Ten days and nights unplugged | Hacker News Reader

Ten days and nights unplugged

mittal.vc

43 pointsmittal47 comments

I, on the other hand, have never understood how can people live with all that noise. The first thing I do when I get a new device is shut down all notifications. And taking out my phone while in a face-to-face conversation would fill me with guilt. I still have more phone, but it doesn't have mobile Internet and I only get a couple of calls per week.

Guess it's just one more oddity of mine.

Not that much of an oddity: you're not alone. On the contrary, the parallel life described by the OP, is the life that me, you and millions of others actually live every single day. And from the description he gives of his normal life, I for one am happy with my normal life that incorporates simple things like sitting outside in a chair and listening/watching animals in my garden rather then doing the same but being interrupted every minute with a new status update.

Come on, 10 days without electronics? That is an amazing feat nowadays?

(I personally could do it without a problem - well, if I hadn't go to my programming job, of course - take a mathematics book, pen and notebook, and learn something new.)

What about a year? How could we have lived just a couple of years ago?

Have you tried it? I had to go about 2 weeks without internet when I moved apartment. The only access I had was the local café and I only used that to send files for work (so I went in spent 20-30 minutes on email/dropbox and then left). It's amazing how difficult it was and how much it changed how I lived for those two weeks.

There were positives (I read more, went out more etc.) but they didn't last too long. The time my roommate and I would have wasted on the internet previously was now allocated to TV. Rather than only watch shows we liked we channel surfed for hours. It was kind of like being thrown back in time to how I wasted time when I was younger.

I've had a good 6 months of minimal personal electronics a few years back. Aside from work, I didn't connect at all. I had a new apartment in a complex which was being rewired for FIOS at a snails pace, my cell phone coverage was shitty and I didn't move in with a TV. Plus my PowerMac had a blown power supply which I declined to replace.

I spent more time at the gym, hiking, meeting people in person, exploring and reading books than ever. It refreshing, but compared to my coworkers, I felt like an alien species.

I have some interesting anecdotes to share about a somewhat opposite situation. I, uh, I just got a Facebook account. I have actively refused it for a long time, and even now I am very picky about it -- my friends list has a bunch of people I don't even know, my location frequently changes and I access it only through Tor because I hate Facebook's privacy policy (or lack of thereof). That being said, I was the last in my group of friends to do it. Most of them opened their FB account years ago. I opened it because one of my friends left the country, but he doesn't use an IM program, nor checks his e-mail too often, and this was pretty much the only way to stay in touch.

I noticed a bunch of weird things about FB-trained users:

* A few days ago, I threw a party and invited two good friends that I haven't seen in a while. Both of them were a bit pissed on me, because I'd moved to Ireland without so much as dropping by to tell them I'm leaving, but were happy to see me and had struggled to make it to the party, because they knew I'd probably be going back soon. Now, I've never even been to Ireland, let alone move there, so I was understandably dumbfounded, until I realized that the last location I'd listed on Facebook was a city in Ireland. The thought that someone would take the location I list on the Internet seriously didn't even cross my mind. Hell, when I started using the Internet, around a quarter of the other users claimed they were from Middle Earth, and I claimed I was from Coruscant!

* Facebook events. I nearly missed a friend's anniversary because he just opened a Facebook event, instead of inviting everyone over. You know, by telephone. Needless to say, I probably skipped over it in my inbox or whatever they call it.

* "Like" and "Epic". I consistently denied using the former without leaving a comment, because I think it's lazy, but the latter is, unfortunately, starting to enter my vocabulary. At first, whenever someone was saying that this or that had been epic, I was literally asking them what exactly they meant. I'm seriously alarmed by this, as our entire vocabulary is being invaded by "lazy" words that can mean pretty much anything you want them to mean. "Epic" is the new "nice". Is it sunny outside? Whoa, what a nice, warm day. Is it raining? Whoa, how nice and cozy. Is there a fucking blizzard outside? This is going to be such a nice Christmas day! Now, my jalapeno sauce was about as epic as the adventures of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk.

Needless to say, my integration in this new Interwebs-powered social network has not been without glitches...

>> "my friends list has a bunch of people I don't even know"

WHY? This is consistently one of the biggest complaints about Facebook. I can understand people who've had Facebook since it's early days having this problem but if you just opened your account why did you add people you don't know?

