Life Without Internet
Imagine what your life would be like without access to the world at your fingertips.
There’s a period in my life I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
I was in my mid-20s and had just moved to Berlin. I was there on an exchange-program of sorts where I volunteered and, in exchange, I got food and board. Good enough for young me, especially if it meant I could live in Berlin for a year.
So I packed up my stuff in a bag and went.
When I got to the apartment I’d be staying at though, I found out that I was going to stay there alone. (It turned out the other volunteers weren’t going to show up for another three months).
To make matters worse, the host organisation — who furnished the apartment to a bare minimum — hadn’t installed an internet connection.
It may be hard to relate to today, but this was a time where there weren’t ubiquitous internet connections everywhere. Moving to a new place often meant installing a new connection.
So, as I lay there on my first night, it dawned on me that I knew no-one in this new city, I didn’t speak a word of German, and I was going to wake up the next morning to a new job I had never done before.
And I had no access to the internet.
I had never felt so alone. But the thing is, that three month period turned out to be one of the best of my life.
Even though internet hadn’t yet penetrated every aspect of life back then, sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were growing wildly and already part of the zeitgeist.
We were already addicted to their algorithms, it’s just that everything was so new that we probably didn’t fully realise it yet.
So, needless to say, my new internet-less life came as a shock.
But slowly, I adapted.
I remember returning from work everyday and cooking up some food in that sun-lit kitchen. I had a simple FM radio and would listen to radio documentaries on BBC World Service.
And I read a lot.
I probably read more fiction books in those few months than I have in all the years since. I used the time to learn a new language and made my first videos.
In that simple routine, I remember time dilating.
With no distractions holding me in, I was also pushed out into this new city, compelled to meet new and wonderful people.
“Sure”, I hear you say. “It was a cool period because you were young and in Berlin!”
For sure, that was a huge part of it.
But, I ask you: would my experience have been the same if I had had an iPhone in my pocket?
The other day, I walked past a class of high-schoolers during their lunch break. The classroom was completely quiet.
Every single person had their head down, scrolling.
And I’m not judging. Whenever I have a second free, I immediately feel the urge to pull my phone out for no other reason that I’m compelled to do so.
Having worked in the Tech industry, I've seen first hand the extent to which these technologies are designed to hijack human psychology in the pursuit of profit.
We, as fallible human beings, don't stand a chance.
For better or worse, the incentives driving much of the internet today are not aligned with bettering our lives.
So what can we do?
I don’t believe in advocating for a return to a ‘better, tech-free, past’. Not only is that position a cherry-picked delusion, it’s also practically impossible.
The internet, just like the oncoming AI wave (and the microprocessor, the telegraph, and the lightbulb before them) are technological progressions that reflect the incredible human spirit of innovation and ingenuity.
Turning our backs against that mind-blowing lineage is impossible.
Yet every technological innovation in history has had tremendous effects on the ways we, humans, come to live. And, at the outset, there’s never really any way of predicting what those consequences will be.
It’s like we’re living through one huge continual experiment and we’re the lab mice.
So I guess it’s up to you and me. Individually, we have to figure out where we stand in relation to the technology at our fingertips.
What’s clear is that for me, those three months with no internet remind me what it’s like to step out of the incessant torrent of information. How it’s only once you’re out of it that you truly become cognisant of its force.
Would I have the guts to turn off my modem and cellular data now?
I’m not sure but I definitely do want to sit a little more often on the banks of this wild river that we call progress.
Enjoyed what I wrote?
You can support my writing by sending me as little as $1.