The other day I suddenly remembered the door of my college room. Since I was at university pre-Internet, pre-mobile phones there was a piece of paper and a pencil on the door so that people who came round to find me could leave a message... by writing on the door.
Facebook was great when it was about randomly writing on people's walls, and having a way to contact that fellow college student you just meant. Now it's all about sharing click-bait, and very little social interaction.
These things still existed even after the Internet.
I graduated a couple of years before the first iPhone came out and when having a Blackberry or other connected device was not the norm. I still used the internet pretty heavily, but it was just not mobile. Odds were that the person would see the message on the door first before they got an email you sent.
At my school (in the mid-'90s) it was the same thing, but with whiteboards. You'd affix a cheap little whiteboard and non-permanent marker to your door, and people who came by would leave you messages. Then at day's end you'd come back, read the messages, and wipe the board clean for tomorrow.
It strikes me now how much those little whiteboards prefigured social media. Some people used them to leave status updates, like we do today on Facebook -- you'd write how you were doing today or where you were going to be later at the top of your board. And others (like me) used them like Twitter, as a place to leave little jokes for others to come by and read.
Just because new communication mechanisms come out doesn't mean old ones are abandoned and things are all worse.
Honestly, these regular screeds against the Internet remind me of the many individuals in history who have decried the evils of writing, newspapers, telephones, radio, and television.
"Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" or "refusing to talk to people as a principle - isn't that so 'awesome'?"
It's fine, you don't need to be on every silly new 2.0 dot com, no issue there.
But you're shutting yourself out of a means of communication with other people. The fact that it involved technology is a detail
You can go to the pub and not drink, you can use FB with a fake name and not do anything with it and you can choose an email provider that suits you, but shutting yourself out does not make sense
Precisely. You don't have to be on every new fad website or app, broadcasting your every motion to the rest of the world. But you don't need to go to the extreme of not having email or walking to a library instead of using the amazing repository of information that is the internet.
> "Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub"
It does make sense, your Facebook/Twitter/... presence doesn't go away when you go to bed or go on holiday, it's always there to be ogled at, poke and prodded, unlike your non-presence in the pub when you stagger off home at closing time.
> if I don't respond to whatever internet/text message they sent with near immediacy- because it's always available
I have to agree with you on this one. But I believe it suffices to say that no, you're not looking at email/fb/whatsapp/whatever all the time (and acting like that)
As someone who barely ever picks up a call or reads an SMS in less than an hour, and often a full day, people are annoyed at first but soon get used to it.
I feel I'm definetly older than most of you. I've had about three long term best friends, excluding romantic relationships. Ride, or die friends. One friend is on FB, but not there much.
The main reason I joined FB is I thought I was missing out on meeting new people.
I used my real identity on FB for a year. I still wore sunglasses, because I didn't think anyone had a right to see your entire face. Yes--I've got friend requests. I look up that person, and boom--they have 500 friends. Why do they want another one?
I even had the cutest Amish girl want to be friends of FB. She had 3000 friends. She was married. What's the point?
I don't think I had one person FB friend request that didn't seem to have a selfish agenda? To be fair, I really didn't reach out to people I once really liked. We seemed to go in just different directions.
I want to like FB, but I just find the site depressing. The most interesting people, I once knew well, are now just posing for pictures, crafting their comments to get their seemingly so fragile egos the "Likes", and seem to be using FB as some sort of way to control how society views them?
Most would be better off just telling the truth, but they can't. Why? Because the better part of the world will be able to see your vulnerabilities, and those bad days that make you human, will never be able to be erased. A few mistakes, and you are that person that will be judged by the rest? And the rest, makes snap judgements, and most will likely remember you by that one bad day.
So, it you have any sence of self preservation, you will just post those fishmouth pictures, and be nauseating optimistic.
Why--you can't want to be called out as a Troll, or Debbie Downer, or have a negative view on anything the sheep haven't given disscused in committee beforehand.
So, what do we have? We have FB. A site that forces people to be superficial, and fake.
Aging, if I was younger, I think my time on FB would have less nauseating? Maybe?
People promote these sites as the end all. How can you meet anyone if they never show the real person behind the keyboard?
I do like HN for obvious reasons. My only complaint is they should pay moderators. Why--it might weed out the moderators that use the site as a power trip?
When I was a youngin' browsing BBSes in the 90s, I remember distinctly encountering a text guide to "the art of disappearing", essentially getting off the grid as Stephen Fry mentions. It involved a whole bunch of seemingly paranoid steps, like burning your passport, and booking your flight (one-way) with cash. I also remember thinking to myself how silly the whole concept was - why would I ever want to do something like that?
These days, I'm realizing more and more that it doesn't sound that crazy in this increasingly dystopian world.
Goodness me, that's a lot of bloviation. I think there's a point buried in there somewhere that has been made far more succinctly by a lot of other people.
