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.
It's lame how a timeless Buddhist principle is derided as "privilege" by contemporary leftists. So closed minded and presumptuous towards something so effective and universally applicable.
My personal observation is that those with the least engage in this practice the most, partly because they don't have the bandwidth to bother. It's the middle and upper-middle class who are the terminally online cynics.
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?
"Privilege" has sort of morphed in an mostly-untouchable insult and I don't think it means very much of anything any longer and should not be used. What it means in practice:
- You can't have an opinion because you're in the wrong group.
- Your opinion is wrong because you're in the wrong group.
- Your opinion is hypocritical (and therefore wrong) because of the group you're in.
It's a big step back with regard to argumentation. Ideas are either correct or not, and the fact that they came from someone who might have some advantages does not weigh in on this.
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.
The US doesn't mandate any vacation or sick leave days, so a huge chunk of the population can't even get a week off work, much less afford $4k per person.
I would imagine the set of people who would spend $4K per person on a week in the Galapagos does not contain very many people who don’t have 3 weeks of vacation per year (or are retired).
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.
Technically you don't even need a flip phone to disconnect from the media and the news. Plenty of people have smartphone but choose not to care about what happens in the world, at least what we have no say in it.
Although if I was American, I think I'd be pretty interested (worried) in what my country is becoming under Trump presidency.
But then, until the elections there is not much one can do.
It's definitely privileged to take a trip to the Galapagos, but I don't think it's privileged to ignore the news. A lot of poor people ignore the news. They may be too busy, or they may feel powerless to change anything. I think the real question is what exactly this entirely content-free statement means: "I’ll be focusing more on stories that actually matter instead of chasing the flash-in-the-pan ephemera that nobody remembers the next week."
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 random person. Unimportant
Sport result. If you follow that team you already know, if not then not important.
Seriously go to the front page of the New York times or some other outfit and count the stories that you needed to read today.
I think OP's point is that if your life is so blessed that "90% of the news is unimportant to you" then that itself is a great, fortunate privilege.
For example, I can tell you that if you are an immigrant in the USA from one of the (now many) targeted countries, even one with legal residency, news about ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
> ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
Maybe the first few stories are, but what past masked goons throwing up Nazi salutes and sending people to foreign labor camps do you need to keep up on? If you're into politics, then sure, but your average Joe probably doesn't need to know that they're, yet again, terrorizing people and acting like a secret police force.
Are we forgetting that this specific policy we are discussing was voted in by the public and won the popular vote barely more than a year ago?
I think if more people were legitimately better educated and informed that outcome might not have happened.
The problem is…who is doing the informing and educating? Oftentimes the sources taking up that role are doing so with motives that are not in the people’s best interests.
Wow. Great. Which term is our President on again and can you confirm that time flows linearly and cannot, in fact, flow backwards to undo the election?
The public has no ability to affect change on the policy this Presidency makes. Especially not the public that is predisposed to dislike the President.
This is sadistic and selfish to believe the public must be relentlessly informed of these individual policies that they cannot do anything about. Anything they are informed about present day will almost certainly be forgotten years down the line.
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 anonymous net forums.
If you look at the old media, important decisions are mentioned but completely ignored after someone has said something offensive or an accident happened somewhere.
Social media is people and people are the problem, not technology or anonymity. Everyone who has spent Christmas with relatives knows this.
That's just it though, the "news" is not providing valuable information to the majority of people, it's mostly a series of takes designed to fit into easily digestible narratives so they can attract enough viewers to survive as a business.
99.9% of people would be better voters if they put five hours a week toward reading about and better understanding shit from an undergrad liberal arts program (history, political philosophy, statistics, media studies, basic physical science, economics) and five hours a year into catching up on the news, than vice versa.
Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little, focus on critical thinking and media analysis skills in primary and secondary education - not as the main focus but certainly as important, civic building classes.
News media gets harsh anti-monopoly rules: no more billionaires owning every station in every jurisdiction, in fact no more conglomerates whatsoever. More independent funding for local news: I'm content for a bunch of these to go bankrupt on a regular basis but we'll sponsor more people putting out independent journalism.
At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism, with a mission charter the citizenry must have accurate reporting to understand how they will choose leaders to guide international politics. This one would be tricky to get right, I suspect you'd probably end up tying resource allocation to government funding alotments and the like via some automatic mechanisms.
The first and last are probably pie in the sky: really let's start by shredding a couple of media empires into 50 different fiefdoms and let them battle it out for views, but there'll be no more mergers or cross-media ownership that's for sure.
Personally I'm all for breaking up the media conglomerates. Especially the news. There is a tremendous amount of group-think from professional elites who all goto the same universities and then go work in the same newsrooms. When combined with endless M&A it creates insular monoculture with low tolerance for opposing views in most of these news outlets.
> At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism
That sounds great in theory, but given the recent scandals at the BBC and uncovering of systematic bias there we can see how fragile such institutions can be. Even without M&A driving it the BBC has become a primarily leftist monoculture.
> Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little
Sounds great, but also prone to systemic bias. Universities in general have become echo chambers in liberal arts departments.
Perhaps combine that with options for doing national service of some sort that would balance out education. Afterall, classroom learning only gives one aspect of life and experience. Often just exposing people to new places and environments broadens their outlooks.
German peasants in the 17th century seemed to manage just fine without 24/7 news coverage.
Almost all news that's actually important - that might actually affect your life - will find you one way or another. Most news isn't important (eg sports drama). Or it isn't urgent (eg tariff news). Or both, like celebrity gossip.
Only a vanishingly small percentage of news is both urgent and important. And there's plenty of people in my life who would tell me if - for example - we needed to evacuate the city due to a fire.
Really. You can switch off. It'll be ok. Try it, and you'll see.
He referred to the Thirty Years War where instead of doomscrolling the peasant especially living in southwestern Germany would get his war news by getting killed or starved and his home burned down.
It's important to have principles and to speak up for them around others, and to get your information from sources of truth.
But it is not important for most people to be plugged into a news mainline every day to read about the latest absurdity of our flailing country. Until or unless there is mass unrest and sustained protests or a general strike, the only thing we can do is vote and boycott, and if you live in a swing district or state, write a politician.
I think "escaping the internet" by stopping news consumption most of the week would benefit most of us, rich and poor, all races, unless you need realtime updates for your safety.
Finishing my PhD I kinda did this same disconnect. Only really getting news by word of mouth or maybe weekly checking Reuters front page. Effectively quit Twitter and BlueSky. It's about a year since I started and I don't regret it for a second. I rarely feel like I've missed something important. Honestly, if it it's important then people will be talking about it.
I'm on HN more now and honestly a bit disappointed with myself for that but even here is less baity than social media and news. It's easier to select topics as well. I just feel myself get angry when I get on those platforms and it reminds me to get off.
I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.
Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.
I did this except it was more like a month. When I got back I realised how much happier I was to be off of X and oblivious to the news. There is virtually zero utility to being "informed" of most things, and plenty of downsides.
I once stumbled upon the idea of calculating the signal to noise ration of "news". Say you consume 30 pieces of "news" a day, you are roughly at 10k "news" pieces a year. How many of those influence a decision you make. Like which job to take, whom to propose to, where to move.
The author, Hans Rosling by the way, showed with this little thought experiment, how little signal for our personal lives and our important decisions lies in "news".
I also worked in publishing for a while as my first job out of university. Ever since I left that industry I am so happy to be out of that drama generating machine.
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 way or another. Now, most HN comment sections have a bunch of comments missing but the remainder are surprisingly decent.
The downside is that I now interact with HN a lot more, which I was hoping would not happen.
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
It’s almost impossible to browse twitter without an account anymore. If you get a direct link to a tweet you can see it, but every click will prompt you to log in. Same for other platforms.
If I'm being entirely honest I made it in a very 'scratch-my-own-itch' way so you're better off just writing it yourself. Example idiosyncratic choices I went with: all lists are public, allow subscribing to other people's lists, no login required for lists, only Google Chrome support. I doubt anyone else shares those preferences.
I'm on a tropical island vacation and still checking HN. The typical tropical tummy troubles leave me with some time to fill reading tech news, and I don't see any problem with it. I appreciate the general lack of political stuff on US political stuff HN (except the comments).
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 subscription?
How to keep up on the news without being jerked around by the engagement machine?
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 (where I'm residing right now). As a result, I'm currently quite oblivious to the day-to-day in India, but honestly that hasn't been of much consequence.
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.
The only problem I have with escaping the news cycle is relying on other people for important information. "Today is shorts and t-shirt, tomorrow is freezing rain" has caught me by surprise. So I find myself following the weather more than I would if I were watching local news. But it's not just weather.
Regardless. It's good to feel disconnected from these things. But at the same time I recognize I have a responsibility to take care of the things within my reach.
Is this what people were doing in 1939 though? I really hope not.
Use Firefox with maximum tracking protection and use a PiHole with FTL as your DNS to block advertisement. Add uBlock Origin for the occasional cookie and WebRTC denial.
Then social media will be so broken, you'll automatically get so annoyed at it that you will just stop using it. Even youtube forces you for around 10 seconds to wait in a loading loop every damn video, just because they use anticompetitive measurements against Firefox users.
For the important things that you want to watch, I recommend minitube. It's using yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, and its interface is designed so you have to actively subscribe to everything or actively have to search for everything (e.g. when you want to learn about something there's no distractions on the way there which is super neat).
My smartphone is stored next to the toilet during the day, in airplane mode. This way I use social media only while pooping. After all, shit has to go where shit belongs, right?
you don't need to keep up on the news. reject the premise and be free. honestly we wish we could be more ignorant. how do you stop learning about the news when it is everywhere?
It hasn't 100% worked for me, but it's been progress for me to:
- turn on grayscale
- don't use any social media
- turn off all recommendations for the two indulgences I do have (YouTube, Reddit)
The no recommendations has been especially helpful because I only have my subscription feed, and I can curate that.
As far as news goes - Economist is a good one imo. Weekly news is a fast enough cadence that also filters out noise and nonsense from the knee-jerk, instant reaction news cycles. I've also found the New Yorker to be pretty great, since their pieces are so long that they're usually about events that happened weeks to months ago.
But +1 to others' comments: maybe you don't need to know everything, either. Reading books about history, even recent history, has been a great way for me to fulfill my need to understand our society.
Despite all that I've typed above, if you really want to get regular news consumption, I highly highly recommend Heather Cox Richardson. She distills the daily news and often adds historical context.
One probably needs an assistant that tells one news that said assistant knows is important to... one. What news actually is important? E.g. if Bitcoin is crashing? (Probably not just important for crypto-bros, but could affect the broader economy). If you're planning trip to Sicily and Mount Etna just erupted. Or if you have relatives there..
I guess the assistant should know whether a piece of news can be important or not, but if something happens to be a slow-boil (e.g. the fascist takeover of the USA), it could end up as a surprise.
Perhaps one of those planet-burning text generators can be one such assistant...
Just keep it in the front of your mind that most of the stuff you're reading is ephemeral bullshit. If you come across something that you think is important, make a note of it. I keep a small journal of stories I find notable and that may be important in the future. Everything else is lost to the wind.
Electronic devices are very effective distraction tools, especially phones. Companies and apps leverage our psychology and biology to get our attention, but we can take control of what we interact with—and if we remove the hooks, they won't be able to exploit them anymore.
What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which apps can be installed, how often they can notify or distract us, and so on.
A very basic step is using an app blocker. The ideal solution would be a phone with a local AI that is aligned with my personal preferences and instructions.
For example, it could deliver news just once a week from outlets across the entire political spectrum, eliminate social media entirely, and surface only important emails and messages at the most appropriate times.
That's what I thought, too. Perhaps if you're as chronically online as he makes himself out to be, then not posting a tweet for a week feels like years. If he gained a new perspective, then great, but I'm deliberately leaving my phone in the hotel room when on vacation because nothing good ever comes out of it.
He is a journalist who writes a newsletter and focuses on social media, politics, and breaking news. Being away for a week in does count as disappearing in his world.
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.
> 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, especially from someone like Ken. Just because a bunch of privileged Americans were friendly with each other while enjoying an amazing time in nature doesn't immediately negate the very real problems going on in the US.
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.
See them discuss about how much someone of them gets paid or taxed, if he has medical help if needed or if he can afford to live where he's living now.
This person lives and breathes politics, he is a political blogger. Just interacting with people outside of politics was new for him.
He isn't saying 'ignore politics', and he isn't saying 'we can all agree on everything'. What he is saying is 'making your life about political issues distorts your perspective to where you think that everyone hates one another to point of declaring a civil war' and is advocating sitting down and just socializing with people without the baggage.
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.
If you want to get people on your side, the best way to do that is not to argue with them, but to be friendly with them. This doesn't mean rolling over and letting them say untrue things or not advocating for causes that are important to you, but it means respecting that other people have different views and putting aside disagreements to socialize with them. There is a reason why armies disallow 'fraternizing with the enemy'.
I've been trying to migrate back to command-line-only applications to get a facsimile of this.
I don't think that command-line tools are better in any kind of "objective" sense, but I find that if you live primarily within tmux + neovim (and maybe Codex/Claude if you want to be super cool), then it's much easier to not be distracted by the rest of the world.
Nowadays, when I do work I will have a full screen terminal window open. I have an utterly gigantic 85" 8K TV as my "monitor" and I will have an ungodly number of tmux splits, but importantly I don't think those splits are distracting from actually doing work. At some point I will figure out how to get the dbt Cloud `preview` functionality working locally and I think I can avoid the vast majority of any of my work requiring a browser.
Sometimes it does kind of feel like I'm just being a hipster by using a lot of tools that have existed since antiquity, but I think they do a good job at not being distracting.
Forgive the messy desk. I wish I could say it's atypical, but it's not. I always have a ton of projects going on concurrently and as a result it's easy for stuff to pile up. I'll probably clean it this week.
My work computer isn't plugged in so I'm afraid you'll have to use your imagination for the million tmux splits.
Can you share some details? Do you disconnect while in your hometown going about your daily routine, or do you have this down time in a different environment? I'm kind of looking for inspiration. I have grown kids and friends that I text with so I'm also wondering how my relationship with them would fit into this. Has that played a role for you?
IRC -> Bitlbee.org public servers -> XMPP and more
gopher://magical.fish -> huge gopher portal. Gopher://sdf.org and
a few more than proxies to Gutenberg and the like.
Mosh -> decent SSH speeds.
For fora and asynchronous chats, Usenet and Fido/DoveNet.
Music? Podcasts? Download these before, and store them.
Also, books and phlog posts are far lighter and you can seek around freely, and you can read stories in a much faster way.
And, if any, tons of stations still have short wave channels, both in English and in Spanish.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively researching and buying backpacking gear and soaking up tips for next spring. I am massively looking forward to being on a mountain alone for a few days with only a Garmin inReach Mini as my link to the outside world, gonna be nice to disconnect like that.
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.
It's lame how a timeless Buddhist principle is derided as "privilege" by contemporary leftists. So closed minded and presumptuous towards something so effective and universally applicable.
My personal observation is that those with the least engage in this practice the most, partly because they don't have the bandwidth to bother. It's the middle and upper-middle class who are the terminally online cynics.
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?
"Privilege" has sort of morphed in an mostly-untouchable insult and I don't think it means very much of anything any longer and should not be used. What it means in practice:
- You can't have an opinion because you're in the wrong group.
- Your opinion is wrong because you're in the wrong group.
- Your opinion is hypocritical (and therefore wrong) because of the group you're in.
It's a big step back with regard to argumentation. Ideas are either correct or not, and the fact that they came from someone who might have some advantages does not weigh in on this.
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.
The US doesn't mandate any vacation or sick leave days, so a huge chunk of the population can't even get a week off work, much less afford $4k per person.
I would imagine the set of people who would spend $4K per person on a week in the Galapagos does not contain very many people who don’t have 3 weeks of vacation per year (or are retired).
I would suggest most Americans and most people on HN have a tremendous amount of privilege, do they not?
Is it beneficial to be imposing a purity test before taking the meaning of any lesson?
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.
Poor people suffer from political conflict more directly, enduring the abysmal policies coming from the top in a very concrete way.
Technically you don't even need a flip phone to disconnect from the media and the news. Plenty of people have smartphone but choose not to care about what happens in the world, at least what we have no say in it.
Although if I was American, I think I'd be pretty interested (worried) in what my country is becoming under Trump presidency.
But then, until the elections there is not much one can do.
It's definitely privileged to take a trip to the Galapagos, but I don't think it's privileged to ignore the news. A lot of poor people ignore the news. They may be too busy, or they may feel powerless to change anything. I think the real question is what exactly this entirely content-free statement means: "I’ll be focusing more on stories that actually matter instead of chasing the flash-in-the-pan ephemera that nobody remembers the next week."
Privilege isn't just about wealth. The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!
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 random person. Unimportant
Sport result. If you follow that team you already know, if not then not important.
Seriously go to the front page of the New York times or some other outfit and count the stories that you needed to read today.
I think OP's point is that if your life is so blessed that "90% of the news is unimportant to you" then that itself is a great, fortunate privilege.
For example, I can tell you that if you are an immigrant in the USA from one of the (now many) targeted countries, even one with legal residency, news about ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
This is something outraged rich people tell themselves to feel better about their outrage.
and the ICE news would be that 10% that is important.
> ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
Maybe the first few stories are, but what past masked goons throwing up Nazi salutes and sending people to foreign labor camps do you need to keep up on? If you're into politics, then sure, but your average Joe probably doesn't need to know that they're, yet again, terrorizing people and acting like a secret police force.
Apparently more people need to see more information about those things because they’re still happening
Maybe you need to read more news if you think we have people in charge who'd care about public opposition to the practice.
This is foisting misery on people who have no capacity to affect change.
No capacity to affect change?
Are we forgetting that this specific policy we are discussing was voted in by the public and won the popular vote barely more than a year ago?
I think if more people were legitimately better educated and informed that outcome might not have happened.
The problem is…who is doing the informing and educating? Oftentimes the sources taking up that role are doing so with motives that are not in the people’s best interests.
Wow. Great. Which term is our President on again and can you confirm that time flows linearly and cannot, in fact, flow backwards to undo the election?
The public has no ability to affect change on the policy this Presidency makes. Especially not the public that is predisposed to dislike the President.
This is sadistic and selfish to believe the public must be relentlessly informed of these individual policies that they cannot do anything about. Anything they are informed about present day will almost certainly be forgotten years down the line.
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 anonymous net forums.
If you look at the old media, important decisions are mentioned but completely ignored after someone has said something offensive or an accident happened somewhere.
Social media is people and people are the problem, not technology or anonymity. Everyone who has spent Christmas with relatives knows this.
> 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?
That's just it though, the "news" is not providing valuable information to the majority of people, it's mostly a series of takes designed to fit into easily digestible narratives so they can attract enough viewers to survive as a business.
Almost all news ignores just about everyone unless someone else actively tries to inject the news into their life.
Being relentlessly informed of all the miseries of the world is a choice for most people in developed countries not in the middle of a war.
> Privilege isn't just about wealth.
Which poor people exactly do you consider privileged, and why?
> The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!
What can they do about the news, though? I specifically said, "they may feel powerless to change anything".
We live in democracies. The price of entry is a citizenry informed enough to choose how they want many issues of state handled.
The alternative is worse, and the result of an uninformed citizenry can be disasterous and a regression towards non-democracy.
99.9% of people would be better voters if they put five hours a week toward reading about and better understanding shit from an undergrad liberal arts program (history, political philosophy, statistics, media studies, basic physical science, economics) and five hours a year into catching up on the news, than vice versa.
The price of entry is actually just being born in the country (or at least that's all that's required in most democracies).
You personally might have the expectation that when you vote, you should be informed about what you're voting on/for - but that is entirely optional.
edit: I'd love to hear about some of your proposed solutions to solving this problem ;)
Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little, focus on critical thinking and media analysis skills in primary and secondary education - not as the main focus but certainly as important, civic building classes.
News media gets harsh anti-monopoly rules: no more billionaires owning every station in every jurisdiction, in fact no more conglomerates whatsoever. More independent funding for local news: I'm content for a bunch of these to go bankrupt on a regular basis but we'll sponsor more people putting out independent journalism.
At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism, with a mission charter the citizenry must have accurate reporting to understand how they will choose leaders to guide international politics. This one would be tricky to get right, I suspect you'd probably end up tying resource allocation to government funding alotments and the like via some automatic mechanisms.
The first and last are probably pie in the sky: really let's start by shredding a couple of media empires into 50 different fiefdoms and let them battle it out for views, but there'll be no more mergers or cross-media ownership that's for sure.
Personally I'm all for breaking up the media conglomerates. Especially the news. There is a tremendous amount of group-think from professional elites who all goto the same universities and then go work in the same newsrooms. When combined with endless M&A it creates insular monoculture with low tolerance for opposing views in most of these news outlets.
