The old web never died

People talk a lot about how they don't like their phones anymore. The general sentiment is that the affordances of the smartphone are somehow engineered nefariously. The best comparison I can think of is the mass relay infrastructure of Mass Effect, which was designed by ancient cosmic horrors to structure intergalactic civilisations to essentially lazily domesticate them by making them grow into a specific shape around a fundamental technology for energy and space travel. I used to believe this too, but no longer do. In part because I think it gives the tech oligopolies too much credit. Facebook doesn't have a mind control ray, as Cory Doctorow put it, and neither does Apple. And what's more, even if they did they'd all be in contention for its levers of control. But they're also not very good at big picture thinking. Corporations usually aren't; they're aiming for the quarterly earnings or whatever. Why else would Apple have leant so hard into the "move everything to China" spatial fix?

All the smartness of tech is small scale, if even that. In the large, they're all idiot children who lucked into world domination and now don't know what to do with it. That's why the DOGE gambit is just to fuck things up; they can't build what they can't understand and they don't understand shit. Worse yet, they also don't know they don't understand, and are too arrogant to find out.

The hand computers most people carry with them everywhere, confusingly for historical reasons referred to as "phones", aren't mind control devices. So where does the thing that feels like coercion come from? Apps, certainly. A scummy ecosystem. Social pressure. Well, the good news is that you have control over which apps you use and how, and to some extent over your social context. If social media bums you out -- don't use it.

I want to be extremely clear: I am not saying this is a skill issue. Using smartphones and, worse, social media in a way that isn't detrimental to your health is more difficult than not, and this is 2000% on the corpos who benefit from this being the case. I'm saying it's broadly speaking possible. For most people, I think a "yes and" strategy to their smartphone would work better than going full dumb phone. But you should definitely try if it's within your means! Find what works for you.

Amid this whole situation people have started pining for the old days. Nostalgia culture is pervasive at this point, including people missing "the old internet". To those who miss it, I have good news: it never really went away. I of course also have matching bad news. The good old days were never really good. For starters, tech was a lot less accessible and affordable, so many of us weren't here.

So to sum up; I advocate a hybrid/subversive use of tech. Use the stuff, but be mindful of how and actively subvert the parts you don't want. 'Phones gave us the Messenger surveillance hellscape. They also gave us Signal, one of the most accessible secure comms invented in the history of humankind. I'm going to describe a bunch of strategies I use.

Buy used or ideally not at all

Apple has now fully priced me out of their smartphones. I simply can't afford a new iPhone. The good news is I haven't bought one since iPhone 7. I currently use an iPhone 11 Pro Max I bought second hand. Going for the bigger models generally pays off since you can cram a bigger battery in there and the bang for currency ratio on the second hand market increases the more expensive the phone was originally (unlike the prices for new phones). My model has had its battery changed at least twice (once by me), and works fine despite being nearly six years old. I'll keep using it until it falls apart because it has everything I need. Smartphones were a solved technology in 2019, after all.

For phones, it pays to be patient and wait for a model with more storage. You'll need it for the rest of the strategies below, and the price difference is in the noise at least on the Swedish second hand market.

KonMari®™ your apps

A great bathroom break maintenance task if you need one is to go through your list of apps and delete those that don't spark joy. Grocery shopping? You can do that in the browser. See also, Prefer plain web.

The best place on iOS to do some spring cleaning is, confusingly enough, in Settings > General > iPhone Storage, where you can swipe left to get a Delete button and thus mass delete apps. To my knowledge it's the only way to do this on iOS.

Avoid notifications and attention traps

One of iOS' best features is not allowing notifications by default. Only allow notifications you can't live without, and immediately revoke them for any app that uses them for ads. Your attention is worth a lot more than this. Also be liberal in your use of "do not disturb" modes and consider leaving your phone in another room, a jacket pocket, your bag, or somewhere else out of sight. Just seeing the damned thing is apparently distracting.

If you're easily distracted like me you may also strategically avoid certain websites. YouTube used to be a real menace to me because I got distracted by all the shiny stuff on the home page. Turns out you get a plain search bar if you deny cookies and don't log in, which is perfect for me.