I usually think the same for vast majority of stuff on HN, i.e. most articles could be cut down to one or two paragraphs with little value lost, but... There are generally two reasons why I read - to extract information and for the experience of reading. Stephen Fry's blog is one of the rare cases where I just enjoy the writing and the information value doesn't really matter.
"I have heard many People say, 'Give me the Ideas. It is no matter what Words you put them into.' To this I reply, Ideas cannot be Given but in their minutely Appropriate Words."
Oh ok, I get the point... But for a lot of articles it seems that 90% of the value can be conveyed with 10% of the length, so I usually just quickly skim it - unless it's the type of text where the value is in the experience of reading and not information (stories, poems, ...).
I guess that can be true for technical articles the most (e.g. just get to the instructions, numbers, results etc), but probably not as easily for things like this Fry post.
Good point. Weird how inefficient it is when people express themselves. If we had a dictionary where we could look up every idea, no one would have to say anything anymore, it'd all have already been expressed better, and we could all just stfu and not waste readers' time.
n.b.: notwithstanding my unsubtle point, I upvoted RivieraKid, with whom I agree about the value of reading these woefully inefficient thoughts, like Fry's, that I love.
Definitely, it's just like those documentaries that could be summed up in 5 minutes or less. Although, come to think of it, YouTube does that pretty well nowadays.
I like his "Ode less travelled" a lot but his other works of fiction not so much. And his blog posts (including this one) seem to be a few straightforward points blown up into an essay. I realise that he enjoys language for it's own sake. I do too in a much lesser way but his style simply doesn't resonate with me.
"Those very politicians, advertisers, media moguls, corporates and journalists who thought the internet a passing fad have moved in and grabbed the land. They have all the reach, scope, power and ‘social bandwidth’ there is. Everyone else is squeezed out — given little hutches, plastic megaphones and a pretence of autonomy and connectivity. No wonder so many have become so rude, resentful, threatening and unkind.
The radical alternative now must be to jack out of the matrix, to go off the grid."
This is awfully regressive, but not only that; it's also foolish. If his point is that by going 'Off The Grid' you can escape these people, he's out of luck- these people are AFK as well as online. Try walking through a major city without seeing a single advert.
If you want to get away from all the shit on the internet, the only way is forwards, not backwards.
I've been trying to do this and as of this week, HN and stackexchage are the last social accounts I have but only because I can't find a way to delete them. I could just log out and walk away but it feels like there's no closure that way. Anyone know of a way to close an HN account?
Email hn@ycombinator.com, that said I did try that once and nothing happened. But that was long before dang stepped up and took a more active role in moderating threads. Kinda glad it didn't happen because the site's improved a fair bit since then.
I'm kinda a bit like you, I'm really only active online on StackOverflow and here. I have a twitter account but to be honest it's mostly full of re-tweets. I binned Facebook to no great loss, and I broke my mobile phone in January and have never bothered to replace it. I feel I have one foot "off the grid"...baby steps :)
I've tried getting in touch with HN a few times to delete my account. Well, I actually understand the value of keeping the content I've contributed so I really just wanted a name change so my presence was anonymous. Never heard back though.
Change the email address to a random uuid-like hash @example.com, then change your password to a random hash. Do not allow your browser or password manager to save these values.
Now you’ve locked yourself out with no way back in.
Solid, but somehow very creepy, answer. I'm imagining someone discovering that they're a clone, and that their original was just sort of shut into a closet and forgotten about.
It's not really about keeping myself from commenting here or anything like that. There's something about the account being out there, the karma associated with it and such that nags at me a little, probably only because it's my real name and the volume of content associated with it. If I could change the username it'd bug me a lot less. I'm sure I'll come to terms with it somehow and still feel like I've successfully jacked out. Still, it seems like it'd be easy to add functionality like reddits: delete the account, keep the content, replace the username with [deleted]. [deleted123] would keep the content grouped under a single name if that's important. Maybe I'll write a letter to HN suggesting it.
Does HN count as "social"? It feels more like an Internet forum to me. I guess you're using your real name here, but you don't have to. I don't know anyone socially who I would expect to find on here.
I'll tell you how I did it for Wikipedia. First, I removed my email address for password recovery. Then, I opened notepad and mashed my keyboard. Then I copied the rather long string of random characters to the clipboard, went to the password reset screen and then pasted it into the password and confirm password editbox. Then I hit update, and then I closed notepad without saving, and then I rebooted my computer.
This is a video of "La Cosquillita" by Juan Luis Guerra. I didn't know this song, so I listened to all of it. I'm completely clueless about why this may be related to the discussion.
Bad autotranslation of the lyric: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr... (It's difficult to translate because it uses a local variations of the spelling/pronunciation of the words. tl;dl: Someone fell in love and is "ticklish".)
>They have been given, willy nilly, demographic tags like ‘millennial’, ‘post-millennial’, ‘Generation Z’, ‘i-Gen’ — not out of anybody’s acute cultural observation, sympathy or understanding but either to bulk up a HuffPo article or to delineate convenient advertising categories, within which many sub-categories can be established. You are not a person, you are an algorithmic assumption, a mould into which hot selling-jelly may be poured.
Well, obviously, and for every generalization concerning a whole generation, you're not, and you're not supposed to be, a person. There's a time to talk of people individually and as persons (e.g. in personal relationships, workplace, etc.) and times to generalize and talk about their collective patterns of behavior.
And those names are not always coming from journalist hacks without "acute cultural observation, sympathy or understanding" either. E.g. "Generation X" came from a member of said generation itself, Douglas Copland, trying to describe how it is for him and his friends.
In any case, "Generation ___" is just a convenient handle to talk about many people together -- its usefulness comes from whether it describes something statistically useful, not from whether it caters to the individuality of each unique snowflake person (and of course most just delude themselves that they are that, while following very similar paths with their generation for most things).
>my proudest boast would be: ‘My friends and I, we disappeared ourselves. No social media, no email, no chat, no wifi, no selfies, no SMS, no smartphones. We did it. We did this thing. We Got Off The Grid.
I'd say this again underestimates how many people are "off the grid" (even if they have internet at home) and don't participate in the whole social media/chat/selfies/etc thing.
The irony being? It wasn't exactly a "stick it to the man / down with money" post, even if he has a small paragraph talking about young people rebelling in it.
I've started to give a pass on this sort of thing. A lot of time the author doesn't have direct control over the publishing medium. The text is Stephen Fry's, but the site design, ads, system administration, url, etc. are likely all managed by someone else.
Journalists similarly shouldn't be held accountable for the ads that appear next to their articles in magazines or the local paper no matter how ironic.
The fact that there IS an ad in the middle of his tirade probably illustrates his point that "the corporation" has infiltrated every facet of our lives.
Well, in this case the publishing medium is presumably owned/controlled by him since it's posted on http://www.stephenfry.com
While he may not have the knowledge to modify the site himself, he could tell the people he's paying to remove the ad. It's most likely the case that he wants the ad.
“It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity.”
He is not talking about everybody who has had such an experience -- but those who linger on to it for decades and hurt their lives and the lives of others with that.
So, yes, grow up -- or grow over it.
You'd rather they didn't?
Life has not only that, but even worse experiences in store -- like losing a limb, your mobility, your life expectancy, your whole family, your house and homeland, etc just like that.
Much worse stuff has happened to people -- and some live that everyday -- and they still rebound and go forward. Wallowing in self pity is bad for those doing it and bad for those around them. And it can even turn them, themselves to something dark (many rapists were in turn abused when younger).
Let's take an ounce of effort to post the whole quote shall we?
Speaking to the US TV show The Rubin Report about campus free speech, safe spaces and trigger warnings on literature.
"In terms of how they think, they can’t bear complexity. The idea that things aren’t easy to understand, they want to be told, or they want to be able to decide and say, ‘This is good and this is bad,’ and anything that conflicts with that is not to be borne.
There are many great plays which contain rapes, and the word rape now is even considered a rape, if you say: ‘you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in a Shakespeare class, or you can’t read Macbeth because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once, because uncle touched you in a nasty place’, well I’m sorry.
It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place, you get some of my sympathy, but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity. Get rid of it, because no one’s going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself. The irony is we’ll feel sorry for you, if you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Just grow up.”
Context matters, you can dice up anyone's words to make them say what you like but it doesn't prove a point, it's still a deception, and you're still doing everyone the disservice of assuming that you know better than they do to make up their minds for them. Grow up.
This from a man who described in great detail his near-suicide experience following the 'Cell Mates' breakdown? What was that if not self-pity? Should we have felt no sympathy for him? Or is that too complex?
I wouldn't take any so-called wisdom from this man.
Fry was already a serial social-media "quitter", going on and off Twitter a few times; he even (famously) entirely quit real society, back in the day, after a bunch of bad reviews; and he has self-confessed mental health issues. All considered, it's not that surprising that he might want to disconnect altogether, regardless of specific episodes.
Why do people feel like FB and messengers are the entire "Grid"? You can go off social networks and still enjoy the marvel that is the internet (it works for me). My guess is that people develop a genuine addiction to FB and need to avoid all temptation for a while. Going offline for a longer than that is not a good idea though.
>> "My guess is that people develop a genuine addiction to FB and need to avoid all temptation for a while. Going offline for a longer than that is not a good idea though."
Maybe it is. Look at it like any other addiction. If you're addicted to alcohol you don't stop for a while that start and hope you can drink in moderation. I guess a better analogy might be an alcoholic who can go into a bar and not drink. I guess there are a lot of people who can do that but for others the temptation can be too much. I know personally I've purged social media accounts several times only to start them up again 6 months later.
