Life Beyond the Clock with Jenny Odell

Do you ever feel like time is marching in a particular direction? Towards, say, rising global temperatures, mass extinctions, ever-increasing divisions — and ultimately, towards inevitable collapse? What if this particular perception of time contributes to our feelings of despair and hopelessness about our futures? What if it limits our ability to imagine and fight for a more just, equitable, and regenerative system?

In this conversation, we’ve brought on Bay Area artist and author Jenny Odell to help us unpack and reimagine our experience of time and to foster hope and inspire action for a better future. We focus on insights and stories from Jenny’s two books, her 2019 New York Times Bestseller How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and most recently, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock.

In this conversation, we learn about the commodification and colonization of time under capitalism, how it happened, when it happened, and how the fungibility of time contributes to human and planetary suffering. We explore her unique reframe of classes to include those who time, those who are timed, and those who self-time. We also talk about a more ecological and place-based sense of time, a life beyond the clock, unbound from capitalism, that shows that neither our lives nor the life of our planet is a foregone conclusion, that we are not alone in our efforts to dismantle capitalism, and that the more-than-human world is actually an active participant in the endeavor — and here to help. 

Thank you to Carolyn Raider for this episode’s cover art and to Bowerbirds for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond/Lanterns.

Further Resources:

• Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock, by Jenny Odell
• How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell
• The Bureau of Suspended Objects
• Where Almost Everything I Used, Wore, Ate or Bought on Monday, April 1, 2013 (That Had a Label) Was Manufactured, to the Best of My Knowledge

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