How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

The author of this book is an artist and writer who grew up in Cupertino, California, and now lives and works in Oakland. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008 and an MFA in design and technology from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. Since then she has taught art at Stanford University while working as a visual artist. As she writes in Chapter 1, her art has often involved using things that already exist rather than creating something new. For example, one of her best known projects was The Bureau of Suspended Objects, which she created as artist-in-residence at the San Francisco dump. For this exhibit, she established an archive of 200 objects taken from the dump, in which she researched each item’s provenance and history. This information could be accessed via a QR code that linked to a page for each item.

Odell’s background as an artist prepared her well for writing about the topic she chose. Many people who reject social media look to quit cold turkey; some could even be accused of being Luddites if they speak out against using technology in a more general sense. This is not the case with Odell.