Prefer plain web

Plain web sites are pretty cool today, and the web is a lot more tightly sandboxed and often more efficient than an app. Ad and tracker blockers also work on the web but not on apps. The problem with websites is that they're annoying to use on the phone because they end up being an activity in a special virtual machine, which for stupid historical reasons is mostly available as a viewer of Web documents because the former grew out of the latter snd the distinction is ambiguous.

You can somewhat alleviate this problem by adding websites you use often to your Home Screen. In some cases they will open in the web browser, and in some cases they will behave mostly like a regular app (in case they are progressive web apps, PWAs). This feature is a bit hit or miss on iOS, but I hear it's great on Android.

On my Home Screen I have:

• a website to report findings of ticks to a local research group
• My two mastodon instances (one shortcut each; both PWAs)
• A clothes store I buy stuff from sometimes
• Qobuz where I usually buy digital music (and more important wishlist it)
• Bluesky (which oddly enough isn't a PWA)
• My library's website (for wishlisting books)
• The control page for our robot vacuum cleaner, running Valetudo (PWA)
• My SilverBullet instance (PWA)
• Bookrastinating, my BookWyrm instance (think Goodreads for nerds) (unfortunately a PWA, which is bad because it relies on having a back button for navigation which isn't there in app mode)
• Navidrome a self hosted music player that works a lot like Spotify. It is a PWA but it's completely broken on iOS.
• Prisjakt, a Swedish price comparison site I use to wishlist things I'm buying to get notified when they go on sale

Strategically use non-phone tech

I have a Tangara hacker iPod clone (review still pending!) that I use to play music and podcasts offline. It's a nice indie project worth supporting, but the firmware needs a few tweaks for my use case so I don't recommend it to a general audience (yet). But the hardware is nice, especially if someone could figure out a physical clickwheel, so I'm confident it can get there.

I also use CDs and an old boombox, mainly for my three year old who can change CDs herself and who benefits from the concrete interaction with a Thing as opposed to software. CDs and a battery + mains operated boombox is also a much more reliable technology than streaming and Bluetooth speakers, which is good because three year olds don't generally take kindly to service disruptions or having to wait while mommy debugs why the fuck the connection that worked fine five minutes ago just went belly up or charges yet another battery.

CDs (and DVDs) are very cheap second hand because almost no one has the technology to play them. Good news; quality optical players with SATA connections that work fine in modern PCs are also dirt cheap, and Exact Audio Copy still works on modern computers, including through WINE on Linux. For blu-rays you have to spend a bit more, and the only functioning ripping tech is MakeMkv. It is great though.

I briefly had a dalliance with MiniDisc, which is an aesthetically cool format that's technically terrible. I thought it would be fun to see how my relationship with music changed if I burned my playlists to little retro futuristic discs. However it turns out that minidiscs occupy the exact worst place in the old tech Venn diagram. They're nostalgic for 30-40 year olds, which is bad because several of them have jobs and, worse yet, no kids. This means the technology is very expensive for what it delivers, and worse yet is falling apart because it wasn't designed to last 30 years. The only option out there that's even worse is arguably iPods.

Besides this I set a lot of timers. My primary device for this is a Flipper Zero, but getting one for this purpose is, uh, overkill.

Have at least one AFK engagement

One of the reason "screens" are "bad" is probably the same reason eating chips for food is; it displaces other things that you actually need with an impoverished simulacrum. Of course you can have some chips, but also eat your veggies.

For human interaction, eating your veggies is doing things AFK. Get in an association. Collaborate with someone. Have friends. Write letters. Go to protests. Or riots. I don't know, I have small kids. My life is mainly being yelled and thrown sand at and then going to work.

I generally don't recommend having kids for your AFK engagement until better childcare is more widely distributed, there is such a thing as society again and you don't have to be the entire village it takes to raise your kids. Let's be real: this is all a labour extraction scam from the people in charge and they can all go run their economy without labour and see how that works for them.

