This disassembled mind

Two Crows on a Pine Branch, by Kawanabe Kyōsai, ca. ca 1887

 From How to Do Nothing:

If we think about what it means to "concentrate" or "pay attention" at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing.  To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention.  We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action.  It seems the same on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a "movement" to move.  Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other. (81)

Odell goes on to say that this is important because collective action of any kind is impossible if we are each distracted: "A soical body that can't concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can't think and act."  She quotes Berardi's After the Future.... "For Berardi, the replacement of sensivitity with connectivity leads to a "social brain" that "appears unable to recompose, to find common strategies of behavior, incapable of common narration and of solidarity."

This "schizoid" collective brain cannot act, only react blindly in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger.  That's bad news for sustained refusal.  While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse -- not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed -- means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed.