I experimented with something on this book, and that was reading it on my ereader instead of a physical book, and I borrowed it from my library. This proved challenging for getting accurate citations, so the citations here are only limited to their chapters.
Onto the review.
There are political limitations to the approach to resistance this book talks about. Odell touches on some compelling points but critically, her best points are coming when she mentions other writers’ discussion of the issues she is tackling. I kept waiting for the book to coalesce into some type of compelling driving point, but by the halfway mark it never did. I was given examples of books, articles, and manuscripts which seem to provide what I was looking for in this book, and with that in mind it seemed unnecessary to continue into the book reading in detail when I was just growing increasingly frustrated. I could, as the author recommended, discipline my focus to power through, but life is too short for that.
The last straw for me was a passage where the book did begin to coalesce into something resembling an argument, but that argument proved to be overly individualistic, and advocated for a type of fragmented political action dressed up as collective struggle. The argument here about how to overcome the “attention economy” boils down to a variation of the logic of dieting: Follow these prescripts, and if you fail, it’s because you lack discipline. The idea of using collective power to effect some type of change to the economy is dismissed out of hand, substituting it with a wishy-washy libertarian-tinged notion that people can just will themselves individually out of a social, political, and economic system which places people under stress, then bombards them with solutions-for-sale. It’s all well and good to nod toward public works, bioregional identity, and carving space to be alone with one’s own thoughts, but it disregards the immense pressures on people to pay bills, to compete in a marketplace of labor, and justify their own utility to society at large. These are not issues which can just be willed away by atomized individuals, they are things which must be dealt with socially utilizing collective power.
Art alone can’t teach us to focus better.
On the flip side of the argument that we need to be more disciplined and deep with our focus is the reality that billions of dollars are spent every year focusing on targeting the biological triggers of people in order to manipulate us into buying into new trends, to grow demand to generate new markets, and harvest all sorts of data. This is not, as Odell suggests to say that we’ve already lost the battle of focus:
The idea that I’ve already lost the battle of attention doesn’t sit right with me, an agential being interested in gaining control of my attention rather than simply having it directed in ways that are deemed better for me.
Chapter 4
It’s to say that individual human beings are being targeted by an industrial-scale campaign to nab our attention and to sell us stuff, hijacking our ability to think and to focus. This is something Odell alludes to, but in nonspecific terms. One can look at this as nefarious if one wants, but that’s beside the point here. The point is that if one engages at all with the digital world, without extensive measures being taken, one is being manipulated for the purpose of selling things to us. To an extent individuals can reduce this problem, but in the end if we want our digital space to be different, we need to approach it at a social and cultural level.
I don’t think the fact this reality is uncomfortable is a good enough reason to say it’s fine, we can just focus our way out of it.
As a response to the attention economy, the argument for ethical persuasion happens on a two-dimensional plane that assumes that attention can only be directed this way or that way. I am not as interested in that plane as I am interested in a disciplined deepening of attention. While I am all for legal restrictions on addictive technology, I also want to see what’s possible when we take up William James’s challenge and bring attention back, over and over again, to an idea “held steadily before the mind until it fills the mind.”
Chapter 4
Now, this idea that there are either bad ways or beneficial ways to use persuasion technologies as being not good enough is compelling. Who gets to choose what is ethical or beneficial for us? The structure of these systems are still not democratic. This was one of the better parts of the book.
She uses art as an avenue to build this focus, but much of the (American, at least) landscape is increasingly art-less. Our neighborhoods and homes are mass-produced, barely even making nods to architectural art, and we are increasingly isolated from community spaces which are not mediated by the solely commercial. Our mass media, the easiest-to-access art for most people, is increasingly the result of creation-by-committee, where corporations sculpt work for optimal profit. Artists carve a space in this environment to express themselves, but they have so much more to offer than what they are allowed. It is, practically speaking, part of what the SWA strike in 2023 was all about. To find the arts which could help train stronger focus, one needs to have the access and leisure time to get to that art. Elsewhere she talks about focusing on the natural world around us, yet wandering the streams in our own commercial backyards, focusing closely on details of the world around us. But this too requires leisure time to set aside for this activity, and again, access. These are problems which require collective solutions.
Is it a bad book? Not really, though I suppose I can’t make a strong claim one way or the other about that, as I skimmed two chapters after reaching Chapter 4, getting exhausted by the book, and wanting to just get the conclusion out of the way. The book is ultimately advocating for the same type of ideas you see in works like Thoreau’s Walden, Thich Nhat Hahn’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, or, really, any Zen Buddhist commentary on mindfulness and meditation. It does not plumb the depths of the rich philosophical and metaphysical ideas found in Buddhist and Daoist thought, and instead lingers on Hellenistic philosophers, keeping a laser-like focus on the Western tradition of dissent from mainstream culture. The problem is the book is not nearly as insightful as those works, and chooses instead to be three times as long as it needs to be in an attempt to illustrate a depth it does not have.
In the end, I am glad to have read it, because there’s a lot of good resources and ideas referred to within the body of the work, but in the end I did not find the actual content of the book compelling.
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