- The most violent book I’ve read this year. Jenny Odell argues the unthinkable – why don’t we harness doing nothing as a form of political activism?
- Lessons from the scrivener – you can’t say “no” to your boss, but to refuse, you don’t have to.
- Published in 2019, it’s a product of its time – might the Fediverse make collective action and co-operation easier?
This is the most violent book I’ve read this year. Jenny Odell argues the unthinkable. We live at work, and it travels with us on our phones; we eat coffees for lunch, and nickel and dime as much coin as we can grab through side hustles. Why don’t we harness doing nothing as political activism?
Odell starts off by quoting an ad that you’d be mistaken for thinking was an Adbusters job:
You might not like it, but this is what peak lean entrepreneurship looks like. It’s emblematic of the times we live in: For whatever reason, the technology we buy should make work easier and easier, yet we find ourselves working more and more for less pay. This never-ending downward spiral has many a one asking – where’s the exit?
A complete and total escape is not the answer. The allure of escaping a fucked up and bullshit world is not new. Odell explores this through the works of Hannah Arendt, who, in The Human Condition, writes that accounts of men wanting to get away from it all are a regular occurrence in written history. Almost every time, these desires are defined by an establishment of one’s own rule, not liberation proper – there’s an exodus, people live together off the grid, but “only when some are entitled to command and others forced to obey.”
We want to completely retreat if only to be free from “action’s calamities” – to be free to make tidal waves, but to not be around for when they hit. It’s no surprise, then, that when Odell recounts the failed experiments of the American anarchist communes of the 1960s, the quasi-libertarian seasteading fantasies of FBI informant Peter Thiel aren’t too far behind.
Thiel argues that a technocratic seasteading society in international waters would be free from the sordid game of politics that seemingly causes all our suffering. But if you have the power to finance and build such a structure before the calamity, you’ll still have that power after it hits… It’s far easier to imagine the cataclysmic world-ending event than it is to imagine any significant change in The Way Things Are.
Doing nothing can be incredibly violent. Not in the sense that people are going to get their dukes out and start a riot. Witnessing someone politely refusing to do something intercepts us at our most critical faculties. Take The Trainee, an experimental short film by Pilvi Takala, a Finnish performance artist:
In the film, Takala becomes a marketing trainee for Deloitte’s Finnish branch. She spends the entirety of her first day ‘just doing some brain work,’ sitting at a desk without a laptop. Ajatustyö, brain work, whatever – you don’t need to speak Finnish to know that she’s bullshitting. Yet the highly-productive and supercharged nature of the office environment obliges everyone she meets to uphold the justification of writing her thesis.
What’s the first unwritten custom of work? When you have nothing to do that could make any meaningful contribution to society, don’t bring it up and let the boss think you’re squeezing every minute out of your day. Poking fun at the banality of boring tasks and big empty gaps of time is rebellious, but you never really escape the power relations1 of the workplace by playing Solitaire, looking at Facebook, making memes, or whatever floats your boat. But by doing absolutely nothing? Staring out of the window and watching the world go by? How very DARE you.
Appearing to do absolutely nothing, as Takala does, is almost insulting. This is an environment where we are conditioned to be always on and highly productive for the sake of keeping up appearances (and not getting fired). We fear refusal, or at least find it unthinkable – we don’t know if we can afford the consequences. Stanford Duck Syndrome has us sick with the agony of appearing calm and relaxed, but isolated and struggling under the surface. Universities are, after all, an institution second to the office in being obsessed with performance.
https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/25/the-big-bad-duck/
The grandmaster of doing nothing, without a doubt, was Diogenes of Sinope. We ought to take a page from his book (not that he ever owned books). He’s unlike many Greek philosophers who came before and after him in that his philosophy was expressed through what might be described as performance art – living in a barrel, roaming the streets with a lantern looking for an honest man, even showing up the most ascetic of philosophers in throwing away all basic possessions, and quite literally shitting on stage plays. But Diogenes wasn’t just for show – he lived those performances, day after day. If he ever conformed to society, he did so under an ironic pretense. In the panic of an oncoming war on the horizon, Diogenes would roll his barrel around just to look as busy as everyone else.
Second to Diogenes, and entirely fictitious, would be the titular character of Bartleby, the Scrivener. The story being 170 years old (this year!), it has well escaped the clutches of copyright and is public domain:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231
Review Within a Review: Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville’s shiftless clerk is, as far as anyone with an opinion on work ethic is concerned, an anomaly in common-sense reality. His employer – the narrator – increasingly expresses his frustration with descriptions that are like a reverse skeuomorph of the Vine boom sound effect:
I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning…
For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt…
I was thunderstruck. For an instant I stood like the man who, pipe in mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by a summer lightning; at his own warm open window he was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell.
