
The author of ‘The Stars in Our Pockets’ on eschewing the internet - edmoffo
https://onezero.medium.com/how-the-internet-destroyed-our-natural-ability-to-navigate-the-offline-world-1cf0c224da12?source=rss----444d13b52878---4&gi=f9622d4f3821
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oh_sigh
I don't think I'd ever give up the internet altogether, but I wonder if there
is a place for more thoughtful interaction with the internet - e.g. like how
RMS browses(has a daemon download a page and email it to him for offline
viewing).

You can still access all the information that way, but the "click ->dopamine
hit, click ->dopamine hit, etc" training like you might get scrolling through
reddit or social media feeds is interrupted by the time delayed nature of your
browsing.

~~~
JohnFen
I hadn't heard about RMS' daemon before -- that's brilliant! I think I may do
something along those lines myself.

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egdod
> To keep reading this story, create a free account.

Unskippable this time too. Reader view doesn’t help. Turning off JS doesn’t
help.

Medium has gotten worse and worse. At this point it is literally unusable.

~~~
ErikAugust
[https://beta.trimread.com/articles/3265](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/3265)

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zabzonk
When I saw (actually, misread) the title I was hoping it would be about Samuel
R Delany's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" which is a complete knock-
out SF book and probably the best thing Delany ever did. Oh well.

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stars_in_My_Pocket_Like_Grains_o...](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stars_in_My_Pocket_Like_Grains_of_Sand)

~~~
morelisp
Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders far eclipses (the forever
unfinished) Stars in My Pocket, but won’t get the same attention for obvious
reasons.

It is also a lot more relevant to the article, given the protagonists’
eschewal of communication technology. With similar artistic goals, I think.

~~~
zabzonk
But not an SF book? And I find everything after and including "The Mad Man"
pretty unreadable.

~~~
morelisp
It spans an alternate history beginning in 2007 to numerous predicted future
events through 2080ish; if the sf community doesn't want it the sf community
is poorer for it.

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vincent-toups
It often feels as though almost everything on the internet post 2000 or so has
been an enormous bait and switch. Build a good service people like, get a lot
of people hooked on it, and then gradually fuck it up in an attempt to
generate some kind of revenue.

I, personally, hate it. Its depressing to see a technology so full of promise
(seem to, anyway) regress. Become less magical, less useful. Its no wonder
young people are skeptical of capitalism - it seems to literally be eating the
goose. Not even the goose that laid the golden egg - just the goose, in hopes
there might be a golden egg inside.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
It feels that way because it has been exactly as you describe. I can only
assume it's youngsters who have been doing the undeserved downvoting. If you
look at the timeline, you can get a feel for why, and who:

1988/9 First ISPs and connections outside academia

1993 Eternal September, AOL let the great unwashed out on to the net. Damn
annoying for six months or so, but the net recovered.

1994 First spam, and colossal in scale. Two bottom feeding US lawyers filling
every usenet group with US Green Card spam.

1995 NSF end their ban on online commercial activity.

First e-commerce kicks off, and it's all a bit hobby-esque, and even large
businesses are adopting netiquette habits. Like linking out, providing chatty
informative pages for no other reason than "because", etc. Putting an
e-commerce order somewhere might get you a lovely long chatty thank you email
direct from the owner, or a hand written note in the box. The internet still
feels like something remarkably different to meatspace.

By the millennium, _the year AdWords was born,_ as the first dot com boom
turned into a full on idiocy fuelled bubble, it was the birth of bait and
switch. There's a whole ballooning category of "internet marketers" with
gloriously scummy SEO, fraudulent sales tactics, learn to spam better courses
and worse. Like all easy way to riches sales, the only way to get rich is with
the easy way to riches book, subscription or course parting fools from money.

Now everyone commercial, from the largest 5 world companies down, are internet
marketers of the worst possible interpretation of the term. Commerce, scam and
affiliate slice forced into _everything._ Bait and switch all the way down.

