Is it time to get offline?
I like modern tech, but I'm slowly coming to hate the internet.
I read Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism late last year and found it preaching to the choir, but noticed that most of the negative effects of technology use were actually from internet use. The attention economy, privacy violations, enshittification, etc. are all mostly byproducts of the internet being so tightly integrated into our lives. When I heard about CVE potentially losing its funding (I know very litte about CS or anything related to software, so I'm unsure of how big a threat this really is to an end-user), the thought popped into my head... "is it time to get offline?".
I am 20 years old, so my entire life has been spent in a world where devices are connected to the internet far more often than not, and I wonder if it's time to switch to an "offline first" mentality? I already embrace this philosophy when it comes to music, downloading the songs I want to my computer and syncing them to my phone through iTunes, but this would take that one step further: turn on my computer's wi-fi to check emails, read through the new posts here, check some other sites, etc. and then turn it off until I explicitly need to do something online.
I'm lucky enough that most of the (important) things I do on my computer can be done 90% offline, but I wonder if it's even worth doing? I'm curious to hear thoughts on this from the people of Tildes, or any methods that you have implemented in your life.
EDIT: I should clarify: I already have basically no social media, I use beeper to see my instagram DMs (I can't really get rid of this without abandoning any age-adjacent social life) and that's it. You could call Discord and Tildes social medias, but that's maybe pushing it. I'm more talking about the recent resurgence of physical media and reframing the internet as something that is accessed rather than omnipresent in my usage habits.
One of the key resentments I have with life is the nature of food addictions, problems, and diet in general.
If someone has a problem with alcohol or drugs or smoking or sex, barring physical problems (tapering off drugs/alcohol), one can go cold turkey and completely quit any of those (at least in theory).
But with food, one still must continue to eat to survive. One cannot simply give up eating. So one must find a workable solution to eat, but not overeat; to eat, but to enough good things and avoid bad things that cause problems.
I feel it is somewhat similar with the internet.
First, it is difficult to go cold turkey completely because we depend on it for communications. Be it email for work or various social media to keep in touch with friends, it's hard to completely give up. And while I grew up in a world before even printing out directions from the internet, having to use general paper maps to navigate, there are so many useful tools that make life so much easier.
So perhaps instead of giving up the internet and giving up technology, you mean that you feel you have become overly addicted to certain behaviours that you feel¹ are negative and unhealthy.
And so, like with eating, I'm not sure it's really healthy to give all of that up entirely.
And very much like eating — when I was diagnosed with diabetes, I immediately stopped eating added sugar, i.e. sweets, non-diet soda, candy, dessert. Alas, I didn't know about carbs, but that's another story. The point is that I changed my eating habits. And a decade later when I had insurance and started to get my diabetes under control, I learned that consuming too many carbs led to increased hunger and overeating, especially if followed up with more carbs and insufficient protein and fat.
Learning how to eat healthily caused me to be able to keep my diabetes under control.
I think one should consider consuming the internet healthily. Not to give it up, but to figure out the negative behaviours and avoid them.
I find it difficult not to argue with people with whom I strongly disagree. For example, I am one of now finally very many who believe that fascism has come to the US. I find it difficult to engage with those that believe otherwise.
And I'm still struggling with that - to disengage from that. To find comfort talking to those with whom I do agree in hopes that it helps lead to action to save our country; but at least the catharsis of venting with those who see the same problems.
It is easy to spend too much time scrolling through content that is like sugar and addictive. So if you are finding your days lost with little to show for it, the solution is not to give up on the internet, but rather, change your browsing habits. Set a timer and allow a half hour or hour of scrolling. Try to find sources that are teaching you awesome things instead of mindless brain candy. But also appreciate that we sometimes need mindless brain candy - just limit that like you would limit yourself to a piece of cake instead of the whole thing; a cup or bowl of ice cream and not a whole half-gallon.
Or you can try to minimize that sugar consumption and seek your entertainment elsewhere - but do not think for a moment that you can't waste your time with video media (i.e. TV/etc); even books. You can waste your time² as people have certainly done throughout all of human history.