It's interesting that I was at an itunes free gig in London back in 2010 at the Camden Roundhouse (band was Bombay Bicycle Club and they were very good), and Stephen Fry made a pre gig speech (obviously paid by Apple) to say how marvellous the iphone was and how although some people criticise social media , it is a marvellous thing that helps people feel less lonely, amongst other things (and the iphone helps people stay connected to this social media when on the go). I wonder if he truly believed that then, or was just saying so for Apple's sake. Either way, let's assume he believed it; and so I guess in 2010 it was all still rather new. Now he, like many of us, have grown very tired and cynical of it all. I agree with a lot he is saying in this post. The internet has been hijacked by big money and corporations. I personally am utterly fed up with waiting for web pages to load, unable to read the content because it keeps shifting around the page while another shitty targeted ad gets inserted. And then I realise the content was trash anyway; just more shallow, "read this in 2 minutes" bullshit that gets churned out because the authors know we have lost our ability to stay focused on one thing long enough to read anything substantial and genuinely informative.
I'd say he's just changed his opinion on it and the internet itself has evolved. I know my enthusiasm for the internet and technology has rapidly faded in the recent 2-3 years. Mostly that's just due to fatigue. We can do amazing things on the internet but spending 90% of your waking day on it and doing the same few things instead of taking advantage of everything it has to offer can become unhealthy. You don't necessarily have to go 'off the grid' to fix the problem but going cold turkey could be easier. Take for example my recent experience with Twitter. I decided I was just wasting my time on it (and the actual value I get from it I could just get logged out through search) so I deactivated my account. They give you a 30 day period to log in and reactivate it. I've done this three times now. Very smart move by Twitter but it just goes to show how addictive a lot of this stuff can be.
After owning an Apple Watch I would say it just makes the distractions worse. Somehow it's much easier to ignore a vibration from the phone in your pocket than it is to ignore one on your wrist.
I did try things like that but at the end of the day I had a very expensive device that I used for very little so I sold it. For me the only thing I miss about it is the health tracking. Once they build in a lot more of that the costs will be worth the benefit for me because I just looked back on that data and during my time with the Apple Watch I lost quite a lot of weight just following the activity tracker.
Oh, definitely agreed. I bought a moto 360 and, as someone who doesn't want notifications, it's almost useless. I only like the navigation mode, but that updates too infrequently to be useful.
> He was the first person to apply for a .uk domain name
Is a little misleading. He was the first person to use the modern, nonprefixed uk domain but not the first person to apply for a .uk domain back in the day.
I don't think that such a speech from 2010 contradicts this blog in any way. Social media is still awesome, and it still provides tremendous value. And yes, it's been overtaken by big money and corporations — which earn their big monet by providing value to a lot of people. Thos two positions don't necessarily contradict each other.
I don't think that's necessarily inconsistent with this essay.
Social technology (Facebook, iPhones, etc.) are, in my view, absolutely great at helping us to feel less lonely. I've traveled all over the world but can still stay in touch with close friends from back home. They effectively add a multiplier to Dunbar's number.
That being said, there is still the attraction of slowing down occasionally. I spend my life connected but also try to go on a hike for a week or two every year.
It's also possible that like many intelligent people he doesn't operate from fixed, rigid positions, but enjoys kicking mental footballs around that test out all sorts of contrary positions,
If you read Stephen Fry you will notice that he goes back and fourth on many issues and most of his views aren't based in any kind of critical calculations or observations. Stephen Fry is _the_ celebrity intellectual, he writes whatever he thinks is 'good' to write at the moment. He also isn't very smart in that he doesn't know a lot about history and philosophy so most of his arguments and discussion end up as pure rhetoric.
> I live in a world without Facebook, and now without Twitter. I manage to survive too without Kiki, Snapchat, Viber, Telegram, Signal and the rest of them. I haven’t yet learned to cope without iMessage and SMS.
I respect what he's getting at, but this is all sorts of backwards for someone who wrote an earlier paragraph about escaping the eye of advertisers (and presumably surveillance)
I have gone through a similar phase. Got rid of social media, switched back to a feature phone, am reading real books, listening to music on physical media, using cash where possible and whatever else.
The Internet has gone from a place with a high barrier of entry (and the interesting characters that self selected for that barrier), to an all encompassing entity with a load of moralisers, businesses and governments fighting over the ability to call the shots.
In its current state, I think it's better to take a step back. View the Internet as an occasional tool for getting things done, rather than a place to live within and rely upon. Let the masses have their addictions fulfilled, while technology enthusiasts move on and enjoy real life.
Many of us depend on it to pay the bills, though. On the internet, to build stuff for other people to use the internet more and generate more internet related jobs...
I use a Samsung flip phone. I still prefer the flip ergonomics to a touch-screen one (for ordinary voice call use obviously). Someone calls me, I pick up the phone, flip it open to answer if I want to, talk, close it to end the call, all with one hand, without having to even look at the thing (I can check the outside lcd to see who it is before answering it also). When I want to call someone (I only call about 5 people regularly (wife, mom, dad, sister, closest friends), I just flip it open and press the corresponding speed dial button. For this kind of use, a touch screen doesn't come close.
