I'm leaving the Internet for a year
theverge.com
theverge.com
But I still have to question the viability, and ultimately the value, of this honestly rather extreme abstentionism. If he were moving to a village in Thailand, things would be different – he'd be surrounded by people who don't need the internet, and the society he'd be living in wouldn't expect him to use it.
But, as far as I can tell, he's staying in NYC. The penalty for disconnecting is going to be disproportionately greater there than it would be in a society that doesn't expect even its homeless to be able to get government forms from an internet-connected computer in a public library. He can try to live in New York circa 1992, but he's ultimately going to be expected to live in New York 2012.
I think a more productive self-denial would be to limit one's internet usage to libraries and internet cafes. Cancel the FiOS and 4G, divorce yourself from Twitter and email, but leave the option open of making a trip down to the library to take care of the things in your daily life that actually require the internet.
My parents moved to city that they had never been to at about that time. My mom had to call the directory to ask for realtor so they could find some place to live.
It was back when people actually used the phonebook to look up phone-numbers. It is that long ago.
Today almost none of the tech in available. Payphones still exist, but you have to know where they are -- and they are not exactly cheap.
Heck he can't even buy stuff at a supermarket, since those computers are almost certainly wired to send the purchase information back to be mined for data. And that wasn't unheard of back then. Today? Do they even have a directory anymore?
I think we all know that it's possible to "go rural". Many have done it.
What Paul is doing is far more interesting and valuable to him as a tech journalist. I see this as a research project, not as a rejection of the web. To quote:
> Now I want to see the internet at a distance. By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul. What I worry is that I'm so "adept" at the internet that I've found ways to fill every crevice of my life with it, and I'm pretty sure the internet has invaded some places where it doesn't belong.
He will still live in NYC, still write tech articles, but by disconnecting he will constantly have some distance from the material. I will be happy to read his observations on the field around him through his new perspective.
Having spent a few months in a village in Northern Thailand, I was quite happy on the speed our internet connection was usually providing us. Generally used for checking email, skype, news and that passive income sources were still working.
Going rural in more remote places, where the area is cut off by rain or snow for some months of the year is far more challenging and interesting, at least for me. It shouldn't be, its the lives of the folks who live there everyday, we're just rather more lucky, most of the time.
When I lost house connected internet for a week, having to use libraries and cafes in Canada was far more challenging, in terms of scheduling time to go and use, than it was using the internet in a rural Thai village.
Good luck paying bills and checking your bank account (ATMs are an alternative) & investments when you can't use the internet & they now issue e-bill/e-statement, unless you pay extra for paper.
Paul David[2] is an economic historian who pointed out that factories were completely redesigned once people realized they didn't need to be centered on a steam engine:
Electric light bulbs were available by 1879, and there
were generating stations in New York and London by 1881.
Yet a thoughtful observer in 1900 would have found little
evidence that the "electricity revolution" was making
business more efficient.
Steam-powered manufacturing had linked an entire
production line to a single huge steam engine. As a
result, factories were stacked on many floors around the
central engine, with drive belts all running at the same
speed. The flow of work around the factory was governed by
the need to put certain machines close to the steam
engine, rather than the logic of moving the product from
one machine to the next. When electric dynamos were first
introduced, the steam engine would be ripped out and the
dynamo would replace it. Productivity barely improved.
Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be
completely redesigned on a single floor. Production lines
were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials
around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could
have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or
stopping it at will. The improvements weren't just
architectural but social: Once the technology allowed
workers to make more decisions, they needed more training
and different contracts to encourage them to take
responsibility.
The overall phenomenon is really just Marc Andreessen's thesis[3] in another guise. Today, "Software is Eating the World", and software engineers + the internet are automating processes and arguably obsolescing many jobs. But if we warped back 80-90 years or so, we'd say that "Electricity is Eating the World", and electrical and mechanical engineers were the ones automating processes and obsolescing jobs.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO_plan
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_undercover_economist/...
[3] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...
The greater the number of constraints you can release, to a greater degree, the more likely you are to prompt a revolution.
Could you also provide a link to more information about "Honda's dark factories"? I have no idea what it is, and Google did not help me.
Or the lack of it.
