How do you do it without being a total hermit? Can you even come close?
For all the talk of exit vs. voice, and the internet as the destination to exit to -- is there any meaningful way to exit from it without isolating yourself from society?
If you would like to quit internet and also retain your connection with the society, then I guess you would have to define society and your connection with it.
Living in a modern day City, it would be difficult I guess, because so many daily life services/chores are now partially or wholly dependent on Internet. And if most of your family and close friends are also living in a city, then it becomes more difficult.
But let's say that you move to a rural area, then it should become achievable. Parts of world, still untouched by hyper advanced internet dependent technology, will still retain the old ways of doing most things.
You may have to convince your close ones to move with you and it becomes more difficult if you are married and have children.
I would disagree with your idea of living in a rural area somehow allowing you to distance yourself more from the internet, at least based on my own experience living in exactly such a place in Europe. Sure, we don't need the smartphone to get an Uber or get pizza delivery, but many necessities are also online. So rural does not mean backwards in those regards.
Examples:
I'm entirely dependent on online banking, as the nearest bank office is 30 minutes way (and it will be closed by end of 2021).
The shops around here are mostly just food shops and a few ones that are more specific to the rural life, but for any modern creature comforts I quickly have to resort to online shopping.
Want to take the bus, only mobile tickets are accepted these days.
> Examples: I'm entirely dependent on online banking, as the nearest bank office is 30 minutes way (and it will be closed by end of 2021).
Still, it's a convenience and a habit, not a neccessity. Before the Internet, people were simply taking that 30 minute trip to the bank. Hell, I have a friend who, in 2021, does not even have a bank account.
Except, I live in rural UK (Lincolnshire) and the nearest town with a bank (Boston) is 7 miles along roads that do not have pavements. Where its dangerous to cycle and even more dangerous to walk.
It would be just about possible to live without the internet but getting to the shops would be dangerous without a car. There's little public transport with the nearest once a day bus accessible via a bus stop 1.5 miles along a dangerous to walk road.
17% of the UK (just under 10 million) live rurally in the UK.
...dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere...
Depends on your work. I imagine sailors, off-shore oil rig workers, or fire lookouts don't spend much time online. With satellite internet growing, this might not last for long.
Otherwise, the trick is to drastically limit your device usage. Keep your phone off by default, and only turn it on for 15 minutes a day. Use Self-Control [1] to block distracting sites. Etc.
Oil rigs have surprisingly decent Internet access (and it's free for workers).
My father works on off-shore rigs in Western Australia/PNG and has a higher up/down link and lower ping than I do at home. This has been the case for at least the last 10 years.
What do you mean by 'the internet'? News sites, twitter and your facebook feed? I don't read the news, don't have a twitter account and only use my FB account for talking to people via Messenger and the desktop client Caprine. I don't visit their site, and I do not engage with the platform in any way. Ah yeah and reddit. I nuked all my comments&posts and deleted the account. Haven't been back since.
In many ways I'm untouched by the shit escapade that is going down in the world this year, and I'm glad for that. I only follow some niche bloggers and my webcomics in an rss reader, and that's my daily digest. How do I keep myself entertained? Books & all the other things you can do away from the computer, spiced with the occasional night of video gaming.
IMO it is not necessary to quit internet or even social media unless it is really (I mean really) affecting your life. The benefits that you get from having access to internet and social media is way more than the negatives that you think.
But, anything is harmful if consumed too much (Lol, Even Oxygen)
I think it is possible, 3 years ago I didn't have a connection in my home. I used to have to drive into town and connect through open Wifi hotspots.
I still do not have a cellular phone plan, I have the phone but it is not connected to anything other than my home Wifi and I primarily use it as a BT mp3 player and camera.
Unfortunately quitting the Internet does put you at a disadvantage in many ways, including financial. Many restaurants and service based companies offer big discounts for either online ordering or using their apps.
I would compare not having internet to not having a bank account or credit card, it can be done but puts you at a disadvantage.
Sure, why not? I quit Facebook et al. years ago. The only place I still post is here, for a little catharsis; but overall I don't miss it much. Maybe you mean a full exit, not using the Internet at all even for information purposes; but there's no reason to be so drastic. Just exercise self control and become read-only, for the most part.
I am more in contact with the people I care about now. Voice calls and texts are so much more direct and personal; you become involved in people's lives, rather than perfecting the art of exchanging the role of being the bystander.
What are you so scared you're going to miss out on?
i mean i agree -- for context, i've been in read-only mode aside from here for a bit now, but i wonder what the remaining venues for social interaction will be in our internet-dominated culture, especially post-covid.
even as i quit everything personal, it's still functionally the mode through which many of us now work. slack is social media, whether or not they or our employers would cop to that.
maybe i'm extra pessimistic, but it increasingly feels like the internet is also becoming a mandatory component of having a social life (i'm in my early 20s, grew up on this stuff, etc).
just can't shake the feeling that to recede from it could be futile, if only because it's becoming equivalent to receding from society itself. and the idea of not even having the option to is mildly uncomfortable.
