Jenny Odell

I think that what social media was lacking for them, and what they eventually found in physical meetings and slower media like magazines, was what Hannah Arendt called “the space of appearance.” For Arendt, the space of appearance was the seed of democracy, and it was defined by any collection of people who speak and act meaningfully together. Although it is fragile, the space of appearance can arise anytime these conditions are met, and they have to do with proximity and scale. “The only indispensable factor in the generation of power is the living together of people,” Arendt writes. “Only where men live so close together that the potentialities for action are always present can power remain with them.”

If you become interested in the health of the place where you are, whether that’s cultural or biological or both, I have a warning: you will see more destruction than progress.

This is where I think the idea of “doing nothing” can be of the most help. For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.

In a time increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene (a geologic era in which the environment is irreversibly shaped by human activity), I find Donna J. Haraway’s term for this era even more useful. She calls it the Chthulucene, in which “the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.” In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway writes, “One way to live and die well as mortal critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and re-composition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.”23 With this in mind, when the logic of capitalist productivity threatens both endangered life and endangered ideas, I see little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought.

The dynamism of this plural encounter is what underwrites the possibility of power; we know this intuitively from the form of the dialogue, where the interplay of two arguments leads to something new. Audre Lorde’s reminder to white feminists that difference generates power comes to mind when I read Arendt’s description of power:
[Power]’s only limitation is the existence of other people, but this limitation is not accidental, because human power corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin with. For the same reason, power can be divided without decreasing it, and the interplay of powers with their checks and balances is even liable to generate more power, so long, at least, as the interplay is alive and has not resulted in a stalemate.

It’s a bit like falling in love—that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else’s, that you are no longer your own. But isn’t that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming, or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with these “strangers,” not just now, but for life.

Gould herself described the potential site as an opportunity for all of us simply to remember “our compassion, conscience and civility, to learn to be human again, together.”

Consider two things in tandem. First, people in wealthier neighborhoods almost always have more access to urban parks and to parkland, on top of the fact that such neighborhoods are often in the hills or by the water.

In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention: privileged spaces where some (but not others) can enjoy the fruits of contemplation and the diversification of attention

Second, consider that while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically determined children’s content on YouTube,18 Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children’s use of technology at home.