“Live, Shop, Work & Dine in New York,” reads the tagline of Hudson Yards, a luxury neighborhood in the “Manhattan’s New West Side.” The HY advertises itself as a collective, a “cultural center” that’s “not only changed the way New York looks to the world, but the way the world sees New York.” HY’s website…
Actually Doing Something – 10/23/2023 Throughout my reading of Jenny Odell (2019) I kept thinking about David Foster Wallace (2005), his speech “This is Water”. Lo and behold it appears in chapter 5, “The Ecology of Strangers”. Doing the kind of nothing that precipitates action/change requires acute awareness of having other options from what you’re…
I’m very sensitive to the precarity of doing nothing for people who are not in a position to do nothing. Jenny O writes that the “removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries” between them and their employers (15). So even in my own experience, I’ve been unfairly berated by union reps for…
Han (2022) states that “Today, there are probably very few things to which we would grant… and honorable farewell.” While reading, I have found myself morose and discouraged reading Han’s text on the non-thing, and looking for ways that I resist or fail to fit into his dismal picture of a digitized and data-fied world….