The difference is, it's old school in here. The content, the people, the UI, it's all very different from the modern social media. I had trouble staying regular here when I first discovered HN but after a while, it feels nice to come and see people talking differently from the rest of the Internet. The closest thing to HN is a few reddit subs. This is what feels home now, not Facebook or Twitter like it used to.
I wish I could get a feature phone that just had Maps (and maybe Lyft). Being able to get a map of where I am, anywhere, is a pretty amazing thing. On the other hand, I wish I could get all of those notifications out of my pocket asap.
I noticed myself being just a tiny bit less interested in labouring through the full article knowing that nothing I or anyone else expressed about it after the fact would ever make it to Stephen's attention. The tantalizing idea of a comment affecting an author (no matter how small that chance) definitely plays into my consumption.
It makes me wonder whether a better approach to disconnecting is to set quotas, essentially saying something like "I would like 2 tweets and 1 blog comment to make it to my attention daily -- hide everything else from me for my own sanity."
A man who is an ambassador for mental health charities should not belittle people with mental health problems - especially not in the incredibly glib way he did it.
Why not? Assuming access to books (library, bookstores) and journals via a library (should be present in most schools or within a school district, decent libraries in my rather small town), a student would be in the same situation as most pre-2000 students, many of whom succeeded just fine.
Plenty of students got an education before we assumed everyone had a computer, too. But the environment surrounding the student, including the infrastructure they must interact with as a necessary part of being a student, has changed. At the least, such a student will be at a disadvantage.
Agreed. Most library systems I've come across have their catalog servers located elsewhere, except for very small community libraries. (Granted, this is the worst type of data: anecdata).
As someone who uses the internet in a healthy way and healthy dose, i think this article is like when an (former?) alcoholic suggests to all the people to not even drink one beer occasionally.
Seriously why should I not use email to communicate with people far away from me on interesting topics? Why would I not look up things in Wikipedia? Why would I not look at Fecebook once a day for 2 minutes to see whether there is something extra with my IRL friends and relatives?
OTOH, imagine that you lived in a small community where trade routes or mass migration suddenly made alcohol extremely available, a new problem. You struggle with overuse, try to figure out if it’s a suitable morning beverage, etc. So do most people. Eventually, some people start to talk about moderation, age limits. Maybe we should only drink on Tuesdays, or after work or something.
Culture is being bombarded with new stuff, some of which can cause problems. Culture is adaptive, but it’s hard to keep up with technology. I think it’s OK for people to muse out loud (this is a blog) and possibly useful This is how culture gets made, I think. We need culture to update, so I’m ok with this.
you can of course use it as much as you want -- but I thing the broader point of the author holds: for a generation that is supposed to be rebellious, there is a surprising amount of conformism in accepting these tools as something that need to be used all the time.
It's best to think neither in terms of rebelliousness nor conformism, but in terms of right and wrong -- the standards by which we determine whether rebellion, or conformism, or withdrawal, or some other act are appropriate. Aging hippies and aging squares are both stopped clocks, wrong at least as often as they're right...
That said, I'm with the author in one respect: I don't have a Facebook account and never will. Constant connectedness is the enemy of deep understanding of the world -- although drugs, pinball machines, and basking in one's alleged superiority to the squares are also its enemies.
I feel similarly, but I'm still sympathetic to Mr. Fry's thoughts on the topic. I did find myself thinking "well, it doesn't have to be all or nothing, just look at Joey Hess (https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/) for a nice compromise." Even the Amish have telephones; they're just not in the house - think how many times you've been interrupted at dinner by a phone call and you begin to understand . . .
I agree that most of us should be "off the grid" more than we are, but not for any of the reasons he suggests. There's no real reasoning to this argument, just "It used to be like X before the internet, so the internet is bad." But with no reasons why X is good, as if it's obvious, but the modern ways seem better to me.
> Well maybe they should consider this for a moment. Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies – once they distrusted it, now they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your school. Advertisers.
Really? "The man wants you on the internet, so you should stop!" If you avoid the internet just because of this, you're still letting the advertisers, your boss, "the man" make your decisions for you, rather than coming to your own conclusions..
> Remembering what I was like at fifteen, I wriggle pleasurably at the thought of how it would feel in 2016 to tell a teacher that, no, I couldn’t possibly ‘e-mail’ my homework, because I don’t have e-mail:
> ‘I’m not on your email, miss/sir.’
> ‘Don’t be absurd, Stephen. Email me the essay as soon as possible.’
A bit of a strawman here, isn't it? In what situation would a teacher ever demand you send an assignment ASAP instead of on the assigned due date? And if it's because you've missed the due date, what right do you have to act difficult and decide the medium over which you turn it in? Either accept the failed grade, or play by the rules of the person who is accommodating you.
Self control when it comes to technology is great and all, and if you feel you need or want less than the average person, that's fine. But thinking you're better than everyone else because you refuse to use a tool some people use incorrectly?
