I’ve pulled the plug on the Internet. After a few months of being offline, these are my findings:
- Love DAB radio; even in a region with only one English station, it’s enough to get my news. Very grateful for BBC!
- Great to exercise the power of boycott and say “fuck you” to shitty ISPs. In the US, most ISPs support the republicans. And most ISPs worldwide do not accept cash payments (thus support the oppression of forced-banking).
- Very grateful for some¹ public libraries with truly open and anonymous wi-fi. (¹ some is stressed b/c sadly most public libraries outsource Internet to shitty big corps and are elitist enough to deny wi-fi to those who lack a GSM subscription [i.e. those who most need wi-fi], and some libs also block egress Tor [indeed they are naïve about how liability and accountability works])
- Web enshitification has less of an impact when just getting the web in small doses as a periodic library visit.
- No more wasting time doom scrolling.
- Money saving. Broadband costs are unreasonable in most parts of the world.
- Sending postal mail instead of e-mail is liberating, as it cuts Microsoft out of the loop (almost all businesses and gov offices use MS email). Also fun to typeset letters in LaTeX.
- ArgosTranslate enables offline people to machine-translate documents. This is great for privacy anyway, because it’s a bad idea to trust the cloud with translating personal docs you get in the mail.
Shortcomings -- and what we need to make this lifestyle easier:
- Severe lack of offline apps. In the 90s and 2000s when many people had spotty access, apps were more accommodating of that. There are no Mastodon, Lemmy, or Kbin apps to facilitate offline reading and writing, and periodic syncing.
- Most websites are now designed to assume everyone has 24/7 access. Coupled with an unhealthy and short-sighted hostility toward bots, webpages are rich with JS. They are a shit-show to download and tend not to make content easily fetchable for later consumption.
- Can be tedious to find open hotspots outside of libraries where you can make enough noise to make a VOIP call. (UPDATE: fortunately hospitals tend to have open wi-fi access and generally no noise constraints. Some libraries have a lobby where VOIP calls can be made)
I could really use a way to synchronize posts and messages (XMPP, Lemmy, Mastodon, e-mail) with a smartphone, and then to synchronize the phone with a PC. This would really cut down on having to lug a laptop around. An Android app would serve the most people, but it’d perhaps be easier to implement on a linux-based phone like PostmarketOS.
Advice if you want to try unplugging, in baby steps
A non-stop broadband contract with continuous billing setup is designed to be inconvenient to stop. Perhaps there is a threat of startup costs if you want to return to their service, and pains of returning equipment. Bear in mind they are exploiting your auto-pilot comfort by giving startup discounts to new customers but not to their loyal boot-lickers. You can probably save money if you’re willing to bounce around to other providers anyway.
Find a cheap prepaid mobile data package and make your phone a hotspot. Or if you are more advanced get an LTE USB modem that plugs into a router that supports a GSM uplink. “Cheap” in this case does not mean cheap per meg -- it means cheaper per month if you can greatly reduce your consumption by doing things like killing the graphics on your web browser. If you have enough discipline you can get by on ~5gb/month for probably around $5—10. It’s enough for basic comms.
When your 5gb (or whatever) of mobile data runs out, don’t topup right away. See how long you can hold out. Use the library wifi. I would have a week of offline time after my data runs out before topping up. Then each cycle that timespan grew. Now I have been offline for months.
Prepaid mobile broadband is a good middle step because you are not pushed to stay on an auto-pilot plan. It’s actually the opposite.. you have the inconvenience of topping up each time you need to continue your access, which is perfect for a progression into offlineness.
One of the reasons I use no apps but use websites: most of the time there is a way to save the page as something that will work offline.
I've moved back to analog as much of my activities too. And when I use digital anything, I do my best to not us GAFAM-controled services instead giving my money to smaller & non-US companies. But I'll admit I still use broadband Internet access (and I also still use and iPhone and an iPad).
Cost would probably not be a reason for us to stop using broadband, here in France mobile and broadband are not very expensive. I pay 34€/month for unlimited high-speed fiber, and each of our phone cost me 12€/month each with a 120giga data allowance... that my spouse or I seldom use (mostly when there is an emergency of some sort or some issue with the fiber access).
My motivation to go offline/analog is mostly about privacy and ownership. And the enjoyment of using analog tool too, but that one is really subjective.
