extractos hacia l'offline

soy fan del blog time spent offline de mehret biruk, que me ha influenciado bastante en los meses recientes.

también me han movido mucho los libros recientes de Jenny Odell (hace poco ~aves compartía un extracto al respecto) y el de Digital Minimalism de Cal Newport, aunque ahora no los tengo a la mano como para ver qué fue lo que subrayé ahí.

en paralelo, llevo tiempo sintiendo y notando en otras personas un cansancio respecto a la vida online y a las "redes sociales" en general, ya sean proprietarias o no. ¿sesgo de confirmación? claro, pero no deja de parecerme interesante.

he pensado ir coleccionando por aquí algunos extractos de textos en inglés de personas que admiro y que apuntan en esas direcciones. tal vez después venga alguna clase de análisis y reflexión, pero no por ahora.

Mehret Biruk

Today, I can’t fathom waking up to such noise; the avatars shouting their grievances at me first thing in the morning. There are no avatars really; no hard, flat, cool object under, beside, on top of my pillow. When my alarm goes off, I get out of bed, tap Stop on the hard, flat, cool object on my desk and I begin my day with a simple ritual to grasp at and reorient myself to reality, another day.

I write about what I know, I ask for guidance for what I don’t yet know, and lately, it shocks and delights me how much I know, without the noise, without the avatars; tucked away in the quiet corner of my room with a desk, a chair, my $2 notebook and a pen. And on those empty pages, scribbling, scribbling, scribbling, I know enough to know. With such knowing, I go about my day and end my day making more time, more moments for I; Sitting With Myself. There’s no Twitter, no avatars. No way.

It is funny the things you can get used to.

And there was the in-between: In between waking up to Twitter day after day and Today. All the tips, the tools, the tricks, and days of Today followed by weeks and weeks of waking up to the noise, to the avatars. And I would wonder, desperate and in rage, How come, if I love Today so much, how come I keep going back to the noise, to the avatars for days on end? And when the answer came to me one day, about two or so years ago on those empty pages scribbling my grievances, that I couldn’t stand myself, I wept; tears staining the pages, making a mess of the truth staring right back at me: I simply could not stand myself. There weren’t enough tips, tools, tricks in the world— no amount of gimmicks that could save me from the thing that kept me running back to the noise, to the avatars: I disliked myself. And I asked the empty pages, desperate and with tears staining each word as I wrote it down, I asked for guidance. I asked— What should I do then?

(it's worth looking at the blog as a whole, and the popular posts that are listed in the link below)

André Stalz

Building social media or social networks is not interesting to me anymore. These platforms seem like they're mostly strangers talking to strangers, where relationships are dependent on shared interests or shared opinions. Social media platforms are huge attention routers, mostly useful for those who are seeking attention, and mostly detrimental to everyone else. Every time I open Twitter I regret it. Mastodon bores me. I can't bother to even open Bluesky. The SSB community is sweet, but I don't actually know these people.

Kristen Leo

I ghosted. I feel like I should offer an apology. It’s been an almost ten-year parasocial relationship between me, you, and YouTube, and I left without a goodbye. It’s been half a year of this content creator creating no content, half a year since I deleted TikTok, and I just dipped my toes back into Instagram in January. Social media and I have been on a break, I should say, and I’ve both loved and absolutely hated every moment of it.

I’ve been looking back at the 15+ years of the online performance/experience I’ve subjected myself to and examining what ultimately made me need this self-induced social media cancellation. Since 2009, I’ve been evolving with the internet, warping myself and my content to fit into whatever the online audiences have had an appetite for. But this latest era… I don’t know if I’m built for this one - I don’t know if any of us are.

In the sustainability world, we talk a lot about conscious consumption. Eventually, I think this mindset will expand to our relationship with the online world. Certainly not everyone, but a significant number of “users” will snap out of the video slot machine matrix and crave something healthy. In a way, we’ve already regressed to the blogger era.

solderpunk

I have been intellectual, emotionally, spiritually, whateverly prepared for probably a good two years now to start really seriously walking the walk on a bunch of stuff I have been talking about for even longer, with regard to removing computing and the internet in particular from the centre of my life. Not completely stopping either, but doing both less, and doing that less both via different means and toward different ends, doing both more conscientiously and becoming less invested in them so it will be easy to continue moving away them, Zeno paradox style, forever, because I think that's the inevitable future. Parts of making this shift happen include levelling up on non-computery or less-computery things to fill the gap left behind by less computing, systematically changing the computing stuff I don't leave behind to be more in line with my principles, gracefully wrapping up and winding down stuff that I don't want to put much more energy into but which other people have a reasonable expectation of not being abruptly abandoned, both just as part of being a responsible netizen but also so that the reduced time I continue to spend online is not consumed largely by things that fall in the "duties and obligations" category but are things I really genuinely want to do. I desperately want to be able to spend more of my reduced computer time emailing friends and writing gemlog/phlog posts without a sense of guilt that I should be doing something else.