What Makes A Millenial?: Reading Odell and Malcolm Harris
In Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing”, she discusses her views of anticapitalism, anti-technology, and the attention economy. She uses the book as a call to activism to change how we live life. In her book, she cites many stories from her personal experiences, examples from other people’s lives, and quotes and ideas from books. While I was reading “How to Do Nothing”, I came across a quote that really interested me. It was from the author Malcolm Harris and it read
“If were built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers-and we are-then were hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses.”
When we had to pick a book to write another essay on, I wanted to get to learn more about the book that quote came from. Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials is about how the world has labeled millennials as laziest, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. Malcolm Harris examines the upbringing of this generation and the trends while they were growing up such as runaway student debt, the rise of the intern, mass incarceration, social media, and more. He talks about what it means to be young in America and how millennials were the first generation raised explicitly as investments. Kids These Days he dares us to confront and take charge of the consequences now that we are grown up. In this essay I will compare these two books and discussing if Malcolm Harris and Jenny Odell were in the same room, what would they agree and or disagree on.
In the book’s first two chapters, Harris maps the effects of a “hyper-capitalized youth control complex” that formed, he argues, in the last two decades of the 20th century. Harris thinks the American education system is either a workplace or a profit machine. One of the biggest themes in the book is college. Adults groom our generations to go to college and made to feel like a failure if you don’t attend college. Harris discusses the student debt crisis and the scam that is higher education. Harris makes clear that higher education has become a debt machine that profits everyone except students. He says that student loans are backed by college students’ ability to make money in the future. Not only to mention that colleges’ price tags have jumped 200 percent or more. Another chapter argues persuasively that primary and secondary education actually involves processes of labor capitalization we’ve cloaked in a “pedagogical mask.” In school, he says, “When students are working, what they’re working on is their own ability to work.” Childhood is “the time to accumulate the skills and abilities necessary to compete in a tough adult job market,” an “arms race that pits kids and their families against each other in an ever-escalating battle for a competitive edge”. Like for example how kids play instruments they hate because that looks good on their college application. He also discusses how we are a participation trophy and an “everybody is a star” generation. We are raised to enter the harsh world of adulthood, but also told we can do anything if we try hard enough. When we think we’ve tried hard enough, we give up. The rest of the book, while interesting, was not exactly things I felt like I could relate to. He discusses high-stakes testing, juvenile policing, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Unlike Odell, Harris gives us what he calls “Bop It Solutions” which are “Buy It!”, “Vote It!”, “Give It!”, and “Protest It!”. While these aren’t solutions to fix the world, they are little steps we can take on making the world a better place.
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In “How to Do Nothing”, Odell discusses the ruthless professionalism of childhood and education that Harris discusses. She relates this to one of her favorite things to discuss in her book, the attention economy. She says, “I’d further venture that this fear renders young people less able to compete individually or collectively. An atomized and competitive atmosphere obstructs individual attention because everything else disappears in a fearful myopic battle for stability. It obstructs collective attention students are either locked in isolated struggles with their own limits, or worse, actively pitted against each other.” She then uses those ideas and the quote I used in the first paragraph to discuss systemic abuses. She uses Facebook and the quitting of Facebook as an example of the attention economy and systemic abuses.
In “How to Do Nothing”, Odell speaks very strongly on social media. It is a relevant theme throughout the entire novel. She discusses digital detox and what life would be like without technology and social media, but how that is not a viable solution because our society is run by these social media companies. She also discusses social media and its relation to the attention economy. Social media capitalizes on our attention and makes it into revenue. We can not avoid this, however, as social media is something that we can not escape. Harris also talks about social media in “Kids These Days”. Since this book is all about millennials, what would it be without a section on social media? Harris agrees with a lot of the same ideas as Odell but also introduces some positives about social media. He discusses success stories on social media platforms and how social media has birthed some of the stars of our generation. On the topic of jobs created on social media platforms, Harris says
“This may not increase the number of people who can make a living doing any of these things, or the quality of their lives. It may not mean that more or better people can see their dreams realized. But it is a way for investors to profit off even the worst rappers and the weakest party promoters.”
Harris describes the way social media abuses the attention economy by saying “social media capitalizes on and further develops young people’s ability to communicate.” Both authors discuss how social media hinders individuality. I think in “How to Do Nothing”, Odell should have used this book to legitimize her ideas with other authors’ ideas. Instead of just using his ideas in a small section of chapter 3, she should have brought his ideas into her discussion of social media. In section 6.3, Harris discusses how social media affects the millennial character and the millennial situation. I think Odell using Harris’ ideas of how social media affects millennials would have been good points to add to her book. It would have helped strengthen her anti social media stance by including points of how social media affects an entire generation.
Odell discusses her anti-capitalist views of how little of our thoughts belong to us and, more devastatingly, how the time that’s taken from us forms our lives. Without time to do “what we will,” Odell says we’re left with 24 “potentially monetizable hours,” the space of which allows for leisure only where we’re willing — and financially able — to sacrifice monetary gain for it. She says, “In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living… time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’”. Activities that might be considered “nothing” in the capitalist framework, like “solitude, observation, and simple conviviality,” are to Odell inalienable rights “belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.” These ideas relate to Harris’s views on capitalism and the professionalism of childhood. He says, “The ‘capital’ part of ‘human capital’ means that, when we use this term, we’re thinking of people as tools in a larger production process.” Where Harris's ideas differ is on the ideas regarding childhood. He believes that childhood and education have become capitalized over the past 20 years. Schools are teaching children how to be good employees instead of teaching them creativity and how to learn. I think that if Odell and Harris were to discuss this topic, Odell would have no arguments. She would agree that kids’ childhoods are being capitalized.
Odell and Harris share many of the same ideas. They are both young authors, so their views are coming from growing up in the age of millennials. “How to Do Nothing” and “Kids These Days” are actually very similar books when it comes to their core values. They are both anti-capitalism, anti social media, anti attention economy, and both believe that just because the world sucks, you don’t have to struggle. You can do something about it. They both believe that the world can not be changed, however, you can change the way you interact with the world. Social media is not suddenly going to shut down, and the student debt crisis won’t just disappear into thin air. What we can do is live as Harris and Odell want us to and change what we can.