Narrator, Bartleby, the Scrivener
Bartleby basically does one session of crunch, before he refuses everything asked of him by saying, “I would prefer not to.” He may be burned out and listless, but he’s also got titanium testicles. Few workers in his position would say they’ve refused with such placidity.
The reader may grow themselves frustrated with the narrator’s inability to be rid of Bartleby. Anyone in his shoes would evict Bartleby on the spot. But if the narrator did that, there would be no story. Even after he moves offices, and his old office’s new tenant has Bartleby whisked off to jail, he strives to understand the man out of sympathy. Yet Bartleby continues to respond with that odious phrase – “I would prefer not to.” Or a variation of it.
While someone with power might interpret “I would prefer not to” as an outright refusal, like the narrator, it’s quite different from saying “no.” That’s what makes it so odious. If Bartleby were to outright refuse, he would totally negate his employer’s request by saying, “No,” collecting his things, and leave the building, with or without further altercations. But if he did that, there would be no story.
In fact, Bartleby, even when insulted by his coworkers, and roared at by his employer, prefers not to show any resistance at all. He’s not even fed up with his job (which, from the point of view of a 21st century person, being a copyist sounds eerily like copying and pasting into Excel spreadsheets from 9 to 5). Bartleby refuses to work, but gives no reason; as for why he gives no reason, he gives no reason.
“I would prefer not to” is a refusal. It is also, Odell explains, a refusal “that negates the terms of the question.” Saying “No,” or “I refuse,” as I understand it, accepts the terms of the request, but in a negative way. Compare those papers, or copy and paste into these spreadsheets – it’s a yes or no question where “no” is supposed to be unthinkable. Answering with something that flips the terms on their head, with all the placidity and despondency of Bartleby, takes genuine willpower.
If we can’t completely escape, yet don’t want this state of affairs to continue, Odell proposes a third space that she calls ‘standing apart.’ Bartleby refuses, but never retreats – to stand apart, then, is to observe our world as it is now, continue to engage with it, but to also make space to step outside this world and give yourself “the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not.” We can refuse this world without wiping the slate clean, without appealing to seastading and outer space fantasies.
Union strikes, then, can be considered acts of collective refusal. As Adam Conover argues: “The only way that average people have ever gained economic security and prosperity is by refusing to work:”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcgC-kuPEuo&t=42
The general strike of 1934 on America’s west coast was a spectacle to behold. In response to the death of a longshoreman and volunteer cook at the hands of the police, thousands of people turned out to march alongside the bereaved in absolute silence. Sadly, in the UK, the last time we had such an earth-shattering general strike was in 1926, and in the aftermath, the government decided that it was illegal to hold sympathy strikes.
Last year’s Twitter migration to Mastodon can also be considered an act of collective refusal. In my previous post, I explored the findings of a recent study that suggests when Twitter users declared they were leaving, and actually left, that encouraged some of their followers to come with them:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/14/wash-that-x-site-outta-our-hair/
Not everyone who migrated to Mastodon stayed. Some retreated back to Twitter because of high switching costs – if the community you left was tight-knit, densely connected to users who matter to you, it’s much harder to leave. Many of the friends I left on Twitter got more out of their communities than I did mine:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/15/i-want-my-twitter-friends-back/
Some, following the trends of the past year, moved to BlueSky, and then to Threads. Both platforms have promised to federate – but there’s a big difference between a federated network and a federatable one. Caesar Marcus Augustus Zuckerberg recently decreed, “Let there be Threaderation.” Translate: “I didn’t really mean to imply that we’d be federating to let our own users leave:”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon
Some folks just want to be entertained. They’re not into this whole ‘social media activism’ bit and want to move on to the next hot thing. They just want to grill, for God’s sake. I get that, I honestly do. I used to be a terminally online Smash Ultimate player, and every time a new platform fighter came to town – Rivals (on the Switch), Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (1 and 2), Fraymakers, hell, even when Melee had a moment with Slippi’s near-lagless rollback netcode – my feed became a drinking game. Take a shot for every person on your feed who publicly declared their departure from Ultimate, whether that be for its hodgepodge of clunky accessibility design choices, or because they and their friends found the new game to be really, really fun.
Any new service (or game) can expect to see explosive growth accompanied by dips in userbase in its first few weeks. I’m optimistic about this kind of growth – it’s natural that when we hear good things about a new game, or bad things about the one we’re currently playing, we give it a try, hopeful about the things that make it better. Some folks decide it’s not for them, and leave. What’s really baffling is that these dips are taken to mean that the new thing is a complete dud. The study above points to the contrary – the number of people who stayed on Mastodon eclipses those who left. Let’s not enthrall ourselves with stories here – we’ve got folks out here who are crunching the numbers, and the Fediverse is doing just fine, actually2:
“Why don’t you move to Threads? Or BlueSky? They’re federating!”
