Appstinence is just one of a seemingly growing constellation of groups, mostly led by young people, advocating for reduced reliance on technology, either for one’s own mental health or as a protest against powerful tech companies that have an ever-growing hold on all aspects of our lives.
I’ma be real with you. Choosing to dump technology entirely instead of learning to use it responsibly and finding things that aren’t dominated by corporations looking to control us seems really short sighted and leaning into false promise of things being different at best.
It’s quite like the whole Climate Change movement and how we won’t do anything to constrain giant corporations or billionaires in how they impact the planet, but instead individuals (often poverty stricken) are expected to shoulder the burden through recycling programs that don’t even end up recycling what those individuals take the time to sort.
It’s also eerily similar to the anti-AI movement which focuses on all the most negative aspects of AI generation, ignores the benefits of locally-hosted models as opposed to giant models owned by corporations run out of energy and water hogging data-centers, and similarly ignores that the AI that consistently is a failure is general purpose AI whereas highly specialized AI is often very successful. I am by no means an AI lover, I don’t use it at all in my every day life, but I think it’s foolhardy to write it off entirely instead of making regulations that prevent this kind of environment-destroying investment in endless data centers for profit. Much like the Climate Change issue, it’s the smallest and weakest among us shouldering the burden, making our own lives harder, while nothing materially changes and AI advances anyway.
These modern Luddites are not wrong that some aspects of the modern era are terrible, but some of the things they decry are the same things that are so beautiful about it. When I was a young person, finding LGBTQ+ or atheist groups was basically impossible without the internet. As someone who grew up in a relatively rural area, it was hard to make friends and connections even in a mostly unconnected world (I am in my forties, for reference, so I grew up in the era of CompuServe and AOL being the only “online” options). Having the internet suddenly opened me up to finding people who I could actually be open and vulnerable with, something I couldn’t say was true about most of my IRL peers at the time. Returning to that, especially at a period where Christofascism is taking hold, is asking to let the Christofascists dictate how society looks and functions and removing those footholds of access for people who are queer or atheist or disabled. It returns us to an unconnected world where people suffer in silence for decades not knowing that there is nothing wrong with who they are deep down as they are regularly shamed and abused by their IRL peers for not appearing or acting the “right” way.
Especially with the likelihood of modern communication methods being clamped down upon, embracing the technology and finding ways to use it to benefit humankind instead of deciding it’s all evil is the way forward. The world was, for example, a better place with Fred Rogers in it, who leveraged the technology of television, often villainized as terrible for children, as a way to connect with children and educate them in a healthy, humane, and loving way. I see shades of that type of villainization in this movement, equating screen time with being unhealthy.
All tools are able to be misused. All tools are able to be used positively. It’s all in who is using those tools and what their aims and intents are. A hammer can be used to both create and destroy in positive ways in the trade of construction. A hammer can also be wielded as a violent, dangerous weapon. It all depends on whose hands it is in, and what they aim to use that tool for.
Dropping technology instead of standing for using it in positive ways will always be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I think you make a wise point for most people. I’ll bet it’s a pretty cool community, though. You can maybe avoid the worst things about tech through smart moderation but you can’t step back in time to the pre-smartphone era that way. If crowds of young people are rediscovering drugs, card games, and sitting around fucking each other I’d call that good news for the world.
Yeah I think the focus should be on technological sovereignty, not abstinence. We need control over our data, control over our software, control over our devices, control over our hardware, and through these things we can gain control over our lives while still accessing these extremely useful tools. We need our own search engines, our own operating systems, our own applications, our own email, our own social media, our own video hosting, etc etc. We can never go back, the only way out is through.
This is extremely hard and expensive, though. It’ll require mass organization of millions of people, we can’t do it as individuals.
That’s correct. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We have to increase our mastery of it instead.
The core relationship is rather simple and needs to be redefined. Remote compute does not assign numbers to any of us, we provide them with identities we create.
All data allowances are revokable. Systems need to be engineered to make the flow of data transparent and easy to manage.
