How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

  Consider two things in tandem. First, people in wealthier neighborhoods almost always have more access to urban parks and to parkland, on top of the fact that such neighborhoods are often in the hills or by the water. When I spoke with Mark Rauzon, one of the original founders of FOSC, he noted that the surrounding neighborhood is well-to-do, which meant that at the get-go, FOSC had lawyers, architects, and landscape designers at its disposal—all of them landed, property-owning professionals. This is a very different situation than in West or East Oakland, where people might be working paycheck to paycheck, with no margin to spare on stewarding or even paying attention to the local watershed. In turn, people in these neighborhoods have far fewer physical spaces for rest, recreation, and conviviality—and those that do exist may be poorly looked after.

  Second, consider that while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically determined children’s content on YouTube,18 Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children’s use of technology at home. As Paul Lewis reported for The Guardian, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button, had a parental-control feature set up on his phone by an assistant, to keep him from downloading apps. Loren Brichter, the engineer who invented the “pull-to-refresh” feature of Twitter feeds, regards his invention with penitence: “Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about.”19 In the meantime, he has “put his design work on the back burner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey.” Without personal assistants to commandeer our phones, the rest of us keep on pulling to refresh, while overworked single parents juggling work and sanity find it necessary to stick iPads in front of their kids’ faces.

  In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention: privileged spaces where some (but not others) can enjoy the fruits of contemplation and the diversification of attention. One of the main points I’ve tried to make in this book—about how thought and dialogue rely on physical time and space—means that the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and of the environment. This knot will only come loose if we start thinking not only about the effects of the attention economy, but also about the ways in which these effects play out across other fields of inequality.

  By the same token, there are many different places where manifest dismantling can begin to work. Wherever we are, and whatever privileges we may or may not enjoy, there is probably some thread we can afford to be pulling on. Sometimes boycotting the attention economy by withholding attention is the only action we can afford to take. Other times, we can actively look for ways to impact things like the addictive design of technology, but also environmental politics, labor rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, anti-racism initiatives, measures for parks and open spaces, and habitat restoration—understanding that pain comes not from one part of the body but from systemic imbalance. As in any ecology, the fruits of our efforts within any of these fields may well reach beyond to the others.

  An individual body can be healed, and it can become healthy. But it can’t necessarily be optimized; it’s not a machine, after all. I think the same holds true for the social body. Recalling Frazier’s exclamation in Walden Two that humanity is only 1 percent as productive as it could be (productive of what?), we might ask what goal manifest dismantling has to offer in place of the North Star of productivity. Beyond the vague cyclicality of what Purdy calls “going on living,” can there be teleology without a telos?

  For an answer, I’ll return to Feminism and Ecological Communities, where earlier Chris Cuomo questioned movements that posit humans as “paradigmatic ethical objects.” Alongside an argument for ecological models of identity, community, and ethics, she suggests a potential abandonment of teleology. But to me, it sounds less like Masanobu Fukuoka’s “abandoned” orchard defeated by insects, and more like his unruly and functioning farm:

  Moral agents can decide to how to negotiate the world without hopes of reaching a predetermined, necessary state of harmony or static equilibrium, or any ultimate state. Indeed, the abandonment of such a teleology also entails abandoning hopes that our decisions and actions will result in perfect harmony or order, and such non-teleological ethics can’t be motivated by a desire to actualize a pre-established end or enact given roles. We can, however, value the somewhat ordered/somewhat chaotic universe in which we inevitably dwell, and we can also decide that it is good and worthwhile to prevent significant destruction to other valuable members of the universe through the agency and choice that also seem inevitable.20

  This is something like a goal without telos, a view toward the future that doesn’t resolve in a point but rather circles back toward itself in a constant renegotiation. The idea of an aimless aim, or a project with no goal, might sound familiar. Indeed, it sounds a bit like our old friend, the useless tree—who “achieves” nothing but witness, shelter, and unlikely endurance.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN BENJAMIN LOOKED at history, he saw something other than a horizontal march toward ever greater territories. Directly opposed to the notion of technological progress, what he saw was a series of unredeemed moments of contingency, in which people struggled over and over against the ruling class. In an address to the Free Student League of Berlin in 1914, Benjamin said that “the elements of the end condition are not present as formless tendencies of progress, but instead are embedded in every present as endangered, condemned and ridiculed creations and ideas.”21 In every moment of history, something was trying to happen, like two ends of something striving to meet each other.

  In this context, it was the historian’s task to turn his back on the imagined course of progress and dig up each record of this impulse from the debris, to make the past live in the present, to literally do it justice. Manifest dismantling is similar. It asks us to remember—in the sense of re-membering, the opposite of dismembering. Recall that the Angel of History, beyond disinterested preservation, seeks “to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.” To tear up the concrete or take down the freeway is to start to piece a community back together, though it may not (ever) look the same again.

