Jenny Odell Interviewed

I first encountered Jenny Odell’s work reading her book, How to Do Nothing. Treading the line between self-help and political manifesto, she spins a convincing argument against the attention economy, rejecting the isolating effect of a life lived on the internet. Instead, she proposes attunement to nature as a way to resituate ourselves in the physical world. I particularly resonated with Odell’s work because of how she wrote about her hometown of Cupertino, California, near my hometown of Sunnyvale. Although both suburbs have gained near-mythic status as homes to some of the world’s most powerful tech giants, Odell succinctly names the uneasy placelessness of a region that has come to define itself by its successes within the digital realm. In doing so, she creates new ways of looking and by extension, locating. The power of Odell’s writing lies not in identifying, but in combating this ahistorical placelessness through her research that excavates overlooked geographies.