bay Area’s Throwback Station”), and KBLX (“the Soul of the Bay”). Especially when I’m driving home late on Interstate 880, feeling anonymous in the dark, flat expanse, I’m comforted by the fact that some other people are hearing the same thing I am. I’ve come to know the physical coverage of the radio waves so well that I can predict when a station will fuzz out on a certain freeway interchange, and when it’ll come back.

  More important, none of these stations ever play anything like “the Jenny mix.” Instead they will occasionally play a song that I like even more than my archetypal song, in a different way and for reasons I can’t really pinpoint. The songs fall into genres I normally say I dislike, including Top 40. (It was only on KBLX that I heard Toni Braxton’s Top 40 hit “Long as I Live,” which I listened to obsessively for weeks afterward.) Especially with something as intuitively appealing or unappealing as music, to acknowledge that there’s something I didn’t know I liked is to be surprised not only by the song but by myself.

  My dad, a musician for much of his life, says that this is actually the definition of good music: music that “sneaks up on you” and changes you. And if we’re able to leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can’t yet see, we can also acknowledge that we are each a confluence of forces that exceed our own understanding. This explains why, when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don’t know is talking to something else I don’t know, through me. For a person invested in a stable and bounded ego, this kind of acknowledgment would be a death wish. But personally, having given up on the idea of an atomic self, I find it to be the surest indicator that I’m alive.

  By contrast, at its most successful, an algorithmic “honing in” would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why. It certainly makes sense from a business point of view. When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction.

  Thinking about what it would mean to submit to such a process, becoming a more and more reified version of “myself,” I’m reminded of the way Thoreau described unthinking people in “Civil Disobedience”: as basically dead before their time. If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I’ll find it—imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self—I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living. After all, if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put the book down.

  Extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege. That’s not to say we have nothing to gain from those we have many things in common with (on paper). But if we don’t expand our attention outside of that sliver, we live in an “I-It” world where nothing has meaning outside of its value and relation to us. And we’re less prone to the encounters with those who turn us upside down and reorganize our universe—those who stand to change us significantly, should we allow it.

  Of course, having encounters entails risks that not everyone is willing to take. For example, I once dated someone whose very intelligent brother only ate at chain restaurants when he traveled, his reasoning being that he wanted to know what he was getting and that he didn’t want to waste time risking something he wouldn’t like. This used to infuriate my then-boyfriend whenever he visited, since we lived in a part of San Francisco famous for its Mexican, Salvadorian, and Ecuadorian food. The idea of eating at Chipotle instead of La Palma Mexicatessen or Los Panchos, especially when you were only going to be in San Francisco for a few days, seemed absurd. Food-wise, this man had achieved the strange feat of going somewhere without actually going anywhere.

  To live without encountering plurality, both within oneself and without, brings about a phenomenon that Sarah Schulman describes in her book The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Schulman gives a firsthand account of what happened in 1980s New York, when the children of suburban families who had been part of post–World War II white flight filled the vacancies left by the dying, AIDS-affected queer community in places like the Lower East Side. Both in urban and psychological space, Schulman witnessed “the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones,” a process leading to a kind of social monoculture. Afraid of anyone who differed from the suburban archetype, the newcomers to Schulman’s neighborhood were not only uninterested in learning anything about the incredibly dynamic place they had moved to, but ignorant of their role in destroying that dynamism. They, too, had gone somewhere without going anywhere. Schulman compares the first gentrifying businesses in her neighborhood—beacons that signaled to newcomers using aesthetics and price—as isolated outposts, like “the hard currency kiosks in the Soviet Union that sold Marlboros to apparatchiks and tourists.”7

  What’s especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate, defensible, and capable of “efficiency” is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person; it’s that it’s based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. Although I can understand it as the logical outcome of a very human craving for stability and categories, I also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces inside and outside this imagined “self”: fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality. It’s also about control, since if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we must further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence (the mythology that attend
s gentrification). But whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not.

  Any loss of control is always scary, but to me, giving up on the idea of a false boundary makes sense not only conceptually but phenomenologically. That’s not to say there’s no such thing as a self, only that it’s hard to say where it begins and ends when you think about it for even a few moments. Alan Watts once called the sensation of an ego a hallucination, “a completely false conception of ourselves as an ego inside a bag of skin.”8 Learning to see past this boundary can also be a relief. In “My Adventures with the Trip Doctors,” Michael Pollan experiences something like this relief during an ayahuasca experience with a seasoned guide. At some point during the trip, Pollan’s traditional self disintegrates: “‘I’ now turned into a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its, and they were being scattered to the wind.” Later, his “I” changes again: “Everything I once was and called me, this self six decades in the making, had been liquefied and dispersed over the scene. What had always been a thinking, feeling, perceiving subject based in here was now an object out there. I was paint!”9

  But then who is the self perceiving the paint? Pollan is forced to conclude that there is more to consciousness than the ego. Significantly, the result is a feeling not of fear but of relief:

  The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more, and there was no one left to mourn its passing. And yet something had succeeded it: this bare, disembodied awareness, which gazed upon the scene of the self’s dissolution with benign indifference. I was present to reality but as something other than my usual self. And although there was no self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, and that was calm, unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego.