The internet has changed. How I've disconnected and my concerns.

[MikeGs]

I wanted to post this as an answer to @CitricScion 's post, but It came out a little bit long. So here's my approach on how my internet usage changed, how I've disconnected, my concerns, and what I feel the future of the internet might be.

Mine is an interesting story. I've been into IT since I was around 8 years old. I have tons of CD's and DVD's of backups, software and operating system ISO's that I downloaded back in the day. I remember being able to install iAtkos' version of Mac OS X Leopard on my non-apple laptop, creating tons of virtual machines, batch files, modding and digging through Windows regedit when I was around 11 years old.

Currently, I have three degrees in IT and software dev. Worked as an IT technician at 15-16, and as a full stack dev during covid all the way up until mid 2022, when I finished a project and felt burned out. I'm currently working as a smart-home, intranet, coax and electrical installer. I basically plan and execute the entire wiring of newly built/renovated houses, apartments and flats worth hundreds of thousands (€).

For some reason, I feel way happier with my current job. I feel like days go by slower, I get to chat and meet all kinds of people, I feel welcome, and I feel that my work actually makes a difference. I don't want to go back to sitting in a cubicle for 8+ hours a day, I already had enough of that after spending more than 7 years getting my degrees. Also, in my current work position, there's no incentive to check my phone at all.

Around 2020, shortly before the pandemic, I used to take two different trains to get to my university. I'd take me around 1,5 hours to get there, and another 1,5 hours to come back home. Public transportation sucks in my area, and it probably runs even worse nowadays.

One day I noticed that I was the only person in the entire train car that wasn't actively looking at their phone, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I know that people used to read newspapers or books when taking the bus or train, so it's nothing new. What worries me is that most were scrolling through social media. It's not like I'd peek at their phone screens or anything, but the hand gestures were a dead giveaway.

I've been off of Twitter for three years now, and off of Facebook for six years. I only use Instagram DM's (which I check every three days) and Reddit. I don't watch Youtube or any kind of content on my phone. I side load all of my movies and TV shows. There's no social media apps installed on my phone at all. I've got Focus and Do not disturb modes enabled.

I exclusively use Reddit on my PC, and I purge what subreddits I follow every single month. I want to make sure that whatever pops up on my home screen actually benefits me and it's of my interest. Nothing political, no massive subreddits, and niche oriented subs are my rules.

I also try my hardest to make my internet usage as active as possible. There's a difference between active and passive:
- Active: Intentionally searching and looking for content and information that you're willing to find.
- Passive: Letting an algorithm feed-based platform dictate what you're going to see next.

In my country, using Whatsapp is a must, and it's one of the few things that's keeping me from buying a dumb phone, apart from online banking and two-factor auth. Ever since I've used Whatsapp, I've muted every group chat that I've joined, and I've always had the "last online" feature disabled. People can't add me to groups unless I accept a group invite.

When these groups become overwhelming, and muting them is not enough, I move them to the "Restricted chat" folder, where you'll not see them unless you scroll up and input a security code or biometrics.

This has really made a difference, I feel less anxious and less worried about missing out. Days last longer, I get to do more things and be more productive. I get to enjoy little things and down time again, letting my imagination go rampant. This has allowed me to go back to software dev as a hobby, and I've had a great time. I spend some hours every week working on projects and tinkering the same way that I used to when I was 10 years old.

Even though I've done my part I can't help but wonder if the average person out there has even thought of doing something similar. Sometimes it's not a matter of whether or not I do it, It's a matter of how/if this be reversed. People are still going to be stuck, they'll keep consuming mindless content and wasting hours in front of their phones.

With the dead internet theory slowly becoming a reality, eating away most organic traffic and replacing it with AI generated content on social media, I can't help but wonder what comes next.

I feel like the future of the internet is self-hosted, self-regulated independendent intranets. There's a chance that most of the public internet will become unusable within 5 years.