The article seems to be about what he imagines a young person of today would do if they wanted to affect a counter cultural lifestyle. Sticking it to the man (advertisers, your boss, parents, etc.) and throwing common mediums and traditions out the window to freak out the normies. He's not saying the old way was better, he goes to lengths to point that out when he says:
>This is just maudlin, nostalgic mush. You can’t go back. But all my imagination can do when picturing a life off the grid is summon up the life I had before the grid existed, so I cannot help being retrospective.
He's using the past way of life as a framework to build his vision on, not as the desired outcome. The imagined exchange with a teacher is equally fanciful but serves the point of illustrating a conflict between a young person and an establishment figure. A failed grade would be of no consequence here since it is certainly an expected response from someone in a position of power attempting to force you into conformity... missing this point is telling of your misunderstanding of the article so I think I'll leave it at that.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] thread... wait. That sounds familiar.
Facebook was great when it was about randomly writing on people's walls, and having a way to contact that fellow college student you just meant. Now it's all about sharing click-bait, and very little social interaction.
I graduated a couple of years before the first iPhone came out and when having a Blackberry or other connected device was not the norm. I still used the internet pretty heavily, but it was just not mobile. Odds were that the person would see the message on the door first before they got an email you sent.
It strikes me now how much those little whiteboards prefigured social media. Some people used them to leave status updates, like we do today on Facebook -- you'd write how you were doing today or where you were going to be later at the top of your board. And others (like me) used them like Twitter, as a place to leave little jokes for others to come by and read.
Just because new communication mechanisms come out doesn't mean old ones are abandoned and things are all worse.
Honestly, these regular screeds against the Internet remind me of the many individuals in history who have decried the evils of writing, newspapers, telephones, radio, and television.
"durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch"
"Not having an online presence" makes as much sense as "not having a presence at the pub" or "refusing to talk to people as a principle - isn't that so 'awesome'?"
It's fine, you don't need to be on every silly new 2.0 dot com, no issue there.
But you're shutting yourself out of a means of communication with other people. The fact that it involved technology is a detail
You can go to the pub and not drink, you can use FB with a fake name and not do anything with it and you can choose an email provider that suits you, but shutting yourself out does not make sense
It does make sense, your Facebook/Twitter/... presence doesn't go away when you go to bed or go on holiday, it's always there to be ogled at, poke and prodded, unlike your non-presence in the pub when you stagger off home at closing time.
Not quite- if I don't make it to the pub one night, people just brush it off and think "I'll talk to him next time."
People seem much more vitriolic if I don't respond to whatever internet/text message they sent with near immediacy- because it's always available.
It seems like there's a shut-off valve with the pub, or a land-line and answering machine- not so with facebook, texting, what have you.
I have to agree with you on this one. But I believe it suffices to say that no, you're not looking at email/fb/whatsapp/whatever all the time (and acting like that)
The main reason I joined FB is I thought I was missing out on meeting new people.
I used my real identity on FB for a year. I still wore sunglasses, because I didn't think anyone had a right to see your entire face. Yes--I've got friend requests. I look up that person, and boom--they have 500 friends. Why do they want another one?
I even had the cutest Amish girl want to be friends of FB. She had 3000 friends. She was married. What's the point?
I don't think I had one person FB friend request that didn't seem to have a selfish agenda? To be fair, I really didn't reach out to people I once really liked. We seemed to go in just different directions.
I want to like FB, but I just find the site depressing. The most interesting people, I once knew well, are now just posing for pictures, crafting their comments to get their seemingly so fragile egos the "Likes", and seem to be using FB as some sort of way to control how society views them?
Most would be better off just telling the truth, but they can't. Why? Because the better part of the world will be able to see your vulnerabilities, and those bad days that make you human, will never be able to be erased. A few mistakes, and you are that person that will be judged by the rest? And the rest, makes snap judgements, and most will likely remember you by that one bad day.
So, it you have any sence of self preservation, you will just post those fishmouth pictures, and be nauseating optimistic.
Why--you can't want to be called out as a Troll, or Debbie Downer, or have a negative view on anything the sheep haven't given disscused in committee beforehand.
So, what do we have? We have FB. A site that forces people to be superficial, and fake.
Aging, if I was younger, I think my time on FB would have less nauseating? Maybe?
People promote these sites as the end all. How can you meet anyone if they never show the real person behind the keyboard?
I do like HN for obvious reasons. My only complaint is they should pay moderators. Why--it might weed out the moderators that use the site as a power trip?
Seriously, I had to read that line twice to realize that it was intended sarcastically. I think I just Poe's Law-ed myself.
If it really has to be there, it would (to my eye) look better to lead with it, i.e. "Stephen Fry: Off the Grid".
These days, I'm realizing more and more that it doesn't sound that crazy in this increasingly dystopian world.
http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/vanish.htm
Maybe life too.
Instead of going through this whole redundant process of living through it, we could just be given some 10 word summary, like e.g.:
"There was some fun, some sadness, a few regrets, a couple profound experiences, a lot of boredom, quite some pain, mostly ok, and then you died".