> At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism
That sounds great in theory, but given the recent scandals at the BBC and uncovering of systematic bias there we can see how fragile such institutions can be. Even without M&A driving it the BBC has become a primarily leftist monoculture.
> Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little
Sounds great, but also prone to systemic bias. Universities in general have become echo chambers in liberal arts departments.
Perhaps combine that with options for doing national service of some sort that would balance out education. Afterall, classroom learning only gives one aspect of life and experience. Often just exposing people to new places and environments broadens their outlooks.
> Which poor people exactly do you consider privileged, and why?
those with insulation from genocide and displacement despite poverty.
their point is that, say, a german peasant in 17th century couldn't avoid the Thirty Years War.
German peasants in the 17th century seemed to manage just fine without 24/7 news coverage.
Almost all news that's actually important - that might actually affect your life - will find you one way or another. Most news isn't important (eg sports drama). Or it isn't urgent (eg tariff news). Or both, like celebrity gossip.
Only a vanishingly small percentage of news is both urgent and important. And there's plenty of people in my life who would tell me if - for example - we needed to evacuate the city due to a fire.
Really. You can switch off. It'll be ok. Try it, and you'll see.
He referred to the Thirty Years War where instead of doomscrolling the peasant especially living in southwestern Germany would get his war news by getting killed or starved and his home burned down.
"The news" is hardly reality either, and nor does it record most of the political conflict in the world.
It's important to have principles and to speak up for them around others, and to get your information from sources of truth.
But it is not important for most people to be plugged into a news mainline every day to read about the latest absurdity of our flailing country. Until or unless there is mass unrest and sustained protests or a general strike, the only thing we can do is vote and boycott, and if you live in a swing district or state, write a politician.
I think "escaping the internet" by stopping news consumption most of the week would benefit most of us, rich and poor, all races, unless you need realtime updates for your safety.
Finishing my PhD I kinda did this same disconnect. Only really getting news by word of mouth or maybe weekly checking Reuters front page. Effectively quit Twitter and BlueSky. It's about a year since I started and I don't regret it for a second. I rarely feel like I've missed something important. Honestly, if it it's important then people will be talking about it.
I'm on HN more now and honestly a bit disappointed with myself for that but even here is less baity than social media and news. It's easier to select topics as well. I just feel myself get angry when I get on those platforms and it reminds me to get off.
I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.
Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.
I did this except it was more like a month. When I got back I realised how much happier I was to be off of X and oblivious to the news. There is virtually zero utility to being "informed" of most things, and plenty of downsides.
I once stumbled upon the idea of calculating the signal to noise ration of "news". Say you consume 30 pieces of "news" a day, you are roughly at 10k "news" pieces a year. How many of those influence a decision you make. Like which job to take, whom to propose to, where to move.
The author, Hans Rosling by the way, showed with this little thought experiment, how little signal for our personal lives and our important decisions lies in "news".
I also worked in publishing for a while as my first job out of university. Ever since I left that industry I am so happy to be out of that drama generating machine.
The big one is voting, of course. It's not like following international politics will impact what firmness mattress I will buy.
uninstalling twitter on my phone was one of the best decisions I made
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 way or another. Now, most HN comment sections have a bunch of comments missing but the remainder are surprisingly decent.
The downside is that I now interact with HN a lot more, which I was hoping would not happen.
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
It’s almost impossible to browse twitter without an account anymore. If you get a direct link to a tweet you can see it, but every click will prompt you to log in. Same for other platforms.
Same, I have about 5 friends I follow - but I do it via bookmarked xcancel so I feel less sullied by the experience.
how do you killfile HN users?
I use personal software: https://overmod.org/
If I'm being entirely honest I made it in a very 'scratch-my-own-itch' way so you're better off just writing it yourself. Example idiosyncratic choices I went with: all lists are public, allow subscribing to other people's lists, no login required for lists, only Google Chrome support. I doubt anyone else shares those preferences.
If you add a LICENSE or CONTRIBUTORS file, I'd be tempted to fork or contribute.
( You're perfectly okay to not want either of those things, of course. )
I like your killfile lists
> Roshan's Socialism Slop
I omce made a podcast screener for my kids, and that was a category I screened for there as well.
I'm on a tropical island vacation and still checking HN. The typical tropical tummy troubles leave me with some time to fill reading tech news, and I don't see any problem with it. I appreciate the general lack of political stuff on US political stuff HN (except the comments).