Just try to find a healthy balance if you've realized the balance is unhealthy. :)
When you work on the true root of the problem, you'll be able to avoid substituting one problem for another.
¹ And I would agree in general that things like doomscrolling and such are unhealthy if done too much
² We all need to relax. Not everything that isn't immediately productive is without benefit. As you need sleep every day, you need relaxation and entertainment every day.
I really love this response, and will definitely steal some of your analogy when talking to my friends about this stuff >:) but I should clarify: I already have basically no social media, I use beeper to see my instagram DMs (I can't really get rid of this without abandoning any age-adjacent social life) and that's it. You could call Discord and Tildes social medias, but that's maybe pushing it. I'm more talking about the recent resurgence of physical media and reframing the internet as something that is accessed rather than omnipresent in my usage habits.
The book mentioned by op in the initial post actually advocates for something similar to this - for intentional use of internet rather than the compulsive use we normally engage in. Meaning: use internet only if necessary, if it's the best way to accomplish the goal in mind, and if you can plan schedule and control the online time taken to do it. Things like that.
Great response and analogy. I will say though as someone who’s been struggling with hyper sexuality that sex is not in the same category as alcohol/gambling/cigarettes etc. While I agree to the extreme that you will die if you stop eating sex/intimacy in any form is also a life necessity (except for asexuals maybe) though maybe not to survive but to live.
One of my weird shower thoughts is that down the line, we will find that (outside of ace folks) sexual intimacy is necessary in some form, and that not partaking over an extended period of time results in some sort of psychiatric disorder. Given a lot of the new frontiers we are seeing in things like gut health, it wouldn’t surprise me if we find those sorts of odd connections elsewhere.
It seems like that if this were consistent enough to be a pattern, it would have been discovered when living a life of celibacy for religious reasons was more common.
I'm on the ace spectrum myself anyway so it seems especially silly as an idea to me tbqh.
I guess just as silly as asexuality seems to me. Maybe we’re just that different and having a hard time coping with the that idea.
I've got no trouble with conceiving of people being different, but I think "not having sex for an extended period of time causes a psychiatric disorder" is something that probably isn't true of the vast majority of allosexuals either, given the existence of plenty of counterevidence. In any case, I have no problem being immune to that particular risk.
I increasingly lean this way. IMO, modern social media has become a toxic FOMO cesspool ridden with ads -- the worst timeline of Instagram's original model. And since I can't stand short form video, even news sites are beginning to give me a bad taste in my mouth.
My positive spin on it? people first. I love Tildes because I get recommendations and thoughts entirely different from my own from a bunch of diverse, brilliant people. I find most social media uninteresting because that signal has been lost in a noise of self-promotion and marketing.
Find your people. Follow RSS feeds to keep up with the blogs of brilliant people you know. Maybe start a blog yourself so other people can keep up with your life outside of social media. Use sites like Tildes and hobbyist forums that still let people connect. Play video games online with your friends.
But don't consume the neverending stream of toxic Ghostbusters II pink slime that is modern mainstream social media. It will rob you of your time. Your attention. Your money. Your friends. And ultimately your happiness.
To add to this, you can also use RSS to follow many of their social media activities without having to play games with platform algorithms. Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit and YouTube all offer RSS feeds. As does Tildes, at least for new topics. There are also third party feeds for many websites, like for instance Hacker News.
Another thing that has made a big difference for me is that last year, I stopped visiting news websites and switched to daily and weekly news digests. I use Kill the Newsletter, which converts emails to RSS feeds. It has had the biggest positive impact on my mood and quality of life that I have made in years. I remain up-to-date about what's going on, albeit with some delay, but as I don't visit news front pages multiple times a day, I no longer get that hourly doze of doom and gloom that I did when I tried to keep up with the news cycle.
Almost all major news websites offer email newsletters, but I would also recommend adding Wikipedia's Current Events (the link is to a third party RSS implementation, you can find the Wikipedia page here) and News Minimalist to your news reader. Good news digests tend to be more detached and objective than ongoing news coverage, with fewer clickbait headlines and sensationalist takes. And since the things I am reading about have usually already happened, also I am more detached and find it easier to just note the facts and not get too emotionally invested. As an added bonus, I also save surprisingly much time every day by not getting sucked into the constant news loop.
