Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain(kenklippenstein.com) |
Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain(kenklippenstein.com) |
Being able to ignore fascists is a privilege.
People like the person you are responding to have managed to make the term fascist not mean anything anymore.
Well, no, it isn't his actual job, the job he says he's doing
My personal observation is that those with the least engage in this practice the most, partly because they don't have the bandwidth to bother. It's the middle and upper-middle class who are the terminally online cynics.
Look at what the people who were living high on the hog due to tax/graft/dysfunction before losing their heads in the french revolution got up to. Look at the rabbit holes minor British nobility went down. The current american upper-ish middle class is just another cover of the same stupid bad for everyone song.
In what way is hopping on a plane to an island retreat for a week a “timeless Buddhist principle”? And immediately shilling your next commercial project while you’re at it?
Sounds more like a timeless US-American practice.
Thanks for sharing your personal experience - I do agree that the middle class is the most anxious; anxious about dropping lower and levelling up at the same time. Terminally online though seems to be a pretty common thing across all classes - just look at Trump or Musk tweeting every 5 minutes…
It’s perhaps less than 0.001% of the population that can allow themselves to do it.
But it is not important for most people to be plugged into a news mainline every day to read about the latest absurdity of our flailing country. Until or unless there is mass unrest and sustained protests or a general strike, the only thing we can do is vote and boycott, and if you live in a swing district or state, write a politician.
I think "escaping the internet" by stopping news consumption most of the week would benefit most of us, rich and poor, all races, unless you need realtime updates for your safety.
I'm on HN more now and honestly a bit disappointed with myself for that but even here is less baity than social media and news. It's easier to select topics as well. I just feel myself get angry when I get on those platforms and it reminds me to get off.
Smart phones are ubiquitous, and influencer is a key path for many to try and move out of their economic bracket.
Although if I was American, I think I'd be pretty interested (worried) in what my country is becoming under Trump presidency.
But then, until the elections there is not much one can do.
That's not true disconnecting. You should just experience it and not share it. That week should only exist in your own memory.
"It sure would be a shame to miss that photo! ... And so I did"
It's an act of rebellion towards a world browbeating you into performance for invisible strangers
Sometimes it's just for you. While walking with a friend last night I passed a home I've probably passed a hundred million times. Though this time, I noticed something, the second floor had a Christmas tree peaking out of a window. At that moment I realized that someone in the folds of Queens NYC took their time to put up this tree leaving the curtains drawn so someone on the street below might look up will and see their tree. It was such a weird little thought that I had to snap a picture even though my first thought was "nah." Will I ever share it? No. There's no reason to. But I have that little snapshot of that scene and the thoughts that came with it.
Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.
The author, Hans Rosling by the way, showed with this little thought experiment, how little signal for our personal lives and our important decisions lies in "news".
I also worked in publishing for a while as my first job out of university. Ever since I left that industry I am so happy to be out of that drama generating machine.
It’s just so bizarre to me as a non-American that someone would go to the Galapagos Islands and come away knowing the political affiliations of the people they were with. It shouldn’t even need to come up
The downside is that I now interact with HN a lot more, which I was hoping would not happen.
I know that with mastodon I can just subscribe to the rss feed of anyone without using an account, visiting a server's feed or actually firing up a fediverse compatible app
If I'm being entirely honest I made it in a very 'scratch-my-own-itch' way so you're better off just writing it yourself. Example idiosyncratic choices I went with: all lists are public, allow subscribing to other people's lists, no login required for lists, only Google Chrome support. I doubt anyone else shares those preferences.
I've been toying with different solutions over the years but haven't found anything great. Magazine subscription to something like the Economist? Weekly Sunday paper subscription?
How to keep up on the news without being jerked around by the engagement machine?
IRC -> Bitlbee.org public servers -> XMPP and more
gopher://magical.fish -> huge gopher portal. Gopher://sdf.org and a few more than proxies to Gutenberg and the like.
Mosh -> decent SSH speeds.
For fora and asynchronous chats, Usenet and Fido/DoveNet.
