I know I daydream about throwing away the internet entirely but for this one post let me pull back on that fantasy, almost all the way back, and instead just make a much more reasonable and smaller request:
Give up on all “push algo” apps. Yes, all of them.
You can keep all other apps if you want, including “subscription” type apps where you get stuff from the people you follow and maybe even things that they (real humans) “boost” to you. You can subscribe to a thousand people for all I care, or just friends and fam. You can stay entertained for all time watching hours and hours as long, any kind of screen, brightness set as high as you like, headphones on too, why not, as long as it’s stuff you actually subscribed to.
What I mean by push algo apps are the ones that have a robot that “recommends” things for you to “explore” and “discover”. Stop using them entirely.
For all y’all who like me are trying to get away from screen ever more, that’s great, welcome here, that’s been my obsession topic for a while (and sometimes I falter and other times I can stay away), you’re great, keep going, but this one is for those who love being online and actually want to be on the internet all the time and who think all of us gray screen offline needs are self-flagellatingly boring. To those I say:
You can stay online. You can stay connected. You can stay hooked up to each other literally all the time if you want. (If you don’t that’s fine too.) You don’t have to read books or write poems. (If you want to, that’s cool.) You can still use phone, computer, and apps.
But there’s a whole category of apps that push junk to you that I’m asking you, pleading with you, to give up.
Good thing is you’ll be free from all the machine generated slop out there.
There’s this related-ish issue, the network effect, that in a perfect world I’d also ask you to scrub away (corporate-owned apps like Line and WhatsApp that turn your conversations and relationships into a product) but that’s a story for another day. If you only manage to ditch the push algo apps you’ll still have made such a huge positive change for yourself and for the world.
This isn’t a notifications issue. Whether your phone is constantly bonging and beeping with the latest vid from your faves or if the pushing algo apps only are open when you reach for the phone and click on their icons to open them, that’s completely secondary. Even if you only use the apps whenever you want to, intentionally and deliberately, a lot of the same problems remain.