Mini Electronic Vacations

I take my phone with me when I go out (which has to be in a car) in case something happens. It’s just a phone with a 1×1.5 inch screen. They told me it has the same processing power as a smart phone, in a flip phone case. I still have never owned a smart phone with a big screen. I navigate with directions written on paper. It’s hit or miss with my phone as far as call quality goes, though. They do a good job screening junk calls, however. I think I mentioned on here that it found my wifi, and somehow knew my wifi password, and connected itself. I manually disconnected it, but this still ticks me off.

I also had an auto payment set up with my bank, which I could and did cancel. The next thing I know, it was turned back on! I got an email notice that it had been scheduled again! I could turn it off again, but this is beyond creepy, causing unnecessary stress and having to do this extra work, too. I need to switch banks. My current bank was recently bought by private equity. I’m not surprised by this, but their fingers seem to reach very, very deep indeed.

I do have and use an iPad (no cell, just Wi-Fi), I like watching movies on it. I have no notifications for anything except the alarm clock and timers. It seems every app wants you to turn on notifications, with constant reminders to turn them on if they are off, for what amounts to really unimportant events. I can’t imagine having a device that dings all the time, that would drive me crazy. Or trying to manage it all.

I was trying to explain to my younger coworkers that it’s quite possible to live a life without all this junk. And it is junk. Before all this nonsense, we lived much fuller, more satisfying lives. No one I know seems to remember this. An acquaintance of mine told me that her parents still have a land line, with a rotary dial. She said it drives her nuts watching them dial. I said the call quality is probably better than mine. Good for them.

I reconnected with a friend from elementary school a few years ago. She didn’t want to talk on the phone. All she does is send text messages, all day, every day. That’s how she wants to stay in touch, and all she sends are texts about every minutiae happening in her life. I just can’t do that. That would drive me nuts, too. It’s probably easier with a smart phone, I guess. I wonder if the ability to even have a conversation will be lost.

I’m with you on the Luddism, Ian. I have a mobile phone (dumbphone that cost me $50 Australian when I bought it in 2016; my total phone hardware expense in the past six years, instead of the hundreds that people spend for each new iPhone) I also have two smartphones, acquired in various free ways. But I never use them. Almost never carry my phone outside the house, unless I’m expecting a specific call, because my sense of privacy means I don’t like the idea of leaving an electronic trail of wherever I went. (Which is part of the reason I try to pay for everything in cash, too. I have no paranoid fear that the .gov is surveilling me specifically — I just prefer the Greta Garbo approach of “I vant to be left alone.”) “Never had a bar” (as they say Down Undahere) of Fakebook, Instascam or similar antisocial media, either.

It’s been barely a generation that mobile phones, especially the computerised Internet communication types, have been in the hands of the masses. It’s amazing how much they have affected the basic operations of society, and indeed, the human brain. Nobody finds it necessary to remember anything any more. It’s all there on the phone! Who needs to understand directions on how to find an address? Let the GPS voice tell you. The phenomenon of people sitting next to each other, not talking, but texting back and forth between themselves, has often been remarked upon. What amazes me most is that so many people are hardly aware of the world around them any more. Their total attention is on a 5-cm square screen, instead of their environment. Humanity has become like the apocryphal ostrich with its head in the sand.

While I am in awe of the information that one can have at one’s fingertips through the Internet — I’m a news junkie — it’s sad that phones have shrunk the mental frame that people have. I live in a great city with many noteworthy sites, but so many folks are staring at their hands instead of regarding the wonders around them. You’re not the one who’s out of touch — the screen zombies are.

My grandfather was said to have told my grandmother
Why do you want a telephone in the house it will just be ringing all the time.
That was around 1948. How right he was.

I never do autopay. Not since this Golds gym I’d joined back in my traveling gig days refused to let me cancel when my employment went out of state. Apparently in that place, you’d have to throw a loudly public fit inside the gym, disturbing to the other members, before they’d give you the cancellation papers.

I never Google. Not since they suckered me into giving them my personal Gmail and Youtube commenter information which they then freely share with anybody willing to pay to learn all they could about me.

I never give out my serious email to just anybody. Not since I gave it to Home Depot after a purchase and then started ‘winning’ all manner of prizes from outfits I’d never heard of, on the condition I’d just answer a few personal questions. My Gmail is now a low pri account for spam and loose acquaintances.

I too was hopeful that information tech would make human society better. But I think all it did was get people to double down on whatever they were before the tech. Sure, some scientists got to become even more sciencey. But suckers became even worse suckers. Greedy people got even greedier. And people into random bits of low information became full-on informational bottom feeders.

Ian Welsh: ‘Being constantly connected, I’m almost certain, is likewise bad for you. You need space, you need time with your own feelings and thoughts when they’re not being jerked around.’

