> I get so curious about people’s financial situations when they’re able to make such asymmetrical moves like that. He lives in a rural town near Pittsburgh, does selling $10 zines afford that lifestyle? What about healthcare? Does he have a trust fund? A recent inheritance? Bitcoin? Years of an early retirement strategy paying off? I shouldn’t ruin the anti-capitalistic vibe with such trivial capitalistic questions but I love it and my brain jumps to trying to make the math work for myself.
peoples' true natures/intentions make more sense when you remove "because money" from the equation
but it's hard to see through it when your own life revolves around "because money"
I barely interact with people online. It’s here and email. And that’s it. I don’t have a web site, don’t have a blog and don’t have any interest in social media. 99% of the time I don't even have a brower open if I'm using the computer.
Turns out when you live that life there’s a lot of people out there who do the same. It’s easy to forget there is a completely offline world if you’re online all the time. I spend most of my time with them. In fact I’m about to go out to lunch with four people (age range 29-55) who are similarly offline. We arranged lunch over the phone.
I’d go as far as saying that the online world, past essentials, is actually the minority.
Reading this article I couldn't help but think of a fantastic talk I found quite motivating by Andrew Kelley, Don't Take The Black Pill.
In it he talks about staying in the game, keeping strong voices advocating for good and positive change, and how stepping back, while a valid protection mechanism concedes the victory to whatever it is that's exhausting us.
We're going through a phase. It'll die. It'll die, because the previous phases died, or at least evolved into something else. We're not in the Dotcom era because the market dealt with that suckiness. We're not in Eternal September because Usenet was killed by other platforms because Usenet sucked as a UX. We're not in Web 2.0 because the market decided the semantic web was a noisy hot sucky mess. We aren't all just using AOL or (OMG, do you remember this?), MSN, because, well, they sucked.
If I look around me today, I see stuff that sucks. I see a glint of the next evolution - mostly small, independent, human-centred (perhaps AI supported). It's tiny right now, but there's a good chance that the specific future I'm thinking about is already here just not evenly distributed yet.
And it's natural to not want to try and build that, and instead just accept that [waves hands] all this is a sucky mess, and it's burning us out, and you go fix it, because I'm out.
But the best way to fix this is to roll up your sleeves and fix it. Maybe going and writing a religion zine is part of that, maybe it isn't. Maybe going and becoming a farmer fixes it, but it almost certainly doesn't.
We need more talented people building the future they want to see, not running away from the one they're being handed by a roomful of billionaire morons (who consider themselves geniuses).
Take it back. We've done it before. It's not easy, but the journey is where the stories are.
What else is possible in our personal lives other than to eventually let the internet go? I'm almost certain that 90% of the content I read is AI slop. Software in general is horrible, advertisements and dark patterns are everywhere. Even offline, it ruined movies, series, books and games. Now I have to research an author before buying a book to make sure that they are real and they don't mass produce AI slop.
Sure, I will still use internet and AI professionally, because they are paying me to do it, but it will be just a tool.
A lot of the people referenced in this post were in Developer Relations (or something adjacent). That's all going away [1], and going offline is the (over)-reaction to what is undoubtedly career-ending.
I think generative content will get good enough that people simply don’t trust what they read online. Humans might still generate content, but I predict over time they will be crowded out and worse blatantly copied to the point of discouragement. AI-powered miscreants will outpace enforcement efforts.
Personally I’m betting that we will see a major comeback in local radio and print media, as global network effects regress local with collective trust.
If you cast your gaze way down the road, circa 2064 AD, one of the multitude of permutations that might play out is that the promise of bona fide AGI and automation has been achieved. La dolce vita becomes the standard in the age of abundance, and freed from the tyranny of making a living, we are then fully unplugged, or at least have the option to be.
> I get so curious about people’s financial situations when they’re able to make such asymmetrical moves like that. He lives in a rural town near Pittsburgh, does selling $10 zines afford that lifestyle? What about healthcare? Does he have a trust fund? A recent inheritance? Bitcoin? Years of an early retirement strategy paying off? I shouldn’t ruin the anti-capitalistic vibe with such trivial capitalistic questions but I love it and my brain jumps to trying to make the math work for myself.
peoples' true natures/intentions make more sense when you remove "because money" from the equation
but it's hard to see through it when your own life revolves around "because money"
I barely interact with people online. It’s here and email. And that’s it. I don’t have a web site, don’t have a blog and don’t have any interest in social media. 99% of the time I don't even have a brower open if I'm using the computer.
