I was thinking of one of the questions proposed in class for the blog carnival as telling a story of recent repairs, and I could not get my mind off repair as “rejection”. This repair includes interactions with physical and digital things and non-things, with me as the hub at the center. I have had…
One of the most manipulative aspects of the like vs. dislike framework is how much it limits our encounters with ourselves and others. Odell writes about how algorithms “incrementally entomb” us until we become a static, deeply monolithic sum of our likes—an ‘us’ that fosters self-understanding through tidy, world-shrinking formulas shrouded as play (137). Meanwhile,…
Power centers want the people in the margin to unquestionably follow the rules they had set. Noncompliance has no space in the process of profit-making. Therefore, in a capitalist culture of productivism, refusing to produce (what the system demands) is an act of resistance. However, refusal is deeply connected to the activist’s background, social status,…
The Yorkie is smaller in height than an average blade of grass. To her, everything is supersized, bombastically large, critically unmoored. There is no context, no meaning to convention beyond raw joy. She is open to everything and closed to none, the natural enemy of the attention economy aside from that of tennis balls. I,…
Odell conceptualizes “nothingness” from different perspectives, including its antithesis to “busyness” in present times. She defines busyness as what Robert Louis Stevenson called a “symptom of deficient vitality” and “a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.” (qtd. on pdf, p. 8)….
“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…
I was thinking about how the simultaneousness of nearness and distance has been a benefit of the development of phones and other digital tools as I read the passage where Han discusses it (p. 55). When my dad and I talk about how much we miss each other, he often says, “Thank God for phones…
It’s funny because I’d been working on my duck face all summer only to encounter Han and get told that my engagement with an informaton turns my countenance in a non-thing that is information, or a digital illusion. But so what? If we must abide a terrestrial order, why can’t our lives be optimized to…