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Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- sallveburrpi 9mo agoEscaping 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.
- black_13 9mo ago[dead]
- lapcat 9mo agoIt'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."
- wolvoleo 9mo agoI ignore the news a lot too. For the reasons you mention, I can't change anything and it only makes me angry seeing all the far right nonsense happening. There's no point anymore. I just follow the tech news now. It does lead to me being out of touch with some local stuff though but who cares. I'm in some pretty niche communities anyway so what goes on in the mainstream isn't that relevant to me.
- truculent 9mo agoPrivilege isn't just about wealth. The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!
- lapcat 9mo ago> 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".
- XorNot 9mo agoWe 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.
- its_ethan 9mo agoThe 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 ;)
- XorNot 9mo agoIncrease 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.
- kadir1234 9mo agoNot "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...
- Eisenstein 9mo agoIs it beneficial to be imposing a purity test before taking the meaning of any lesson?
- MrJohz 9mo agoIsn'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?
- godelski 9mo agoGoogling 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.
- MrJohz 9mo agoI would suggest most Americans and most people on HN have a tremendous amount of privilege, do they not?
- Arainach 9mo agoThe 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- MangoToupe 9mo ago"The news" is hardly reality either, and nor does it record most of the political conflict in the world.
- unethical_ban 9mo agoIt'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.
- godelski 9mo agoFinishing 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.
- notepad0x90 9mo agocan 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.
- aucisson_masque 9mo agoTechnically 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.
- thrance 9mo agoPoor people suffer from political conflict more directly, enduring the abysmal policies coming from the top in a very concrete way.
- dijit 9mo agoeven if they suffer societal consequences; its also still easy not to put it to mind and suffer anxiety from it. This makes you susceptible to populism though. I know this because I am from an impoverished family.
- potato3732842 9mo agoExactly. People who are stupid enough to afford dysfunction peddle stupid policy that makes everyone's lives worse. They don't care because they're not affected and when they are it's not bad enough to make them question the beliefs that got there. All the stuff the "rich but not nobility" people did to pour gas on the fire in the lead up to the french revolution is a good comparison point IMO.
- notepad0x90 9mo agoI don't disagree one bit, but how is that related to my comment or the thread?
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- energy123 9mo agoIt'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.
- potato3732842 9mo ago>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. Look at what the people who were living high on the hog due to tax/graft/dysfunction before losing their heads in the french revolution got up to. Look at the rabbit holes minor British nobility went down. The current american upper-ish middle class is just another cover of the same stupid bad for everyone song.
- _heimdall 9mo agoYou really should give specific examples of what the French elites or British nobility did if you want to use those as examples to write off an entire category of people today based solely on their economic position.
- potato3732842 9mo agoI didn't choose the comparison point because it is nonsensical, I chose it specifically because it is relevant. The french first and second estates convinced the government to debt spend to high heaven in the proceeding years. And much of this spending benefitted them, the .gov going to war with the english and buying warships made with timber and nails they made money off of for example. They also were exempt from the bulk of the taxation and they in turn got to levy their own taxes to a degree. So a lot of them got quite rich over that time as the normal people got hungrier and hungrier. It's a very good parallel to how the white collar class in the US peddled all sorts of changes to policy and the economy to their relative benefit at the detriment of the industrial and skilled services economy which either got sold overseas or consolidated and financialized to the benefit of the the professional managerial types and white collar workers (and of course the CEOs and whatnot too) and to the detriment of the common man who winds up driving for uber because the factory that employed him went poof.
- larodi 9mo agoYes, exactly. Op escaped because he can allow himself to. He is wealthy and well educated also - knows what a disconnect means and is able to pay for a pricey trip to end of the world why his affairs cater to themselves. It’s perhaps less than 0.001% of the population that can allow themselves to do it.
- troyvit 9mo agoWhy does it take a trip to the Galapagos to disconnect though? We could just as easily block access to all our socials (including HN) for a week and probably still do fine at our jobs.
- _heimdall 9mo agoThis really gets to the question of what reality is though. Is reality really defined by living in a tech-driven world and living on screens all day?
- heikkilevanto 9mo agoI 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.
- llmslave2 9mo agoI 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.
- kachapopopow 9mo agouninstalling twitter on my phone was one of the best decisions I made
- sdoering 9mo agoI 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.
- pegasus 9mo agoThe big one is voting, of course. It's not like following international politics will impact what firmness mattress I will buy.
- 9mo ago
- DetectDefect 9mo agoI have to wonder why the author bought a round-trip ticket?
- stanleykm 9mo agodoes going on vacation for a week count as “disappearing”?
- Eisenstein 9mo agoHe 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.
- criddell 9mo agoSounds like he realized he was one of the baddies.
- hypeatei 9mo agoThat'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.
- kristofferR 9mo agoOver 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.
- ropetin 9mo ago> 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.
- Eisenstein 9mo agoI 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ffuxlpff 9mo agoSee 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.
- Eisenstein 9mo agoThis 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'.
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- lawgimenez 9mo agoI bet everything will get partisan right after if they got stuck on that island. Or stay for a year. This is delusional.
- adolph 9mo agoThe article doesn't deliver on the headline of why the author disappeared. At no point is the motivation for going to the Galapagos disclosed.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- symbogra 9mo agoMotivation... it's a cool place for a holiday? See some endemic wildlife?
