Internet works best in small dosages

Internet works best in small dosages :: Syntax at Amima

We often credit Facebook and Twitter for all the harms of the world, but the more I think about it, the less I agree. Those were not the culprit, they only took full advantage of societal changes. The IRC and bulletin board days were just as consuming. But the per-minute billing was saving us.

Today, broadband is the least of it — we're online everywhere: mobile phones, television, fridges. This is exactly why the web we remember so fondly is not a thing anymore.

There is nothing I can do about it. Being offline is a privilege few can afford. There are steps towards that, and I have already taken some: my enjoyment of the internet has increased, and I have more time for other things. It should not be a surprise, that none of them involve a 200$ worth of junk in an "offline bag".

I stopped using services with algorithmic feeds. I either stopped using them all together (Reddit, Musk's version of Twitter), or removed the feed (like on Google Youtube). Those services are designed around the feed; they are as addictive as they can be. They expect nothing of you. You are only a mindless consumer of whatever they throw in your eyes. The less algorithm they can use at you, the less inclined you are to waste time on them. This is a self-propelling machine: the harder it is to use them, the less you use them. And the less you use them, the less you want to use them. It can be seen as using their weapons against them! All their thinking is about how to make using their services as effortless as possible. By optimising for effortlessness, they lost the ability to imagine their products being used any other way. Have you tried finding anything on Google Youtube recently? I did! I also don't want to use it much anymore.

Seeing how this works on my brain, I continued this path. First, I replaced my laptop for a desktop. To use The Big Screen now I need to sit in front of the computer, on the chair I spend 8 hours prior working. I still do it (my goal is not to abandon the internet), but I do not want to spend hours more there. I do what I want to do, and I go somewhere else.

Now the "somewhere else" is not where the small screen is. Ever since I replaced my iPhone with an eInk phone, my usage of mobile internet went close to zero. The modern web is not designed for reading, as reading requires brain power - and the brain power is what internet moguls can't control. It's all video and pictures, and those are pretty terrible on eInk! My mobile usage is 90% signal and SMS.

Constant access is the mistake we all made together. Like Douglas Adams once said, this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely considered a bad idea.

Who Is Writing This

Michał Sapka

Father, husband, software engineer from southern Kraków, Poland. I'm deeply into speculative fiction and FOSS.

This site exists because there are things I like to talk about, but I've got no one to listen to me as often as I'd like. I started it mostly to talk about computers, but over time its focus shifted towards human narratives. This means you'll mostly find "reviews" here of novels, movies, and even games, intertwined with BSD or Emacs and critiques of the current state of the world.

It goes without saying that nothing you read here was AI-generated. All thoughts, words, and typos are mine and mine alone. I do use automated systems for spell checking and grammar correction, as English is not my native language.

Internet works best in small dosages

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