Humanity barely has put a toe in the virtual ocean and you ain’t seen nothing yet compared to where this all looks to be going. I’ve started paying some attention to the Web3, crypto community, NFT, metaverse thing. It is in many ways intensely sad.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/21/when-the-stagnation-goes-virtual/

The vibe that the Web3 movement aspires to is the Gibson and Neal Stephenson-style ‘consensual hallucination’/metaverse.

What it’s actually reminiscent of is Philip K. Dick’s novel ‘The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch’ and his short story ‘The Days of Perky Pat,’ in which his characters have such benighted, hopeless physical lives* that they pour all their energies into building up Ken & Barbie-style ( ‘Perky Pat’ in Dick’s story) accessorized dollhouse layouts, so they can then escape by taking a futuristic drug that enables them to hallucinate they’ve been incarnated as Perky Pat and her male companion in Perky Pat’s fantasy reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_Perky_Pat

*In the short story because there’s been a nuclear war, in the novel because they’ve been conscripted to be Martian colonists.

@Joan,

Now is the time for as many millions of computer-owning layfolk and “civilians” as possible to set up their own home desktop printing facilities if they haven’t already, and all those millions of people should copy-over and print-off their own personal ” best of the web” material onto acid free copying paper ( lasts for centuries) so that they will have something they think is valuable after it disappears with the disappearing internet. Between all those millions of people making their own millions of choices of what to copy onto acid free paper ( lasts for centuries), something of value may well be saved.

They should also support their local and regional libraries if they are not too poor and beaten down by time-demands. Those who can do so might be able to slow down the ongoing rush by the digigoths and cyberbarians who have taken over the commanding heights of library management in their rush to digitize every single thing in every single library and then burn and pulp all the books, magazines, newspapers, etc ( and also destroy all the microfiches and microfilms) so that there will be no going back from the Digital Revolution. That evil goal should be thwarted, if possible.

Also, they should buy and own all the books they personally want to see preserved in the world for their own present or future enjoyment or information. Friends-of-library book sales, withdrawn-from-circulation library book sales, etc., offer a chance to buy up these books to save them from destruction. We are currently living through the Bonfire of the Books as well as everything else we are living through. But it isn’t advertised because it isn’t ceremonial Naziform book burning. It is instead ” Aztec Sun Priest” style mass book sacrifice to feed the hungry DigiGods.

People should do what they can to save analog information artifacts from the fires of digital destruction.

Chuck Mire: *The predominantly average users of social media who grew up in the digital age lack the ability to discern facts from fiction. Long form reading and research (books) are not their forte.*

The average American already only reads at a seventh-grade level and has the critical, debating skills of a fourteen-year-old. It’s going to get interesting and that case a couple of months back of the Google engineer who claimed the chatbot he was doing a routine maintenance check on had become sentient is indicative of the way the wind is blowing.

Chatbots and AI are getting more sophisticated. They also frequently have access to databases containing portions of the entire internet, so they can access nearly endless amounts of data—including private information about the individuals they interact with.

That means they they’re going to be able to argue politics—or pretty much anything else—better than the average American social media denizen, who reads at seventh-grade level, and has just enough literacy and critical thinking skills to make it through the TV Guide or a shopping list.

Anony’mouse (and Ian)

people will live online. taking in-person away time is valuable, but already people don’t seem to know what to do with themselves when they are in meatspace. they don’t know how to talk to each other. they don’t know how to find a mate without online swiping. my parents and grandparents met their partners in bars and clubs. who can afford that, and even if they can, do they want a free dose of covid too?

Just talking personally, being old enough to have experienced social networking in both the global online community and the what was available at the local yokel venues–the online venue is much, much, better. (And, to be sure , I’ve actually met many of the people I’ve met online in real-life too, not once but multiple times, and have become close friends to them). I’d be much, much, more socially isolated if all I had was the local venues. One of the problem with Facebook is that its purpose seems to be to connect you with other locals and ‘people who know’, instead of people you don’t.

Think of the analogy of looking to buy a good book on Amazon or another online bookstore, vs trying to dig one up at a local bookstore. Our local bookstores (even the chain ones like Barnes and Noble) are filled with rightwing crapola; it’s a shame trees had to die to produce it.

There’s an analogy with this with school size. Yes, a small school results in an environment where everyone knows everyone else at least by name, while a large school results in an impersonal education. My high school class was not large, while my first college was huge (‘a degree factory’, I called it), so I’ve experienced both environments. However, the small school experience can be social hell for the ‘oddballs’ or outliers who end up very socially isolated, while the large school allows these to find others like themselves to connect to. As someone who has very little in common with most of my fellows here in Appalachia now, I understand the the plight of the ‘oddballs’

@Joan,

That sounds like a beautiful dream. I hope it can become real for you.

Perhaps your bookbinding skills and machinery may become so good that you can even make a supplemental living worth the time spent doing it on binding books for others out of their own “best of the net” which they took the time to print onto acid free paper ( lasts for centuries) before it was too late.