I flipped open to a page of How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell in Bookshop Santa Cruz to see if it could convince me into reading the book.
It was page 104. Odell is making a case for “leaving behind what we habitually notice [to] allow one to transcend the self.” She invites us to move past our initial assessments and conditioned ways of how and what we take in while navigating the world.
An all too common way of going about the world is categorizing external stimuli into extractive instruments. What is the use? The function? How does this thing/being/situation impact me? How is this useful to me?
She brings in the philosopher Martin Buber who wrote I and Thou in 1923 to invite a different way of managing one’s attention.
He shines a light on dualistic thinking, and challenges it through his I-It and I-Thou thought process. In I-It, the “other” (stimuli, person, thing) is given a description based on its use and instrumental property, its arbitrary value or lack thereof determined by the I. “Something to be appropriated (taken for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission) by the I.”
In a day and age where we’re living almost two lives, one in the flesh and the digital, it seems as if almost any given moment has the potential to be mined and turned into content to sell in the digital realm. If not for money, for following, for attention from others, etc.
As artist Amalia Ulman studied in her art experiment via Instagram titled Excellences & Perfections (2014), there are three major candidates that hold the most attention in social media. Sex, Beauty, and Health. “Ulman conceived of Excellences and Perfections as a “boycott” of her own online persona. For three months, she allowed her profiles to be exactly what social media seems to demand—that she be a “Hot Babe.”” (New Museum) Over the experiment, she gained lots of followers, cheap flattery, and abusive comments.
I see a new iteration in social media as of June 2023. It still has the popularity metrics from its origins, more points scored to the culturally defined “Hot Babes” of the world in the form of heart button likes, shallow comments, and the follower to following ratio.
However, everyone of all types is finding their niche, and moment in fame. Andy Warhol’s premonition “Everyone in the future will be famous for fifteen minutes” is here. Today social media is not the digital scrapbook that I first used it as. Now we are selling ourselves, ideas, products, etc. and being sold products, people, and culture back. Think sponsored ads, the promotions, the infomercial reels…
In the name of status building and money making, we naturally see through an I-It lens. Even when we go out into the physical realm to escape social media’s digital marketplace and value blueprint, for some of us it follows us there within our thoughts….~Ah, this tree, this scene, this event, this accomplishment will make a good post for instagram (this is my drug of choice)~
“A person who only knows I-It will never encounter anything outside himself because he does not truly “encounter.” Buber writes that such a person “only knows the feverish world out there and his feverish desire to use it… When he says You, he means: You, my ability to use!”
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I thou, on the other hand, allows for every being outside of you, all the stimuli, to exist in a non-hierarchical way. For example, the tree (thou) has its own experience, it exists in an independent equal playing field across from “I.”
I-Thou is stripped of projections, accusations, and interpretations of any kind.
“We encounter the tree in all its otherness, a recognition that draws us out of ourselves and out of a worldview in which everything exists for us. “The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I deal with it- only differently (Buber).”
I love this wonder. What/how are we giving our attention? And how are we constructing our narrative?
Where we are giving out attention is ultimately what life becomes. When I get the notification that I have averaged over five hours of screen time per day on my phone, I feel horrified. This is five hours I am not tending to the garden, art, health of myself and community, resting, reading, exercising, just sitting… etc. Half of those things are tied up in Instagram, where I designate time to thinking about sharing them on Instagram, diluting my present moment. The digital world can never be the corporeal. When we render content for sm, there will always be something lost in translation. Context, nuance, wholeness, the spirit? Life becomes a performance piece, and its hard to know if you’re choosing to perform or playing out a script.
“We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer-term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications of working here for freedom, well-being, and even the integrity of the self.” (114)
I want to take a hard look at where my attention is going toward, how I objectify and advertise myself, and the I-It mentality I project onto my surroundings.
I am full of judgments, categorizations, black and white thinking, all of the copious amounts of schemas I’ve been collecting all my life. It’s the brain’s default. It’s less work to think this way compared with a nuanced allowance for beings to exist outside of our projections.