If he's married, I'd wager 90% of those things will still get done over the internet; but instead of clicking a mouse, he'll ask his wife.
I just won't use the internet in my personal or work life,
and won't ask anyone to use it for me.I'm sure there are some Amish* communities that would take you in and let you hammer some nails while you get back to your non-technological inner being.
* That's always what they seem to do in movies to the point of being a cliche.
I do think there's legitimate value to the idea-- I'd bet most people would be a lot happier without electricity or indoor plumbing than we'd imagine.
But I think if somebody decided to try it for a year, a guy saying "No electricity, huh? Are you gonna stop cooking your food, or are you just doing like a halfway thing?" would sound like an asshole.
Also, what gives with calling my good-faith request for clarification an "attempt to suppress" you? I could have just downvoted you and moved on if that's what I wanted.
I think only someone who has grown up with both of those advances would be able to make this comment with a straight face.
Ask anyone who has nearly frozen to death in the winter because they couldn't afford their electricity bill what they think of that statement.
Or anyone who nearly died from cholera because of drinking from the nearest river due to no water utilities what they think of that statement.
I'm not writing this to be hostile. It is simply a statement that the "good ol' days" were not really so good afterall.
I haven't done it myself, but I have a good friend who spent a couple winters in a cabin in rural Vermont. It's not that bad. You buy enough firewood to last, and get water from the well. It gets cold at night, but you've got a roof and a fire and a sleeping bag, you're not going to die. You can walk and hitchhike to the hospital in the nearest town, if you get sick. Really, the biggest issue is loneliness.
Sure, you give up a lot of comforts which I wouldn't want to, but people lived that way in good spirits for thousands of years. Empirical evidence suggests we have more or less the same capacity for unhappiness regardless of circumstance.
I dabble in a blog featuring $1 meals. I get snide quips from people criticizing "oh, but are you taking costs of running a gas/electric stove into account? betcha haven't taken THAT into account!" So...several meals posted (or coming soon) are indeed cooked over an open fire of random deadwood.
So lighten up. The query is a half-serious challenge to go a step further. Those of us who HAVE lived without Internet for significant periods know it's not that big a deal (though not trying to trivialize it either) and think a good comparable exercise IS to shut off the main breaker, shred the credit cards, and shift into a lower gear for a while. Sounds harsh to some, sounds like a delightful challenge to others.
Clearly I need to stop taking everything so serious.
Meanwhile, we'll be laughing about it.
Electricity is very impactful. But most things that it provides had analogues, at least for the middle to upper classes. Servants fulfilled the role that appliances now play. Horses provided fast enough transport, because the scale of cities were smaller, etc.
All analogies will break down somewhere, but most modern electrical conveniences have fairly close analogues in the past. But nothing seems like the internet.
Now imagine showing someone from 1990 what things are like in 2012 with the internet we have today. While they would think it's "neat" and even "amazing", the magic effect would not be there.
The internet is cool, no doubt, but it's not the leap that electricity has been.
The effects of the internet are largely invisible. Some people today still don't get the internet at all. The world around them changed, but they can't notice. But for someone who does get the internet, it can completely change how you live your life.
I wonder what the biggest "future shock" for (let's say) a 1995 web user visiting the 2012 web? Video and bandwidth seem like the biggest differences, but as you point out, neither are "magic" from a 1995 context.
But I think the magic would be video and bandwidth on a handheld device?
I know I only went halfway back. If you go to 1995, there's a whole class of services that didn't exist.
And another social surprise would be Facebook because of the number of non-techies using the Internet.
Perhaps a better analogy for the Internet would be the printing press, but either way, it was arguably the ubiquity, accessibility and automation of electric power that changed society the most. Similarly, the fact that we can whip our phones out and query Wikipedia over a lunch discussion to settle a bet is much more revolutionary than the content of the article, or even the breadth of Wikipedia itself.
For anyone interested in media commentary I recommend Niel Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death. Published in 1986 it is a eerie and lucid look into media and its measurable effects on society. I find it more relevant today than when it was published.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
Your linked source also doesn't say anything about criticism of the phrase.
"The title is a play on McLuhan's oft-quoted saying "The medium is the message"."
"Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover 'Massage' as it still does. The title was supposed to have read The Medium is the Message but the typesetter had made an error. When McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!' Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age."
It's worth pointing out that McCluhan never wrote a book titled "The Medium is the Message", as the phrase is actually taken from his book "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man", which was published in 1964. I highly recommend it, if you're interested in challenging your preconceived notions of "post-modern" thought, whatever it is you take that to mean. This text covers many topics seminal to media theory, which I won't summarize here, but the line you casually discard as meaningless (as well as the greater context surrounding it) is by far the most influential portion.
Seeing as though I explained the meaning of the phrase for you above, I won't repeat myself here, but on a somewhat lighter note I think were he alive today, he would probably be intrigued by your comments, and the medium by which you derived them. The irony would not be lost on him.
You don't need indoor plumbing once you have servants; You don't need read-to-eat dinners when you have cooks and you don't need a dish-washer or vacuum-cleaner when you have maids.
This even goes to entertainment. When you can afford to hire a musician you don't need a music player.
"Without internet it is back to 1970, without electricity, its back to 1890"
something like that anyway.
After all, you're here now, back on the internet, posting on HN.
It is a good indicator that all of us could probably stand to gain from unplugging for a while every now and then.
http://www.quora.com/Mobile-Phones/What-was-daily-life-like-...
Because the landline phones were so poor due to government monopoly, many people didn't even bother using them. It was common for friends to just suddenly show up at your home. It would have been the same way in the Western world before telephones. For me, it was pretty nice. Everything seemed much more social and there was much more spontaneity on a daily basis instead of everything requiring planning.
Now that cell phones are more common there, I have no idea if people still just show up at friend's homes. Unfortunately, I would assume it would be something that will die away.
You didn't give up the Internet, you just went somewhere that didn't have it. Your time was spent doing something else, and you (probably) had plans on how to get around already.
If you gave up the Internet before you planned your trip, could you have gone?
I highly recommend this type of adventure. Its a lifetime experience.
I think he's going to find many little points of friction that he wasn't expecting. So many non-internet exchanges now end with "sure, send me an email" or "Sure, just go to our website and..." The infrastructure to serve non-web users still exists, but it's fading.
I personally decided to go back to the internet. I'm doing an online course with Udacity; cafe bandwidth didn't cut it.
If I were just doing writing, I actually would go without a home internet connection. It's a much more productive system if your work doesn't require access. But my work now does, and there was too much friction.
If I were doing technology writing, like Paul...well, I'd love to know how this turns out.
But many other times there simply is not, I remember a few years ago (maybe around 2007) job hunting and asking for an application form and being told that all applications had to be made online.
Also for some of the systems I have developed we have ended up using email address as a uniquely identifying piece of information for each customer which basically means that it is a mandatory field whenever a record in the DB is created and I would guess many others have done so too.
Maybe as synthesized speech improves you could have a viable service like this using computer programs as the operator.
It'd be one way to cut back on your Internet addiction. You'll certainly reevaluate the worth of online discussions when you have to actually listen to them play out while you sit there.
In this case obviously he is a writer so he probably has the idea that he will write a pulitzer-prize winning article about his year spent offline.
I think if you're truly fed up with technology, just drop out. No need to make a big announcement about it.
I know this is a very small gesture in comparison, but I now spend time at a small cafe with no wifi and poor mobile phone signal for a couple of hours between commitments on Mondays. Mind mapping on paper and writing on a small netbook. Very productive of ideas.
You do get physical and psychological withdrawals. I've been having fucking night terrors -- I've only had those once in my life, and that's when I gave up a drug addiction. There's an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and emptiness, but I knew this would happen since I don't have much of a social life.
Everything is slow.
At the moment it's not going well, because it's dawned on me that I can't afford the things I've been missing out on -- can't even afford martial arts classes. I've had no motivation to increase my income since I've just been spending time on the Internet.
However, this is what I've been banking on. The deep emptiness will hopefully motivate me to make a real change, as opposed to the shallow and medicated emptiness I felt thanks to the Internet.
Good luck.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/offline/features/2010/lif...
It inspired me to make Hacker Monthly.
What I realized is that it taught me more about Denmark where I came from.
By leaving the internet my suspicion is that he will learn a lot about it and probably get his priorities straight.
