How to Do Nothing Read online

  In 2017, while I was an artist in residence at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, I spent a lot of time going through the ads in old issues of BYTE, a 1980s-era hobbyist computing magazine. Among unintentionally surreal images—a hard drive plugged into an apple, a man arm wrestling with his desktop computer, or a California gold miner holding up a pan of computer chips and saying, “Eureka!”—I came across a lot of ads about computers whose main point was that they were going to save you time working. My favorite was an ad by NEC, whose motto was “Taking it to the limit.” The ad, titled “Power Lunch,” shows a man at home, typing on a computer whose screen shows a bar graph of increasing values. He drinks a small carton of milk, but his sandwich is untouched. Taking it to the limit indeed.

  Part of what’s so painful about this image is that we know how this story ends; yes, it did get easier to work. From anywhere. All the time! For an extreme example, look no further than Fiverr, a microtasking site where users sell various tasks—basically, units of their time—for five dollars each. Those tasks could be anything: copyediting, filming a video of themselves doing something of your choice, or pretending to be your girlfriend on Facebook. To me, Fiverr is the ultimate expression of Franco Berardi’s “fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor.”16

  In 2017, Fiverr ran a similar ad to NEC’s “Power Lunch,” but missing the lunch. In this one, a gaunt twenty-something stares dead-eyed into the camera, accompanied by the following text: “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow-through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.” Here, the idea that you would even withhold some of that time to sustain yourself with food is essentially ridiculed. In a New Yorker article aptly titled “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” Jia Tolentino concludes after reading a Fiverr press release: “This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in [Fiverr’s promotional] video.”17 When every moment is a moment you could be working, power lunch becomes power lifestyle.

  Though it finds its baldest expression in things like the Fiverr ads, this phenomenon—of work metastasizing throughout the rest of life—isn’t constrained to the gig economy. I learned this during the few years that I worked in the marketing department of a large clothing brand. The office had instituted something called the Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE, which meant to abolish the eight-hour workday by letting you work whenever from wherever, as long as you got your work done. It sounded noble enough, but there was something in the name that bothered me. After all, what is the E in ROWE? If you could be getting results at the office, in your car, at the store, at home after dinner—aren’t those all then “work environments”? At that time, in 2011, I’d managed not to get a phone with email yet, and with the introduction of this new workday, I put off getting one even longer. I knew exactly what would happen the minute I did: that every minute of every day I would in fact be answerable to someone, even if my leash was a lot longer.

  Our required reading, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution, by the creators of ROWE, seemed well intended, as the authors attempted to describe a merciful slackening of the “be in your chair from nine to five” model. But I was nonetheless troubled by how the work and non-work selves are completely conflated throughout the text. They write:

  If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?18

  To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever. In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.”

  This constant connection—and the difficulty of maintaining any kind of silence or interiority—is already a problem, but after the 2016 election it seemed to take on new dimensions. I was seeing that the means by which we give over our hours and days are the same with which we assault ourselves with information and misinformation, at a frankly inhumane rate. Obviously the solution is not to stop reading the news, or even what other people have to say about that news, but we could use a moment to examine the relationship between attention span and the speed of information exchange.

  Berardi, contrasting modern-day Italy with the political agitations of the 1970s, says the regime he inhabits “is not founded on the repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. On the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous.” Instances of censorship, he says, “are rather marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention, combined with the occupation of the sources of information by the head of the company.”19

  It is this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happen online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time. The connection between the completely virtual and the utterly real, as evidenced by something like Pizzagate, or the doxing and swatting of online journalists, is deeply, fundamentally disturbing on a human phenomenological level. I know that in the months after the election, a lot of people found themselves searching for this thing called “truth,” but what I also felt to be missing was just reality, something I could point to after all of this and say, This is really real.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MIDDLE of this postelection heartbreak and anxiety, I was still looking at birds. Not just any birds, and not even a species, but a few specific individuals. First, it was a couple of black-crowned night herons that reliably perch outside of a KFC in my neighborhood, almost all day and night. If you’ve never seen one, night herons are stocky compared to other herons. My boyfriend once described them as a cross between a penguin and Paul Giamatti. They have a grumpy stoicism about them, sitting hunched over with their long neck completely hidden away. I sometimes affectionately refer to these birds as “the colonels” (because of their location) or “my precious footballs” (because of their shape).

  Without really thinking about it, I modified my path home from the bus to pass by the night herons whenever I could, just to be reassured by their presence. I remember specifically feeling comforted by the presence of these strange birds, like I could look up from the horrifying maelstrom of that day’s Twitter and they’d probably be there, unmoving with their formidable beaks and their laser-red eyes. (In fact, I even found them sitting in the same place on 2011 Google Street View, and I have no doubt they were there earlier, but Street View doesn’t go back any further.) The KFC is near Lake Merritt, a man-made lake in a completely developed area that, like much of the East Bay and the Peninsula, used to be the type of wetlands that herons and other shorebirds love. Night herons have existed here since before Oakland was a city, holdovers from that marshier time. Knowing this made the KFC night herons begin to seem like ghosts to me, especially at night when the streetlights would make their white bellies glow from below.