No one can censor us to other people without the consent of the viewer. This means moderation needs to be redefined. We subscribe to moderation, and it is curated towards what we individually want to see. No one makes the choice for us on what we can and cannot see.
This among much more in the same thread of thinking is needed. Power back to the people, entrenched by mastery.
When you think like this more and more the pattern becomes clearer, and you know what technology to look for. The nice thing is, all of this is possible right now at our current tech level. That can bring a lot of hope.
That is just the tip of the iceberg with the moderation framework I have in mind.
Anyone can become a moderator by publishing their block / hide list.
The more people that subscribe to a moderator or a moderator team, the more “votes” they get to become the default moderator profile for a topic (whatever that is on the given platform, subreddit for reddit etc).
By being subscribed to a moderation team (or multiple), when you block or hide, it gets sent to the report queues of who you’re subscribed to. They can then review the content and make a determination to block or hide it for all their subscribers.
Someone who is blocked or hidden is notified that their content has been blocked or hidden when it is by a large enough mod team. They can then file an appeal. The appeal is akin to a trial, and it is distributed among all the more active people that block or hide content in line with the moderation collective.
An appeal goes through multiple rounds of analysis by randomly selected users who participate in review. It is provided with the user context and all relevant data to make a decision. People reviewing the appeal can make decision comments and the user can read their feedback.
All of this moderation has a “karma” associated with it. When people make decisions in line with the general populace, they get more justice karma. That creates a ranking.
Those rankings can be used to make a tiered justice system, that select the best representative sample of how a topic wishes to have justice applied. The higher ranking moderators get selected for higher tiered decisions. If a lower level appeal decision is appealed again, it gets added to their queue, and they can choose to take the appeal or not.
All decisions are public for the benefit of users and accountability of moderators.
When a user doesn’t like a moderator’s decision they can unblock or unhide content, and that counts as a vote against them. This is where it gets interesting, because this forms a graph of desired content, with branching decision logic. You can follow that train of thought to some very fascinating results. Everyone will have a personally curated content tree.
Some will have a “cute” internet, filled with adorable content. Some will have a “violent” internet, filled with war videos and martial arts. Some will have a “cozy” internet, filled with non-triggering safe content. And we will be able to share our curations and preferences so others can benefit.
There is much more but the system would make moderation not just more equitable, but more scalable, transparent, and appreciated. We’d be able to measure moderators and respect them while honoring the freedom of individuals. Everyone would win.
I see a future where we respect the individual voices of everyone, and make space for all to learn and grow. Where we are able to decide what we want to see and share without constant anxiety. Where everything is so fluid and decentralized that no one can be captured by money or influence, and when they are, we have the tools to swiftly branch with minimal impact. Passively democratic online mechanisms.
The newer generation of tech users know only of a narrow subset of technology from big tech / ad tech. They know little of anything at all the grassroots era of technology.
One counter point is young people drive the technology trends. Look at how social media and the Internet in general took off in the early 2000-2010s, it was driven by younger generations using these technologies. Now everyone is on social media after the younger generations at the time pioneered it.
If younger generations do rejected apps, smart phones, and surveillance capitalism, maybe there could be change in the direction.
Holy shit. I think this is the best comment I have ever read in my entire life. I’ve been complaining about the exact same things to my IRL peers and they all think I’m nuts for having these “beliefs”. Especially the one about recycling.
There‘s a lot of emotions there that lead to irrational decisions. I can‘t really blame them. These tiny slabs robbed them of a childhood that me and many other generations got to enjoy.
Appstinence is something that I couldn‘t imagine doing because it‘s so drastic and I don‘t have that kind of relationship with my phone where that would be preferable or necessary. But they definitely do and maybe they will learn to have a more healthy relationship to technology afterwards. This could be a necessary step toward a better future for them.
Excellent, insightful comment and I very much appreciate and resonate with this response.
I do think the protest serves to raise awareness, even if it’s a bit extreme. The desired effect is not really to encourage the complete rejection of tech, but bring attention to the issues and get the average person to think a little more about their usage of it. I’m actually kind of proud of these young folks for being able to snap themselves out of the social media-induced hypnotic state their generation seems to be stuck in.
