Now and then I do that, just to switch off from our hyper-connected world. Switching off is the new peace of mind.
Sure, it might still be technically legal to ride a horse down the street. But soon enough, people started putting in multi-lane highways. Also, stores took out their hitching posts. Then we started designing cities around the car, so what used to be a mile away is now 10. And half of that distance is consumed by parking lots.
I haven't ridden a horse since I was 3 or so, but I rode a steam train through town last Sunday, which would be period accurate with your horse, and people smiled. They waved and took photos and thought it was really cool. Which it was.
It isn't practical, as you say, but it is pretty awesome. And because of that people will accommodate you.
Yes, you can use a paper atlas. I have an 8-year-old car with GPS, and a 34-year-old car without. I bought a map book for the 34-year-old car, thinking it'd be a "period accurate" way of driving it; it's anachronistic at best, and frustrating at worst - can you read the street signs, and did you drop your compass under the seat? In the 8-year-old car, I can hit a button, say "Navigate to (an address)" _while driving_, and it figures it out.
Some of these I do on principle (only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, etc.), and I accept a compromised UX as a result. Your mileage may vary, depending on how much you get out of these things, but the immediate impact of them seem generally negative.
You can get battery powered compasses that you stick on your dash. :)
My car's review mirror has a compass in it and I use it for navigation quite often.
Places I had to drive to before GPS are places I have a better understanding of how to get to. I have a friend who refuses to use GPS and his knowledge of the city is far far ahead of mine.
Of course I am lucky to live in a place built on a true x-y coordinate grid system where given any address you can navigate to it w/o issue using, well, just a compass. :)
I wouldn't try that trick in London! :) (There is a cool documentary about London cab drivers and what they have/had to go through to memorize the entire city)
Also google corrects car review mirror to rear view. :)
It isn't. You'll just be an anachronism. If the entire world isn't living the same way then you are only getting a superficial experience. Instead of living a genuine life, you are merely pretending for a while.
That's usually the point where I go into my "facebook is spyware" spiel, with predictable results.
But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind. At all. The only compelling reason to use them is social pressure.
You know better than that. You don't have to lie to try and make a point.
This statement may be hyperbolic, but at its core is not wrong. Smartphones are very easily a net negative in terms of cost/benefit to society. They're ubiquitous because they're addictive, not because they're so wonderful. Everyone used to smoke too, then we came to see the massive damage cigarettes were doing. Smartphones are just cigarettes for the brain.
The internet is also more than just mindless entertainment and social media. GPS isn’t necessary, but they do more than just find stuff they also route you around traffic accidents and locate the closest drug store on a trip. Downloading an instructional YouTube video really helps with home repair, etc.
In app purchases are toxic, but you can also just download a free chess app no gamification required.
Benefit? Probably not. Social Pressure? I'd say it's mostly the same addictive behavior that's built into slot machines.
There's been a lot of high speed evolution that has gone into modern products. Fast food, social media, the perfection of pop music production. The unsuccessful die off.
All those billions of fools being tricked into using them! I can see an argument that the downsides of social media outweigh the benefits of access to nearly unlimited knowledge, but I don't even agree with that argument. I spent more of my life without smartphones than with, and I still 100% would rather have them than not. The access to the knowledge alone is amazing. Stuck out in the middle of nowhere? A quick google search gets you home. Traveling around in the middle of nowhere without a map isn't actually that great of a life lesson after the first time or two. And I live in the "first world" - the benefits to third world countries are profound.
The OP point doesn't seem to be about moving anything backwards, but moving yourself forward by selectively disengaging from certain things.
My PhD advisor once went to a beach resort with his family. Fifteen days in a remote venue without wifi nor cellphone network. He was the kind of person who replies a saturday midnight mail with an absurdly technical and detailed answer, within less than one hour. I thought it would be torture to him. When he came back he told me that it was the most productive two weeks on his life. He wrote two nearly complete paper drafts and proved several theorems. Some things that he couldn't check on the literature were carefully noted.
After that he realised how absurd and unproductive it is to spend your whole life connected to the email and subject to excessive social pressure. I guess having email-free days, or even mornings, would be a productivity boost to many intellectual jobs (unless your job consists in actually replying to mails).
I've been doing this a fair amount lately, particularly when I go on vacation. It's glorious.
There are some inconveniences, for sure, but the good outweighs the bad. Most of what drives my tech use these days is 1) My job, and 2) The social expectations of others. On balance smartphones and ubiquitous internet have benefits, but the bad far outweighs the good. Unfortunately, once a technology is embraced by enough people, you're more or less forced to use it if you want to live in mainstream society.
Ditto for most restaurant menus in a lot of places: they are QR codes now, that point to URLs.
Airlines will only let you book with cards, no cash.
I'll fire up a machine for video or photo editing once in a while or sheet music work, but otherwise they're not much use.
One problem is being too old to care about video games. When Space Invaders came out I couldn't imagine that people would choose that over pinball or foosball. My loss I guess.