How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

This chapter begins with a description of a piece of performance art by the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala. She posed as a new employee at the accounting firm Deloitte and proceeded to rattle her colleagues by sitting and staring in her cubicle or riding the elevators up and down to nowhere. When asked about it, she said she was thinking. Her purpose was to point out that veering from a norm causes discomfort in people because it exposes the fact that the norm is but “a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives” (67).

Odell then goes back in time to ancient Greece to talk about another disrupter of norms, Diogenes. He poked fun at conventions by acting in ways that seemed bizarre, living in a tub and walking around during the day with a lamp, supposedly in search of an honest man. Diogenes disavowed the absurdity of everyday life, but he didn’t withdraw from it, remaining in society even as people around him found his actions odd. Odell calls this occupying the “third space,” that is, not going along with everyone but also not withdrawing, instead staying in society and doing things differently.

Another famous disrupter of norms—or “refusenik”—was a fictional one depicted by Herman Melville in the 19th-century short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.