Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/why-i-disappeared

by eh_why_not • 7 months ago

113 158 7 months ago

Escaping the internet on a luxury trip doesn’t disprove political conflict… it just shows how privilege can opt out of reality and sell the experience as clickbaity insight.

lapcat2• 7 months ago

It's definitely privileged to take a trip to the Galapagos, but I don't think it's privileged to ignore the news. A lot of poor people ignore the news. They may be too busy, or they may feel powerless to change anything. I think the real question is what exactly this entirely content-free statement means: "I’ll be focusing more on stories that actually matter instead of chasing the flash-in-the-pan ephemera that nobody remembers the next week."

truculent• 7 months ago

Privilege isn't just about wealth. The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!

wolvoleo2• 7 months ago

I ignore the news a lot too. For the reasons you mention, I can't change anything and it only makes me angry seeing all the far right nonsense happening. There's no point anymore. I just follow the tech news now. It does lead to me being out of touch with some local stuff though but who cares. I'm in some pretty niche communities anyway so what goes on in the mainstream isn't that relevant to me.

kadir1234• 7 months ago

Not "privilege" per se, I think that's the wrong word. Republican or Democrat, left or right, rich or very very rich - there is a lot of self-selection bias in judging the world from a pool of people who decided to go on vacation to the Galapagos...

Eisenstein5• 7 months ago

Is it beneficial to be imposing a purity test before taking the meaning of any lesson?

MrJohz4• 7 months ago

Isn't that exactly what privilege is though? A measure of a person's ability to be part of that self-selected pool, and to shield yourself from issues that affect other people?

MangoToupe• 7 months ago

"The news" is hardly reality either, and nor does it record most of the political conflict in the world.

unethical_ban• 7 months ago

It's important to have principles and to speak up for them around others, and to get your information from sources of truth.

But it is not important for most people to be plugged into a news mainline every day to read about the latest absurdity of our flailing country. Until or unless there is mass unrest and sustained protests or a general strike, the only thing we can do is vote and boycott, and if you live in a swing district or state, write a politician.

I think "escaping the internet" by stopping news consumption most of the week would benefit most of us, rich and poor, all races, unless you need realtime updates for your safety.

godelski5• 7 months ago

Finishing my PhD I kinda did this same disconnect. Only really getting news by word of mouth or maybe weekly checking Reuters front page. Effectively quit Twitter and BlueSky. It's about a year since I started and I don't regret it for a second. I rarely feel like I've missed something important. Honestly, if it it's important then people will be talking about it.

I'm on HN more now and honestly a bit disappointed with myself for that but even here is less baity than social media and news. It's easier to select topics as well. I just feel myself get angry when I get on those platforms and it reminds me to get off.

notepad0x903• 7 months ago

can a poor person not disconnect in the same way? I think plenty already do without meaning too, lots of tech-illiterate truck drivers and construction workers with flip phones.

aucisson_masque• 7 months ago

Technically you don't even need a flip phone to disconnect from the media and the news. Plenty of people have smartphone but choose not to care about what happens in the world, at least what we have no say in it.

Although if I was American, I think I'd be pretty interested (worried) in what my country is becoming under Trump presidency.

But then, until the elections there is not much one can do.

thrance• 7 months ago

Poor people suffer from political conflict more directly, enduring the abysmal policies coming from the top in a very concrete way.

intended• 7 months ago

As with all addictive goods, the evidence will show that socio-economic factors influence the degree of psychological healthy/unhealthy or growth focused use of a medium/substance.

Smart phones are ubiquitous, and influencer is a key path for many to try and move out of their economic bracket.

_heimdall4• 7 months ago

Are construction workers and truck drivers all poor today? They could have flip phones by choice rather than necessity.

energy123• 7 months ago

It's lame how a timeless Buddhist principle is derided as "privilege" by contemporary leftists. So closed minded and presumptuous towards something so effective and universally applicable.