If anyone has suggestions for good news digests or similar feeds, I'd been keen to hear!
I’ve managed to insulate myself from the worst of the internet’s decline, as I’ve been curating my browsing experience for decades with ad blockers, paywall bypasses, VPNs, and strict privacy settings and extensions. Whenever I step out into the open web on a different machine it’s like an ice bath. The garish nonsense is everywhere like walking through a Vegas casino. It’s like a frontal assault on your attentional faculties, I don’t know how people tolerate it. Must be a boiling frog situation, people don’t realize how bad it is because they’ve always been steeped in it.
I was an early adopter of Thefacebook (lol) but got off there eons ago. Never bothered with any of the other social media platforms, they all seem toxic to me. Reddit was the closest I ever came to frequenting that sort of site; I used it happily for many years but eventually jumped ship to Tildes and this is my primary online hang now.
So by and large, “my” internet is just fine. Don’t get me wrong, it has its problems and has been in noticeable decline as well. But the intentionality in how I view it helps I lot, IMHO. I know that can’t be a solution for everyone, but there’s still value in talking about it.
If you have the time and desire to write about it, I'd like to hear more about the technical ways you curate your internet. I'm using the basic stuff, ff, uBO, etc. but I haven't really gone as deep as I would like, mainly because I don't know where/how to start.
Sure! Happy to. Ironically I’m on my iPhone right now which is quite a bit less hardened than my PC, and I can’t detail specific config I’m using on there without it in front of me. But I’ll tell you what I can from memory.
First off, Firefox and uBlock Origin are essentials. IIRC uBO has a number of “lists” you can subscribe to that block other things than just ads, that kill “annoyances” like cookie notices and the like, those are opt-in and worth it. And if you’re comfortable with CSS, get familiar with making custom rules in uBO for the odd thing it doesn’t catch automatically.
Other extensions I recommend are Decentraleyes, CanvasBlocker, and Bypass Paywalls Clean. I recommend any reputable paid, privacy-vetted VPN. I use Mullvad and they’re great. They also have an ad-blocking feature you can enable for extra coverage if you want. Additionally, make sure you’re not using your ISP’s default DNS. I don’t remember if I’m on Quad9 or Cloudflare but they’re both good. If DNS-over-HTTPS is available make sure you use that. If you spend much time on YouTube, look into SponsorBlock. I use a FOSS “YouTube client” called FreeTube that has SponsorBlock support built-in, but it’s clunky and fragile enough that I can’t really recommend it for everyone. LibRedirect is a cool extension for redirecting requests for the big social media sites through privacy-respecting proxies, but the companies have been fighting back against those 3rd party sites. Nitter and Invidious are both effectively dead, for example, so YMMV with an extension like that.
On iOS I use Mullvad and a content blocker called 1Blocker. Mullvad’s ad blocking is especially valuable on iOS; it even blocks most ads in apps. I keep Safari permanently in private browsing mode since that prevents one tab’s cookies leaking to another tab. And Safari has its own rudimentary element removal feature I use sometimes. I also built an iOS shortcut that will fetch the archive.is snapshot of the current URL, that’s a pretty handy way to bypass many paywalls (and Reddit’s VPN block) on mobile.
On iOS, I strongly recommend checking out Orion, Kagi's browser. Vertical tabs and support for Firefox (and chrome) extensions is a KILLER feature. Completely changed my stance ion iOS browsing, which is only bearable in Safari IMO.
Thanks for the recommendation! Does that require a Kagi subscription? At the moment I’m happy with DuckDuckGo for search and don’t have much wiggle room for extra spend.
It does not, though I have to confess that I recently started paying for a Kagi sub and I do recommend that too.
I am strongly considering an Orion+ lifetime purchase as well. Only $150 to support browser development from an ethical company?
