By her own admission, Jenny Odell’s book isn’t saying anything new, but the terms of reference are bang up to date for a new generation inured to personal branding, social monoculture, and the reification of the self: “It is within a blasted landscape of neoliberal determinism that this book seeks hidden springs of ambiguity and inefficiency.” What she goes on to prescribe as the solution to the multiple distractions competing for our mental energy approximates the concept, familiar in many Eastern religious practices, of being “in the zone”, or its more recent iteration of “flow”.