“I would prefer not to.”
“Dear instance owner: Why have you blocked Threads on your Mastodon instance? We’re federating! Isn’t that what you want?”
“I prefer not to say.”
Judge platforms not by their bells and whistles, but by how easy it is to leave them without losing your friends. Those platforms who are easiest to migrate from are the ones who are most incentivised to do better.
Odell wrote How to Do Nothing in 2018, and it was published in 2019. Its penultimate chapter, “Restoring the Grounds for Thought,” represents a snapshot in time where we knew there was something fucked up and bullshit about social media silos, but federated social networks were no alternative. Twitter seems to put everything, everywhere, all at once in your feed, and there’s very little cohesion. It’s all just… stuff. Stuff without description. This problem has no doubt been exacerbated by all of Elon Musk’s feed twiddling. It’s what social media scholar danah boyd calls “context collapse.” It’s extremely easy to take things out of context on social media for the purposes of smearing others. The alt-right are experts at taking old tweets and twisting the context to make effigies of the accounts of people they don’t like. When Sarah Jeong was hired by The New York Time, alt-righters set their context collapsing shitpost machine to ludicrous speed. For a time, you couldn’t even mention Jeong’s name in conversation without the whole thing derailing at 100mph:
https://www.theverge.com/c/features/23997516/harassment-twitter-sarah-jeong-canceled-social-change
The visibility and comprehension debuffs context collapse applies make it seem impossible to organise online. Narratives about social media ‘addiction’ and ‘digital detoxing’ appeal to a total retreat from social media as the only solution. I would prefer not to. Don’t get me wrong, please don’t forget to touch grass, and see to your friends, family, and local community regularly. As games from 10+ years ago used to advise: “You’ve been playing for a long time! Maybe you should take a break.”
This is precisely the time to stand apart and look at social media from the perspective of how it could be. It’s not the most important problem of our time, but making social spaces online a better place to be will make the bigger problems much, much easier to tackle.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something fundamentally different about engaging people through the Fediverse. I picked a server I thought I shared an identity with, and am placed in a space with like-minded people. Unlike Twitter, where everyone occupies the same space, federated networks are pluralistic by design. The server owner has the power to block (or ‘defederate’) other servers. Many a server has moved to defederate with Gab, a far-right alternative to Twitter. If your server has done this, and you disagree, you’re free to export your list of followers and move on. If you agree, you don’t have to see posts from people you don’t want to engage with. This, in itself, is not a panacea for content moderation online, but it puts more power in the hands of end-users, not unelected tech czars, to tailor their experience to their liking, and that’s a good thing. In my experience, Mastodon has been far, far, FAR less frustrating than Twitter ever was.
Despite my afflictions, Odell purposefully offers no solutions in this book. No such solution exists that can just be applied all at once, and everyone lives happily ever after:
The pitfalls of the attention economy can’t just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques; they also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (p. 347)
What is perhaps most telling is those pioneers of the enshitternet who, instead of picking up the pieces and taking action against what they’ve done, seem to avoid the calamities of their actions. “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs3 both severely limited their children’s use of technology at home… Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the ‘like’ button, had a parental-control feature set up on his phone… 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.”
Perhaps they prefer not to.
The least evil place to buy How to Do Nothing, as well as Odell’s new book, Saving Time, is through Penguin Random House’s website:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-nothing-by-jenny-odell
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672377/saving-time-by-jenny-odell/
- Footnote tangent time. In David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs there’s a bit in chapter 3 where he goes on for a scorching minute about psychoanalytic theories of power and BDSM (as psychoanalysts do). He sums it all up with this absolute gem: “You can’t say ‘orange’ to your boss.”
I don’t usually think, “This needs to be on a t-shirt,” but it gnawed at me. So, I used one of these sites that lets you design your own t-shirt. Astoundingly, I too was turned into a pillar of salt when the website refused to let me use the word ‘boss’:
https://geekdom.social/@bigolifacks/111536433069967214
At time of writing this shirt is still in transit. If it gets here, you’ll know all about it. ↩︎ - I really, REALLY ought to mirror all of my YouTube videos on PeerTube, now that I think about it… ↩︎
- You may point out the fact that Steve Jobs cannot take action against what he’s done, being dead these past twelve years. It’s a good point. ↩︎
That Old Back Catalogue (Part III) – How to Do Nothing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.