[this book made me want to learn more about my local community - people and other earthlings. Finishing this book on Fourth of July is making me think about what narratives we are compelled to pay attention to through the attention economy.]
"This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of Chinese "nail house" blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough."
"I fully understand where a life of sustained attention leads. In short, it leads to awareness, not only of how lucky I am to be alive, but to ongoing patterns of cultural and ecological devastation around me - and the inescapable part that I play in it, should I choose to recognize it or not. In other words, simple awareness is the seed of responsibility."
"I've also learned that patterns of attention - what we choose to notice and what we do not - are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time."
"That's because this kind of thing always seems to be happening: those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they 'produce' can't be measured or exploited or even easily identified - despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides."
"In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for commercial evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on 'nothing.'"
"Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a 'take' after having read a single headline."
"How could accusations of selfishness be leveled on a school that taught altruism to the degree that one was expected to die for a friend? More practically, in order to build the kind of world that Epicurus wanted, he needed to close it off from the world. But his critics didn't see it that way. Clearly the students of The Garden felt deep responsibility to one another, but responsibility to everyone else was left out of the question. They had forsaken the world."
"Politics necessarily exist between even two individuals with free will; any attempt to reduce politics to design (Thiel's 'machinery of freedom') is also an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings. So when Thiel writes of 'new technologies that may create a new space for freedom,' I hear only an echo of Frazier: 'Their behavior is determined, yet they're free.'"
"Do you pack all your things in a van, say, 'Fuck it,' and never look back? What responsibility do you have to the world you left behind, if any? And what are you going to do out there? The experience of the 1960s communes suggest that these are not easy questions to answer."
"The story of the communes teaches me that there is no escaping the political fabric of the world (unless you're Peter Thiel, in which case there's always outer space). The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how."
"But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal."
"Suspicious of abstractions and education that prepared young people for careers in a diseased world rather than show them how to live a good life, he was once seen gluing the pages of a book together for an entire afternoon."
"Refusal requires a degree of latitude - a margin - enjoyed at the level of the individual (being able to personally afford the consequences) and at the level of society (whose legal attitude towards noncompliance may vary)... Differences in social and financial vulnerability explains why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students."
"If we're built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers - and we are - then we're hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses." - from Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris
"In contrast to I-it, I-Thou recognizes the irreducibility and absolute equality of the other. In this configuration, I meet you 'thou' in your fullness by giving you my total attention; because I neither project nor 'interpret' you, the world contracts into a moment of a magical exclusivity between you and me... All of this makes for a being that cannot be 'understood' or 'interpreted' (I-it), only 'perceived' (I-Thou). And that which cannot be understood - a once-and-for-all matter - demands constant and unmixed attention, an ongoing state of encounter."
"Let's not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors."
"At least until everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses 24/7, you cannot opt out of awareness of physical reality. The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to."
"I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind."
"Marwick and boyd describe how context collapse creates a 'lowest-common-denominator philosophy of sharing [that] limits users to topics that are safe for all possible readers.'"
"'You have one identity,' Mark Zuckerberg famously said. 'The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.' He added that 'having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.' Imagine what Audre Lorde, with all her different selves, would have to say to him."
"Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You thought about the call you needed to make, you went to the phone, made the call, and then you walked away. If you decided you had something more to say, you called back later. Not only that, the interaction was with the other person you had decided to contact. Even calling someone to chat aimlessly had more intention than many of the ways we communicate now."
"I would be surprised if anyone who bought this book actually wants to do nothing. Only the most nihilist and coldhearted of us feels that there is nothing to be done."
"If, as if I've argued, certain types of thought require certain types of space, then any attempt at 'context collection' will have to deal not only with context collapse online, but with preserving public and open space, as well as the meeting places important to threatened cultures and communities."
"Really, these are all forms of the same question. They are ways of asking: Where and when am I, and how do I know that?"
"It's a concept I call manifest dismantling. I imagine another painting, one where Manifest Destiny is trailed not by trains and ships but by manifest dismantling, a dark-robed woman who is busy undoing all of the damage wrought by Manifest Destiny, clearing up her mess."
"Somewhere between over-engineering and abandonment, Fukuoka found the sweet spot by patiently listening and observing. His expertise lay in being a quiet and patient collaborator with the ecosystem he tended to."
"When we pry open the cracks in the concrete, we stand to encounter life itself - nothing less and nothing more, as if there could be more."
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