I was confused at first too, but I think the idea is to throw off who Facebook, or anyone looking through Facebook's data, thinks you are. Quoting:

I hate Facebook's privacy policy (or lack of thereof)

If you only add real friends, there's too much signal and not enough noise to cover it up. This is in line with using tor and using fake locations that change frequently.

Yup, you nailed it. I also don't "check Facebook" too often for that to be annoying, and my list of friends isn't all that huge. It's less than 50 people, including the people I don't know.

I only stay in touch with people I want to stay in touch with. There are no ex-colleagues-from-that-job-i-left-four-years-ago-whom-i-met-at-that-concert-an-year-ago-but-can't-quite-remember-their-name. Close friends with whom I really do have links to share and things to chat about.

Because Facebook gets really confused about it. Their "list of people you may know" is quite off, they can't recommend any bar or club in my hometown because I never even listed it as my location. Even the "meet singles in your areas" ads are off. This way, I can stay in touch with my friends and not be a marketing tool for Facebook.

Edit: just to make sure I get my message across the way I want to: I do this because I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the idea, but more importantly because:

a) I hate targeted advertising. If I make a purchase decision, I want to make sure I make it based on actual information, not clever advertising. Avoiding clever advertising is a good way for me not to bump into it.

b) I really think this is wrong. I am a programmer myself, and I think platforms like Facebook are definitely not the way technology should be used. Of course, not all of my friends share the same principles, and I don't want that to be an obstacle; I found this to be a reasonable middle ground.

It'll likely throw off the marketers, at least for a while, but I hope you are aware that if anyone at a 3 letter agency, or even anyone at facebook, cared about you - that it will take them exactly 3 seconds to drop the noise.

Of course. I'm not running from any 3-letter agency, just from overly-aggressive marketers. If I ever did anything a 3-letter agency would be interested in, it definitely wouldn't be on the Internet.

> It'll likely throw off the marketers, at least for a while

Nah, you just get adverts you care even less about than those which have a chance of being some measurable fraction of relevant.

Most of the adverts I see seem to be based on what my contacts have "like"d, or otherwise interacted with, more than what I have done (though this could be in part due to me providing fb with a lot less info to work on than some of my contacts do) so providing fake information about yourself will make little difference there unless your contacts all do the same.

Empirically, it seems to work so far. My likes are quite eclectic, too, but that's by my design -- my homepage gets feeds related to Machete Kills and Oscar Wilde because I actually like both. Most of the ads are obviously wrong (hair conditioning products and club wear; I'm bald and hate clubs).

I honestly don't care about targeted advertising. Irrelevant advertising works fine for me.

I would imagine its to fuzz up Facebook's social mapping.

The thought that someone would take the location I list on the Internet seriously didn't even cross my mind

Firstly, Facebook is supposed to provide information about you. There's little point to providing information that is patently false. Why even waste the keystrokes? If you don't want a piece of information known, just omit it. Thus, people generally expect the information you provided is true.

Secondly, I think we were all a lot more fanciful when we were kids.

> Firstly, Facebook is supposed to provide information about you.

I thought it was supposed to help me stay in touch with people and stuff, like they claim on their homepage. I'm adding false information related to my location to confuse their nosey advertising probe.

I thought it was supposed to help me stay in touch with people and stuff

I'm not really a FB fan or anything, but the idea is you stay in touch in part by providing that information about your life. Getting snippets of friend's ongoing lives helps sustain (or maybe just slow the decay of) rapport, even in their physical absence. If it was just a platform that allowed you to message your friends, it would be no different from an email list.

This is part of the reason that burning man is so meaningful for many people - without phones we have to connect with those around us and be present in the moment. When everyone is like that, it's amazing!

Nathan Jurgenson wrote an interesting piece about how phones are a sort of microaggression- using it is a subtle act of protest against present company. It's a kind of shield, a buffer that says "I'm afraid to fully commit."

The beautiful thing about Burning Man (I'm guessing- I've never been there) is that it's a self-selecting audience. And self-selecting audiences are the easiest to work with. Think about a comedian facing a tough crowd vs. a comedian facing a friendly, hometown group.

