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Recently I read Jenny Odell's book How To Do Nothing and I had a lot of thoughts about it. So I will say upfront what my main criticism is: like a lot of books I feel like it expends most of its interesting ideas in the beginning but then keeps going because we don't let folks publish 90pg books even though a very short but dense book would be so much more enjoyable than a 200pg sparse one.
So, that being said I was expecting a book that was going to be something more like Newport's Digital Minimalism or something along those lines but what I got was a book that was far more about artistic practice as resistance to both capitalism more broadly but also specifically a work culture that tries to encroach on our everyday life, blurring the boundaries of the time you're allowed to take for yourself into a background of unprotected part time work and personal branding.
Some of the interesting ideas in the book were that art can act as an effective counter to a lot of these brain-hijacking forces by drawing attention to environment, to maintenance, to the creation of community. She contrasts these artistic goals with the need to constantly innovate as a sole auteur. I felt a little bit personally called out as someone who is forever feeling like I need to do novel interesting things to matter when, in reality, it's probably far more important to make art that connects to community than to want to do things that are so unlike anything anyone has done before that I get to feel special.
She talks a lot about the idea that we tend to view our work as individuals creating ideas and works rather than everything being a product of community on some level and she ends up promoting the philosophy of regional ecology, where one tries to become very grounded in ones environment with all its contingencies, both as a literal thing one should practice to be a part of one's environment but also somewhat more metaphorically as an artist.
Again, I think the book ends up being spread a little thin across its page count---particularly as some parts don't all hang together well even when the points are good, like talking about social media as context collapsing is good but feels like a different book than the first few chapters---but I think there are good ideas that are worth reading about in it and basically anyone involved in the small internet would probably get something out of it and its discussions of performance art as resistance, art as a way of re-seeing once's environment in radical ways, and maintenance of space and community as art in and of itself.