Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell is an artist and writer best known for her critique of digital culture and attention. Her debut book, How to Do Nothing (Penguin, 2019), became a cult text in tech and design circles, offering a radical reconsideration of productivity and presence in the attention economy. The book established Odell as a distinctive voice challenging conventional assumptions about how we spend our time and what constitutes meaningful activity.

Odell's work extends across multiple formats and platforms. She delivered the Harvard Graduate School of Design commencement address in 2020, bringing her perspective directly to a major institutional audience. Her second book, Saving Time (Penguin, 2023), continues her investigation into temporality, labor, and resistance to extractive systems. Through her practice as both artist and writer, Odell has documented her own departure from the attention economy to pursue study of birds and other forms of close observation, grounding her theoretical work in lived experience.

As a speaker, Odell offers audiences access to a rigorous, deeply considered critique of contemporary digital life. She articulates alternatives to productivity culture and the surveillance mechanisms embedded in social platforms, drawing on philosophy, art history, and personal observation. Her work matters because it moves beyond diagnosis of digital exhaustion to explore what resistance and refusal might actually look like in practice. Odell speaks to audiences seeking to understand their complicity in attention-extracting systems and to imagine different ways of being and thinking.