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> This type of technology is so intertwined in our daily lives that avoiding it isn't a realistic option. That seems like somewhat of an apathetic attitude to

> This type of technology is so intertwined in our daily lives that avoiding it isn't a realistic option. That seems like somewhat of an apathetic attitude to have. Try living without internet for a week, or even a day. It isn't so bad.

schoen 12y ago
I just read the book Two Cheers for Anarchism, where James Scott describes his experiences of "anarchist calisthenics". He suggests, slightly tongue-in-cheek, that practicing occasionally disobeying laws in minor ways like jaywalking could help develop a disobedience skill that he might need some day for an important moral reason. I think in the same way that we who live in an exceptionally wealthy society often get little practice in giving things up, but that this practice might be beneficial. It's not a very original observation to notice how having so many resources and opportunities and conveniences available to us makes us feel more and more dependent and averse to every sort of inconvenience. As a vegan, I always find it remarkable how emphatically people feel that it would be impossibly difficult for them to go without eating animal products, or that they can't imagine how someone could possibly manage without them. Maybe that's literally true in the Aleutian Islands or the Australian Outback or something, but not so much in New York City or Portland, where one could eat in a different restaurant every day for a year without running out of vegan entrées to order directly off the menu. But there are plenty of resources and technologies that I have that my parents and aunts and uncles grew up and lived and worked without for decades and that even today most of the world's population doesn't use—but that it's hard for me to imagine life without. (When I visit friends in Brazil, they don't have a machine to dry their laundry, but use a clothesline, the way almost everybody in history has done it, and to my amazement the clothesline still works OK. It's not even much more labor, just more latency in the clothes-washing process.) The habits we form from being well-off and having so much access to everything we want, worry some people because they consider how something could go wrong and there are skills we might need that we haven't developed. (We might also feel more acute suffering from losing what we're used to; psychologists have documented that losing what you had is consistently perceived as a much greater cost than failing to gain what you didn't have.) War or social unrest or natural disasters or ecological disruption could strike middle-class city dwellers pretty hard because we mostly don't know how to grow food, how to fix things, and so on. But another consequence of our abundance of resources and choices, one that I think is more core to what the parent commenter is getting at, is that when we become dependent on technologies and products and resources, our demand curve for them shifts. The people who supply these things to us have more power over us in terms of extracting money or concessions, because we and then understand that we're unlikely to actually give up our habits. That has consequences in terms of the difficulty in resisting changes that harm us (a classic example is if an Internet service changes its privacy policy in a way that reduces existing users' protections; service operators know that very few people will stop using the service even if most users dislike the change). It also means that the prospect of boycotts over ethical issues that affect others is dimmer. Manufacturers think that there's not that much chance many people would actually stop buying something because of disagreements with how it was made. I think it would be amazing to have a culture where people commonly had the experience of successfully giving up a habit or a product that they liked quite a bit, without being forced to, just as a result of a conscious choice. My Catholic friends often do this once a year during Lent (the religious tradition in many communities used to be to give up specific foods, but many people today interpret it more broadly and personally pick something to give up temporarily—normally, something that they enjoy and that it will be an effort for them to give up). From what I hear, many people find it satisfying and empowering when they succeed. And following Scott's idea, it might be good practice for when you decide that you do have an important reason to give something up.
- schoen 12y ago
  I was also just reminded of the documentary The Century of the Self which I think I originally saw at Aaron Swartz's recommendation. The documentary took me by surprise in some ways because it seemed to start off with a familiar narrative about the benefits of individualism and economic growth in giving people more choices. But at a certain point it turned darker and described how marketers had understood that giving people certain kinds of experiences of choice and personal attention could be deployed as a means of manipulation. It's something like the advice I just read the other day that you can get little kids to put on their shoes by asking them which pair of shoes they want to put on. The question puts the focus on their choice while directing their attention away from the question of whether they wanted to put on shoes in the first place. The darker later parts of the documentary make me think that we have a lot of practice celebrating people's power of choice and freedom from constraint (which I fully agree with). We have a lot of recent experience saying yes when there's no reason not to. What we perhaps haven't been practicing as much is saying no at those times when there is a reason to.
exelius 12y ago
Sounds great for a vacation. But considering I make a living talking to people who don't wear tinfoil hats, it's really not realistic to live the rest of my life disconnected from the net. I imagine the same goes for 99% of people on this site.
- doctorshady 12y ago
  That's a fair point, but I'm still willing to bet you could at the very least drastically reduce the amount of time you spend on the net if you wanted to.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    I could dramatically reduce any number of things if I really wanted to. That doesn't make it practical though, since I don't want to, or I want to still partake in a modern civilization. The better question to ask is "will being off the grid actually solve the problem?" Because plenty of people aren't on the net in Syria, Iraq, Afgahnistan...still doesn't really work out.
  - exelius 12y ago
    Yeah; but it's not about how much time you spend on the net: simply owning a smartphone and using it sparingly exposes a lot of information.