Music? Podcasts? Download these before, and store them. Also, books and phlog posts are far lighter and you can seek around freely, and you can read stories in a much faster way.
And, if any, tons of stations still have short wave channels, both in English and in Spanish.
What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which apps can be installed, how often they can notify or distract us, and so on.
A very basic step is using an app blocker. The ideal solution would be a phone with a local AI that is aligned with my personal preferences and instructions.
For example, it could deliver news just once a week from outlets across the entire political spectrum, eliminate social media entirely, and surface only important emails and messages at the most appropriate times.
I still cull notifications that I don't think provide value (notifications are a privilege based on trust and apps that break that trust lose that privilege), but yeah even when I get notifications I only really get them once every 4 hours or so, and that's nice.
Nice times.
This line of thinking drives me crazy, especially from someone like Ken. Just because a bunch of privileged Americans were friendly with each other while enjoying an amazing time in nature doesn't immediately negate the very real problems going on in the US.
We obviously get along as a society when we are just doing day to day things. You don’t have to be on vacation to witness that.
But when it comes to discussing whether my trans friends have basic human rights, or whether we should treat foreigners like criminals with no due process by default, whether we should build coal power plants or nuclear power plants or solar power plants, or whether we should start a war, or whether healthcare should be a human right, it’s easy to find people I’ll have strong disagreements with these days.
And those are disagreements that have real consequences. Just ask the people I know who are discontinuing healthcare coverage due to ACA subsidies ending.
Ignorance and avoiding discussing these issues is bliss…until one day it might affect you.
The polarization is unfortunate but I think one way to lessen that is to actually confront issues and solve them. And that’s a fight since there’s a whole system setup that intends us to never solve those problems. But perhaps we might observe that a lot of the solved problems no longer occupy the debate space.
I don't think that command-line tools are better in any kind of "objective" sense, but I find that if you live primarily within tmux + neovim (and maybe Codex/Claude if you want to be super cool), then it's much easier to not be distracted by the rest of the world.
Nowadays, when I do work I will have a full screen terminal window open. I have an utterly gigantic 85" 8K TV as my "monitor" and I will have an ungodly number of tmux splits, but importantly I don't think those splits are distracting from actually doing work. At some point I will figure out how to get the dbt Cloud `preview` functionality working locally and I think I can avoid the vast majority of any of my work requiring a browser.
Sometimes it does kind of feel like I'm just being a hipster by using a lot of tools that have existed since antiquity, but I think they do a good job at not being distracting.
ETA:
https://i.imgur.com/HHBt0QE.jpeg
Forgive the messy desk. I wish I could say it's atypical, but it's not. I always have a ton of projects going on concurrently and as a result it's easy for stuff to pile up. I'll probably clean it this week.
My work computer isn't plugged in so I'm afraid you'll have to use your imagination for the million tmux splits.
Now do it for three months. Every year.
Been doing that for 25 years now, and the only regret I have is that I should have started earlier.
It has allowed me to escape the news cycle. I am yet to find an equivalent of the Economist for India (where I'm residing right now). As a result, I'm currently quite oblivious to the day-to-day in India, but honestly that hasn't been of much consequence.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard very good things about the publication’s quality and it’s admirable that it’s a weekly print.
I’d almost rather just read nothing over filtering down to a single perspective that is that specialized. Feels a little like getting all your news through Planet Money. Sure you’ll know what’s going on but through a single lens.
Regardless. It's good to feel disconnected from these things. But at the same time I recognize I have a responsibility to take care of the things within my reach.
Is this what people were doing in 1939 though? I really hope not.
Then social media will be so broken, you'll automatically get so annoyed at it that you will just stop using it. Even youtube forces you for around 10 seconds to wait in a loading loop every damn video, just because they use anticompetitive measurements against Firefox users.
For the important things that you want to watch, I recommend minitube. It's using yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, and its interface is designed so you have to actively subscribe to everything or actively have to search for everything (e.g. when you want to learn about something there's no distractions on the way there which is super neat).
My smartphone is stored next to the toilet during the day, in airplane mode. This way I use social media only while pooping. After all, shit has to go where shit belongs, right?
