Episode 352: Jenny Odell

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2019

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. “I’ve noticed that the times I’m extra susceptible to being on social media is when I am feeling personally insecure or when I’m dealing with existential dread. That within itself is not part of the attention economy—that’s just a human being having feelings and reacting to things. For me, it’s a question of like, ‘What do I do with that?’ I can either feed it back into the attention economy and actually get more of it back—more anxiety or more existential dread—or I can go in this other direction and spend time alone or with people who care about the same things. Those are places where I can bring my feelings and they won’t destroy me.” Thanks to Mailchimp, Substack, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. @the_jennitaur jennyodell.com Jenny Odell on Longform [00:49] How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House • 2019) [00:51] ”How To Do Nothing” transcript of keynote talk (Medium • 2017) [01:10] “A Business With No End” (New York Times • 2018) [02:30] Evan Ratliff on Cointalk [02:42] The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. (Evan Ratliff • Random House • 2019) [03:18] “There’s No Such Thing As A Free Watch” (Museum of Capitalism • 2017) [05:05] The Bureau of Suspended Objects [16:55] Gordon Hempton’s “Desert Thunder” [29:27] Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (Adam Greenfield • Verso • 2017) [37:32] Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer • Milkweed Editions • 2015) [39:25] “Notes of a Bioregional Interloper” (SFMOMA • 2017) [53:30] Mark Lombardi’s drawings [56:40] “On How to Grow an Idea” (Creative Independent • 2018) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	In December 2020, a Latino couple was falsely accused by a white momfluencer of attempting to kidnap her children.
0:07.0	The Karen phenomenon where white women falsely accuse people of color of crimes usually fixates on the
0:13.5	accuser the so-called Karen. But for this series we focus on the
0:17.2	innocent couple at the heart of this story. I just want the public to know
0:21.9	what she did was wrong.
0:24.0	In Perfect Paradise People versus Karen,
0:26.4	available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to the long form podcast. I'm Max Lindsky. I'm here with just one co-host. Aaron Lamer, how are you, sir?
0:41.0	The recent, the floodwaters have receded from my basement studio here in Williamsburg
0:46.2	and we are left with the feign scent of sewage.
0:49.9	Yeah, it's a little musty, but it's fine.
0:52.4	Evan is in Mexico. Hope Evan's enjoying himself. Yeah, it's a little musty, but it's fine.
0:52.5	Evan is in Mexico.
0:53.8	Hope Evan's enjoying himself.
0:55.7	Mexico.
0:56.7	Uh, who's you have in the show this week?
0:58.6	This week on the show, I had Jenny O'Dell.
1:01.6	She is an artist. She's based out in Oakland and she does work that's, I don't know, it's very hard for me to distill it.
1:10.0	Multidisciplinary. Yeah, she does really brilliant stuff around the line between our
1:16.2	digital and physical worlds and she has a book, it's called How to Do Nothing,
1:21.0	came out of a talk she gave in the wake of the 2016 election and it's about many, many things, but it's primarily about the sort of attention economy and how we are all working all the time now. We're all optimizing all the time and how we might be able to break that.
1:37.5	She also wrote that I think it was in the Times that story about all of those weird fake Amazon storefronts that led to other times that then Bought Newsweek magazine. Yeah, she wrote that.
1:53.8	It was in November in The Times,
	...

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