I'm pretty sure you'll find the same sort of cameraderie anywhere that's hard to get to. A mountain summit. A backpacker's hostel. A track meet. Military boot camp. The distance between the self and the other is diminished, and everybody gets along beautifully- so there's no need for phones.

I saw this video on Tumblr of gymnasts at the Olympics- Russian, Chinese, American- none of them speaking the same language- giving each other hugs and thumbs-ups. You probably wouldn't see them on their phones much even if they had them with them- there's too much to take in.

"I'm pretty sure you'll find the same sort of cameraderie anywhere that's hard to get to."

Yes, shared effort leads to mutual respect. Nice insight.

What I don't get is how that's totally acceptable even to otherwise educated people. From what I can remember, reading the paper or watching TV during a conversation was considered rude and often censored, yet cellphones seem to be exceptional. I find it puzzling.

If your manservant brings a telegram during a soiree your guests expect you to pause to read it and respond. Someone casually reading their phone like a newspaper would I think deserve censure, but responding to an incoming notification feels acceptable.

I think if someone had a manservant bring him his phone following a notification, I might let him look at it too...

Every week my significant other and I and some of our friends go to bar trivia. Last week our friend brought a lady friend he had been dating for a few weeks and she brought her roommate. These two were quite a bit younger than us (I'm in my 30s), they were 21 or 22 at the oldest. The whole time they were glued to their phones, except when we were answering questions because you can't have your phones out while answering questions. They got all huffy when they had to put them away, and didn't even want to help with the questions because of it. Neither of them wanted to interact with the people around them at all. It was really the most rude thing I ever saw in my life. My friend and her actually broke up over it.

When people pull their phones out when talking to my or out with me, it really really stresses me out. I don't know why I find it stressful, but I do.

You likely find it stressful since they are completely and totally ignoring you and not even trying to be polite or nice about it. Its one thing to be part of a conversation and not really contribute to it (but are at least paying attention and trying to absorb the information) and another to be "part" of a conversation and completely oblivious to said conversation.

This has happened to me a lot in recent years and I find it stressful as well. Probably the biggest problem I have with it is I don't understand the purpose of going out somewhere with people to not participate at all. Why not just save everyone time/trouble and not go in the first place?

If they don't go they can't tweet about it and post a couple of pictures smiling for the camera

I find stress to be a strange response though. Annoyance would be a more "expected" response. Stress is something I wouldn't expect because I associate stress with more of a "fight or flight" situation.

It's something I find interesting.

I also don't understand the point of going out and not participating, or fully participating. If I have someone in front of me, I find I owe them my full attention, anything else is rude. I also am finding it highly strange that it seems difficult for anyone just to sit quietly by themselves without anything to do for 10 minutes, I think its a product of our "always plugged in" lifestyle.

One can wonder if they act anti-social due to being glued to their phones, or whether they are like that from themselves and it just showed more obvious because of the phones.

I've had this experience too. I was a hardcore Facebook user (the village smartarse), and finally got frustrated and deactivated my Facebook account. Also went largely cold off social media. I even left the Whatsapp group my circle of friends are in.

It felt like diving deep underwater after struggling with the crashing waves. Serene, calm, bliss. I find that now when I return to the surface, I approach it with a very different perspective.

I found it amusing that going without internet access and a cell transported him "to the early 1900s," as opposed to, say, the mid-1980s.

Mid-1990s at the very earliest, and arguably later: he still presumably had easily accessible, fast, internet access with wikipedia and google (just, not on his phone) and could still contact other people on their cellphones.

I started taking semi-regular walks with friends around town without our phones. The take away has definitely been akin to 'pros' list here, but dodged all the 'cons'.

Shameless plug - We actually set up a website to help facilitate these walks, hoping to get others involved: http://www.OffTheGridOnTheGrid.com/

Anyone else finding the text of the article really hard to read? On my screen it looks like out-of-focus grey text and I can feel the eye strain. I had to highlight it all to be able to read it easily. Just an FYI in case the OP reads this.

Edit: I am noticing a difference reading it in Chrome vs. Firefox where I typically browse. Definitely clearer in Chrome.

Another astounding way to visit this ancient past is to talk to one of the billions of people who are over 30 and who perfectly remember that no one was this plugged in even a few short years ago, and many still aren't. Might want to take a compass while you explore these dusty roads.