I get the Sunday paper and that’s most of the news (other than weather) that I ever see. The best part is the crossword that I do with my wife.
My original mini-essay (heh):
It hasn't 100% worked for me, but it's been progress for me to:
- turn on grayscale - don't use any social media - turn off all recommendations for the two indulgences I do have (YouTube, Reddit)
The no recommendations has been especially helpful because I only have my subscription feed, and I can curate that.
As far as news goes - Economist is a good one imo. Weekly news is a fast enough cadence that also filters out noise and nonsense from the knee-jerk, instant reaction news cycles. I've also found the New Yorker to be pretty great, since their pieces are so long that they're usually about events that happened weeks to months ago.
But +1 to others' comments: maybe you don't need to know everything, either. Reading books about history, even recent history, has been a great way for me to fulfill my need to understand our society.
Despite all that I've typed above, if you really want to get regular news consumption, I highly highly recommend Heather Cox Richardson. She distills the daily news and often adds historical context.
I guess the assistant should know whether a piece of news can be important or not, but if something happens to be a slow-boil (e.g. the fascist takeover of the USA), it could end up as a surprise.
Perhaps one of those planet-burning text generators can be one such assistant...
He isn't saying 'ignore politics', and he isn't saying 'we can all agree on everything'. What he is saying is 'making your life about political issues distorts your perspective to where you think that everyone hates one another to point of declaring a civil war' and is advocating sitting down and just socializing with people without the baggage.
As the kids say 'its not that deep'.
All the stuff the "rich but not nobility" people did to pour gas on the fire in the lead up to the french revolution is a good comparison point IMO.
This makes you susceptible to populism though.
I know this because I am from an impoverished family.
The french first and second estates convinced the government to debt spend to high heaven in the proceeding years. And much of this spending benefitted them, the .gov going to war with the english and buying warships made with timber and nails they made money off of for example. They also were exempt from the bulk of the taxation and they in turn got to levy their own taxes to a degree. So a lot of them got quite rich over that time as the normal people got hungrier and hungrier.
It's a very good parallel to how the white collar class in the US peddled all sorts of changes to policy and the economy to their relative benefit at the detriment of the industrial and skilled services economy which either got sold overseas or consolidated and financialized to the benefit of the the professional managerial types and white collar workers (and of course the CEOs and whatnot too) and to the detriment of the common man who winds up driving for uber because the factory that employed him went poof.
I'd rather read a magazine which didn't have the same stories in it.
You just did.
Your response feels spiteful and needlessly mean. When someone is talking to you, listen to their words - such as their words talking about creating art even without an audience - before jumping immediately to attacks.
( You're perfectly okay to not want either of those things, of course. )
Oh no, I would love for others to also be protected from detectable infohazards, so I’d like to reduce the barrier to entry for that. And I’d love any participation from you, of course.
> Roshan's Socialism Slop
I omce made a podcast screener for my kids, and that was a category I screened for there as well.
I tend to prefer "just in time" and "up to date" research to "just in case" spamming my brain with noise.
But I also know how easy it is for me to fall down the rabbit hole of being back in the dopamine inducing social or news streams. I actively had to purge social apps from my phone(s) and on my private phone setup a launcher, that only shows a few selected apps as text names. No icons, no nothing - especially no badges and notifications for missed mails/messages.
This is currently the only way for me to battle these (at least to me) massively addictive systems.
After all, there's more to the democratic process than just voting. There's a global conversation going on which needs informed and diverse participants. Plus there's a personal learning aspect to it, which goes much deeper when one tries to understand and anticipate trends as they happen only to have those inklings and reasonings being checked by the course of history. It's an ongoing lesson in the mysteries of human nature.
Because - on the other hand - I am very much interested in advances in different sciences and would love a better report on actual advances (and not just BS headlines about some new weight loss thing or currently alien speculations from interstellar objects)...
But I am getting there over time. So that I can increase the signal to noise ratio a bit.
- You can't have an opinion because you're in the wrong group.
- Your opinion is wrong because you're in the wrong group.
- Your opinion is hypocritical (and therefore wrong) because of the group you're in.