I’ma be real with you. Choosing to dump technology entirely instead of learning to use it responsibly and finding things that aren’t dominated by corporations looking to control us seems really short sighted and leaning into false promise of things being different at best.
It’s quite like the whole Climate Change movement and how we won’t do anything to constrain giant corporations or billionaires in how they impact the planet, but instead individuals (often poverty stricken) are expected to shoulder the burden through recycling programs that don’t even end up recycling what those individuals take the time to sort.
It’s also eerily similar to the anti-AI movement which focuses on all the most negative aspects of AI generation, ignores the benefits of locally-hosted models as opposed to giant models owned by corporations run out of energy and water hogging data-centers, and similarly ignores that the AI that consistently is a failure is general purpose AI whereas highly specialized AI is often very successful. I am by no means an AI lover, I don’t use it at all in my every day life, but I think it’s foolhardy to write it off entirely instead of making regulations that prevent this kind of environment-destroying investment in endless data centers for profit. Much like the Climate Change issue, it’s the smallest and weakest among us shouldering the burden, making our own lives harder, while nothing materially changes and AI advances anyway.
These modern Luddites are not wrong that some aspects of the modern era are terrible, but some of the things they decry are the same things that are so beautiful about it. When I was a young person, finding LGBTQ+ or atheist groups was basically impossible without the internet. As someone who grew up in a relatively rural area, it was hard to make friends and connections even in a mostly unconnected world (I am in my forties, for reference, so I grew up in the era of CompuServe and AOL being the only “online” options). Having the internet suddenly opened me up to finding people who I could actually be open and vulnerable with, something I couldn’t say was true about most of my IRL peers at the time. Returning to that, especially at a period where Christofascism is taking hold, is asking to let the Christofascists dictate how society looks and functions and removing those footholds of access for people who are queer or atheist or disabled. It returns us to an unconnected world where people suffer in silence for decades not knowing that there is nothing wrong with who they are deep down as they are regularly shamed and abused by their IRL peers for not appearing or acting the “right” way.
Especially with the likelihood of modern communication methods being clamped down upon, embracing the technology and finding ways to use it to benefit humankind instead of deciding it’s all evil is the way forward. The world was, for example, a better place with Fred Rogers in it, who leveraged the technology of television, often villainized as terrible for children, as a way to connect with children and educate them in a healthy, humane, and loving way. I see shades of that type of villainization in this movement, equating screen time with being unhealthy.
All tools are able to be misused. All tools are able to be used positively. It’s all in who is using those tools and what their aims and intents are. A hammer can be used to both create and destroy in positive ways in the trade of construction. A hammer can also be wielded as a violent, dangerous weapon. It all depends on whose hands it is in, and what they aim to use that tool for.
Dropping technology instead of standing for using it in positive ways will always be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I think you make a wise point for most people. I’ll bet it’s a pretty cool community, though. You can maybe avoid the worst things about tech through smart moderation but you can’t step back in time to the pre-smartphone era that way. If crowds of young people are rediscovering drugs, card games, and sitting around fucking each other I’d call that good news for the world.
Yeah I think the focus should be on technological sovereignty, not abstinence. We need control over our data, control over our software, control over our devices, control over our hardware, and through these things we can gain control over our lives while still accessing these extremely useful tools. We need our own search engines, our own operating systems, our own applications, our own email, our own social media, our own video hosting, etc etc. We can never go back, the only way out is through.
This is extremely hard and expensive, though. It’ll require mass organization of millions of people, we can’t do it as individuals.
That’s correct. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We have to increase our mastery of it instead.
The core relationship is rather simple and needs to be redefined. Remote compute does not assign numbers to any of us, we provide them with identities we create.
All data allowances are revokable. Systems need to be engineered to make the flow of data transparent and easy to manage.
No one can censor us to other people without the consent of the viewer. This means moderation needs to be redefined. We subscribe to moderation, and it is curated towards what we individually want to see. No one makes the choice for us on what we can and cannot see.
This among much more in the same thread of thinking is needed. Power back to the people, entrenched by mastery.
