
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
by Jenny Odell
Refusing the attention economy as a political act.
For you if
you feel your attention being harvested and want it back.
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Odell is an artist who got tired of her own feed and went birdwatching, and the book grows out of that. She argues that refusing to hand over your attention is a political act, and that the answer is not a digital detox but a closer look at the place where you live. It's part essay, part manifesto and part field guide.
Where This Book Lives
Pass with note: critics have pointed out that the premise assumes some leisure and a stable life, and that withdrawal isn't available to everyone. Odell is aware of this and argues for a rooted, collective version. Pairs with Enshittification and Rest Is Resistance.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Crip Camp(2020)
dir. Nicole Newnham & James LeBrecht
Same themes: Collective Action, Community
A summer camp that started a rights movement.
In the early 1970s, a ramshackle summer camp for teenagers with disabilities near Woodstock, Camp Jened, ran on hippie rules: no adults in charge of the kids' lives. The campers, among them co-director James LeBrecht and the future activist Judy Heumann, went on to organize the sit-ins and protests that helped win the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was produced for Netflix and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Why it’s here: The film shows that a movement can begin as a summer. What's punk is that the people it follows organize without asking permission, and refuse to be treated as objects of pity. What's pedagogical is the through-line from a place where kids ran their own lives to a federal law that changed what was possible. It's a rare entry on disability and civil rights, and a natural fit for DoCR's self-organization principle.
Where to watch: Streaming on NetflixLetterboxd ↗

At War / En guerre(2018)
dir. Stéphane Brizé
Same themes: Collective Action, Solidarity
The plant is profitable. It closes anyway.
Laurent Amédéo leads 1,100 workers at the Perrin plant — a facility that is profitable, whose multinational parent company has decided to close anyway. Stéphane Brizé shoots En guerre with the grain and rhythm of a documentary: non-professional actors in most roles, a handheld camera that can't find a comfortable distance, meetings that go nowhere for a very long time. Vincent Lindon is the union spokesperson who has to translate collective fury into procedure and back again, day after day. The film covers one stretch of a fight that most films would compress into a montage — the press conferences, the back-channel negotiations, the vote counts, the waiting.
Why it’s here: Brizé makes you sit in the room where a decision is being made about other people's lives by people who will never meet them. What's punk about En guerre is the refusal to let that feel abstract — the camera stays at plant-gate level, in the meeting room, on Laurent's face when the call comes in. What's pedagogical is the film's insistence on duration: you feel what it costs to keep a collective together when the institution on the other side is patient and the workers are not. For anyone who has been told that workers in France are just wired differently, that solidarity at this scale isn't something available to us — this film shows the material conditions that make it possible. And it shows what it costs even there.
Where to watch: Free on Tubi, Kanopy, HooplaLetterboxd ↗
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Aristophanes' Lysistrata: A Dual Language Edition
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The oldest sex strike in history. Still works.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
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Edward Said

How novels made empire feel normal.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Germinal
Émile Zola

They had nothing left to lose. They struck anyway.
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Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo

Twelve Black British lives, one unbroken chorus.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
Amina's Voice
Hena Khan

A shy girl sings out after her mosque is attacked.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers' Strike of 1909
Michelle Markel

One girl stood up. Twenty thousand followed.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Bread and Roses, Too
Katherine Paterson

Bread. Roses. Neither is optional.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
Phillip Hoose

She refused first. History forgot her anyway.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