It's a big step back with regard to argumentation. Ideas are either correct or not, and the fact that they came from someone who might have some advantages does not weigh in on this.
I mean we're on HN... if anything we're more likely to be in a wealthy bubble here. On average. There's plenty outside Silicon Valley but this place is a bubble too.
Yet, I've always been able to take time off if I really press for it.
You're absolutely right that it's not easy and harder than the average crowd here but it's far from out of reach.
Also, you hiked up the price by 20% by rounding in the wrong direction. While Americans don't have mandated vacation most Americans have access to PTO. You don't need to exaggerate problems to be able to discuss them. It only makes them harder to discuss and easier to dismiss
- Median bank account balances in the U.S. range from $5,400 for those under 35
- ... $13,400 for ages 65–74
Does it require saving? Yes. But most Americans go on vacation each year. Give up the cost of a few years of vacations and you have this one.
I want to stress "not out of reach" doesn't mean easy. It explicitly doesn't mean one doesn't have to reach. I'd have said something very different if I meant most Americans could easily go on that trip. I specifically mean if it's something they really wanted to do, enough to save over a few years (or more) then that's something that could be accomplished.
https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-the-average-ameri...
https://www.statista.com/chart/31152/share-of-us-respondents...
The only place I regularly see the points you mention are in the opinion pieces of certain types of pundits who like to peddle outrage and invent menaces that don't exist. They regularly tell me that people say those sorts of things, but rarely seem to be able to provide receipts.
A politician said something and other politicians reacted. Usually unimportant unless it was backed by a law or something. If it was important then the weekly will cover it.
Main Character of the day on Social media. unimportant
A crime happened nearby. Unimportant
A celeb did something. Unimportant
Something happened to random person. Unimportant
Sport result. If you follow that team you already know, if not then not important.
Seriously go to the front page of the New York times or some other outfit and count the stories that you needed to read today.
Television teaches them that the proper response to someone disagreeing is to get angry and shout when the opposing party tries to explain their point of view. Something that is useless or even technically impossible in anonymous net forums.
If you look at the old media, important decisions are mentioned but completely ignored after someone has said something offensive or an accident happened somewhere.
Social media is people and people are the problem, not technology or anonymity. Everyone who has spent Christmas with relatives knows this.
Enlighten me, where do you go for proper investigative journalism that is not considered old media?
For example, I can tell you that if you are an immigrant in the USA from one of the (now many) targeted countries, even one with legal residency, news about ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
Exactly. There's a post from last week on how media/journalism became more entertainment than information, and I think the complete opposite of the first reply: If you have bandwidth and time to consume most of those "world news", then you're the privileged.
One example: In Germany if you watch/read the state regional public broadcast from Berlin[1] for 2 days you will learn more about the whereabouts of Donald Trump, the President of Ukraine, sports news, or some broad reporting about "cultural" aspect of the city (e.g. about Hildegard Knef, something about Karl Lagerfeld and so on), or general gossip.
The city itself has fewer private investments than 5 years, the schools lack basic infrastructure, educational ratings are dropping, delays in public transportation, the hospitals are lacking personnel, 10% unemployment, and an awful housing situation, squeezing the working people.
[1] - I'm totally in favor of public broadcasting that comes from the principle called "broadcast what you want to become or aspire to be" that is more focused on factual journalism (i.e., no commentary), educational programs (especially with Public Universities STEM lectures being broadcasted), educational cartoons, classic music and orchestras, and space/nature/technology documentaries.
Maybe the first few stories are, but what past masked goons throwing up Nazi salutes and sending people to foreign labor camps do you need to keep up on? If you're into politics, then sure, but your average Joe probably doesn't need to know that they're, yet again, terrorizing people and acting like a secret police force.
Being relentlessly informed of all the miseries of the world is a choice for most people in developed countries not in the middle of a war.
Which poor people exactly do you consider privileged, and why?
> The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!
What can they do about the news, though? I specifically said, "they may feel powerless to change anything".
The alternative is worse, and the result of an uninformed citizenry can be disasterous and a regression towards non-democracy.