  Against the odds and the crush of techno-determinism, things keep growing that “small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.” Nature and culture still abound with forms that, like Zhuang Zhou’s useless tree, resist appropriation while sheltering the life beneath them. The newly planted alder trees are growing along Sausal Creek. Mak-’amham, the Ohlone food pop-up, opened a permanent café this year, and the line spilled out the door on opening day. The migrating birds return each year, for now anyway, and I have not yet been reduced to an algorithm.

  The two ends are still trying to meet. Later, describing this movement, Benjamin would use an image that evokes the Rose Garden on another timeless day: “As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun that is rising in the sky of history.”22

  * * *

  —

  I WROTE MOST of this book in my studio, among ceramicists, painters, and printmakers in a former industrial building near Oakland’s shipping port. Today, on my way here, I took a detour through a serious gauntlet of big rigs thundering down Seventh Street to stop at Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, a surprising sliver of sand and marsh between the active cranes and the San Francisco Bay. During the nineteenth century, this site served as the western terminus of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and in World War II was a supply base for the Pacific Fleet of the US Navy. Eventually it ended up in the hands of the Port of Oakland, who turned it into one of the few parks in West Oakland.

  Like most of the land edging the San Francisco Bay, this was once a wetland ecosystem, but building a port also meant dredging the shallows for ships. When the Port of Oakland took ownership of th
e land in 2002, it used sediment to re-create a lagoon and a beach in the hopes of supporting the local shorebird population. It also built an observation tower named after Chappell R. Hayes, an Oakland community activist and environmentalist who ran programs for at-risk youth, helped move a freeway farther away from West Oakland, rallied against the transport of spent nuclear fuel rods through the nearby port, and raised awareness of environmental racism in the boards and committees he served on.

  At the dedication of the tower in 2004, former city council-woman Nancy Nadel spoke about how Hayes, her late husband, had helped local youth start a woodworking company that made fences for new houses in West Oakland. Noting that his nonprofit was named after “a doweling jig, a tool that helps you drill precisely perpendicularly into a piece of wood,” she recalled that “[w]hen someone was stressed and uncentered, one of Chappell’s favorite reminders was to stay perpendicular to the earth, don’t pitch forward, don’t fall back.”23

  If you remember, I started this book in the Oakland Hills. I want to end it here, at the westernmost edge of the city, where the landscape could not look or sound more different. The air today was full of the rumblings of trucks, of containers sliding across the cranes and clacking into place, of industrial vehicles beeping and backing up. A handful of people were walking or jogging on their lunch breaks. I got out my binoculars and headed toward the little re-formed beach.

  In that modest stretch of mud between the hard edge of the port and an old ferry anchorage were a series of small, moving things. Upon a closer look through my binoculars, those things were avocets, sanderlings, willets, greater yellowlegs, snowy egrets, great egrets, adult and juvenile, western gulls, marbled godwits, least sandpipers, and curlews. Farther out on the rocks were black oystercatchers, cormorants, great blue herons, and even the endangered California least terns, a population actively supported by volunteers in Hayward. Some of these birds you might find at Elkhorn Slough—but this was an active shipping port, not (officially) a wildlife refuge. In other words, the beach wasn’t so much a holdover from the past as a hopeful artifice, an invitation to the birds to return. And return they did.

  Above all this activity soared the biggest birds of all: the brown pelicans. They, too, were once endangered, and in some senses still are. In the early twentieth century they were almost hunted out of existence, and they suffered again until the pesticide DDT was banned in the 1970s. Although brown pelicans were taken off the endangered list in 2009, their numbers have fluctuated as they continue to face habitat loss. But this year, I’ve been hearing people mention seeing pelicans they’ve never noticed before. Just before heading to the park, I’d gotten an email from the artist Gail Wight, who told me that after two years of few pelicans, around fifty had arrived near her home on the coast. Now the pelicans were flying plentifully past me, so close that I could see their faces, greeting me one at a time with their joyous six-foot-wide wingspans.

  Behind them rose the skyline of San Francisco, with its new Salesforce tower and its high-rise condos. If I squinted, I could just make out the building where I used to work, where they might have been discussing “brand pillars” at this very moment. Back there, things moved so quickly that we had separate catalogs for Spring 1, Spring 2, and Spring 3. But the pelicans made all of that seem like a joke with no punch line. Based on a fossil dating from the Oligocene Epoch, the general design of the pelican appears not to have changed for 30 million years. In the winter, as they have for countless ages, the pelicans will be heading south to the Channel Islands and to Mexico to build the nests whose designs, too, have remained largely unchanged.