> it increasingly feels like the internet is also becoming a mandatory component of having a social life
Everyone still has a phone number, right? Voice calls, SMS, just remind people you exist, have little chats here and there. Get together in person, plan it old school. People might even like it.
That is far fetched, but I don't know where do you work. I've got 2 slacks going at any point of time - work one is pretty tame and business only (our work culture is dry). The other one is for a developer community and I wouldn't call it "social media", but a community focused on certain topic.
Why act so drastically? It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can quit social media without sacrificing the convenience of online bill-paying, as an example.
I don't disagree, but the implication of it not being at least possible without tremendous effort vaguely concerns me. Just wanted to explore the hypothetical.
I also mean the question narrowed down to social media, too, though. I do wonder about the future of social interaction (maybe covid has me too pessimistic).
Why does it concern you though? Do you think the same way about the electricity or water that are supplied to your home and whether you can live without them? It would be possible to live without them, it would just take a lot of effort and inconvenience. What's different about the Internet?
Electricity and water are fungible (at least in reasonable household or small business quantities). Dependency on these resources doesn't necessarily require other dependencies.
Dependency on internet services is transitive. From the same talk[1] by Dan Geer I quoted in an earlier post:
> The root source of risk is dependence, especially dependence on
the expectation of stable system state. Dependence is not only
individual but mutual, not only am I dependent or not but rather
a continuous scale asking whether we are dependent or not; we
are, and it is called interdependence. Interdependence is
transitive, hence the risk that flows from interdependence is
transitive, i.e., if you depend on the digital world and I
depend on you, then I, too, am at risk from failures in the
digital world. If individual dependencies were only static,
they would be eventually evaluable, but we regularly and quickly
expand our dependence on new things, and that added dependence
matters because we each and severally add risk to our portfolio
by way of dependence on things for which their very newness
confounds risk estimation and thus risk management.
Interdependence within society is today absolutely centered on
the Internet beyond all other dependencies excepting climate,
and the Internet has a time rate of change five orders of
magnitude faster. Remember, something becomes "a critical
infrastructure" as soon as it is widely enough adopted; adoption
is the gateway drug to criticality.
Well, you can use the telephone. You can write letters. You can visit people in person (or you could six months ago).
You can pay bills via mail, or even in person. You can go to a physical ATM (or even into a bank lobby) and get physical money. All that is doable.
Where I can't quit the internet is professionally. Especially with so many people not in the office, there is no way we can function without the internet.
IMHO what's more concerning is 'quitting smartphones' - it's pretty much impossible to have online banking, use e-gov or even 2FA on Google without a phone number.
The non-internet "analog option" must be preserved. I can speak from personal experience that it is becoming more difficult. Unless more people need to actually use the analog option they will be removed in the name of "efficiency" and "replacing legacy baggage".
Asking if it is possible to opt-out of the increasingly digital, interconnected, and interdependent aspects of society isn't particularly important. We need to try anyway to preserve the possibility.
Dan Geer on this topic[1]:
> The most telling fork in the road of them all is whether we
retain an ability to operate our world, or at least the parts we
would call critical, by analog means. Analog means, and only
analog means, do not share a common mode failure with the
digital world at large. But to preserve analog means requires
that they be used, not left to gather dust on some societal
shelf in the hope than when they are needed they will work.
This requires a base load, a body of use and users that keep the
analog working. [...]
> What we have here is an historic anomaly, an anomaly where the
most readily available counter to an otherwise inexorable drift
into a vortex of singleton technology risk and the preservation
of a spectrum of non-trivial civil rights is one and the same
counter: the guarantee, by force of law where necessary, that
those who choose to not participate in the digital melange can
nevertheless fully enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness, that to opt out of the digital vortex does not
thereby require that they live in medieval conditions, and, by
doing so, we reap a national security benefit in the bargain as
those opting out are the base load for the analog alternative.
[...]
> And that is what I am here to tell you, that the future of
humanity and cybersecurity are conjoined, so that as we prepare
to make some decisions that are of the fork-in-the-road sort, we
need to think it through because in making decisions about
cybersecurity we are choosing amongst possible futures for
humanity. Those decisions will be expensive to later reverse in
either dollars or clock-ticks.
> The onrushing world of full personalization means the rational
decision for the individual or the small entity does not and
will not aggregate into the rational decision for society at
large. Perhaps that is the core effect from a rate of change up
with which we cannot keep. [...]
> You, we, are the masters of the universe now. What will we do
with that power, which we have but a short while more?
Living in a modern day City, it would be difficult I guess, because so many daily life services/chores are now partially or wholly dependent on Internet. And if most of your family and close friends are also living in a city, then it becomes more difficult.
But let's say that you move to a rural area, then it should become achievable. Parts of world, still untouched by hyper advanced internet dependent technology, will still retain the old ways of doing most things.
You may have to convince your close ones to move with you and it becomes more difficult if you are married and have children.
Starting on this path, early in life should help.