You can have good internet on remote island chains for $50/month with Starlink. Today, being without is as much a choice there as it is here.
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Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
61–70 of 176 posts
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Privilege isn't just about wealth. The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!
The point is that 90% of the news is unimportant. Often you can read a weekly and that is enough A politician said something and other politicians reacted. Usually unimportant unless it was backed by a law or something. If it was important then the weekly will cover it. Main Character of the day on Social media. unimportant A crime happened nearby. Unimportant A celeb did something. Unimportant Something happened to…
All of this is very easy to filter out while browsing the internet. Not when you are speaking with actual persons. Believe or not, there are still people who watch television and believe in old media.
Television teaches them that the proper response to someone disagreeing is to get angry and shout when the opposing party tries to explain their point of view. Something that is useless or even technically impossible in anonymous net forums.
If you look at the old media, important decisions are mentioned but completely ignored after someone has said something offensive or an accident happened somewhere.
Social media is people and people are the problem, not technology or anonymity. Everyone who has spent Christmas with relatives knows this.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#63Electronic devices are very effective distraction tools, especially phones. Companies and apps leverage our psychology and biology to get our attention, but we can take control of what we interact with—and if we remove the hooks, they won't be able to exploit them anymore. What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which app…
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Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#64I had a similar experience when I stopped using Twitter. I only go back because a friend of mine posts there and I really like his posts. Occasionally I flip to my Following or For You tabs and they look incredibly sophomoric. It's 40 and 50 year olds using teenager memes and tropes. Then I realized, that a similar sort of mechanic applies on Hacker News so I decided to aggressively killfile users who annoy me one wa…
how do you killfile HN users?
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which poor people exactly do you consider privileged, and why? those with insulation from genocide and displacement despite poverty. their point is that, say, a german peasant in 17th century couldn't avoid the Thirty Years War.
German peasants in the 17th century seemed to manage just fine without 24/7 news coverage. Almost all news that's actually important - that might actually affect your life - will find you one way or another. Most news isn't important (eg sports drama). Or it isn't urgent (eg tariff news). Or both, like celebrity gossip. Only a vanishingly small percentage of news is both urgent and important. And there's plenty of pe…
He referred to the Thirty Years War where instead of doomscrolling the peasant especially living in southwestern Germany would get his war news by getting killed or starved and his home burned down.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#66Escaping the internet on a luxury trip doesn’t disprove political conflict… it just shows how privilege can opt out of reality and sell the experience as clickbaity insight.
It's important to have principles and to speak up for them around others, and to get your information from sources of truth.
But it is not important for most people to be plugged into a news mainline every day to read about the latest absurdity of our flailing country. Until or unless there is mass unrest and sustained protests or a general strike, the only thing we can do is vote and boycott, and if you live in a swing district or state, write a politician.
I think "escaping the internet" by stopping news consumption most of the week would benefit most of us, rich and poor, all races, unless you need realtime updates for your safety.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#67I had a similar experience when I stopped using Twitter. I only go back because a friend of mine posts there and I really like his posts. Occasionally I flip to my Following or For You tabs and they look incredibly sophomoric. It's 40 and 50 year olds using teenager memes and tropes. Then I realized, that a similar sort of mechanic applies on Hacker News so I decided to aggressively killfile users who annoy me one wa…
how do you killfile HN users?
I use personal software: https://overmod.org/
If I'm being entirely honest I made it in a very 'scratch-my-own-itch' way so you're better off just writing it yourself. Example idiosyncratic choices I went with: all lists are public, allow subscribing to other people's lists, no login required for lists, only Google Chrome support. I doubt anyone else shares those preferences.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#68> Contrary to the national security threat machine’s picture of a country at war with itself, we all got along so swimmingly that the idea of a civil war or anything like it struck me as laughable, as did the notion that the statistically insignificant number of politically-motivated killings, though real, said anything at all about the vast majority of real-world Americans. This line of thinking drives me crazy, esp…
I think what he is trying to say is that if we all sit down with each other and stop requiring that people agree with our worldview before engaging in good faith, we would find that we actually get along peacefully. He is saying that it isn't as bad as he thought it was before he experienced a situation where that happened.
See them discuss about how much someone of them gets paid or taxed, if he has medical help if needed or if he can afford to live where he's living now.
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#69Ignoring the obvious contradictory nature of the post (a trip to a place that is generally so expensive and time consuming that only the wealthy leisure class can access it yields polite people), what is the alternative to the fast news cycle? I've been toying with different solutions over the years but haven't found anything great. Magazine subscription to something like the Economist? Weekly Sunday paper subscripti…
Use Firefox with maximum tracking protection and use a PiHole with FTL as your DNS to block advertisement. Add uBlock Origin for the occasional cookie and WebRTC denial.
Then social media will be so broken, you'll automatically get so annoyed at it that you will just stop using it. Even youtube forces you for around 10 seconds to wait in a loading loop every damn video, just because they use anticompetitive measurements against Firefox users.
For the important things that you want to watch, I recommend minitube. It's using yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, and its interface is designed so you have to actively subscribe to everything or actively have to search for everything (e.g. when you want to learn about something there's no distractions on the way there which is super neat).
My smartphone is stored next to the toilet during the day, in airplane mode. This way I use social media only while pooping. After all, shit has to go where shit belongs, right?
Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently more people need to see more information about those things because they’re still happening
Maybe you need to read more news if you think we have people in charge who'd care about public opposition to the practice. This is foisting misery on people who have no capacity to affect change.
No capacity to affect change?
Are we forgetting that this specific policy we are discussing was voted in by the public and won the popular vote barely more than a year ago?
I think if more people were legitimately better educated and informed that outcome might not have happened.
The problem is…who is doing the informing and educating? Oftentimes the sources taking up that role are doing so with motives that are not in the people’s best interests.