My personal observation is that those with the least engage in this practice the most, partly because they don't have the bandwidth to bother. It's the middle and upper-middle class who are the terminally online cynics.

potato37328423• 7 months ago

My personal observation is that those with the least engage in this practice the most, partly because they don't have the bandwidth to bother. It's the middle and upper-middle class who are the terminally online cynics.

Look at what the people who were living high on the hog due to tax/graft/dysfunction before losing their heads in the french revolution got up to. Look at the rabbit holes minor British nobility went down. The current american upper-ish middle class is just another cover of the same stupid bad for everyone song.

sallveburrpi2• 7 months ago

You assume too much about my politics…

In what way is hopping on a plane to an island retreat for a week a “timeless Buddhist principle”? And immediately shilling your next commercial project while you’re at it?

Sounds more like a timeless US-American practice.

Thanks for sharing your personal experience - I do agree that the middle class is the most anxious; anxious about dropping lower and levelling up at the same time. Terminally online though seems to be a pretty common thing across all classes - just look at Trump or Musk tweeting every 5 minutes…

larodi2• 7 months ago

Yes, exactly. Op escaped because he can allow himself to. He is wealthy and well educated also - knows what a disconnect means and is able to pay for a pricey trip to end of the world why his affairs cater to themselves.

It’s perhaps less than 0.001% of the population that can allow themselves to do it.

troyvit• 7 months ago

Why does it take a trip to the Galapagos to disconnect though? We could just as easily block access to all our socials (including HN) for a week and probably still do fine at our jobs.

_heimdall4• 7 months ago

This really gets to the question of what reality is though. Is reality really defined by living in a tech-driven world and living on screens all day?

heikkilevanto• 7 months ago

I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.

Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.

llmslave22• 7 months ago

I did this except it was more like a month. When I got back I realised how much happier I was to be off of X and oblivious to the news. There is virtually zero utility to being "informed" of most things, and plenty of downsides.

kachapopopow2• 7 months ago

uninstalling twitter on my phone was one of the best decisions I made

sdoering3• 7 months ago

I once stumbled upon the idea of calculating the signal to noise ration of "news". Say you consume 30 pieces of "news" a day, you are roughly at 10k "news" pieces a year. How many of those influence a decision you make. Like which job to take, whom to propose to, where to move.

The author, Hans Rosling by the way, showed with this little thought experiment, how little signal for our personal lives and our important decisions lies in "news".

I also worked in publishing for a while as my first job out of university. Ever since I left that industry I am so happy to be out of that drama generating machine.

DetectDefect• 7 months ago

I have to wonder why the author bought a round-trip ticket?

stanleykm• 7 months ago

does going on vacation for a week count as “disappearing”?

Eisenstein5• 7 months ago

He is a journalist who writes a newsletter and focuses on social media, politics, and breaking news. Being away for a week in does count as disappearing in his world.

criddell3• 7 months ago

Sounds like he realized he was one of the baddies.

hypeatei3• 7 months ago

That's what I thought, too. Perhaps if you're as chronically online as he makes himself out to be, then not posting a tweet for a week feels like years. If he gained a new perspective, then great, but I'm deliberately leaving my phone in the hotel room when on vacation because nothing good ever comes out of it.

kristofferR• 7 months ago

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively researching and buying backpacking gear and soaking up tips for next spring. I am massively looking forward to being on a mountain alone for a few days with only a Garmin inReach Mini as my link to the outside world, gonna be nice to disconnect like that.

ropetin• 7 months ago

Contrary to the national security threat machine’s picture of a country at war with itself, we all got along so swimmingly that the idea of a civil war or anything like it struck me as laughable, as did the notion that the statistically insignificant number of politically-motivated killings, though real, said anything at all about the vast majority of real-world Americans.

This line of thinking drives me crazy, especially from someone like Ken. Just because a bunch of privileged Americans were friendly with each other while enjoying an amazing time in nature doesn't immediately negate the very real problems going on in the US.

