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Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

kenklippenstein.com

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Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

#71

Post by dangus »

aneeqdhk wrote: post #43
zhivota wrote: post #28

Ignoring 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…

I switched to a weekly subscription of Economist (print) and it has been great. I haven't seen then news in a year (on phone, or TV). If there's something really important happening, then people around me generally tell me. At that point I check what's happening online, but that doesn't last more than a day or 2. It has allowed me to escape the news cycle. I am yet to find an equivalent of the Economist for India (wh…

Isn’t The Economist a super “rich guy” perspective though?

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard very good things about the publication’s quality and it’s admirable that it’s a weekly print.

I’d almost rather just read nothing over filtering down to a single perspective that is that specialized. Feels a little like getting all your news through Planet Money. Sure you’ll know what’s going on but through a single lens.

Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

#72

Post by dangus »

Eisenstein wrote: post #29
ropetin wrote: post #17

> 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.

But this is an environment where people aren’t talking about real and very important issues.

We obviously get along as a society when we are just doing day to day things. You don’t have to be on vacation to witness that.

But when it comes to discussing whether my trans friends have basic human rights, or whether we should treat foreigners like criminals with no due process by default, whether we should build coal power plants or nuclear power plants or solar power plants, or whether we should start a war, or whether healthcare should be a human right, it’s easy to find people I’ll have strong disagreements with these days.

And those are disagreements that have real consequences. Just ask the people I know who are discontinuing healthcare coverage due to ACA subsidies ending.

Ignorance and avoiding discussing these issues is bliss…until one day it might affect you.

The polarization is unfortunate but I think one way to lessen that is to actually confront issues and solve them. And that’s a fight since there’s a whole system setup that intends us to never solve those problems. But perhaps we might observe that a lot of the solved problems no longer occupy the debate space.

Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

#73

Post by MrJohz »

kadir1234 wrote: post #13
sallveburrpi wrote: post #3

Escaping 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.

Not "privilege" per se, I think that's the wrong word. Republican or Democrat, left or right, rich or very very rich - there is a lot of self-selection bias in judging the world from a pool of people who decided to go on vacation to the Galapagos...

Isn't that exactly what privilege is though? A measure of a person's ability to be part of that self-selected pool, and to shield yourself from issues that affect other people?

Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

#75

Post by notepad0x90 »

sallveburrpi wrote: post #3

Escaping 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.

can a poor person not disconnect in the same way? I think plenty already do without meaning too, lots of tech-illiterate truck drivers and construction workers with flip phones.

Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

#76

Post by hvb2 »

ffuxlpff wrote: post #62
slyall wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Believe or not, there are still people who watch television and believe in old media.

Enlighten me, where do you go for proper investigative journalism that is not considered old media?

Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

#77

Post by prmoustache »

arjie wrote: post #58

I 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…

Can't you follow someone without using twitter?

I know that with mastodon I can just subscribe to the rss feed of anyone without using an account, visiting a server's feed or actually firing up a fediverse compatible app

Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

#79

Post by xarope »

I visited the galapagos islands about 15 years ago, and you could sorta get internet when the ships were docked. Enough for me, back then, to check my emails and make sure there were no crit-sits or urgent issues to handle, and then return to admiring the sunset, blue footed boobies, seals everywhere, albatross sitting next to a fish monger in isabela waiting for the fish head to be thrown as a snack.

Nice times.

Re: Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

#80

Post by godelski »

MrJohz wrote: post #73
kadir1234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "privilege" per se, I think that's the wrong word. Republican or Democrat, left or right, rich or very very rich - there is a lot of self-selection bias in judging the world from a pool of people who decided to go on vacation to the Galapagos...

Isn't that exactly what privilege is though? A measure of a person's ability to be part of that self-selected pool, and to shield yourself from issues that affect other people?

Googling it, looks like the trip costs around $6.5k for 2 people for a week. Expensive, but not out of reach for most Americans.

I mean we're on HN... if anything we're more likely to be in a wealthy bubble here. On average. There's plenty outside Silicon Valley but this place is a bubble too.

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