When you think like this more and more the pattern becomes clearer, and you know what technology to look for. The nice thing is, all of this is possible right now at our current tech level. That can bring a lot of hope.
That is actually a really interesting approach to moderation, huh.
That is just the tip of the iceberg with the moderation framework I have in mind.
Anyone can become a moderator by publishing their block / hide list.
The more people that subscribe to a moderator or a moderator team, the more “votes” they get to become the default moderator profile for a topic (whatever that is on the given platform, subreddit for reddit etc).
By being subscribed to a moderation team (or multiple), when you block or hide, it gets sent to the report queues of who you’re subscribed to. They can then review the content and make a determination to block or hide it for all their subscribers.
Someone who is blocked or hidden is notified that their content has been blocked or hidden when it is by a large enough mod team. They can then file an appeal. The appeal is akin to a trial, and it is distributed among all the more active people that block or hide content in line with the moderation collective.
An appeal goes through multiple rounds of analysis by randomly selected users who participate in review. It is provided with the user context and all relevant data to make a decision. People reviewing the appeal can make decision comments and the user can read their feedback.
All of this moderation has a “karma” associated with it. When people make decisions in line with the general populace, they get more justice karma. That creates a ranking.
Those rankings can be used to make a tiered justice system, that select the best representative sample of how a topic wishes to have justice applied. The higher ranking moderators get selected for higher tiered decisions. If a lower level appeal decision is appealed again, it gets added to their queue, and they can choose to take the appeal or not.
All decisions are public for the benefit of users and accountability of moderators.
When a user doesn’t like a moderator’s decision they can unblock or unhide content, and that counts as a vote against them. This is where it gets interesting, because this forms a graph of desired content, with branching decision logic. You can follow that train of thought to some very fascinating results. Everyone will have a personally curated content tree.
Some will have a “cute” internet, filled with adorable content. Some will have a “violent” internet, filled with war videos and martial arts. Some will have a “cozy” internet, filled with non-triggering safe content. And we will be able to share our curations and preferences so others can benefit.
There is much more but the system would make moderation not just more equitable, but more scalable, transparent, and appreciated. We’d be able to measure moderators and respect them while honoring the freedom of individuals. Everyone would win.
I see a future where we respect the individual voices of everyone, and make space for all to learn and grow. Where we are able to decide what we want to see and share without constant anxiety. Where everything is so fluid and decentralized that no one can be captured by money or influence, and when they are, we have the tools to swiftly branch with minimal impact. Passively democratic online mechanisms.
The newer generation of tech users know only of a narrow subset of technology from big tech / ad tech. They know little of anything at all the grassroots era of technology.
One counter point is young people drive the technology trends. Look at how social media and the Internet in general took off in the early 2000-2010s, it was driven by younger generations using these technologies. Now everyone is on social media after the younger generations at the time pioneered it.
If younger generations do rejected apps, smart phones, and surveillance capitalism, maybe there could be change in the direction.
Holy shit. I think this is the best comment I have ever read in my entire life. I’ve been complaining about the exact same things to my IRL peers and they all think I’m nuts for having these “beliefs”. Especially the one about recycling.
There‘s a lot of emotions there that lead to irrational decisions. I can‘t really blame them. These tiny slabs robbed them of a childhood that me and many other generations got to enjoy.
Appstinence is something that I couldn‘t imagine doing because it‘s so drastic and I don‘t have that kind of relationship with my phone where that would be preferable or necessary. But they definitely do and maybe they will learn to have a more healthy relationship to technology afterwards. This could be a necessary step toward a better future for them.
Excellent, insightful comment and I very much appreciate and resonate with this response.
I do think the protest serves to raise awareness, even if it’s a bit extreme. The desired effect is not really to encourage the complete rejection of tech, but bring attention to the issues and get the average person to think a little more about their usage of it. I’m actually kind of proud of these young folks for being able to snap themselves out of the social media-induced hypnotic state their generation seems to be stuck in.
Even bob marley was a small axe.
Standing ovation 👏
Nah, ludditism is the way. Sincerely, a tech bro.
The rare comment that is so good, I upvote all comments that applaud it!