Jenny Odell, the artist and writer, appears on my screen. She’s 35 years old, with long dark hair, a fringe, and big glasses with dark frames. She’s in her kitchen in Oakland, California. She loves nature and for a while she taught art and design at Stanford. In her art she finds objects and images, often on the internet, and arranges them into beautiful shapes. She likes looking at random things and thinking deeply about them. Four years ago she published a book called How To Do Nothing, where she explains that the internet, by being such a useful servant to us, has managed to turn itself into our master; the result is that we no longer pay attention to what’s really important.
Get off all those apps, she says, and start looking at the real world, which actually does need our attention. Barack Obama said How To Do Nothing was one of his books of the year.