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 subscription?
How to keep up on the news without being jerked around by the engagement machine?
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 (where I'm residing right now). As a result, I'm currently quite oblivious to the day-to-day in India, but honestly that hasn't been of much consequence.
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.
The only problem I have with escaping the news cycle is relying on other people for important information. "Today is shorts and t-shirt, tomorrow is freezing rain" has caught me by surprise. So I find myself following the weather more than I would if I were watching local news. But it's not just weather.
Regardless. It's good to feel disconnected from these things. But at the same time I recognize I have a responsibility to take care of the things within my reach.
Is this what people were doing in 1939 though? I really hope not.
Use Firefox with maximum tracking protection and use a PiHole with FTL as your DNS to block advertisement. Add uBlock Origin for the occasional cookie and WebRTC denial.
Then social media will be so broken, you'll automatically get so annoyed at it that you will just stop using it. Even youtube forces you for around 10 seconds to wait in a loading loop every damn video, just because they use anticompetitive measurements against Firefox users.
For the important things that you want to watch, I recommend minitube. It's using yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, and its interface is designed so you have to actively subscribe to everything or actively have to search for everything (e.g. when you want to learn about something there's no distractions on the way there which is super neat).
My smartphone is stored next to the toilet during the day, in airplane mode. This way I use social media only while pooping. After all, shit has to go where shit belongs, right?
you don't need to keep up on the news. reject the premise and be free. honestly we wish we could be more ignorant. how do you stop learning about the news when it is everywhere?
tl;dr - Heather Cox Richardson!
My original mini-essay (heh):
It hasn't 100% worked for me, but it's been progress for me to:
- turn on grayscale - don't use any social media - turn off all recommendations for the two indulgences I do have (YouTube, Reddit)
The no recommendations has been especially helpful because I only have my subscription feed, and I can curate that.
As far as news goes - Economist is a good one imo. Weekly news is a fast enough cadence that also filters out noise and nonsense from the knee-jerk, instant reaction news cycles. I've also found the New Yorker to be pretty great, since their pieces are so long that they're usually about events that happened weeks to months ago.
But +1 to others' comments: maybe you don't need to know everything, either. Reading books about history, even recent history, has been a great way for me to fulfill my need to understand our society.
Despite all that I've typed above, if you really want to get regular news consumption, I highly highly recommend Heather Cox Richardson. She distills the daily news and often adds historical context.
One probably needs an assistant that tells one news that said assistant knows is important to... one. What news actually is important? E.g. if Bitcoin is crashing? (Probably not just important for crypto-bros, but could affect the broader economy). If you're planning trip to Sicily and Mount Etna just erupted. Or if you have relatives there..
I guess the assistant should know whether a piece of news can be important or not, but if something happens to be a slow-boil (e.g. the fascist takeover of the USA), it could end up as a surprise.
Perhaps one of those planet-burning text generators can be one such assistant...
Just keep it in the front of your mind that most of the stuff you're reading is ephemeral bullshit. If you come across something that you think is important, make a note of it. I keep a small journal of stories I find notable and that may be important in the future. Everything else is lost to the wind.
You can have good internet on remote island chains for $50/month with Starlink. Today, being without is as much a choice there as it is here.
Electronic devices are very effective distraction tools, especially phones. Companies and apps leverage our psychology and biology to get our attention, but we can take control of what we interact with—and if we remove the hooks, they won't be able to exploit them anymore.
What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which apps can be installed, how often they can notify or distract us, and so on.
A very basic step is using an app blocker. The ideal solution would be a phone with a local AI that is aligned with my personal preferences and instructions.
For example, it could deliver news just once a week from outlets across the entire political spectrum, eliminate social media entirely, and surface only important emails and messages at the most appropriate times.
step 1: disable notifications and I mean ALL notifications - learn how to process important / timely events without reminders
does going on vacation for a week count as “disappearing”?
That's what I thought, too. Perhaps if you're as chronically online as he makes himself out to be, then not posting a tweet for a week feels like years. If he gained a new perspective, then great, but I'm deliberately leaving my phone in the hotel room when on vacation because nothing good ever comes out of it.
He is a journalist who writes a newsletter and focuses on social media, politics, and breaking news. Being away for a week in does count as disappearing in his world.
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.
