Another Mervilles post. So yes, the website is black and white, yes the figures are Romantic paintings, and yes its probably going to advocate for having a somewhat more inconvenient lifestyle in favour of more personal freedoms. Exactly what I like!
Okay, so we all know that we can be pretty weird if we forget our phones at home by mistake. There’s lots of good and important reasons to keep your phone on you (are there? I doubt this.) What are the good AND important reasons I need my phone on me? - I need to get help (unlikely but important) - I am doing some volunteering and need to access the Government website for somebody (very often, but localised) - I am doing some volunteering and need to keep my line manager in the know (very often, but localised) - I am using a translator app to talk to someone (not very often, but very useful) - I get hopelessly lost (not very often, not very important) - I am on the tram without a ticket and suddenly need to buy a ticket because a ticket inspector has just got on the tram (quite often, quite important)
The good reasons which aren’t important: - Accessing social media - Accessing the internet - Keeping up with my organisations 24/7 - Messaging my family/friends - Listening to music/the radio - Tracking my exercise
Anyway.
In the past, when somebody went somewhere far away or remote they just vanished into oblivion for a while and you got no new information about them. You might have gotten a post card but by the time you got it it would be very old! There are ways to recreate this experience today (sail, camp in the woods) but it is not very common, and it is still usual to at least send back GPS coordinates every so often. That extremely limited information is still much more than we got, historically.
Not even voyaging: in the past when a kid left their parents’ sight, they vanished into oblivion too! Parents had to assume their children were safe, and could only estimate where they were based on the time/if they had a bike/if they were hungry and so on. Much less information.
Nowadays we are all generating an inordinate amount of data and metadata all the time. Constantly, whether TCP packet headers, IP addresses, browser fingerprints, cookies, HTTP request logs, mobile phone mast pings…. This is widely considered a bit weird and probably not fantastic.
So, the author suggests leaving your phone at home! They are nervous they may miss an important call or need to contact the emergency services. I have never had a phone call that needs to be answered within 3 hours, and I think a certain level of cocky self-sufficiency is admirable anyway :P
It is good to rely on the evidence of your own eyes rather than what is presented to you via the screen, avoid compulsively checking things, avoid giving off so much information. Use an add blocker, opt-out of the attention economy as much as you can. There are lots of reasons to try and reclaim that oblivion of ages past: paranoia, mental health, boundary setting, anticapitalism. Do your own thing!
I’d like to read the converse to this article, a passionate and anti-capitalist defence of generating all that information… what could it be good for? Anything? I guess Terra Ignota’s main antagonist, Cruel Poseidon//Cruel Distance, make the argument that constant connectivity is good, actually. But maybe that’s just because the protaganists are information addicts. Hmm.