You personally might have the expectation that when you vote, you should be informed about what you're voting on/for - but that is entirely optional.
edit: I'd love to hear about some of your proposed solutions to solving this problem ;)
those with insulation from genocide and displacement despite poverty.
their point is that, say, a german peasant in 17th century couldn't avoid the Thirty Years War.
Almost all news that's actually important - that might actually affect your life - will find you one way or another. Most news isn't important (eg sports drama). Or it isn't urgent (eg tariff news). Or both, like celebrity gossip.
Only a vanishingly small percentage of news is both urgent and important. And there's plenty of people in my life who would tell me if - for example - we needed to evacuate the city due to a fire.
Really. You can switch off. It'll be ok. Try it, and you'll see.
To the cost: $6500 for two is low. Just getting there will be a significant amount, especially if you don't live in a major travel hub like LA or NYC.
"My Galapagos excursion took place on a boat with over a dozen other travelers."
Most ships are significantly more than $4000 per person, not including travel to the area: https://www.galapagosislands.com/cruises/ship
The absolute cheapest is the 100-passsenger Galapagos Legend at $2000 per person for 4 days, 3 nights - but a flight to Baltra Airport from, say, Pittsburgh will add another $1800 per person, and even from Chicago it's $1500 on a mix of airlines.
If you want a small ship with only a dozen others it will be significantly more expensive. If you want a week on something of that size you're looking at $4700 per person and up - plus travel. https://www.galapagosislands.com/cruises/catamaran/tiptop-ii
News media gets harsh anti-monopoly rules: no more billionaires owning every station in every jurisdiction, in fact no more conglomerates whatsoever. More independent funding for local news: I'm content for a bunch of these to go bankrupt on a regular basis but we'll sponsor more people putting out independent journalism.
At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism, with a mission charter the citizenry must have accurate reporting to understand how they will choose leaders to guide international politics. This one would be tricky to get right, I suspect you'd probably end up tying resource allocation to government funding alotments and the like via some automatic mechanisms.
The first and last are probably pie in the sky: really let's start by shredding a couple of media empires into 50 different fiefdoms and let them battle it out for views, but there'll be no more mergers or cross-media ownership that's for sure.
> At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism
That sounds great in theory, but given the recent scandals at the BBC and uncovering of systematic bias there we can see how fragile such institutions can be. Even without M&A driving it the BBC has become a primarily leftist monoculture.
> Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little
Sounds great, but also prone to systemic bias. Universities in general have become echo chambers in liberal arts departments.
Perhaps combine that with options for doing national service of some sort that would balance out education. Afterall, classroom learning only gives one aspect of life and experience. Often just exposing people to new places and environments broadens their outlooks.
This is foisting misery on people who have no capacity to affect change.
Are we forgetting that this specific policy we are discussing was voted in by the public and won the popular vote barely more than a year ago?
I think if more people were legitimately better educated and informed that outcome might not have happened.
The problem is…who is doing the informing and educating? Oftentimes the sources taking up that role are doing so with motives that are not in the people’s best interests.
The public has no ability to affect change on the policy this Presidency makes. Especially not the public that is predisposed to dislike the President.
This is sadistic and selfish to believe the public must be relentlessly informed of these individual policies that they cannot do anything about. Anything they are informed about present day will almost certainly be forgotten years down the line. But they'll be stressed and unhappy along the way.
Well, even that isn’t true. The congressional midterms are next year. Control over congress is on the ballot. Turnout will be the decider as it always is.
If “did not vote” was a candidate, it often wins elections.
In addition, local politics happen every year with higher levels of influence per person, and they often directly affect individuals more than national politics.
Going around telling people they have no impact guarantees that outcome.
And referring to the present in contrast with the next Presidential election - an event thematically related to the previous Presidential election that you referenced - it seemed relevant.
As for what people need to be informed about - they'll inform themselves via increased prices on just about everything due to tarriffs + continued lowered interest rates despite notable inflationary pressures.
I maintain it is cruel to relentlessly and aggressively inform people of the horrors of the world that they - and I repeat myself - cannot do anything about. From news media fewer and fewer trust every year.