  For now, these old survivors sheltered here—as did I—in a space formerly dedicated to the demands of war. I wasn’t expecting to encounter it today, but this may be the best illustration of what manifest dismantling has to offer to those who are willing to receive it. When we pry open the cracks in the concrete, we stand to encounter life itself—nothing less and nothing more, as if there could be more.

  Standing perpendicular to the earth, not pitching forward, not falling back, I asked how I could possibly express my gratitude for the unlikely spectacle of the pelicans. The answer was nothing. Just watch.

  Acknowledgments

  In describing the grounds of possibility from which this book grew, I will first say that I live and work on the land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, and that their graciousness in sharing their culture with the public has been an inspiration to me. I’d also like to thank David Latimer and Esther Aeschbach for running 300 Jefferson Studios, a space that helps keep artists and writers like me in the Bay Area. As a writer but also just as a person, I’m indebted to the city employees and volunteers who maintain the Rose Garden, as well as the stewards of all the open spaces where I collected my thoughts. Joe Veix, my boyfriend and fellow writer, further supported this book with conversations, dinners, warmth, and unquestioning respect for my need to get away to the mountains sometimes.

  The organizers of Eyeo Festival—Dave Schroeder, Jer Thorp, Wes Grubbs, and Caitlin Rae Hargarten—enabled this book early on by blindly trusting me with a talk called “How to Do Nothing,” but they also deserve thanks for gathering a community whose perspective on technology is refreshingly critical and deeply human. Adam Greenfield first put the idea in my head that “How to Do Nothing” could be a book, and was instrumental in getting the ball rolling. I’m endlessly grateful to Ingrid Burrington for connecting me to Melville House, to Taylor Sperry and the rest of Melville House for taking a chance on an emerging writer, and to Ryan Harrington for being a trustworthy editor and generally keeping my spirits high.

  Both of my parents are present in this book. My mother, the very picture of generosity, has ingeniously found some way to help me with almost everything I have ever done, and her work with children influenced my emphasis on care and maintenance in this book. My father, who frequently shuttles between his electronics job and the top of a mountain, has imbued in me a certain way of looking at the world. I once asked him if he knew about augmented reality, and he said, “Augmented reality? I live there.”

  Lastly, I would like to thank Crow and Crowson for continuing to visit my balcony, morning after morning, directing their alien attention toward this comparatively ungainly Homo sapiens. May we all be so lucky to find our muses in our own neighborhoods.

  Endnotes

  Introduction

  1. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 130.

  2. Robert Louis Stevenson, “An Apology for Idlers” from “Virginibus puerisque” and other papers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1906), 108.

  3. Seneca, Dialogues and Essays (UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 142.

  4. Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy and Uta Grosenick, Surrealism (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2004), 34.

  5. Zhuang Zhou, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 31.

  6. Gordon and Larry Laverty, “Leona Heights Neighborhood News,” MacArthur Metro, March 2011: https://macarthurmetro.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/met11-03.pdf

  Chapter 1

  1. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 129.

  2. John Steinbeck, Cannery Row: Centennial Edition (New York: Penguin, 2002), 10.

  3. Tanya Zimbardo, “Receipt of Delivery: Windows by Eleanor Coppola,” Open Space, January 25, 2013: https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2013/01/receipt-of-delivery29/.

  4. Pauline Oliveros, The Roots of the Moment (New York: Drogue Press, 1998), 3.

  5. Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (New York: iUniverse, 2005), xxii.

  6. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001), 69.

  7. John Muir, The Writings of John Muir (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 236.

  8. Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 104–105.
>
  9. John Cleese, “Creativity in Management,” lecture, Video Arts, 1991: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g.

  10. Martha Mockus, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 76.

  11. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1.

  12. Samuel Gompers, “What Does Labor Want? An address before the International Labor Congress, August 28, 1893,” in The Samuel Gompers Papers, Volume 3: Unrest and Depression, 1891–94 ed. Stuart Kaufman and Peter Albert (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 393. Gompers adds, “There is nothing too beautiful, too lofty, too ennobling, unless it is within the scope of labor’s aspirations and wants. But to be more specific: The expressed demands of labor are first and foremost a reduction of the hours of daily labor to eight hours to-day, fewer to-morrow.”

  13. Eric Holding and Sarah Chaplin, “The post-urban: LA, Las Vegas, NY,” in The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis, ed. Neil Leach (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005), 190.

  14. Franco Berardi, After the Future (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 66.

  15. Ibid., 129.

  16. Bernardi, 35.

  17. Jia Tolentino, “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” New Yorker, March 22, 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-gig-economy-celebrates-working-yourself-to-death.

  18. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2008), 11.

  19. Berardi, 109.

  20. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 2011), 128–129.