I wish you the best in the Offline
Dave Rupert reflects on friends and peers who have recently left social media, AI, or the internet entirely. He highlights Salma's retirement from DevRel, Chad Whitacre's typewriter-written farewell to tech, and Brett Codes' decision to stop using AI. Rupert admires their convictions, mourns the voices we lose, and wishes them well in the Offline, hoping to join them soon.
But being able to observe the Offline from the Online might ruin the magic and mystery hidden there. It’s a door hidden in an old wardrobe that you have to pass through to fully understand.
- jareklupinski
> I get so curious about people’s financial situations when they’re able to make such asymmetrical moves like that. He lives in a rural town near Pittsburgh, does selling $10 zines afford that lifestyle? What about healthcare? Does he have a trust fund? A recent inheritance? Bitcoin? Years of an early retirement strategy paying off? I shouldn’t ruin the anti-capitalistic vibe with such trivial capitalistic questions but I love it and my brain jumps to trying to make the math work for myself.
peoples' true natures/intentions make more sense when you remove "because money" from the equation
but it's hard to see through it when your own life revolves around "because money"
- sdcfgy
I barely interact with people online. It’s here and email. And that’s it. I don’t have a web site, don’t have a blog and don’t have any interest in social media. 99% of the time I don't even have a brower open if I'm using the computer.
Turns out when you live that life there’s a lot of people out there who do the same. It’s easy to forget there is a completely offline world if you’re online all the time. I spend most of my time with them. In fact I’m about to go out to lunch with four people (age range 29-55) who are similarly offline. We arranged lunch over the phone.
I’d go as far as saying that the online world, past essentials, is actually the minority.
Going offline is returning to normality.
- boristsr
Reading this article I couldn't help but think of a fantastic talk I found quite motivating by Andrew Kelley, Don't Take The Black Pill.
In it he talks about staying in the game, keeping strong voices advocating for good and positive change, and how stepping back, while a valid protection mechanism concedes the victory to whatever it is that's exhausting us.
- PaulRobinson
We're going through a phase. It'll die. It'll die, because the previous phases died, or at least evolved into something else. We're not in the Dotcom era because the market dealt with that suckiness. We're not in Eternal September because Usenet was killed by other platforms because Usenet sucked as a UX. We're not in Web 2.0 because the market decided the semantic web was a noisy hot sucky mess. We aren't all just using AOL or (OMG, do you remember this?), MSN, because, well, they sucked.
If I look around me today, I see stuff that sucks. I see a glint of the next evolution - mostly small, independent, human-centred (perhaps AI supported). It's tiny right now, but there's a good chance that the specific future I'm thinking about is already here just not evenly distributed yet.
And it's natural to not want to try and build that, and instead just accept that [waves hands] all this is a sucky mess, and it's burning us out, and you go fix it, because I'm out.
But the best way to fix this is to roll up your sleeves and fix it. Maybe going and writing a religion zine is part of that, maybe it isn't. Maybe going and becoming a farmer fixes it, but it almost certainly doesn't.
We need more talented people building the future they want to see, not running away from the one they're being handed by a roomful of billionaire morons (who consider themselves geniuses).
Take it back. We've done it before. It's not easy, but the journey is where the stories are.
- paid_dot_expert
If you use AI and don't code for 3 years, and then AI collapses, and you need to code again … it won't be that hard to pick up. Let's not exaggerate!
You could code, go and run an Alpaca Farm for 10 years, give that up and probably within 6 months of study be ready to work as a coder again.