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?
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...
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.
Being able to ignore fascists is a privilege.
Well, no, it isn't his actual job, the job he says he's doing