Navigating our attention from a spoon fed reality to a soto zen openness, I thou, would be an extremely different reality. Is it attainable? If we don’t at least attempt to redirect our attention and I-it mentality we are at risk of continuing to perpetuate the dominant culture that is limiting and at worst violent and catastrophic.
Further, the speed at which the perpetuated I-It mentality in the dominant spheres of social media runs at, is a clip that leaves us unable to integrate what we are taking in.
As I scroll from ~story to story~ from static posts, slides, and reels on my Instagram feed, the scene ranges from militaristic abuse in Gaza, someone’s watermelon mint smoothie, someone having tea and advertising how to have a conscious break up… I let this information wash over me. Yet most of it fails to root deeply in a conscious way, but I am certain it manages to influence subconsciously.
The issue with this incessant content, and the pace at which it is engaged with, is it leaves less room to organize for the long term. To be solid and critically think.
“…Immediacy challenges political activism because it creates “weak ties.” Veronica Barassi (anthropologist studying how human rights/democracy is impacted by artificial intelligence and data technology) research suggests that networks built on social media “are often based on a common reaction/emotion and not on a shared political project neither on a shared understanding of social conflict” … Strong ties and well-defined political projects still come from “action on the ground… face-to-face interaction, discussion, deliberation and confrontation.”
Odell follows the dismal effects of this thread from the organizing realm to the individual.
“My experience suggests that these challenges apply not only to activists but also to an individual trying to communicate with others or just maintain coherent trains of thought.”
We need space and time to truly reflect, integrate and contemplate our beliefs, ideologies, politics, and how we want to show up as ourselves and for others.
If we think our solution is to just abstain from social media, or live in a commune away from society, we will just find ourselves in the same reality somewhere else. Social media is only broadcasting what is happening on earth. Some commune far away is still going to be tied up in our dilemmas. Odell referenced several commune attempts from as far back as Epicurus’s school in 341 BC where students dropped out of politics and strived for simple sustainable pleasures and equality. She revealed several commune attempts and more often than not failures that took place in the 60s. Hierarchy, greed, dominance, authoritarianism, etc. still found its way in time and time again.
In the introduction of her book, Odell shares the tale of “The Useless Tree” by Zhaung Zhou, a fourth century Chinese philosopher. In sum, the story is about an interaction between a man and a tree. The man balks at the large gnarled oak tree and declares it useless, unlike straight tall firs or pines dutiful for carpentry. Then, the oak comes to him in a dream, posing “in what way is it useful for me to be a tree that has to give up its trunk, and ultimately life, for your house? I would never have maintained the ability to stay alive if I had been a tree of that sorts.” The carpenter is full of I-It thinking.
Odell asks us to stretch the metaphor from this parable, might we resist in place by being too weird? By being weirder? By resisting the attention economy? The propped up culture none of us necessarily agreed to?
We need the time and space to dream up how to ~weird~ and reshape the digital landscape, and the physical.
Instead of doing away with social media or technology, Odell advises to start paying attention to what we are paying attention to. What is working? What is not?
To get to know your community, human and non human.
She references a drawing by Hallie Bateman exclaiming : “We’re all here together and we don’t even know why”
Let’s be real, we really don’t know. It’s actually quite liberating. The more we think we do know, the more rigid the world becomes. I want to stay in awe. I want to stay in gratitude.
This book leaves me feeling like I just listened to a long dharma talk. I feel myself quiet. The breeze feels louder, one weed in my garden among hundreds of others, and other things, feels like a miracle. Everything being itself for whatever reason, not to play a part in my movie.
I have a serious meeting tomorrow. But I feel a little less fear. I won’t know the person, I just will need to do what I need to do. They aren’t a puppet, or whatever, but a thou.
There is a more skillful way to live, and we need to work towards it consistently. “The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” Robert Swan
Whatever happens, let it be less about winning and losing, rather, being… being free- you, me and that tree nearby. We have a long choppy ocean to cross to achieve the dream boat life we all deserve. We have to keep reassessing our attention and redirecting it to the present, not for ulterior motives (subconscious or conscious).
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