Eisenstein5• 7 months ago

I think what he is trying to say is that if we all sit down with each other and stop requiring that people agree with our worldview before engaging in good faith, we would find that we actually get along peacefully. He is saying that it isn't as bad as he thought it was before he experienced a situation where that happened.

ffuxlpff3• 7 months ago

See them discuss about how much someone of them gets paid or taxed, if he has medical help if needed or if he can afford to live where he's living now.

dangus4• 7 months ago

But this is an environment where people aren’t talking about real and very important issues.

We obviously get along as a society when we are just doing day to day things. You don’t have to be on vacation to witness that.

But when it comes to discussing whether my trans friends have basic human rights, or whether we should treat foreigners like criminals with no due process by default, whether we should build coal power plants or nuclear power plants or solar power plants, or whether we should start a war, or whether healthcare should be a human right, it’s easy to find people I’ll have strong disagreements with these days.

And those are disagreements that have real consequences. Just ask the people I know who are discontinuing healthcare coverage due to ACA subsidies ending.

Ignorance and avoiding discussing these issues is bliss…until one day it might affect you.

The polarization is unfortunate but I think one way to lessen that is to actually confront issues and solve them. And that’s a fight since there’s a whole system setup that intends us to never solve those problems. But perhaps we might observe that a lot of the solved problems no longer occupy the debate space.

lawgimenez• 7 months ago

I bet everything will get partisan right after if they got stuck on that island. Or stay for a year. This is delusional.

adolph2• 7 months ago

The article doesn't deliver on the headline of why the author disappeared. At no point is the motivation for going to the Galapagos disclosed.

symbogra2• 7 months ago

Motivation... it's a cool place for a holiday? See some endemic wildlife?

nephihaha9• 7 months ago

Wildlife most likely.

adolph2• 7 months ago

The author seems based in North America which in December is typically cooler than the equatorial Galapagos.

https://www.climatestotravel.com/climate/galapagos

bdcravens• 7 months ago

You could also go to jail for a week. No internet access there (at least there isn't supposed to be ....)

lrvick2• 7 months ago

I just got rid of my smartphone, which forces me to spend a lot more time thinking when I am not at home. Would highly recommend.

nephihaha9• 7 months ago

Now with digital ID, our rulers are trying to force us to have them.

lrvick2• 7 months ago

I look forward to seeing them in court for trying to force me to accept Google or Apple terms of service.

zhivota• 7 months ago

Ignoring the obvious contradictory nature of the post (a trip to a place that is generally so expensive and time consuming that only the wealthy leisure class can access it yields polite people), what is the alternative to the fast news cycle?

I've been toying with different solutions over the years but haven't found anything great. Magazine subscription to something like the Economist? Weekly Sunday paper subscription?

How to keep up on the news without being jerked around by the engagement machine?

websiteapi• 7 months ago

you don't need to keep up on the news. reject the premise and be free. honestly we wish we could be more ignorant. how do you stop learning about the news when it is everywhere?

nephihaha9• 7 months ago

The news isn't even the news.

mooglevich• 7 months ago

tl;dr - Heather Cox Richardson!

My original mini-essay (heh):

It hasn't 100% worked for me, but it's been progress for me to:

- turn on grayscale - don't use any social media - turn off all recommendations for the two indulgences I do have (YouTube, Reddit)

The no recommendations has been especially helpful because I only have my subscription feed, and I can curate that.

As far as news goes - Economist is a good one imo. Weekly news is a fast enough cadence that also filters out noise and nonsense from the knee-jerk, instant reaction news cycles. I've also found the New Yorker to be pretty great, since their pieces are so long that they're usually about events that happened weeks to months ago.

But +1 to others' comments: maybe you don't need to know everything, either. Reading books about history, even recent history, has been a great way for me to fulfill my need to understand our society.