While I sometimes can get nostalgic about the time when using the internet meant turning on the computer, dialing up to the internet and counting the minutes before logging off again, I am not sure I could get back to that. And going completely offline is not feasible for most people in practice, but we can try to do is be much more intentional when we are online. Mindless scrolling on social media serves no purpose other than hoping something interesting will pop up. In a way, opening Tildes or an RSS reader is sort of similar in that you are not looking for something specific, but you are more in control of what you will encounter than on the big social media sites. I agree that much of the internet is now shit, but there is still plenty that isn't, and to a large degree, we choose ourselves what we spend time on. As long as it is intentional and with a purpose, and not mindlessly letting the algorithms control our engagement.
I would also add further that tildes and RSS is not engineered by entire departments of psych grads deliberately designing the site to take away your agency as much as physically possible with their algorithms, which I believe goes a long way too.
For the few social media sites which still allow some version of “literally just chronological (with occasional inserted ads)” they offer much more control to the user because they don’t actively try to manipulate your attention to work against yourself.
I work from home and need to be online at my computer during work hours, but I typically don't use my actual computer at all when I'm not working. I'll check my email or tildes a few times on the weekends (like right now) but for the most part I go offline. I don't physically turn it off or disable its connection, because I'll still play games on it streamed to my TV or other devices.
I also use a dumbed-down phone with the browser and most other non-essential apps removed, and don't carry it around with me when I'm at home. I've got an offline hardware mp3 player that I use for music and podcasts, and when I watch movies or TV I limit myself to just the one TV screen--if I find myself wishing I had something else to do then it means whatever I'm watching is probably just bad and I should turn it off and do something else entirely. I also have a few other specific-purpose devices with the majority of distractions removed (some with internet disabled entirely) for other various hobbies like writing, drawing, and gaming.
It's definitely possible to vastly reduce your internet usage (or at least the attention-sucking, enshittified aspects of it), and I really believe that it's done wonders for my mental health and general happiness. Not saying that it's a lifestyle that everyone could or should try, but it works great for me.
This is one thing that I have yet to get down with. I carry an Analogue Pocket or 3DS around in my bag for boredom-busting on the train, but I can't get over the usefulness of bluetooth and the simplicity of having music on my phone. I do suppose that was the original intention behind the iPhone, to combine an iPod and mobile phone into one tool.
I have a bluetooth dongle that lets me use wireless buds with the hardware player, but this is definitely one thing I go back and forth on more than anything else. The hardware player is running Rockbox which is kind of fun to tinker with sometimes, but it's also so much more convenient listening to podcasts on something that can connect to the internet.
To quote Steve Jobs from the 2007 iphone unveil keynote, "a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device". So, yep!
I would say we're definitely headed in that direction if not quite there yet. As a 40-something, I commend you for your insightfulness in recognising that getting (mostly) off the internet is in fact a possibility. To be honest, I've been under the impression that your generation wouldn't be able to even consider spending most of their days offline. I love being proven wrong and maybe this bias indicates that it's moreso myself who needs to cut down on the doomscrolling.
My time to get off will come once AI image generation and storytelling get divorced from human input to the degree where online spaces can become flooded with non-stop streams of AI generated content, making human-generated content impossible to find (humans must actually spend time designing and producing their content so we will definitely lose this race). Technically we probably aren't far off form this point as there are too many useful idiots egotripping on their "prompt mastery", unaware that instead of being "an artist" using "a tool", they are the tool being used by for-profit companies to train better AI models geared to replace them.
I guess there's still a chance that AI companies run out of critical funding before getting there, but the more dystopian alternative is that more funding will be provided by more and more morally dubious actors, which will make the ensuing dead internet even more hellish than it would have otherwise been.
I think the core part of this pretense is that–for my peers (and myself, to a certain extent)– using technology is being online. A decent chunk of my friends probably couldn't tell the difference between a web browser and a search engine, and it's really not their fault. The idea of having no internet is synonymous with having no technology, even though the actual hardware is still perfectly performant without connectivity.
