You can still live like what's described in this article. Get yourself a dumbphone and a paper atlas, only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, read paper books, newspapers, etc
Now and then I do that, just to switch off from our hyper-connected world. Switching off is the new peace of mind.
The thing about technology is that even if you don't change everyone else will.
Sure, it might still be technically legal to ride a horse down the street. But soon enough, people started putting in multi-lane highways. Also, stores took out their hitching posts. Then we started designing cities around the car, so what used to be a mile away is now 10. And half of that distance is consumed by parking lots.
Honestly, if you hitched your horse to the side of where they have the shopping carts, or even a lamp post, not only would most not mind, most would think it was cool, and if they really hated it, wouldn't know who was responsible for/had had the right to remove the horse.
I haven't ridden a horse since I was 3 or so, but I rode a steam train through town last Sunday, which would be period accurate with your horse, and people smiled. They waved and took photos and thought it was really cool. Which it was.
It isn't practical, as you say, but it is pretty awesome. And because of that people will accommodate you.
Much like living outside the Matrix, would you really want to go back, knowing what you know?
Yes, you can use a paper atlas. I have an 8-year-old car with GPS, and a 34-year-old car without. I bought a map book for the 34-year-old car, thinking it'd be a "period accurate" way of driving it; it's anachronistic at best, and frustrating at worst - can you read the street signs, and did you drop your compass under the seat? In the 8-year-old car, I can hit a button, say "Navigate to (an address)" _while driving_, and it figures it out.
Some of these I do on principle (only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, etc.), and I accept a compromised UX as a result. Your mileage may vary, depending on how much you get out of these things, but the immediate impact of them seem generally negative.
You can get battery powered compasses that you stick on your dash. :)
My car's review mirror has a compass in it and I use it for navigation quite often.
Places I had to drive to before GPS are places I have a better understanding of how to get to. I have a friend who refuses to use GPS and his knowledge of the city is far far ahead of mine.
Of course I am lucky to live in a place built on a true x-y coordinate grid system where given any address you can navigate to it w/o issue using, well, just a compass. :)
I wouldn't try that trick in London! :) (There is a cool documentary about London cab drivers and what they have/had to go through to memorize the entire city)
You can't really. People think it's simply a matter of getting rid of all the new tech.
It isn't. You'll just be an anachronism. If the entire world isn't living the same way then you are only getting a superficial experience. Instead of living a genuine life, you are merely pretending for a while.
And the world knows that everybody has a smartphone. The last restaurant I went to had QR codes on the tables rather than paper menus. Of course, I could have asked for a paper menu but they didn't provide one by default and it would have added a new extra step. It isn't a big deal of course, just slightly slower restaurant service, but a million little deals like that add up to a hassle.
I'm very happy to have gotten into a committed relationship right before online dating apparently became mandatory, although also vaguely curious what the experience is like. It seems like such a personal thing was suddenly connected to the internet, which is fascinating. Although also terrifying. I'm glad I don't have to actually deal with it.
IG is used for messaging, so the inability to text back and forth is the issue, with or without the rant. Attractive people are reluctant to give out their phone numbers and SMS is uncool.
You can sell your car, get a horse, and travel around like it is the 19th century. Of course, nothing around you will be like the 19th century. Not that it isn't worth doing for other reasons, but moving your tech backwards doesn't move the world around you backwards.
> moving your tech backwards doesn't move the world around you backwards.
The OP point doesn't seem to be about moving anything backwards, but moving yourself forward by selectively disengaging from certain things.
My PhD advisor once went to a beach resort with his family. Fifteen days in a remote venue without wifi nor cellphone network. He was the kind of person who replies a saturday midnight mail with an absurdly technical and detailed answer, within less than one hour. I thought it would be torture to him. When he came back he told me that it was the most productive two weeks on his life. He wrote two nearly complete paper drafts and proved several theorems. Some things that he couldn't check on the literature were carefully noted.
After that he realised how absurd and unproductive it is to spend your whole life connected to the email and subject to excessive social pressure. I guess having email-free days, or even mornings, would be a productivity boost to many intellectual jobs (unless your job consists in actually replying to mails).
> But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind.
All those billions of fools being tricked into using them! I can see an argument that the downsides of social media outweigh the benefits of access to nearly unlimited knowledge, but I don't even agree with that argument. I spent more of my life without smartphones than with, and I still 100% would rather have them than not. The access to the knowledge alone is amazing. Stuck out in the middle of nowhere? A quick google search gets you home. Traveling around in the middle of nowhere without a map isn't actually that great of a life lesson after the first time or two. And I live in the "first world" - the benefits to third world countries are profound.
> But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind. At all.
This statement may be hyperbolic, but at its core is not wrong. Smartphones are very easily a net negative in terms of cost/benefit to society. They're ubiquitous because they're addictive, not because they're so wonderful. Everyone used to smoke too, then we came to see the massive damage cigarettes were doing. Smartphones are just cigarettes for the brain.
Smartphones are simply tools. I use mine as a flashlight, notebook, calculator, camera, phone, book, and compass even without access to the internet. People would have lined up to buy an affordable device that did all of that in 1990.
The internet is also more than just mindless entertainment and social media. GPS isn’t necessary, but they do more than just find stuff they also route you around traffic accidents and locate the closest drug store on a trip. Downloading an instructional YouTube video really helps with home repair, etc.
In app purchases are toxic, but you can also just download a free chess app no gamification required.
Likewise; you don't have to accuse me of lying to make a point. Almost all of the arguments in favor of smartphones in this thread are based on caving to social pressure. Cell phones and texting are sufficient. And by the way, it's called hyperbole.
> But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind. At all. The only compelling reason to use them is social pressure.
Benefit? Probably not. Social Pressure? I'd say it's mostly the same addictive behavior that's built into slot machines.
There's been a lot of high speed evolution that has gone into modern products. Fast food, social media, the perfection of pop music production. The unsuccessful die off.
> You can still live like what's described in this article. Get yourself a dumbphone and a paper atlas, only pay with cash, avoid loyalty cards, read paper books, newspapers, etc
I've been doing this a fair amount lately, particularly when I go on vacation. It's glorious.
There are some inconveniences, for sure, but the good outweighs the bad. Most of what drives my tech use these days is 1) My job, and 2) The social expectations of others. On balance smartphones and ubiquitous internet have benefits, but the bad far outweighs the good. Unfortunately, once a technology is embraced by enough people, you're more or less forced to use it if you want to live in mainstream society.
That's pretty much me, except for reading a couple of websites (like this) , online banking, and pirating e-books for my Kindle.
I'll fire up a machine for video or photo editing once in a while or sheet music work, but otherwise they're not much use.
One problem is being too old to care about video games. When Space Invaders came out I couldn't imagine that people would choose that over pinball or foosball. My loss I guess.
Now and then I do that, just to switch off from our hyper-connected world. Switching off is the new peace of mind.