If you can afford it, clever move.
It feels, relieving at that time. It feels that life can be simpler.
Maybe I'll do that again soon....
We used to put these things called checks into little paper envelops. We then put an inexpensive stamp onto them an deposited them in mailboxes. About 3 days later our bills were magically paid.
In all honesty does anyone actually have hard numbers on the number of people that actually use online bill pay? I'll willing to bet that a larger number of people still pay via a mailed check.
Given experiences like that, and my previous work schedule: In the meantime, I've played in the park; re-learned futball to where I can perform advanced, intensive dribbling; re-experienced my long distance running regimen with old friends; progressively mastered the track bike (in complex traffic scenarios, track standing, skid stops, heel stops, etc.); re-organized my thoughts in ordinary language philosophy, contemporary neuroscience, quantum mechanics, Wittgenstein and Spinoza; I've begun a semi-daily writing activity; longboarding; road tripping; skipping stones; befriending animals; etc.
These are the activities which contrast with $ pip install -r reqs.txt or reading another API or vim or bash scripting.
But what else have I noticed?
Daily I sit underneath the Texas sun, and watch. I watch people use these devices. I see IE everywhere and hours upon hours of people fumbling with that. Or texting. Playing some app or Twitter.
It's beautiful, as I sit under the sun, silent. It upsets me how so many able bodies opt for such narrowly prescribed lifestyle.
This argument often turns into ad hominem or red herring involving luddites, Amish, throwbacks, vintagers, etc.. But this text-based lifestyle is a choice too, you know, regardless of how "technologically savvy" or "liberated" or "autonomous" or "anonymous" one is.
Take Paul Grice's Maxims for conversational exchange: Many maxims are at play, and we shouldn't expect for anyone to be "in control" of their execution of a maxim (maxim of relevance, truth, etc.). And an important point is that Grice notes a maxim of relevance: relevant _information_.
Do I aim to supply anyone with _information_ with my post? Am I giving you information? From my post, does it seem like I, the author, would see _information_ as imperative to my point? Yes, naturally programmers expect an optimally informative state such that transaction might occur, but...
Please, just read the sentences. I'm not a politician trying to convince you. I am a human being with an approximate grasp of Academic English. I mean, you're re-labeling my style with "UNINFORMATIVE."
How do you expect me to take that?
And "as bad as you seem to believe." Please point to anywhere in what I have written that suggests I have described an overarching state of affairs to which we should all direct our attention.
My point is nothing more than "it is a lifestyle choice amongst many". Of course as someone who works out daily, as my anecdotal bits clear emphasize, I am at once suggesting my own bias. But "things"... I'm nowhere in that post talking about _things as they are_ or "the grand scheme."
You've applied that concept, not me. I'm mainly interested in this idea that _Everything before the Internet is boring_. I am thinking in terms that we have all well acknowledged: hours spent in front of a screen. The 5:01 developer intuits this. When I consider my hours not spent in front of a screen, I have sport, books, travel, etc. Others have this as well. Sometimes family or quite simply that too-sunny-fucking-idyllic-sunday feeling that tells you: What I am discussing here, with this poet, must be more interesting than work. So my point is actually a request for us to halt the discussion. Before we talk about values (good, bad, etc.), let's first acknowledge that it is a lifestyle. We should understand the values of the lifestyle (notably the one the original author seems to reject).
And as a follow-up: What motivates this linguistic policing?
A lot of it was filled with TV and moving around needlessly (to get things, to send things, to be somewhere at a certain time to pick up the phone...). It really sucked.
Just to quantify the above statement: there is a group of "typically good" posts which I often get 6 or 7 points for: this included 7 for explaining what a plasma is, 7 for explaining how to do square roots and complex numbers with 2x2 matrices; 7 for discussing WTFs on the IRS tax forms, 6 for re-encoding hard-to-read XML as easy-to-read JSON, 6 points for explaining how French copyright law doesn't recognize the public domain.
That's a pretty esoteric set right there. It pales in comparison to the "big hitters." I got an unexpected 27 points for rickrolling Hacker News. I got an unexpected 20 for speculating non-constructively on whether there is a programming "voltage" equivalent to match the metaphor that most programming instructions are like force fields.
