I walked right out of the machinery- My life without social media, feeds and algorithms

I finally did it. I connected my Android Pixel to my computer and with a little hackery was able to pry the YouTube app out of my phone. It comes "preinstalled" on the Pixel, which apparently means it's "not easily uninstallable". You have to launch the phone in dev mode and use ADB to truly exorcise the demon, but I was not going to let that stop me. And with that, my phone is without any distractions. Nothing. No Facebook, no Twitter (and no, I will NOT call it X!), no news of any kind. Not even Reddit, one of my oldest and dearest online spaces, escaped my scythe. Not just uninstalled, the accounts have been deleted, and years of careful curation Thanos-snapped away. When I go to the bathroom, I don't even bother to bring my phone anymore. My Pixel is now more like an old Nokia dumb phone, except that it has a much nicer keyboard and you can use it to pay for bus fare.

I have been on a bit of a quest, you see. After losing my awesome job, most of my life savings, my democracy and my sanity, well, I needed to digitally detox. So, I logged off. In the meantime, I have been living my house-husband trad-wife best life, drinking tea, remodeling a kitchen, seeing my doctor, walking the dogs, writing the most inspired code of my life and trying, somehow, to get back on the horse. This algorithm-less life has for the most part been quite a success, except that we are going broke. So, yeah, time to dust off that LinkedIn profile and start knocking on doors. "Can you explain this gap in your resume?" I struggle for a good answer. Was it a sabbatical, or a vacation, or a mid-life crisis, or an alcohol fueled major depressive episode? No answer seems appropriate, so I just reply that "I felt like it" and pray that the candor is well received. It usually isn't.

Back in my day, the internet came in the mail and movies came from a red vending machine at the grocery store. We had AOL on the family Bondi Blue iMac, putting 10-year-old Adam on the cutting edge, relatively speaking. Once I got home from school, I was left unattended with an online connection, neither of my parents really understanding the ramifications of such. Newgrounds.com and Unreal Tournament were my original stomping grounds. Rotten.com was known as the worst the Web had to offer- now such degeneracy seems quaint. It was the primeval era of Flash and Shareware games, Hamster Dance and Lol Cats. Remember the baby dancing to "Hooked on a Feeling"? Those were the days! We were told by our parents, "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet" and yet, the Internet was, at that time, far more trustworthy than it is today.

My oh my how things have changed.

Let me just say what we are all thinking- the Internet sucks now. The enshitification is complete. I'm not just a whiny old fogey. We really are going backwards, undermining the internet's original purpose and poisoning the very web itself. The free, mostly benevolent shared space is gone. What once was a broad open field is now a small number of vast cattle yards. Even that which refuses to be penned-in is, as blithely as a child might pick up a pretty seashell, strip-mined and resold for a mountain of gold. The richest, least trustworthy men on Earth rule their empires while openly colluding with The Evil One. At best they coddle his ego. At worst, they turn their kingdoms into scam-ridden, sloppy propaganda mills. Yet even as Altman, Zuckerberg, Cook and Musk line up to curtsy and bow in Trump's court, we continue to stay logged in. We keep buying iPhones and Pixels, despite entirely adequate alternatives. We scroll down down down the infinite well of "content", knowing it makes us sick. We know it powers the fortunes of fascists. Is it base human nature to live so brainlessly, our evolutionary design driving us towards reward without regard to consequence? Or is it the voracious greed of smart, mean little nerds with daddy issues so deep and so broad, even the whole world is not enough? Indeed, one planet is not enough- They now turn their sights to The Red Planet and beyond, hoping to escape the gravity which pins the rest of us down and float away from Terra Madre to a realm of power so elevated, even money does not matter.

A few months ago, I ended my hermitage, and I descended from the mountain determined to live some better way. I had developed a pathological, techno-agoraphobic fear of my phone, emails and SMS, preferring to leave my phone off for days at a time. Now I felt brave enough to answer calls at least. I tentatively opened the apps- they were still there, but everything was so much worse. My heart could not bear to read the news and my mind refuses to grapple with the horror of American politics. When my vote-by-mail ballot appears in my mailbox, it goes directly into the recycling bin. It's honestly amazing that I paid my taxes.

Thus began the great culling.

