Economic precarity shrinks people’s margin for refusal

Evidence

Taking a cue from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” who answers not “I will not” but “I would prefer not to,” I look to the history of refusal for responses that protest the terms of the question itself. And I try to show how that creative space of refusal is threatened in a time of widespread economic precarity, when everyone from Amazon workers to college students see their margin of refusal shrinking, and the stakes for playing along growing. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 37

Categorization

• XREF: Precarity-refusal tension echoes the Frankfurt School account of authoritarian adaptation under economic insecurity and Milgrom’s cost-of-defection analysis. — connects to: Refusal requires a margin from economic vulnerability — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 303; Refusal requires social and financial margin most people lack — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 299; Refusal requires a margin of individual and social latitude (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Worth interrogating whether Odell’s refusal-in-place solution requires exactly the privilege (employed Amazon worker, enrolled student) that precarity erodes.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Refusal requires a margin from economic vulnerability — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 303; Refusal requires social and financial margin most people lack — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 299; Refusal requires a margin of individual and social latitude (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Refusal requires a margin from economic vulnerability #corroborates (0.97) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 303
• Refusal requires social and financial margin most people lack #corroborates (0.95) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 299
• The new employment contract erodes the margin for refusal #expands (0.92) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 313
• Unemployment makes people passive and withdrawn rather than radicalized. #complicates (0.72) — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 641