That's why one of my projects has been to archive and self-host everything that I might need in the near future. Software, media, custom offline maps with directions, dev tools, VM's, ISO's, voice and messaging servers, anything that I might need, from things compatible with Windows 98, to a whole bunch of Linux Distros.

With my hopes of finding stuff through search engines getting slimmer every day, AI generated content polluting most of the web 2.0 and archive.org getting targeted every few months, I can't trust online availability anymore.

[JINSBEK]

Hey, thanks for sharing such a thoughtful response. I hadn’t heard of the “Dead Internet Theory” before, so I just watched a Kyle Hill video on it. Like you, I’ve been exposed to software, and later the Internet, at an early age. When I was 4 my dad got one of those eMachines, and I used the Internet on it… Pretty soon I was playing things from Japan, Mexico, France, whether it was games, books, movies, or music… I made my own stuff and shared them on the Internet: graphics, websites, even a little music. I learned a lot from other creators about all sorts of fields. It was neat.

For about a year and a half during the pandemic, I became a fully-remote IT worker. It was the most miserable time of my life, because in all my other jobs, I was so used to talking to people, learning from them, interacting with them face-to-face. It was my favourite part of working as a journalist, as a healthcare worker in a hospital, and at the meat counter as an apprentice butcher. When I travel to places, I love taking Lyft/Uber/taxi because I love talking to the drivers and getting to know them and their place in this area. But that’s just commute—suddenly, I was spending 10+ hours of my day without real human contact, and engagement in a physical environment. When I attended a work-related tech conference in Denver, I realised I was socially starved and danced my heart out at both the sponsored concert and the afterparty at a nearby club. After hanging out with a bunch of guys, talking like normal people in a lounge instead of over another f’kin’ Zoom or Discord call, it started to sink in that I needed to get out.

I don’t have something like 99+ Slack notifications to bother me anymore. My work email stays at work. I go to my office Downtown either biking or taking the bus, I talk to people, I interact with my co-workers and we do things like alcoholic mini-golf for Christmas parties. One of our leading attorneys barges into the locked mailroom just to give me chocolate doughnuts.

The rise of AI-generated content has been such a schlock. I used to work for an artists’ self-publishing platform. It started out with us trying to introduce Vietnamese fine art to the West, which was awesome; I played a curatorial role in critically educating people on the pieces à la Robert Hughes, and giving people an understanding of Vietnamese history, geography, and culture often depicted in these paintings. Sounds great, and we opened our platform for other artists to use. Verifying artists whom the team hadn’t met physically in Hanoi quickly became a pain: can you show us your process? We got a surprising amount of pushback from “artists” interested in using our platform. I think the most annoying incident was the case of this one artist who was quickly gaining a following on Twitter, for her imaginative digital ink works. I was always skeptical as she never showed WIPs and sketches, but her Followers just loved what she was sharing and were eager to buy her future works on our platform. It finally came to a head on World Oceans Day. She produced a work featuring a skeleton of a sea turtle with human teeth and arm bones… My fiancée, who was studying marine biology and is personally involved in sea turtle care, took this woman to task, and she never appeared on social media again.

I want to have fun on the Internet again, and I think self-hosted, self-ruled instances on the Fediverse and webrings in general may see a surge in growth. But I’m skeptical as to whether any of these will ever reach mass adoption.

And maybe that’s fine.

As the wider Internet has started to push me away, I’ve been throwing myself more into my immediate community. I moved across the continent to settle in the historic arts district of this city, I’ve befriended local studio artists, I regularly volunteer with surrounding neighbourhood organisations, I go to parties and raves again. A few years ago I thought the Internet would make up the meat of my life, and now, it’s just a peripheral facet of it.

I just worry about how our kids will grow up, y’know? My fiancée and I don’t even want to have kids if they’re just going to grow up with phone zombies as peers. I can’t control what other parents do. (Believe me, working in an emergency department you really wish you did.) I grew up being taught how to answer the phone properly, these kids literally don’t know how to say hello in real life. We might just stick to rehabbing orphaned baby squirrels because we know we can release them out into a healthy squirrel society, haha.