schoen 12y ago

I just read the book Two Cheers for Anarchism, where James Scott describes his experiences of "anarchist calisthenics". He suggests, slightly tongue-in-cheek, that practicing occasionally disobeying laws in minor ways like jaywalking could help develop a disobedience skill that he might need some day for an important moral reason. I think in the same way that we who live in an exceptionally wealthy society often get little practice in giving things up, but that this practice might be beneficial. It's not a very original observation to notice how having so many resources and opportunities and conveniences available to us makes us feel more and more dependent and averse to every sort of inconvenience. As a vegan, I always find it remarkable how emphatically people feel that it would be impossibly difficult for them to go without eating animal products, or that they can't imagine how someone could possibly manage without them. Maybe that's literally true in the Aleutian Islands or the Australian Outback or something, but not so much in New York City or Portland, where one could eat in a different restaurant every day for a year without running out of vegan entrées to order directly off the menu. But there are plenty of resources and technologies that I have that my parents and aunts and uncles grew up and lived and worked without for decades and that even today most of the world's population doesn't use—but that it's hard for me to imagine life without. (When I visit friends in Brazil, they don't have a machine to dry their laundry, but use a clothesline, the way almost everybody in history has done it, and to my amazement the clothesline still works OK. It's not even much more labor, just more latency in the clothes-washing process.) The habits we form from being well-off and having so much access to everything we want, worry some people because they consider how something could go wrong and there are skills we might need that we haven't developed. (We might also feel more acute suffering from losing what we're used to; psychologists have documented that losing what you had is consistently perceived as a much greater cost than failing to gain what you didn't have.) War or social unrest or natural disasters or ecological disruption could strike middle-class city dwellers pretty hard because we mostly don't know how to grow food, how to fix things, and so on. But another consequence of our abundance of resources and choices, one that I think is more core to what the parent commenter is getting at, is that when we become dependent on technologies and products and resources, our demand curve for them shifts. The people who supply these things to us have more power over us in terms of extracting money or concessions, because we and then understand that we're unlikely to actually give up our habits. That has consequences in terms of the difficulty in resisting changes that harm us (a classic example is if an Internet service changes its privacy policy in a way that reduces existing users' protections; service operators know that very few people will stop using the service even if most users dislike the change). It also means that the prospect of boycotts over ethical issues that affect others is dimmer. Manufacturers think that there's not that much chance many people would actually stop buying something because of disagreements with how it was made. I think it would be amazing to have a culture where people commonly had the experience of successfully giving up a habit or a product that they liked quite a bit, without being forced to, just as a result of a conscious choice. My Catholic friends often do this once a year during Lent (the religious tradition in many communities used to be to give up specific foods, but many people today interpret it more broadly and personally pick something to give up temporarily—normally, something that they enjoy and that it will be an effort for them to give up). From what I hear, many people find it satisfying and empowering when they succeed. And following Scott's idea, it might be good practice for when you decide that you do have an important reason to give something up.

schoen 12y ago
I was also just reminded of the documentary The Century of the Self which I think I originally saw at Aaron Swartz's recommendation. The documentary took me by surprise in some ways because it seemed to start off with a familiar narrative about the benefits of individualism and economic growth in giving people more choices. But at a certain point it turned darker and described how marketers had understood that giving people certain kinds of experiences of choice and personal attention could be deployed as a means of manipulation. It's something like the advice I just read the other day that you can get little kids to put on their shoes by asking them which pair of shoes they want to put on. The question puts the focus on their choice while directing their attention away from the question of whether they wanted to put on shoes in the first place. The darker later parts of the documentary make me think that we have a lot of practice celebrating people's power of choice and freedom from constraint (which I fully agree with). We have a lot of recent experience saying yes when there's no reason not to. What we perhaps haven't been practicing as much is saying no at those times when there is a reason to.

exelius 12y ago

Sounds great for a vacation. But considering I make a living talking to people who don't wear tinfoil hats, it's really not realistic to live the rest of my life disconnected from the net. I imagine the same goes for 99% of people on this site.

doctorshady 12y ago
That's a fair point, but I'm still willing to bet you could at the very least drastically reduce the amount of time you spend on the net if you wanted to.
- XorNot 12y ago
  I could dramatically reduce any number of things if I really wanted to. That doesn't make it practical though, since I don't want to, or I want to still partake in a modern civilization. The better question to ask is "will being off the grid actually solve the problem?" Because plenty of people aren't on the net in Syria, Iraq, Afgahnistan...still doesn't really work out.
- exelius 12y ago
  Yeah; but it's not about how much time you spend on the net: simply owning a smartphone and using it sparingly exposes a lot of information.