Spend Time Offline
As we have seen in the previous theses, our digital environment:
Regulates our lives towards a smaller number of paths purposely designed by others rather than trails more fortuitous and exploratory.
Builds up a monolithic authentic self rather than a lush set of mutually-enriching contextual identities.
Is heavily focused on categorising people,
Robin Berjon • Retrofuturism
There is something called “being chronically online” where people almost see themselves as the main character in some big game - life isn’t about other people, it’s about watching people - and they attempt to exempt themselves from criticism, live through others parasocially, and throw stones in the online arena.
Kyla Scanlon • Language, Loneliness, and AI
If you spend all of your time consuming internet culture, you are consuming stories and myths and personalities that only exist online. To curate your online presence is to give up a piece of your physical self, to live in a simulated universe of your own creation.
Ginevra Davis • I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person
I remember times when I was perfectly content doing things by myself - no internet required. I used to listen to music in the background, yes, the same CD would play in a loop while I got lost reading, making something, writing something, cleaning or tidying. Now I don’t have a CD player, music has most of the time been replaced by someone
... See moreWith Instagram there was the idea that my life is constantly available for perception and evaluation by other people. I had these thoughts: I’d upload a photo and then I’d view my Instagram story and try to pretend to be somebody else—a stranger—and imagine how they’d see me. I’d be trying to present myself to be legible in a certain way to... See more
Charlie Warzel • How to Leave an Internet That’s Always in Crisis
Because to not be online is to accept that you will be forgotten. This is the great, unspoken truth of our age. If you do not post, you do not exist. If you are not constantly reinforcing your presence, your relevance, your desirability, then you are slipping, shrinking, becoming unimportant. It is not enough to simply be anymore, you must be... See more
The Elegance of Digital Disappearance
objects tied to purpose - a kitchen for cooking, a bathroom for washing, a living room for reading & socialising - but the internet isn’t an object tied to a purpose; it’s everywhere, and you can’t really turn it off and walk away from it, which is why it’s so hard to disconnect. When the internet was limited to the family computer and you had to
... See moreUnless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever. In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.”
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
As a dutiful member of a fairly soft generation of hyperconnected internet guinea pigs, I've had a fairly up and down history with the assorted feelings of malaise.