Beg, borrow, and steal

You may not be able to fully get out of the streaming services, but there are actually several ways to get offline music. Some artists still release CDs, and second hand CDs are dirt cheap (as I described above). There is also the gold standard Bandcamp for indie artists. For regular artists, Qobuz works great. They generally seem to get the same streaming library as Apple Music and Spotify; so you could probably buy all the music you usually listen to slowly over time for the same amount of money you gift the record companies through Spotify.

Then there's also good old piracy, which also hasn't gone away. I used to argue that piracy as a general rule is neither immoral nor obviously generally harmful to artists (especially the big ones; there are arguments you can make about indies), and I still believe this with some of the caveats the wisdom of age adds. If anything, the streaming economy, which is far more exploitative than BitTorrent or LimeWire or Soulseek ever was, is living existential proof of this. "Please, think of the artists", says record label exec turning around to rob their own artists blind.

In many countries, including Sweden, recording video and audio off of streaming platforms is perfectly legal, analogous to how my parents recorded songs on the radio on cassettes. Yt-dlp can not only download video from YouTube, but also from SVT Play (Swedish public service TV), SoundCloud, and many others.

Use your library

Libraries, physical libraries, are great. Digital libraries suck and mostly contain spam. Most libraries have purchasing suggestion systems and will be very happy to buy books you suggest. This is good because it saves shelf space, your money, and indirectly contributes to steering commons like our libraries by signalling what people want.

Remember that there are also university libraries, so if your books are niche, technical, or theoretical in nature consider asking them instead.

Contribute to the commons

Back in the web two oh days connected data and folksonomies were all the rage. There was a sometimes naive belief that the principles of open source could be applied to just about anything to establish bibliographic control over humanity's knowledge in a way that would have made Paul Otlet's Mundaneum seem modest in comparison. Like many hype cycles, this largely fell flat, but many many of the collaborative projects remain and are very useful.

My personal favourites are Wikipedia, which everyone knows about, and the music database MusicBrainz, which is lesser known. MusicBrainz helps catalogue music, and is amazing for tagging music you're ripping from CDs (or finding online through other means). The general availability of catalogues through Spotify and Apple Music has made importing metadata into MusicBrainz much easier, since there is now an automated service to do that.

I’ve also occasionally contributed to OpenStreetMap. Primarily by debugging routing to encourage it to use my preferred biking routes (usually some nice dedicated biking path is missing or lacks the correct metadata to show up with the right coefficient to the optimiser). I’m quite envious of the gamified StreetComplete client, which gamifies filling in missing data. It’s only for Android though. Thanks to @harisont@mstdn.social for the tip!

MusicBrainz also has ListenBrainz, its own version of AudioScrobbler, later last.fm, another mid 00's project. ListenBrainz allows you to log your music listening and get recommendations, decoupled from where you actually played the music.

Go offline

If you've followed any of the advice above a large part of your digital life is now available offline. Internet used to be intermittent, and it sometimes makes sense to consume it that way. You can try engaging flight mode or, if you're worried about getting calls, mobile data. As an added bonus you may be able to reduce your mobile data consumption and get a cheaper mobile plan through this technique.

Also consider getting a paper magazine subscriptions. Most newspapers are trash and don't deserve your money, but there are a lot of good magazines out there.

RSS still exists

RSS, a technology for encoding websites as updateble feeds, is still out there. You can follow this blog via RSS!

Once you have a working RSS reader (I recommend Reeder, which isn't a subscription and very rarely receives updates, a feature I appreciate) you can receive updates to read offline. I usually go for a triage-queue approach where I skim through content in the inbox and flag it for later reading. In the olden days I used to send it to a read it later service (Pocket may have been the last one), which I had Jury-rigged into a terrible Rube-Goldberg machine though IFTT to send daily dispatches to my Kindle for reading as a newspaper for breakfast. I no longer have the time to read at breakfast (or mostly at all), and so no longer use this setup, but I hear many e-readers now have naive support for this model.

Nudge yourself

Place apps you don't want to spend time in off your Home Screen, and place apps you do want there. For example, I have reading apps, podcast and music players, and Drafts, into which I'm typing this text right now.