Apparently overloading the words "life" and "lolcats" to metaphorically refer to a quality living and the distractions on the internet, and doing it in the only appropriate way possible, is offensive. Okay, I can accept that. The other thing I've discovered was offensive was pulling out a Linus Torvalds quote and saying "this is insanely important, here's why" is offensive if those reasons are ultimately religious in nature.
Those boundaries are not possible for me to know unless I test them, and no, I don't pretend to know what all of them are. It is again a bit of a religious thing, and sorry. It boils down to this: basically, I suck. I will make mistakes, cross boundaries, and not know what the hell I'm doing.
That is a most important thing for me. It means that I have room to grow. And that's what I strive to do whenever I see a comment getting modded steadily downward.
Basically discourse. You don't always have to have super comments. You can just talk, and argue - you may not get points for it, but that's OK, and sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised. And you won't usually get downvotes. Unfortunately sometimes you will (like the Linus comment). I've had it happen to me too, it's not pleasant but you have to ignore it. If you know your comment was good, then just accept it and move on.
(Small message to newcomers: Don't post anything provocative until you build up a Karma cushion or you may end up with a killed account. And you won't be told if that happens!)
Things like that picture you posted are just stupid. Reddit makes you think people like it, but actually people find it annoying. Or perhaps people like it sometimes when they are in the mood. But that's not what this site is for - different sites for different purposes.
Jokes also don't go over well, except in rare cases (apparently your rickroll was - but don't do it often, it's rare). The reason people dislike jokes is that they have a tendency to take over sites, and people are very worried about that happening here. But they are accepted rarely - which is exactly what people want - mostly good stuff with a small smattering of levity.
So when you have a joke, combined with a stupid sentence like the one in the picture you get massive downvotes. You may think that overloading the meaning of the words is the problem. But if you had written "Was there quality of life before the internet?" you also would have gotten downvotes since it's an empty sentence - if you want to talk about that then keep going, don't just raise the question (if you notice other people did in fact talk about this very topic). Putting that in a image instead of in text made it much worse, using "lolcat" made it worse. Combine everything (joke, image, empty sentence, lolcat) together and the downvotes are quite expected.
I think this is important though. I was part of the last generation that spent most of my childhood without computers (born 1990). We didn't have our first computer until I was 6 (my uncle built it as a gift for me - it ran MSDOS + had 2 games on it). Most of my time was spent outside playing sports and building things. As I got older and go my first games console (N64) I spent more time using computers but most of it was still spent outside.
When I look at my younger family members who have grown up with the internet it surprises me how little time they spend outside. When they visit friends they play games on the computer. Being 'grounded' and not allowed out is no longer a punishment. Being made to go out and not use the computer is.
I think it will be very interesting to look back 50 years from now and see how much of an impact this has on peoples' development. Will people born with computers evolve significantly differently from those born without them?
I grew up without the internet; i don't think we are that far apart or disconnected from the first internet generation.
Life before the internet was incredibly boring most of the time.
I constantly switch sides. The internet makes me think we're heading toward the Huxley scenario. And the government, with their SOPA/CISCPA actions make me thing we're heading toward the Orwellian scenario. And it is still to be decided which direction we end up.
In the mid-90s, before broadband proliferation, I managed to get from London to Manchester via train (200 miles) which takes bloody forever. When I got there, I realised I'd forgotten the damn software I was supposed to be installing (100Mb of deployables). That resulted in an additional 400 mile round trip to London and back via slow train.
A 2 day install job took 4 days and several hundred pounds.
Now I'd just log in to their kit and install it from the comfort of my favourite chair in 10 minutes :)
I noticed I was bored, but I also felt that maybe it was good to be bored, at least once in a while. Having your desire for entertainment/attention constantly satisfied is just as unnatural as having your desire for sugar/fat/carbs constantly satisfied. Practicing meditation maybe helped me see that boredom can be beneficial.
Two other things I noticed: I suddenly had masses of free time. Previously, spare time was mopped up by surfing or reading books on my iPad. And while at the station I got the urge to look up something on my smartphone, remembered I wasn't allowed to, and rediscovered the forgotten experience musing about a question I had no way of finding the answer to.