I was watching an old episode of Good Game (an Australian video game review show) and the news segment mentioned how Ubisoft was introducing always-online DRM to their games, the fact that it was called "radical" was amazing to me, it took less than 15 years for us to get so used to the idea of being always connected, monitored, and restricted from accessing the stuff we paid for!
Part of my desire to disconnect before this happens is that–if I can become the "guy who doesn't really have an online presence" around my friends/family, I'll be significantly more protected from AI slop. If I'm only interacting with people in the real world, then I'll be sure that the person I'm talking to is real, and if I never post anything anywhere online, I'm not really a viable person to use as scam bait.
Yep. I've been resisting for all of those 15 years, starting with not subscribing to the Adobe Creative Cloud (even when I depended on Adobe software for my work), refusing when my mobile carrier cheerfully offered to automatically upload all of my device data to their free cloud service, etc. It just never seemed like something that would make my life better. So many people called me an idiot that have now finally seen the light.
A part of me is hoping that the dead/fake internet would happen as soon as possible, because at this limbo stage my work is kind of hard to pull off. It involves producing high quality objects using a painstakingly slow process and having to compete against rogue players who just use AI to make their offerings seem like comparable quality (which they aren't, not even close). When customers are disappointed, it of course undermines the entire field. If the general public eventually completely loses trust in anything they see online, then at least the playing field is levelled as everyone's work is again evaluated in real life. But that's not really great for me either because my customers are almost 100% abroad. They won't be coming to my country to inspect quality.
Out of curiosity, are any of your friends using AI as a therapist? It's another phenomenon that's caught my attention online. When you outsource some of your most intimate social interactions to a bot, your real life social skills will deteriorate and you'll be worse off. I worry that this will serve to socially isolate even more people even further in a world where "the loneliness epidemic" is already a thing.
I'm studying graphic design at uni right now, and this one hurts my soul. I'm tempted to grab a "lifetime" copy of the Affinity suite now just in case.
God, I hope not. That's the kind of thing that I don't think I'd hear about even if they were, because there's still stigma associated with both 'talking' to AI, and seeing a therapist at all (though, this one is way less prominent). That said, I've been in so many situations where a friend has googled something, and then I have to stop the conversation and tell them "you're looking at the AI generated answer, that means nothing, scroll a bit and find a real source". 9 times out of 10 the real info is just a few results down, and is completely different to what they read initially.
Scary shit.
Oh, do grab the Affinity Suite! It's what I'm using now. I do still have Adobe CS6 on an old laptop and 1-2 times a year I have to use it for something, but for the most part Affinity works as well or better than Adobe. The biggest obstacle is the learning curve when not everything can be done using the same workflows.
Disclaimer: obviously I'm not privy to what Adobe products are capable of these days as I haven't been using them, but judging by their most recent launch events they've taken a pretty awful direction - trying to serve unskilled non-designers rather than / in addition to the professionals.
If you do anything video/effects related, DaVinci Resolve has long outperformed Adobe Premiere.
Before I give my own view on this Eddy Burback recently ditched his phone for a month, not in a clickbait type of challenge but in a way I think is entertaining, well told and well considered.
On to my own take about it all. For reference, I am in my later 30s. Unlike you, I do have an active (although somewhat fuzzy) recollection of a time when being online was not as easy as it is today.
My job requires me to be online, but outside of that, I am trying to be more conscious about why I am online and when. @winther already covers part of that quite well, but I extend that to the devices I use as well. One of the things I am actively working on is not grabbing my phone whenever I have some "downtime" and want to "pass time". What I am noticing is that I am quite capable of entertaining myself in these moments through observing the world. It also gives me moments to actually think for myself.
Interestingly enough, by thinking for myself I don't even mean that I am actively organizing my thoughts. Often it is quite the opposite where it is an internal flow of "ramblings" and half thoughts about all sorts of things. Sometimes they lead me to some insights about something that has been keeping me busy, sometimes it just helps me in letting go of things, etc.
The main takeaway is that before I had less of those moments, in fact I mostly had them under the shower because there you obviously don't have any device within reach. Shower thoughts are not unique to showers, but in modern society much rarer as phones and computers constantly push information to you where you are passively consuming it.