Despite all that I've typed above, if you really want to get regular news consumption, I highly highly recommend Heather Cox Richardson. She distills the daily news and often adds historical context.

hypeatei3• 7 months ago

Just keep it in the front of your mind that most of the stuff you're reading is ephemeral bullshit. If you come across something that you think is important, make a note of it. I keep a small journal of stories I find notable and that may be important in the future. Everything else is lost to the wind.

netsharc• 7 months ago

One probably needs an assistant that tells one news that said assistant knows is important to... one. What news actually is important? E.g. if Bitcoin is crashing? (Probably not just important for crypto-bros, but could affect the broader economy). If you're planning trip to Sicily and Mount Etna just erupted. Or if you have relatives there..

I guess the assistant should know whether a piece of news can be important or not, but if something happens to be a slow-boil (e.g. the fascist takeover of the USA), it could end up as a surprise.

Perhaps one of those planet-burning text generators can be one such assistant...

aneeqdhk• 7 months ago

I switched to a weekly subscription of Economist (print) and it has been great. I haven't seen then news in a year (on phone, or TV). If there's something really important happening, then people around me generally tell me. At that point I check what's happening online, but that doesn't last more than a day or 2.

It has allowed me to escape the news cycle. I am yet to find an equivalent of the Economist for India (where I'm residing right now). As a result, I'm currently quite oblivious to the day-to-day in India, but honestly that hasn't been of much consequence.

sixothree• 7 months ago

The only problem I have with escaping the news cycle is relying on other people for important information. "Today is shorts and t-shirt, tomorrow is freezing rain" has caught me by surprise. So I find myself following the weather more than I would if I were watching local news. But it's not just weather.

Regardless. It's good to feel disconnected from these things. But at the same time I recognize I have a responsibility to take care of the things within my reach.

Is this what people were doing in 1939 though? I really hope not.

dangus4• 7 months ago

Isn’t The Economist a super “rich guy” perspective though?

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard very good things about the publication’s quality and it’s admirable that it’s a weekly print.

I’d almost rather just read nothing over filtering down to a single perspective that is that specialized. Feels a little like getting all your news through Planet Money. Sure you’ll know what’s going on but through a single lens.

cookiengineer• 7 months ago

Use Firefox with maximum tracking protection and use a PiHole with FTL as your DNS to block advertisement. Add uBlock Origin for the occasional cookie and WebRTC denial.

Then social media will be so broken, you'll automatically get so annoyed at it that you will just stop using it. Even youtube forces you for around 10 seconds to wait in a loading loop every damn video, just because they use anticompetitive measurements against Firefox users.

For the important things that you want to watch, I recommend minitube. It's using yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, and its interface is designed so you have to actively subscribe to everything or actively have to search for everything (e.g. when you want to learn about something there's no distractions on the way there which is super neat).

My smartphone is stored next to the toilet during the day, in airplane mode. This way I use social media only while pooping. After all, shit has to go where shit belongs, right?

criddell3• 7 months ago

If you haven’t already, read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and then feel good about disconnecting from the outrage machine.

I get the Sunday paper and that’s most of the news (other than weather) that I ever see. The best part is the crossword that I do with my wife.

Frannky• 7 months ago

Electronic devices are very effective distraction tools, especially phones. Companies and apps leverage our psychology and biology to get our attention, but we can take control of what we interact with—and if we remove the hooks, they won't be able to exploit them anymore.

What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which apps can be installed, how often they can notify or distract us, and so on.

A very basic step is using an app blocker. The ideal solution would be a phone with a local AI that is aligned with my personal preferences and instructions.

For example, it could deliver news just once a week from outlets across the entire political spectrum, eliminate social media entirely, and surface only important emails and messages at the most appropriate times.

kachapopopow2• 7 months ago

step 1: disable notifications and I mean ALL notifications - learn how to process important / timely events without reminders

WorldMaker• 7 months ago

I like iOS' "Notification Summaries" as a compromise. It's about as close to "turn all these notifications into a regularly scheduled newspaper" as we can get.

