Simon Woods

The literal cost of using the modern web slapped me in the face just now. It got me thinking…

This is one of those things that inspires me to think about what life would be like if I gave up being as involved with the web as I currently am.

I could save the desktop for mostly offline work, with limited access to the web saved purely for uploading/sharing stuff, and then rely mostly on mobile computing. This could fit in with spending more time outside, taking my new main computer with me, and generally avoid the muck of tracking-based platforms of services.

IDK… maybe becoming “anti-connected” to some degree. Essentially reverse my general trend of the past decade and switch much more of my focus to the people near me. I wouldn’t be anywhere near as involved with the web because I simply wouldn’t have the time or other resources, as part of an intentional decision to free myself of the misery that is the modern web.

However! I could still work on TIL. I mean, the beauty of Micro.blog is that I don’t have to sell my soul to really understand it, test things out, etc.

A lot of these thoughts have become possible thanks to moving to Firefox. Between the Containers feature and lack of focus on the Google silo, it really has helped me to think about what I am doing on the web through a lens of pragmatism and with a greater degree of transparency.

It’s time for me to think about this in a real way, to make changes that are practical. I actually think it will help a lot with TIL, since it lines up nicely with the philosophies upon which Micro.blog was built. In particular it’s the idea of a “good web”, in which we have the ability to control our online presence and not have to accept a life lived as little more than value-based data, a faceless thing there to be used for the efforts of other people to increase their ill-gotten gains.

This is a lot of meta-style talk, which I didn’t want to spend so much time on in public posts. However, it is a significant process for me on a number of levels and I would like to have a public record of my thinking as I go through the process of making the aforementioned changes over the next few months.

It feels, at some level, that it lets the people in charge off the hook. Thoughts?

– Adam Tinworth

Having shared Euan Semple’s thought-provoking post, Adam got a fairly quick reply from Pete Brown which only further provoked me to once again consider a general viewpoint I have been wrestling with for the past few years.

An important point of context within these issues that is often neglected: these companies, this version of the web, a lot of it is US-centric. They are literally constructs made from the culture of the US, and whilst of course they are also built with a diversity of viewpoints I think it is vital to remember that there is a difference in how these things are built even compared to that which is most similar, for example Canada.

I don’t know, maybe I live in too much of a bubble of my circumstances in life but the fact remains that I have yet to meet people who are so desparately in need of the connected web on our own little island, as compared to seemingly large numbers of Americans for whom the internet has been something of a lifeboat. Not to say it isn’t significant here, of course it is, but rather that there is difference in the difference even between our two relatively similar nations… that the environment is different, there are different motivations for the various part of our societies, and that’s before we even get to Europe and further afield.

I’ve just never quite felt that if I were to sacrifice the internet my life would be inescapably ruined; at least with regard to the social, overly worked part of the internet where the silos and the like exist. As such I have never quite felt that this is necessarily a socio-economic aspect of our lives that requires constant and immediate care. In many ways, it truly is what it is and little else.