- bdcravens 9mo agoYou could also go to jail for a week. No internet access there (at least there isn't supposed to be ....)
- lrvick 9mo agoI 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- zhivota 9mo agoIgnoring 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?
- websiteapi 9mo agoyou 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?
- nephihaha 9mo agoThe news isn't even the news.
- mooglevich 9mo agotl;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.
- hypeatei 9mo ago
- Frannky 9mo agoElectronic 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- kachapopopow 9mo agostep 1: disable notifications and I mean ALL notifications - learn how to process important / timely events without reminders
- WorldMaker 9mo agoI like iOS' "Notification Summaries" as a compromise. It's about as close to "turn all these notifications into a regularly scheduled newspaper" as we can get. I still cull notifications that I don't think provide value (notifications are a privilege based on trust and apps that break that trust lose that privilege), but yeah even when I get notifications I only really get them once every 4 hours or so, and that's nice.
- tombert 9mo agoI'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.
- barbs 9mo agoI'd love to see a photo of this 85" TV setup, if you're willing to share :)
- tombert 9mo agoYep, gimme ten minutes. ETA: https://i.imgur.com/HHBt0QE.jpeg 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.
- modeless 9mo agoYou 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.
- inemesitaffia 9mo agoIt's available there. And the National Telco has a Starlink community gateway capable of 10 Gbps.
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- arjie 9mo agoI 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.
- throwaway290 9mo agohow do you killfile HN users?
- arjie 9mo agoI use personal software: https://overmod.org/ 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.
- leobg 9mo agoI 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.
- arjie 9mo agoI’m glad you like it. Besides the entire promotion of external loci of control I find the repetitiveness so grating.
- xnorswap 9mo agoIf 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. )
- symbogra 9mo agoI'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).
- throw-12-16 9mo agoWealthy people have lots in common regardless of politics. Being able to ignore fascists is a privilege.
- nephihaha 9mo agoThe main political threat to this world is not from Fascism. Not even close.
- criddell 9mo agoThe two of you are most likely not talking about the same thing. People like the person you are responding to have managed to make the term fascist not mean anything anymore.
- nephihaha 9mo agoI'm well aware that the term is overused, and that the term "Fascist" is some form of bogeyman. We are facing ever increasing restrictions on our lives, and we are seeing that from mainstream governments and big tech etc. There is a rise in the far right for sure, but we are being moved towards a global polity not an ultranationalist one.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoThe post mentions Republicans, who are literal fascists at this point.
- prmoustache 9mo agoI have been offline for a week, hurry up I need to share my experience online!
- riffraff 9mo agoNot even offline, minimal internet.
- onetokeoverthe 9mo ago[dead]
- cess11 9mo agoWriting about stuff and entertaining parasocial relationships is his job, it's not exactly weird that he wrote a post about his holiday trip.
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago> Independent journalist covering national security and U.S. politics. Well, no, it isn't his actual job, the job he says he's doing
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- xarope 9mo agoI 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.
- anthk 9mo agoI could perfectly survive with gopher://magical.fish, IRC, Mosh, and https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org 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.
- johndoh42 9mo agoGood 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.
- ojo-rojo 9mo agoCan 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?
- zkmon 9mo agoBut you felt the strong urge to write once you are on the flight back. I bet you were thinking about the stuff that should go into that writing, all the time during that week. You were collecting photos to share. That's not true disconnecting. You should just experience it and not share it. That week should only exist in your own memory.
- homeonthemtn 9mo agoOne of the best feelings is letting things go. "It sure would be a shame to miss that photo! ... And so I did" It's an act of rebellion towards a world browbeating you into performance for invisible strangers
- MisterTea 9mo ago> "It sure would be a shame to miss that photo! ... And so I did" Sometimes it's just for you. While walking with a friend last night I passed a home I've probably passed a hundred million times. Though this time, I noticed something, the second floor had a Christmas tree peaking out of a window. At that moment I realized that someone in the folds of Queens NYC took their time to put up this tree leaving the curtains drawn so someone on the street below might look up will and see their tree. It was such a weird little thought that I had to snap a picture even though my first thought was "nah." Will I ever share it? No. There's no reason to. But I have that little snapshot of that scene and the thoughts that came with it.
- Terretta 9mo ago> Will I ever share it? No. There's no reason to. You just did.
- Arainach 9mo agoNo, they didn't. They talked about their process and their mindset. They didn't share the photo. Your response feels spiteful and needlessly mean. When someone is talking to you, listen to their words - such as their words talking about creating art even without an audience - before jumping immediately to attacks.
- blackhaj7 9mo ago“They were young and older, professors and small business owners (even an Army colonel!), Republicans and Democrats, from big cities and small towns” It’s just so bizarre to me as a non-American that someone would go to the Galapagos Islands and come away knowing the political affiliations of the people they were with. It shouldn’t even need to come up
- nephihaha 9mo agoI find it even more bizarre that someone would think that binary system is a real choice.
- nephihaha 9mo agoGoes to a foreign country, still whitters on about "Republicans and Democrats" as if they were the only show in town. Oh dear...
- sleazebreeze 9mo agoI noticed that too, I had to re-read it a few times to make sure I was understanding it properly, it seemed so out of place. Then I read the rest of the article and realized this guy has zero perspective on anything.
- pickleglitch 9mo agoI've been a fan of Ken's reporting for a while now, but I find this genre of post insufferable.