Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Off the Grid

stephenfry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 175 posts

Re: Off the Grid

#11

Post by scotchmi_st »

"Those very politicians, advertisers, media moguls, corporates and journalists who thought the internet a passing fad have moved in and grabbed the land. They have all the reach, scope, power and ‘social bandwidth’ there is. Everyone else is squeezed out — given little hutches, plastic megaphones and a pretence of autonomy and connectivity. No wonder so many have become so rude, resentful, threatening and unkind.

The radical alternative now must be to jack out of the matrix, to go off the grid."

This is awfully regressive, but not only that; it's also foolish. If his point is that by going 'Off The Grid' you can escape these people, he's out of luck- these people are AFK as well as online. Try walking through a major city without seeing a single advert.

If you want to get away from all the shit on the internet, the only way is forwards, not backwards.

Re: Off the Grid

#12

Post by [deleted] »

raverbashing wrote: post #7
SpeakMouthWords wrote: post #4

The good folks of tumblr have a succinct counter-argument to suggestions like this. It is, and I quote: "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch"

I kind of agree "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" or "refusing to talk to people as a principle - isn't that so 'awesome'?" It's fine, you don't need to be on every silly new 2.0 dot com, no issue there. But you're shutting yourself out of a means of communication with other people. The fact that it involved technology is a detail You can go to the pub and not d…

[deleted]

Re: Off the Grid

#13

Post by andrepd »

raverbashing wrote: post #7
SpeakMouthWords wrote: post #4

The good folks of tumblr have a succinct counter-argument to suggestions like this. It is, and I quote: "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch"

I kind of agree "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" or "refusing to talk to people as a principle - isn't that so 'awesome'?" It's fine, you don't need to be on every silly new 2.0 dot com, no issue there. But you're shutting yourself out of a means of communication with other people. The fact that it involved technology is a detail You can go to the pub and not d…

Precisely. You don't have to be on every new fad website or app, broadcasting your every motion to the rest of the world. But you don't need to go to the extreme of not having email or walking to a library instead of using the amazing repository of information that is the internet.

Re: Off the Grid

#14

Post by jasonkostempski »

I've been trying to do this and as of this week, HN and stackexchage are the last social accounts I have but only because I can't find a way to delete them. I could just log out and walk away but it feels like there's no closure that way. Anyone know of a way to close an HN account?

Re: Off the Grid

#15

Post by teh_klev »

raverbashing wrote: post #7
SpeakMouthWords wrote: post #4

The good folks of tumblr have a succinct counter-argument to suggestions like this. It is, and I quote: "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch"

I kind of agree "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" or "refusing to talk to people as a principle - isn't that so 'awesome'?" It's fine, you don't need to be on every silly new 2.0 dot com, no issue there. But you're shutting yourself out of a means of communication with other people. The fact that it involved technology is a detail You can go to the pub and not d…

> "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub"

It does make sense, your Facebook/Twitter/... presence doesn't go away when you go to bed or go on holiday, it's always there to be ogled at, poke and prodded, unlike your non-presence in the pub when you stagger off home at closing time.

Re: Off the Grid

#16

Post by trentmb »

raverbashing wrote: post #7
SpeakMouthWords wrote: post #4

The good folks of tumblr have a succinct counter-argument to suggestions like this. It is, and I quote: "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch"

I kind of agree "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" or "refusing to talk to people as a principle - isn't that so 'awesome'?" It's fine, you don't need to be on every silly new 2.0 dot com, no issue there. But you're shutting yourself out of a means of communication with other people. The fact that it involved technology is a detail You can go to the pub and not d…

> "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub"

Not quite- if I don't make it to the pub one night, people just brush it off and think "I'll talk to him next time."

People seem much more vitriolic if I don't respond to whatever internet/text message they sent with near immediacy- because it's always available.

It seems like there's a shut-off valve with the pub, or a land-line and answering machine- not so with facebook, texting, what have you.

Re: Off the Grid

#17

Post by RivieraKid »

ablation wrote: post #9

Goodness me, that's a lot of bloviation. I think there's a point buried in there somewhere that has been made far more succinctly by a lot of other people.

I usually think the same for vast majority of stuff on HN, i.e. most articles could be cut down to one or two paragraphs with little value lost, but... There are generally two reasons why I read - to extract information and for the experience of reading. Stephen Fry's blog is one of the rare cases where I just enjoy the writing and the information value doesn't really matter.

Re: Off the Grid

#18

Post by teh_klev »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #14

I've been trying to do this and as of this week, HN and stackexchage are the last social accounts I have but only because I can't find a way to delete them. I could just log out and walk away but it feels like there's no closure that way. Anyone know of a way to close an HN account?

Email hn@ycombinator.com, that said I did try that once and nothing happened. But that was long before dang stepped up and took a more active role in moderating threads. Kinda glad it didn't happen because the site's improved a fair bit since then.

I'm kinda a bit like you, I'm really only active online on StackOverflow and here. I have a twitter account but to be honest it's mostly full of re-tweets. I binned Facebook to no great loss, and I broke my mobile phone in January and have never bothered to replace it. I feel I have one foot "off the grid"...baby steps :)

Re: Off the Grid

#19

Post by raverbashing »

trentmb wrote: post #16
raverbashing wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" or "refusing to talk to people as a principle - isn't that so 'awesome'?" It's fine, you don't need to be on every silly new 2.0 dot com, no issue there. But you're shutting yourself out of a means of communication with other people. The fact that it involved technology is a detail You can go to the pub and not d…

> "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" Not quite- if I don't make it to the pub one night, people just brush it off and think "I'll talk to him next time." People seem much more vitriolic if I don't respond to whatever internet/text message they sent with near immediacy- because it's always available. It seems like there's a shut-off valve with the pub, or a land-l…

> if I don't respond to whatever internet/text message they sent with near immediacy- because it's always available

I have to agree with you on this one. But I believe it suffices to say that no, you're not looking at email/fb/whatsapp/whatever all the time (and acting like that)

Post reply on HN