Turns out when you live that life there’s a lot of people out there who do the same. It’s easy to forget there is a completely offline world if you’re online all the time. I spend most of my time with them. In fact I’m about to go out to lunch with four people (age range 29-55) who are similarly offline. We arranged lunch over the phone.
I’d go as far as saying that the online world, past essentials, is actually the minority.
Going offline is returning to normality.
Reading this article I couldn't help but think of a fantastic talk I found quite motivating by Andrew Kelley, Don't Take The Black Pill.
In it he talks about staying in the game, keeping strong voices advocating for good and positive change, and how stepping back, while a valid protection mechanism concedes the victory to whatever it is that's exhausting us.
https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4
We're going through a phase. It'll die. It'll die, because the previous phases died, or at least evolved into something else. We're not in the Dotcom era because the market dealt with that suckiness. We're not in Eternal September because Usenet was killed by other platforms because Usenet sucked as a UX. We're not in Web 2.0 because the market decided the semantic web was a noisy hot sucky mess. We aren't all just using AOL or (OMG, do you remember this?), MSN, because, well, they sucked.
If I look around me today, I see stuff that sucks. I see a glint of the next evolution - mostly small, independent, human-centred (perhaps AI supported). It's tiny right now, but there's a good chance that the specific future I'm thinking about is already here just not evenly distributed yet.
And it's natural to not want to try and build that, and instead just accept that [waves hands] all this is a sucky mess, and it's burning us out, and you go fix it, because I'm out.
But the best way to fix this is to roll up your sleeves and fix it. Maybe going and writing a religion zine is part of that, maybe it isn't. Maybe going and becoming a farmer fixes it, but it almost certainly doesn't.
We need more talented people building the future they want to see, not running away from the one they're being handed by a roomful of billionaire morons (who consider themselves geniuses).
Take it back. We've done it before. It's not easy, but the journey is where the stories are.
If you use AI and don't code for 3 years, and then AI collapses, and you need to code again … it won't be that hard to pick up. Let's not exaggerate!
You could code, go and run an Alpaca Farm for 10 years, give that up and probably within 6 months of study be ready to work as a coder again.
Internet is what you make of it. You don't have to algo-flood your brain and then complain about it on the same social network.
What else is possible in our personal lives other than to eventually let the internet go? I'm almost certain that 90% of the content I read is AI slop. Software in general is horrible, advertisements and dark patterns are everywhere. Even offline, it ruined movies, series, books and games. Now I have to research an author before buying a book to make sure that they are real and they don't mass produce AI slop.
Sure, I will still use internet and AI professionally, because they are paying me to do it, but it will be just a tool.
vgr's waldenponding is about the "And I mourn what we don’t get to hear from them."
An ineffable game happens that one's retreat diminishes.
https://www.econtalk.org/venkatesh-rao-on-waldenponding/ https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding-ii
A lot of the people referenced in this post were in Developer Relations (or something adjacent). That's all going away [1], and going offline is the (over)-reaction to what is undoubtedly career-ending.
1: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTvrz-4iXT-
I think generative content will get good enough that people simply don’t trust what they read online. Humans might still generate content, but I predict over time they will be crowded out and worse blatantly copied to the point of discouragement. AI-powered miscreants will outpace enforcement efforts.
Personally I’m betting that we will see a major comeback in local radio and print media, as global network effects regress local with collective trust.
I feel like if you need to make a public blog post about how you're done with the internet, you're not done with the internet.
If you cast your gaze way down the road, circa 2064 AD, one of the multitude of permutations that might play out is that the promise of bona fide AGI and automation has been achieved. La dolce vita becomes the standard in the age of abundance, and freed from the tyranny of making a living, we are then fully unplugged, or at least have the option to be.
Sounds more like people who grind to commercialise their content on the internet giving up, because it's now so hostile. In which case, fair enough.
There must be another way, one where we can stay online without being trapped in toxic social networks