I also have taken active steps to make the phone attract less attention. It is always on silent with it only vibrating for phone calls. For most applications I turn off the majority of notifications as well. Most things are not urgent enough to actively attract my attention, they can wait until I look at my phone and most notifications from apps don't need to be notifications at all.
The same principle I have extended to applications on desktop computers as well. Outlook notifications are largely off at work except for meetings. Slack/teams/etc are all on silent as well. If there is a red counter I know there is a message I need to check out, but I can do so at my own leisure. Technically this has less to do with being offline, but in my mind it is very much related. As this constant barrage of attention grabbing notifications only serve to distract me from my own thoughts and actions.
Besides working in IT, technology has been part of my hobbies for over two decades now. But in the past few years it has started to dominate to the point that basically all my hobbies are through my computer. Which wasn't always the case. I used to be quite the bookworm but in the past years started reading less and less. Recently I got myself a Supernote Nomad for journaling and general note-taking, which (after sideload koreader) is also quite nice as an e-reader. Having something to do to actively step away from my computer has been extremely helpful as well in disconnecting from the online world.
To wrap it up, I don't think going completely offline is really necessary. As I said, I remember the days from "before" and I really do appreciate the utility of modern phones and computers in many areas. But I have found a lot of benefit in being much more intentional in my actions, and I plan to keep exploring ways to be more intentional.
❗❗❗ This is something that I was made aware of from this HealthyGamerGG video, but still something that I've struggled to implement into my own life. I've made a note to do way more frequent tidying of my spaces, making of loose-leaf tea rather than a teabag, preparing/eating food in silence, because it gives me a chance to be bored and process the days events, but I don't know if there's something else I could be doing.
Difficult to say without knowing your other habits. Like I said, for me, it is the moments where I had gotten into the habit of grabbing my phone whenever I have nothing to do. One other thing comes to mind is that you can also more actively pick such moments. We are living in an apartment and recently the weather has gotten better, so at some point I decided to just hang out on the balcony and just do some people watching. Not actively watching for specifics, just leaning on the railing and just take it all in without too much focus.
Having said that, do you feel like you should be doing more? More specifically, do you feel like you are missing something? As I said in my previous comment, I personally don't need to be completely offline. I just want to be online on my own terms and choose my offline moments as well.
Because in my mind there isn't inherently something wrong with doing things online if I am the one actively reaching out for the information or interaction.
To me the insidious parts of many parts of the internet in the modern dag and age are those that try to lure you in and keep you there.
But when it comes down to it, I don't think there is a difference between someone reading a web serial online vs someone reading a book. Or someone reading a magazine or someone reading a interesting blog post.
Basically what I am getting at is that "online" is a container term that is incredibly broad. So it makes sense to stop for a moment and consider what you are actually talking about when you say "online". Does that make sense?
Fuck Cal Newport. The term "digital minimalism" already had a meaning (it means using the smallest programs with the smallest processor/RAM/HDD space necessary for the task) and he just clobbered it. And it doesn't have any other terms.
So now whenever I try to discuss the topic, if I try and use the one and only term then people think I'm talking about Cal Newport's term. I can't search "digital minimalism" to find any discussions on it, because all I find is Cal Newport's book matter, either.
Boo.
The bad news is: if the only other post using the minimalism.digital tag was referring to Newport's version, I think the tag refers to Newport's version. The good news is: you have the chance to coin a new term!
Feeling this heavily at the moment. Just recently deactivated IG and while keeping FB, I unfollowed all my groups and pages and nuked the ability to doom-scroll as much as possible. Also deleted the apps from my phone as a way to fight and notice the urge to jump into the firehose of despair.
Just doing this small amount has already significantly affected my mental health in a positive way. I realize I was despairing so hard that it was making me even avoid to do little things around the house. I was getting psychologically frozen.
My remaining use of the web I am HEAVILY curating now. I have deleted bookmarks, cut entire sites out of my online routine, etc
The main problem with social media algorithms is that they work slightly better at retaining your attention than anything that came before--even at the expense of anything else.
