![]() ![]() ![]() In her book, Odell, an art professor at Stanford, chronicles her research on how to gratify the need to stay informed without trapping oneself in the exploitative “attention economy” of social media. During a check-in conversation, a friend recommended a book that he thought would help me: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, an artist based in Oakland. ![]() ![]() I was glued to social media, more than at any other point during the summer, doomscrolling through images of apocalypse. I was living with my mom after graduating college in May and had the privilege to sit at home and be fed, while watching ash rain down from the sky. I didn’t have one friend in Oakland who wasn’t suffering in some way, mostly artists who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic. The George Floyd protests that rocked Oakland for weeks straight met with a devastating yet predictable reaction from the Oakland City Council, denying a proposal to cut the police budget by a single vote. Houselessness in the Bay Area was reaching catastrophic levels with little help from the government. Amid record heat, we were experiencing the worst fire season in history. The COVID-19 death rate in California was reaching record highs every day. IT’S AUGUST 2020, and California is on fire - a fitting end for a summer that many believed could not possibly have gotten worse. ![]()
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