> 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, especially from someone like Ken. Just because a bunch of privileged Americans were friendly with each other while enjoying an amazing time in nature doesn't immediately negate the very real problems going on in the US.
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.
See them discuss about how much someone of them gets paid or taxed, if he has medical help if needed or if he can afford to live where he's living now.
This person lives and breathes politics, he is a political blogger. Just interacting with people outside of politics was new for him.
He isn't saying 'ignore politics', and he isn't saying 'we can all agree on everything'. What he is saying is 'making your life about political issues distorts your perspective to where you think that everyone hates one another to point of declaring a civil war' and is advocating sitting down and just socializing with people without the baggage.
As the kids say 'its not that deep'.
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.
If you want to get people on your side, the best way to do that is not to argue with them, but to be friendly with them. This doesn't mean rolling over and letting them say untrue things or not advocating for causes that are important to you, but it means respecting that other people have different views and putting aside disagreements to socialize with them. There is a reason why armies disallow 'fraternizing with the enemy'.
I've been trying to migrate back to command-line-only applications to get a facsimile of this.
I don't think that command-line tools are better in any kind of "objective" sense, but I find that if you live primarily within tmux + neovim (and maybe Codex/Claude if you want to be super cool), then it's much easier to not be distracted by the rest of the world.
Nowadays, when I do work I will have a full screen terminal window open. I have an utterly gigantic 85" 8K TV as my "monitor" and I will have an ungodly number of tmux splits, but importantly I don't think those splits are distracting from actually doing work. At some point I will figure out how to get the dbt Cloud `preview` functionality working locally and I think I can avoid the vast majority of any of my work requiring a browser.
Sometimes it does kind of feel like I'm just being a hipster by using a lot of tools that have existed since antiquity, but I think they do a good job at not being distracting.
I'd love to see a photo of this 85" TV setup, if you're willing to share :)
Yep, gimme ten minutes.
ETA:
https://i.imgur.com/HHBt0QE.jpeg
Forgive the messy desk. I wish I could say it's atypical, but it's not. I always have a ton of projects going on concurrently and as a result it's easy for stuff to pile up. I'll probably clean it this week.
My work computer isn't plugged in so I'm afraid you'll have to use your imagination for the million tmux splits.
Good start.
Now do it for three months. Every year.
Been doing that for 25 years now, and the only regret I have is that I should have started earlier.
Can you share some details? Do you disconnect while in your hometown going about your daily routine, or do you have this down time in a different environment? I'm kind of looking for inspiration. I have grown kids and friends that I text with so I'm also wondering how my relationship with them would fit into this. Has that played a role for you?
I just got rid of my smartphone, which forces me to spend a lot more time thinking when I am not at home. Would highly recommend.
I could perfectly survive with gopher://magical.fish, IRC, Mosh, and https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org at 2.7KBPS speeds.
IRC -> Bitlbee.org public servers -> XMPP and more
gopher://magical.fish -> huge gopher portal. Gopher://sdf.org and a few more than proxies to Gutenberg and the like.
Mosh -> decent SSH speeds.
For fora and asynchronous chats, Usenet and Fido/DoveNet.
Music? Podcasts? Download these before, and store them. Also, books and phlog posts are far lighter and you can seek around freely, and you can read stories in a much faster way.
And, if any, tons of stations still have short wave channels, both in English and in Spanish.
You could also go to jail for a week. No internet access there (at least there isn't supposed to be ....)
The article doesn't deliver on the headline of why the author disappeared. At no point is the motivation for going to the Galapagos disclosed.
Motivation... it's a cool place for a holiday? See some endemic wildlife?
I bet everything will get partisan right after if they got stuck on that island. Or stay for a year. This is delusional.
Wealthy people have lots in common regardless of politics.
Being able to ignore fascists is a privilege.
I have to wonder why the author bought a round-trip ticket?
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively researching and buying backpacking gear and soaking up tips for next spring. I am massively looking forward to being on a mountain alone for a few days with only a Garmin inReach Mini as my link to the outside world, gonna be nice to disconnect like that.
I have been offline for a week, hurry up I need to share my experience online!
Not even offline, minimal internet.
Writing about stuff and entertaining parasocial relationships is his job, it's not exactly weird that he wrote a post about his holiday trip.
> Independent journalist covering national security and U.S. politics.
Well, no, it isn't his actual job, the job he says he's doing