Monetized time and privatized space jointly price out unproductive leisure.

Evidence

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from “what we will.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 86

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the claimed theme that Odell isn’t recommending withdrawal but diagnosing how attention and time get captured; echoes the ‘manifest dismantling’ frame if it appeared earlier — connects to current debates about surveillance capitalism and attention economy. — connects to: Television privatizes leisure and thereby erodes community social capital — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining…, 67; Eroded economic security dissolves time boundaries toward always-monetizable hours — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 85; Capitalism treats time as a scarce factor convertible into surplus profit — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 194 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘compromised leisure, a freemium leisure’ invites testing whether this is genuinely descriptive or rhetorical — worth comparing to her later solutions for whether she shares the same economic frame.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Television privatizes leisure and thereby erodes community social capital — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining…, 67; Eroded economic security dissolves time boundaries toward always-monetizable hours — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 85; Capitalism treats time as a scarce factor convertible into surplus profit — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 194 (+2 more)