I still cull notifications that I don't think provide value (notifications are a privilege based on trust and apps that break that trust lose that privilege), but yeah even when I get notifications I only really get them once every 4 hours or so, and that's nice.

tombert2• 7 months ago

I've been trying to migrate back to command-line-only applications to get a facsimile of this.

I don't think that command-line tools are better in any kind of "objective" sense, but I find that if you live primarily within tmux + neovim (and maybe Codex/Claude if you want to be super cool), then it's much easier to not be distracted by the rest of the world.

Nowadays, when I do work I will have a full screen terminal window open. I have an utterly gigantic 85" 8K TV as my "monitor" and I will have an ungodly number of tmux splits, but importantly I don't think those splits are distracting from actually doing work. At some point I will figure out how to get the dbt Cloud `preview` functionality working locally and I think I can avoid the vast majority of any of my work requiring a browser.

Sometimes it does kind of feel like I'm just being a hipster by using a lot of tools that have existed since antiquity, but I think they do a good job at not being distracting.

barbs• 7 months ago

I'd love to see a photo of this 85" TV setup, if you're willing to share :)

tombert2• 7 months ago

Yep, gimme ten minutes.

ETA:

https://i.imgur.com/HHBt0QE.jpeg

Forgive the messy desk. I wish I could say it's atypical, but it's not. I always have a ton of projects going on concurrently and as a result it's easy for stuff to pile up. I'll probably clean it this week.

My work computer isn't plugged in so I'm afraid you'll have to use your imagination for the million tmux splits.

modeless• 7 months ago

You can have good internet on remote island chains for $50/month with Starlink. Today, being without is as much a choice there as it is here.

inemesitaffia• 7 months ago

It's available there. And the National Telco has a Starlink community gateway capable of 10 Gbps.

arjie4• 7 months ago

I had a similar experience when I stopped using Twitter. I only go back because a friend of mine posts there and I really like his posts. Occasionally I flip to my Following or For You tabs and they look incredibly sophomoric. It's 40 and 50 year olds using teenager memes and tropes. Then I realized, that a similar sort of mechanic applies on Hacker News so I decided to aggressively killfile users who annoy me one way or another. Now, most HN comment sections have a bunch of comments missing but the remainder are surprisingly decent.

The downside is that I now interact with HN a lot more, which I was hoping would not happen.

throwaway290• 7 months ago

how do you killfile HN users?

arjie4• 7 months ago

I use personal software: https://overmod.org/

If I'm being entirely honest I made it in a very 'scratch-my-own-itch' way so you're better off just writing it yourself. Example idiosyncratic choices I went with: all lists are public, allow subscribing to other people's lists, no login required for lists, only Google Chrome support. I doubt anyone else shares those preferences.

prmoustache2• 7 months ago

Can't you follow someone without using twitter?

I know that with mastodon I can just subscribe to the rss feed of anyone without using an account, visiting a server's feed or actually firing up a fediverse compatible app

nicbou• 7 months ago

It’s almost impossible to browse twitter without an account anymore. If you get a direct link to a tweet you can see it, but every click will prompt you to log in. Same for other platforms.

LightBug1• 7 months ago

Same, I have about 5 friends I follow - but I do it via bookmarked xcancel so I feel less sullied by the experience.

symbogra2• 7 months ago

I'm on a tropical island vacation and still checking HN. The typical tropical tummy troubles leave me with some time to fill reading tech news, and I don't see any problem with it. I appreciate the general lack of political stuff on US political stuff HN (except the comments).

throw-12-162• 7 months ago

Wealthy people have lots in common regardless of politics.

Being able to ignore fascists is a privilege.

nephihaha9• 7 months ago

The main political threat to this world is not from Fascism. Not even close.

criddell3• 7 months ago

The two of you are most likely not talking about the same thing.