"I have heard many People say, 'Give me the Ideas. It is no matter what Words you put them into.' To this I reply, Ideas cannot be Given but in their minutely Appropriate Words."
- William Blake
n.b.: notwithstanding my unsubtle point, I upvoted RivieraKid, with whom I agree about the value of reading these woefully inefficient thoughts, like Fry's, that I love.
"Poets love their handwriting, it’s like smelling your own farts."
Don't I love to read my own Hacker News comments?
And I bet Stephen Fry loves to read his own essays.
The radical alternative now must be to jack out of the matrix, to go off the grid."
This is awfully regressive, but not only that; it's also foolish. If his point is that by going 'Off The Grid' you can escape these people, he's out of luck- these people are AFK as well as online. Try walking through a major city without seeing a single advert.
If you want to get away from all the shit on the internet, the only way is forwards, not backwards.
I'm kinda a bit like you, I'm really only active online on StackOverflow and here. I have a twitter account but to be honest it's mostly full of re-tweets. I binned Facebook to no great loss, and I broke my mobile phone in January and have never bothered to replace it. I feel I have one foot "off the grid"...baby steps :)
Now you’ve locked yourself out with no way back in.
Ta-da! No more Ta bu shi da yu.
This is a video of "La Cosquillita" by Juan Luis Guerra. I didn't know this song, so I listened to all of it. I'm completely clueless about why this may be related to the discussion.
Bad autotranslation of the lyric: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr... (It's difficult to translate because it uses a local variations of the spelling/pronunciation of the words. tl;dl: Someone fell in love and is "ticklish".)
Well, obviously, and for every generalization concerning a whole generation, you're not, and you're not supposed to be, a person. There's a time to talk of people individually and as persons (e.g. in personal relationships, workplace, etc.) and times to generalize and talk about their collective patterns of behavior.
And those names are not always coming from journalist hacks without "acute cultural observation, sympathy or understanding" either. E.g. "Generation X" came from a member of said generation itself, Douglas Copland, trying to describe how it is for him and his friends.
In any case, "Generation ___" is just a convenient handle to talk about many people together -- its usefulness comes from whether it describes something statistically useful, not from whether it caters to the individuality of each unique snowflake person (and of course most just delude themselves that they are that, while following very similar paths with their generation for most things).
>my proudest boast would be: ‘My friends and I, we disappeared ourselves. No social media, no email, no chat, no wifi, no selfies, no SMS, no smartphones. We did it. We did this thing. We Got Off The Grid.
I'd say this again underestimates how many people are "off the grid" (even if they have internet at home) and don't participate in the whole social media/chat/selfies/etc thing.
> Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers.
Journalists similarly shouldn't be held accountable for the ads that appear next to their articles in magazines or the local paper no matter how ironic.
The fact that there IS an ad in the middle of his tirade probably illustrates his point that "the corporation" has infiltrated every facet of our lives.
While he may not have the knowledge to modify the site himself, he could tell the people he's paying to remove the ad. It's most likely the case that he wants the ad.
The 58-year-old went on to say: “Grow up.”
So, yes.
So, yes, grow up -- or grow over it.
You'd rather they didn't?
Life has not only that, but even worse experiences in store -- like losing a limb, your mobility, your life expectancy, your whole family, your house and homeland, etc just like that.
Much worse stuff has happened to people -- and some live that everyday -- and they still rebound and go forward. Wallowing in self pity is bad for those doing it and bad for those around them. And it can even turn them, themselves to something dark (many rapists were in turn abused when younger).
It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy
His criticism is of "self-pity". I can agree.
Speaking to the US TV show The Rubin Report about campus free speech, safe spaces and trigger warnings on literature.
"In terms of how they think, they can’t bear complexity. The idea that things aren’t easy to understand, they want to be told, or they want to be able to decide and say, ‘This is good and this is bad,’ and anything that conflicts with that is not to be borne.
There are many great plays which contain rapes, and the word rape now is even considered a rape, if you say: ‘you can’t watch this play, you can’t watch Titus Andronicus, or you can’t read it in a Shakespeare class, or you can’t read Macbeth because it’s got children being killed in it, it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once, because uncle touched you in a nasty place’, well I’m sorry.
It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place, you get some of my sympathy, but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity. Get rid of it, because no one’s going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself. The irony is we’ll feel sorry for you, if you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Just grow up.”
Context matters, you can dice up anyone's words to make them say what you like but it doesn't prove a point, it's still a deception, and you're still doing everyone the disservice of assuming that you know better than they do to make up their minds for them. Grow up.
I wouldn't take any so-called wisdom from this man.
So?
That would only prove he can wallow in self-pity too.
Which he has admitted already anyway, and condemned even in himself.
It certainly doesn't prove that self-pity is not as bad as he says.
So he is right. As for him doing it, it doesn't even make him a hypocrite (since he admits it) -- just fallible.
Like an ex (or even current) drug addict sincerely warning people that drugs are bad and that they shouldn't do them.