The first to go were Facebook and Twitter. Facebook had all my friends and family, and Twitter mostly served as a means of accumulating free porn, but I could not in good conscience allow these accounts to live. Salting the earth behind me, I deleted the phone apps. Next up was Reddit, my first love. I considered how much value Reddit had actually provided me over the years. Not much time was needed before I kissed Reddit goodbye, looked deep into her eyes, slit her throat and buried the corpse in the garden. Adieu pour toujours, mon amour! Next came the news apps. Reddit had always been my chief source for news, but there was still the Google News app on my phone that could hold my attention for brief periods, but in the words of Marie Kondo, it did not bring me joy. Which brings me to YouTube, the sole survivor. I wanted to keep it, I really did. "I listen to music on YT" I thought. But in the end, it had to die along with the others. The phone app is deleted, but the account is retained for the desktop. It's allowed to live, only to endure daily whippings with the "Do not recommend" button. Don't cross me- your whole channel will be blacklisted for the impudence of annoying me with short form videos and god help you should your AI slop appear upon my feed.

The final fire bomb was the etc/hosts file. With it, I am entirely isolated from social media networks, save a few. Here is the result

It is certainly a different life now. I used to scroll through the night, only to start scrolling again the moment I was awake. Now when I get up in the morning, I drink coffee, stretch, take my crazy pills, eat some eggs and bacon, and take a bath, not a shower, but a real honest to goodness bubble bath. With the time saved, I can afford to shave my head every day. It's nice to not be rushed. But it's almost rude at this point to reject the apps, sort of like, "I don't own a TV" or "I don't eat meat". The proposition is almost always received as a humble brag. I wonder how one rebuilds a career in tech, while rejecting its fundamental economics. I wonder what my family is posting on Facebook, and what porn is going unappreciated on Twitter. I hate myself for giving up politically, wondering if I am a bad person for burying my head in the sand. I cry for the people less lucky than I, who must grind at unglamorous low paid labor, only to return home exhausted, with no real friends and nothing to do but stare into a hyper bright magic rectangle, before repeating, day after day, until an machine finally takes their livelihood. That job will be automated away by engineers not so different from myself, each of us scrambling to stay ahead of bankruptcy, dragging each other down as we struggle to keep our own heads above water, knowing that someday soon, your job too will go away, if not taken by AI, then by a Mexican teenager who is smarter than you but will work for pesos. What happens when the machines finally take everyone's job and tiny cabal of Skesis own everything?

There are dark times ahead. Humans are barreling down the wrong path, with the accelerator on the floor, heading for a cliff that will launch us like Thelma and Louise into a techno-feudalist digital dark ages. Forget about, for just a moment, global warming. We now face an info-apocalypse, when nothing is real, and everything is a meme. I can still foresee a day when the misinformation bubble finally pops and the internet rapidly shrinks, and that's the best possible scenario. The worst case is a prison-planet, 1984 and Brave New World combined and shaped and algorithmically biased by the Trump Dynasty towards whatever dark desires lurk within their shallow and murky souls. With their social networks, they will watch you. With their algorithms, they will manipulate you. With AI and AR, they will rewrite reality in front of your very eyes. No need to tear apart the human mind with your hands- give them some shiny toys and they will do it for you. Are we really going to ride this trend line down to it's most terrible terminus- a jihad against general computing? One day, you might not just be obliged to carry an iPhone- one will be assigned to you at birth. Your right to install and uninstall software could be made illegal. Your right to actually own your computer can be taken away. One day it may be illegal to NOT own an iPhone! One day, you may find, that you can't logout of the network at all. Could they actually outlaw coding itself? Even if they cannot, surely they will try.

For me, this is a eulogy for the internet. The fun and trust is gone- most of what remains is, quite literally, mass mind control. Count me out. My love for coding remains, and much of my time now is spent learning to use the very AI tools I fear so much. I'm hoping my next computer won't be a macbook- maybe one of those System76 laptops- and I'm looking at the FairPhone too. In my radical college days, I ran Ubuntu on a netbook with specs worse than my Pixel and a screen not much bigger- maybe it's time to live like a real man again, escape from the the Apple-verse to a cabin in the words (metaphorically) and live that FOSS life again. These things would not exist without the internet, so I am thankful for that. The best parts of the old web still cling on, for now. But I don't live on the internet anymore- I just work here now.