scribbled thoughts and messy writing
August 28, 2019
Categories:
books
(Spoilers ahead.)
It is difficult to form a main thought or opinion of this book because it is difficult for me to articulate what this book is even about. It is not, as the title suggests, a self-help book on social media and the attention economy.
There are long passages about Odell taking walks and gradually being aware of nature, in terms of learning to notice and learn the names of specific plants and birds. This reminds me of The Overstory, of people living their lives without ever “looking” at a tree. I downloaded the iNaturalist app she mentioned because I also don’t know how to be aware of nature in any finer level of detail than “oh, a bird.”
There is, inevitably, a discussion about social media and identity. I’ve vaguely heard of danah boyd’s concept of “context collapse,” in which nuances in how you communicate to different people in different situations all flatten into one context (globally public social media). The idea is that you either express yourself in a way that is inappropriate for some of audience (i.e. you wouldn’t talk to a close friend in the same way or about the same topics as you would with your boss at work), or you filter yourself down to the blandest-common-denominator so that no one could possibly find it offensive. I often think about my own “online identity”, and my eschewal (mainly out of discomfort) of “mainstream” social media like Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. But what about my Twitter or my blog, where I am currently writing about my undeveloped and unformed opinions?
The last topic I wanted to bring up was the idea of utopian spaces viewed through the lens of colonialism. Odell writes about Peter Thiel’s misguided underwater colony project and compares it to B.F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two, and writes:
Preemptively calling it a "peaceful project" avoids the fact that regardless of how high-tech your society might be, "peace" is an endless negotiation among free-acting agents whose wills cannot be engineered. Politics necessarily exist between even two individuals with free will; any attempt to reduce politics to design [...] is also an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings.
(p. 52)
I enjoyed reading this book and found it generally interesting, but it left me kind of unsettled and unsure of how to think and what to do next. But perhaps that’s in keeping with the spirit of How to Do Nothing.