I'm leaving the Internet for a year

I don't think 15 days is enough to get over the initial novelty and "honeymoon period" to be really sure it's so great.

After all, you're here now, back on the internet, posting on HN.

It is a good indicator that all of us could probably stand to gain from unplugging for a while every now and then.

What was the quote I heard recently on NPR.. something like:

"Without internet it is back to 1970, without electricity, its back to 1890"

something like that anyway.

For many things (In the UK at least) there is still a non Internet infrastructure for interfacing with things like Government departments and banks.

But many other times there simply is not, I remember a few years ago (maybe around 2007) job hunting and asking for an application form and being told that all applications had to be made online.

Also for some of the systems I have developed we have ended up using email address as a uniquely identifying piece of information for each customer which basically means that it is a mandatory field whenever a record in the DB is created and I would guess many others have done so too.

For the past couple of months I've lived without iPhone (with Prompt and Textastic) or phone for that matter (except for the occasional Skype call). I've tried to restrict my development and general Web usage to ~2 hours a day. I recall bumping into a colleague at around 3-4a.m. We had a smoke and then he got called away to do tech support on some web app he had been contractually obligated to support.

Given experiences like that, and my previous work schedule: In the meantime, I've played in the park; re-learned futball to where I can perform advanced, intensive dribbling; re-experienced my long distance running regimen with old friends; progressively mastered the track bike (in complex traffic scenarios, track standing, skid stops, heel stops, etc.); re-organized my thoughts in ordinary language philosophy, contemporary neuroscience, quantum mechanics, Wittgenstein and Spinoza; I've begun a semi-daily writing activity; longboarding; road tripping; skipping stones; befriending animals; etc.

These are the activities which contrast with $ pip install -r reqs.txt or reading another API or vim or bash scripting.

But what else have I noticed?

Daily I sit underneath the Texas sun, and watch. I watch people use these devices. I see IE everywhere and hours upon hours of people fumbling with that. Or texting. Playing some app or Twitter.

It's beautiful, as I sit under the sun, silent. It upsets me how so many able bodies opt for such narrowly prescribed lifestyle.

This argument often turns into ad hominem or red herring involving luddites, Amish, throwbacks, vintagers, etc.. But this text-based lifestyle is a choice too, you know, regardless of how "technologically savvy" or "liberated" or "autonomous" or "anonymous" one is.

It's useful to keep in mind McCluhan's adage "the medium is the message". It's the way a new medium influences culture in and of itself that has the greatest impact on us, not the content it carries.

Perhaps a better analogy for the Internet would be the printing press, but either way, it was arguably the ubiquity, accessibility and automation of electric power that changed society the most. Similarly, the fact that we can whip our phones out and query Wikipedia over a lunch discussion to settle a bet is much more revolutionary than the content of the article, or even the breadth of Wikipedia itself.