I want to own the books/content I purchase, and I want to preserve the little privacy we have remaining.
That's the reason why I use a paper agenda (which is silly, since all the persons I have appointments with will be using a digital/online agenda, I know). That's also why I don't take much pictures with my phone either (I will sketch, or I will use a dedicated camera) and that's why I stopped reading ebooks almost completely and went back to print. If anyone is interested in reading more about my motivation to switch back to analog, I've written about it on my blog (which is full static, ads and script-free, btw ;)
For me, the easiest way to not be online is to turn off the computer (thx to it running Linux, it boots in a few second so it's never a big deal) as I don't care much about the phone as I use it as... a phone only. I have almost no app installed on it beside the things I'm required to access to (like banking and security apps). There is no social anything, no games, no Instagram, no streaming, no nothing. I even removed the default email account. I also made it a rule that, beside messages from my spouse, I will always wait to be back at home to answer a message or to listen to my voice mail (nothing is that urgent that it can't wait a few hours, or more).
As far as the (real) nuisance of those websites filled with scripts (and ads), I use a fork of the Firefox browser (so it's not chrome-based) with the 'uBlock Origin' extension that is not only the best ad-blocker I've ever used but also a great tool to finely control what scripts are running on every single website. It's also great to fine pick content one may want to remove from a webpage.
When I stumble such a shitty website, I simply close the tab. It's rare I can't find other relevant content to read elsewhere.
As a side-note, there a re still many people trying to run their website without relying on scripts (and without ads) but the sad reality is that most people simply can't be bothered exploring the Web anymore. Most of us gather in a few centralized platforms andexpect to be fed content without us doing much work... which means we don't have much control over what's shoved down our throat, nor over how our every moves and words are being recorded and spied upon.
I would like to try out Dab, but have not yet managed to find a radio set that offers the same level of comfort than my old FM radio (the same number of quick access buttons to my favorite stations, as I don't want to use menus). So, I keep using FM which is fine as it should be available at least up 2033, here in France.
Privacy and ownership is also the reason why we don't use streaming services anymore. CDs and DVDs are more then enough for us to enjoy music, a movie or a series. And there is no tracking at all, and no one can remove the DVD from our home either. We own it. So, if some newer content is not available on disc, too bad for them as we won't be watching it, end of the discussion. There are plenty content available on disc, more than we could ever watch in a lifetime ;)
I suppose by “Apps” you have phone apps in mind. But when I wrote about severe lack of offline apps, I meant in the specific context of communication. E.g. to use Lemmy, we are forced to use a web app. We are often led to think a website is a static document of sorts, but if JavaScript is used, that’s really an app. And it’s a crippled app because JS apps do not generally have a means to access your hard drive. Rightfully so, but it means we cannot read and write Lemmy posts offline and then synchronize as we briefly pass through a hotspot.
Part of the problem is “apps” on phones are simply just browser replacements, which is the worst of both worlds because it’s even more limiting. But a well designed FOSS app can theoretically serve us best by keeping a local DB which is then sync’d, like usenet news was back in the 90s. Short of that, it’s useful to save webpages with something like this:
It’s a good policy. I’ve gone as far as to stop emailing gmail and microsoft recipients. That step certainly causes waves around me. It useful because other people are forced to respect my choice to not have GAFAM in the loop. It forces people to think about their choices.
I love writing letters with LaTeX. It turns a writing task into a coding task, but then when I print the letters on paper, the end result is analog. It brings me great satisfaction to play with LaTeX. The shame is that this world is lost to most people who can’t see past the perception of inconvenience.
There was a bit of a parallel revolution on that in Australia (IIRC). Masses of people working from home during the pandemic led to bosses expecting staff to be available 24/7. But I would draw a line around 6 hrs day, 5 days/week, and still require the boss to have the luck of reaching me in a home office.. not when I’m on the go. I think Australia passed some kind of law giving people a right to be unplugged in their off hours.
I can tune ~25 FM stations. When I bought a DAB radio, it found 75 digital stations, some of which were quite important. Some were a mirror of an FM station, but usually better quality. In one case, the DAB station and identical FM station were both low quality, in which case FM was better because when a DAB signal is weak, it cuts out, which is much worse than a bit of static.
Indeed, streaming is all about tracking. Your smart TV watches you watching it. I’m back to popping into the library for media.