Not only are they right -- but they also speak from personal experience.
Maybe it is. Look at it like any other addiction. If you're addicted to alcohol you don't stop for a while that start and hope you can drink in moderation. I guess a better analogy might be an alcoholic who can go into a bar and not drink. I guess there are a lot of people who can do that but for others the temptation can be too much. I know personally I've purged social media accounts several times only to start them up again 6 months later.
He and Douglas Adams were the first people in the UK to get Apple Macs, for example. He was the first person to apply for a .uk domain name
Is a little misleading. He was the first person to use the modern, nonprefixed uk domain but not the first person to apply for a .uk domain back in the day.
Watch the 2 parts if you have the time, it's really good.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/10104138/Stephen-Fry-...
Social technology (Facebook, iPhones, etc.) are, in my view, absolutely great at helping us to feel less lonely. I've traveled all over the world but can still stay in touch with close friends from back home. They effectively add a multiplier to Dunbar's number.
That being said, there is still the attraction of slowing down occasionally. I spend my life connected but also try to go on a hike for a week or two every year.
Sure. We all go thru phases, cycles. So do relationships, hobbies, habits.
I now help admin an org's web presence. It's fun, for now. In a few years I'll go back to being a hermit.
Ah… Zardoz… Nothing beats Sean Connery running around in weird sci-fi shorts. Also, Beethoven.
I respect what he's getting at, but this is all sorts of backwards for someone who wrote an earlier paragraph about escaping the eye of advertisers (and presumably surveillance)
The Internet has gone from a place with a high barrier of entry (and the interesting characters that self selected for that barrier), to an all encompassing entity with a load of moralisers, businesses and governments fighting over the ability to call the shots.
In its current state, I think it's better to take a step back. View the Internet as an occasional tool for getting things done, rather than a place to live within and rely upon. Let the masses have their addictions fulfilled, while technology enthusiasts move on and enjoy real life.
Physician, heal thyself!
If I really want to focus I put my phone in airplane mode.
It makes me wonder whether a better approach to disconnecting is to set quotas, essentially saying something like "I would like 2 tweets and 1 blog comment to make it to my attention daily -- hide everything else from me for my own sanity."
One of the better discussions of this topic is Vi Hart's explanation[1] of Edmund Snow Carpenter's[2] "They Became What They Beheld".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4
[2] almost certainly written with Marshall McLuhan
Idiot. Never apologize to SJWs.
what are you basing that on exactly
OTOH, imagine that you lived in a small community where trade routes or mass migration suddenly made alcohol extremely available, a new problem. You struggle with overuse, try to figure out if it’s a suitable morning beverage, etc. So do most people. Eventually, some people start to talk about moderation, age limits. Maybe we should only drink on Tuesdays, or after work or something.
Culture is being bombarded with new stuff, some of which can cause problems. Culture is adaptive, but it’s hard to keep up with technology. I think it’s OK for people to muse out loud (this is a blog) and possibly useful This is how culture gets made, I think. We need culture to update, so I’m ok with this.
That said, I'm with the author in one respect: I don't have a Facebook account and never will. Constant connectedness is the enemy of deep understanding of the world -- although drugs, pinball machines, and basking in one's alleged superiority to the squares are also its enemies.
[0] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.8001.pdf
> Well maybe they should consider this for a moment. Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies – once they distrusted it, now they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your school. Advertisers.
Really? "The man wants you on the internet, so you should stop!" If you avoid the internet just because of this, you're still letting the advertisers, your boss, "the man" make your decisions for you, rather than coming to your own conclusions..
> Remembering what I was like at fifteen, I wriggle pleasurably at the thought of how it would feel in 2016 to tell a teacher that, no, I couldn’t possibly ‘e-mail’ my homework, because I don’t have e-mail:
> ‘I’m not on your email, miss/sir.’
> ‘Don’t be absurd, Stephen. Email me the essay as soon as possible.’
A bit of a strawman here, isn't it? In what situation would a teacher ever demand you send an assignment ASAP instead of on the assigned due date? And if it's because you've missed the due date, what right do you have to act difficult and decide the medium over which you turn it in? Either accept the failed grade, or play by the rules of the person who is accommodating you.
Self control when it comes to technology is great and all, and if you feel you need or want less than the average person, that's fine. But thinking you're better than everyone else because you refuse to use a tool some people use incorrectly?
(I'm not sure if I should include a smiley with this or not, to be honest.)
>This is just maudlin, nostalgic mush. You can’t go back. But all my imagination can do when picturing a life off the grid is summon up the life I had before the grid existed, so I cannot help being retrospective.
He's using the past way of life as a framework to build his vision on, not as the desired outcome. The imagined exchange with a teacher is equally fanciful but serves the point of illustrating a conflict between a young person and an establishment figure. A failed grade would be of no consequence here since it is certainly an expected response from someone in a position of power attempting to force you into conformity... missing this point is telling of your misunderstanding of the article so I think I'll leave it at that.