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The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).
How to Do Nothing
Jenny Odell
Pain rolled off him like rain from a slate roof.
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
The Roman poet Terence wrote a line that was once famous: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—“I am human, and nothing human is alien to me”—and I think this strikes precisely the right note. Terence doesn’t say that everything human is fully accessible to him, that there are no relevant divides of race or class or sexual orientation or religion; he doesn’t say that everyone else is instantly or fully comprehensible to him. He says, rather, than nothing human is alien to him: nothing human is beyond his capacity to understand, at least in part.
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