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Comment by crucialfelix | Hacker News Reader

6 months while travelling in India in 2003. I had brought my Mac, but on the 9th day some mysterious force blew the "daughterboard" and bricked it. So I had to devote myself to meditation and occasional slow internet cafes.

I noticed how much the screen alters perception. It's a bizarre 2d world. Completely unreal. We evolved to live in our bodies interacting with objects, but instead we end up glued to pathetic little screens, addicted to "information".

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As an American, I traveled in northern India for three months in 2004, two of them sedentary in Mcleod Ganj. It still resonates both from the contrast of India itself, but also in how I was able to happily fill my days without screens and fill them with friendly people. I'd amble around with my legs not unlike the way I amble around the Internet today. I'd 'waste' a half hour hanging out with strangers over metal cups of chai.

At the time, I had a Palm Tungsten and a foldup portable keyboard and would every day or so write a blog post on it. I'd send it out by putting its card (SD?) onto a USB adapter, dragging that to a slooooow Internet cafe where I'd hope I could connect to my Movable Type (Gatsby before there was reasonable JavaScript). If it didn't connect, no bigs.

It might have been the peak happiness of my relationship with the Internet. Just enough.

I got my invite to Facebook a year later.

I was up there for a month or two and did Vipassana there in 2003. It was wonderful. I met many very interesting people.

The town was already overpopulated for its size, but these days I hear it's really extreme. I talked to somebody who was born and grew up there. He said that now there are so many hotels and concrete developments all over the hills. It's just a mess.

I can only imagine. As if _where we are_ is a living thing as well.

I remember at the time there was a bend in the road where you'd face the beautiful Himalaya across the valley, but if you looked down the near embankment you'd see where all the bajillions of plastic water bottles were disposed of for a town that didn't (yet?) have a plan for them. Only tourists such as myself drank them.

Was there and in nearby places a year ago, and it's the same story that happened to Manali and now Kasol. The interesting culture and crowd move somewhere, it becomes a hub, it becomes overly crowded, and people move again.

It feels to me that the screen almost becomes perception after heavy usage. Like navigating a device and the apps within it becomes just another part of the world that we can interact with. And when we use a device we can go almost instantly from a thought to executing that thought by opening an app, making a google search etc. So it's almost as if the fact that things "lag" in the physical world, that it requires us to move and force things and use energy to action things is a positive. That friction between thought and outcome maybe is something that we need.

"Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, have the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension." - Marshall McLuhan

I don't deny our new super powers, but you have to take a break to let the perceptual system reset (eyes, feeling, smell, intuition). This is what is getting amputated. We don't realize it because we are stuffing our visual channel with information.

Much of this gives the impression we are powerful, but it's just overloading the circuitry. It's like primitive humans getting sudden access to salt sugar and fat and just gorging themselves.

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