Small psychological effects like preferring to be in-the-know about negative news slightly more than positive news are over-amplified until everything is negative just to be perform slightly better in the hyper-competitive information markets.
Every few years I decide my social media and/or news consumption had become unhealthy, so I withdraw for a while as a kind of reset. It doesn't need to be a binary and it doesn't need to be permanent to see an improvement.
I mean more than one thing by unhealthy.
If it's spring where you are, this is a great time to cut back it take a break, it's nice out. Spring can feel like a reset or new start, I think that's why spring cleaning is a thing.
What I usually do is look at the times I'm consuming that I didn't used to. This usually means before bed and when I wake up, sometimes also during lunch. So I cut those out and usually end up replacing them with reading. This doesn't really help with the vision issue, but it's a step. Inevitably I end up with a book which I'm not enjoying very much, so I naturally find something else to do because I don't feel like reading. I think the Internet is really good at filling those times when you don't really have anything to do. Really, though there's nothing wrong with being bored or zoning out. That kind of mind clearing can give you the opportunity to figure out how you feel about something or come up with new ideas, things that are harder to do if your brain is engaged the entire time you're awake.
I have always made it a point not to be on my phone when I'm in person with someone, the person in front of me is my priority. This may be old fashioned nowadays, but it really does feel like it helps with connection.
I've had this top of mind. Recently I've been spending a bit more time just muscle-memory refreshing forums (Reddit and otherwise), and binging on TV, which doesn't feel great. I am also a citizen of my country, but I'm concerned about the surveillance of opinions. I used to go online for weirdness, human authenticity, and the wild west of honesty. The internet once seemed like more of a place to be human, if your day-to-day was regimented and constrained. (In a weird way, I loved 4chan for what it once represented-- not most of it, but the unfettered, generally benign cesspool of being able to 'do anything' online.) I also enjoyed the control and tinkering that comes of computers, but more and more, enshittification just compromises the ability to take things at face value. The only way to gain control is to reduce their access to you.
I've deleted social media (easy, minus letting go of relationships that were predicated on mutual use of it) and figured out what my alternative occupants could be: puzzles, baking, food prep. Things that busy the hands and occupy the mind without stress.
I'm trying to stop browsing Reddit entirely, decouple my finances from tech (I work as a software engineer, so being both online and on a computer is advantageous; it's hard to feel like I'm allowed to coast if I have a rent or equivalent mortgage), and eventually figure out how to decouple my phone's functionalities into other means until it's basically a fancy brick for 2FA (and only because passkeys aren't universally accepted).
I don't "hate" the internet, but I do severely dislike this version of what the Internet has become; and the internet became this way when the moneyed interests got involved and started to craft things into their image, and accrued enough power/authority to bend things to their interests.
Completely anecdotal, but I feel the "tipping point" was probably around the "YoU WoUlDnT DoWNlOaD a CaR" phase, and the mass audience took that messaging at face value.
Edit: I think better, healthier versions of the internet could absolutely exist, but it would require some robust regulatory practices from the Fed that would favor the human and not the business... And they've been favoring the business since at least the Carter Administration.
I use computers quite a lot. I'm a software engineer. I live in Silicon Valley. I hack on Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, etc. But I don't feel like technology is ruining my life. I use YouTube/Nebula for media but it's primarily educational content. I use Tildes/HackerNews for online discussion. Like how you can eat food without getting obese you should be able to use technology without ending up 3 hours into TikTok.
To be fair I don’t think subways were ever a popular way to socialize. And I don’t talk to anyone on the subway but I’m not disconnected from my community.
The best time to get offline was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
I labeled your comment as noise, but also realized that you are relatively new to Tildes so might not be aware of these labels and what they mean. See an explanation about them here. The reason I labeled your comment as noise is that while it is longer than just "this", it doesn't contribute much (if anything) to a discussion other than expressing a sentiment. Basically all you said is "yes, get offline" without saying why.
Oh, wow, noted. I was quoting the proverb:
But copy that. I know for next time.