People like the person you are responding to have managed to make the term fascist not mean anything anymore.

prmoustache2• 7 months ago

I have been offline for a week, hurry up I need to share my experience online!

riffraff• 7 months ago

Not even offline, minimal internet.

cess11• 7 months ago

Writing about stuff and entertaining parasocial relationships is his job, it's not exactly weird that he wrote a post about his holiday trip.

PunchyHamster• 7 months ago

Independent journalist covering national security and U.S. politics.

Well, no, it isn't his actual job, the job he says he's doing

xarope• 7 months ago

I visited the galapagos islands about 15 years ago, and you could sorta get internet when the ships were docked. Enough for me, back then, to check my emails and make sure there were no crit-sits or urgent issues to handle, and then return to admiring the sunset, blue footed boobies, seals everywhere, albatross sitting next to a fish monger in isabela waiting for the fish head to be thrown as a snack.

Nice times.

anthk• 7 months ago

I could perfectly survive with gopher://magical.fish, IRC, Mosh, and https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org at 2.7KBPS speeds.

IRC -> Bitlbee.org public servers -> XMPP and more

gopher://magical.fish -> huge gopher portal. Gopher://sdf.org and a few more than proxies to Gutenberg and the like.

Mosh -> decent SSH speeds.

For fora and asynchronous chats, Usenet and Fido/DoveNet.

Music? Podcasts? Download these before, and store them. Also, books and phlog posts are far lighter and you can seek around freely, and you can read stories in a much faster way.

And, if any, tons of stations still have short wave channels, both in English and in Spanish.

johndoh42• 7 months ago

Good start.

Now do it for three months. Every year.

Been doing that for 25 years now, and the only regret I have is that I should have started earlier.

ojo-rojo• 7 months ago

Can you share some details? Do you disconnect while in your hometown going about your daily routine, or do you have this down time in a different environment? I'm kind of looking for inspiration. I have grown kids and friends that I text with so I'm also wondering how my relationship with them would fit into this. Has that played a role for you?

zkmon• 7 months ago

But you felt the strong urge to write once you are on the flight back. I bet you were thinking about the stuff that should go into that writing, all the time during that week. You were collecting photos to share.

That's not true disconnecting. You should just experience it and not share it. That week should only exist in your own memory.

homeonthemtn• 7 months ago

One of the best feelings is letting things go.

"It sure would be a shame to miss that photo! ... And so I did"

It's an act of rebellion towards a world browbeating you into performance for invisible strangers

MisterTea• 7 months ago

"It sure would be a shame to miss that photo! ... And so I did"

Sometimes it's just for you. While walking with a friend last night I passed a home I've probably passed a hundred million times. Though this time, I noticed something, the second floor had a Christmas tree peaking out of a window. At that moment I realized that someone in the folds of Queens NYC took their time to put up this tree leaving the curtains drawn so someone on the street below might look up will and see their tree. It was such a weird little thought that I had to snap a picture even though my first thought was "nah." Will I ever share it? No. There's no reason to. But I have that little snapshot of that scene and the thoughts that came with it.

blackhaj7• 7 months ago

“They were young and older, professors and small business owners (even an Army colonel!), Republicans and Democrats, from big cities and small towns”

It’s just so bizarre to me as a non-American that someone would go to the Galapagos Islands and come away knowing the political affiliations of the people they were with. It shouldn’t even need to come up

nephihaha9• 7 months ago

I find it even more bizarre that someone would think that binary system is a real choice.

nephihaha9• 7 months ago

Goes to a foreign country, still whitters on about "Republicans and Democrats" as if they were the only show in town. Oh dear...

sleazebreeze• 7 months ago

I noticed that too, I had to re-read it a few times to make sure I was understanding it properly, it seemed so out of place. Then I read the rest of the article and realized this guy has zero perspective on anything.

pickleglitch• 7 months ago

I've been a fan of Ken's reporting for a while now, but I find this genre of post insufferable.

Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

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