  One of the reasons the night herons are still here is that, like crows, they don’t mind humans, traffic, or the occasional piece of trash for dinner. And indeed, crows were the other birds I had started paying more attention to. I had just finished reading Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds and had learned that crows are incredibly intelligent (in the way that humans measure intelligence, anyway) and can recognize and remember h
uman faces. They have been documented making and using tools in the wild. They can also teach their children who are the “good” and “bad” humans—good being ones who feed them and bad being ones who try to catch them or otherwise displease them. They can hold grudges for years. I’d seen crows all my life, but now I became curious about the ones in my neighborhood.

  My apartment has a balcony, so I started leaving a few peanuts out on it for the crows. For a long time the peanuts just stayed there and I felt like a crazy person. And then once in a while I’d notice that one was gone, but I couldn’t be sure who took it. Then a couple times I saw a crow come by and swipe one, but it wouldn’t stay. And this went on for a while until finally they began hanging out on a telephone wire nearby. One started coming every day around the time that I eat breakfast, sitting exactly where I could see it from the kitchen table, and it would caw to make me come out on the balcony with a peanut. Then one day it brought its kid, which I knew was its kid because the big one would groom the smaller one and because the smaller one had an undeveloped, chicken-like squawk. I named them Crow and Crowson.

  I soon discovered that Crow and Crowson preferred it when I threw peanuts off the balcony so they could do fancy dives off the telephone line. They’d do twists, barrel rolls, and loops, which I made slow-motion videos of with the obsessiveness of a proud parent. Sometimes they wouldn’t want any more peanuts and would just sit there and stare at me. One time Crowson followed me halfway down the street. And frankly, I spent a lot of time staring back at them, to the point that I wondered what the neighbors might think. But again, like the night herons, I found their company comforting, somehow extremely so given the circumstances. It was comforting that these essentially wild animals recognized me, that I had some place in their universe, and that even though I had no idea what they did the rest of the day, that they would (and still do) stop by my place every day—that sometimes I can even wave them over from a faraway tree.

  Inevitably, I began to wonder what these birds see when they look at me. I assume they just see a human who for some reason pays attention to them. They don’t know what my work is, they don’t see progress—they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week. And through them, I am able to inhabit that perspective, to see myself as the human animal that I am, and when they fly off, to some extent, I can inhabit that perspective too, noticing the shape of the hill that I live on and where all of the tall trees and good landing spots are. I noticed that some ravens live half in and half out of the Rose Garden, until I realized that there is no “rose garden” to them. These alien animal perspectives on me and our shared world have provided me not only with an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also a reminder of my own animality and the animateness of the world I live in. Their flights enable my own literal flights of fancy, recalling a question that one of my favorite authors, David Abram, asks in Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology: “Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?”20

  Strange as it sounds, this explained my need to go to the Rose Garden after the election. What was missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality was any regard, any place, for the human animal, situated as she is in time and in a physical environment with other human and nonhuman entities. It turns out that groundedness requires actual ground. “Direct sensuous reality,” writes Abram, “in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.”21

  When I realized this, I grabbed on to it like a life raft, and I haven’t let go. This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.

  * * *

  —

  I WANT TO be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that “doing nothing”—in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen—entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully. On this level, the practice of doing nothing has several tools to offer us when it comes to resisting the attention economy.

  The first tool has to do with repair. In such times as these, having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves—individually or collectively. There is a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. When overstimulation has become a fact of life, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.

  That’s a strategic function of nothing, and in that sense, you could file what I’ve said so far under the heading of self-care. But if you do, make it “self-care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This is an important distinction to make these days, when the phrase “self-care” is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming a cliché. As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (a book parodying goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-priced wellness empire), put it: self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”22

  The second tool that doing nothing offers us is a sharpened ability to listen. I’ve already mentioned Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in the broader sense of understanding one another. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”23 Unfortunately, our constant engagement with the attention economy means that this is something many of us (myself included) may have to relearn. Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a “take” after having read a single headline.

  I alluded earlier to the problem of speed, but this is also a problem both of listening and of bodies. There is in fact a connection between 1) listening in the Deep Listening, bodily sense, and 2) listening, as in me understanding your perspective. Writing about the circulation of information, Berardi makes a distinction that’s especially helpful here, between what he calls connectivity and sensitivity. Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units—an example would be an article racking up a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by like-minded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue: check the box. In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.

  Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous—and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in. Thinking about
sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.

  So connectivity is a share or, conversely, a trigger; sensitivity is an in-person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both. Obviously, online platforms favor connectivity, not simply by virtue of being online, but also arguably for profit, since the difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time, and time is money. Again, too expensive.

  As the body disappears, so does our ability to empathize. Berardi suggests a link between our senses and our ability to make sense, asking us to “hypothesize the connection between the expansion of the infosphere…and the crumbling of the sensory membrane that allows human beings to understand that which cannot be verbalized, that which cannot be reduced to codified signs.”24 In the environment of our online platforms, “that which cannot be verbalized” is figured as excess or incompatible, although every in-person encounter teaches us the importance of nonverbal expressions of the body, not to mention the very matter-of-fact presence of the body in front of me.