So, the first half of April was essentially a ‘fortnight off’ as far as this goes – I was in Scotland staying with my mother and none of my usual tools were available for tracking or enforcing Project Unplug. As I said in the previous update though I was going to use it as a kind of checksum for the whole endeavour – it would be a chance to observe whether or not I suddenly fell back into the old pattern of Internet overuse.
And thankfully the answer was – no.
The truth is, I see less and less value in the Internet as time goes by. It’s a treasure trove of great stuff, but those treasures are embedded into a vast landscape of utter banality. It has all started to remind me of that great short story by Jorge Luis Borges about the Library of Babel. It’s a place that contains an endlessly expanding collection of books, each consisting of random permutations of the letters of the alphabet. Logically, it must contain all human knowledge – past, present and future. And logically it must also contain a perfectly accurate index to its contents… somewhere. And the librarians that go searching for it go insane because of the futility of the quest. Sure, there’s an accurate index in there – but there are also infinite inaccurate ones, and even they are dwarfed by the endless array of books that are literal gibberish.
Really the Library of Babel is a cruel joke. It tells us that content, no matter how rare and important, has no value without curation. And in turn, that curation has no value without editing.
Sure, there’s a book in the library that tells you the secrets of the universe. The problem is that it comes with an infinite number of alternative books that tell you a different story about the secrets of the universe. Which one is correct? Don’t worry, there’s a book in the library that will tell you…
I honestly think these days that you could cut the whole Internet down to 5% of its size and still retain 99% of its true value. Current estimates suggest that we create around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. That’s 1.7MB of data, per person, per second. That’s more than two floppy disks worth of data every second. That’s how many disks Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders took up back in the 80s, and I am damn sure I haven’t produced anything close to the cultural worth of that while I’m sitting here.
To be fair, most of this data is just invasive telemetry and incriminating software logs. But it also includes 500 hours of new video footage per minute on Youtube. It includes over 183,000 blog posts per hour. Over 10 billion Facebook status updates in a day. Data hoarding is one of modern society’s great toxins – it courses through the veins of the Internet steadily eroding the average value of everything it touches. Over time, the average quality of the Internet goes down because it’s easier to fill it full of rubbish than it is to fill it full of gems. Moreover, in an attention economy, this hoarding is a remarkably aggressive toxin as everyone tries to promote the visibility of their own anti-contribution to ‘the discourse’. We’re not collectively engaged in a process of separating the wheat from the chaff. We’re all standing on a pile of chaff we created, yelling ‘Come and get your wheat’.
So yeah, suddenly having my self-imposed restrictions removed didn’t change the way I thought about my online time.
I did find myself spending, again, more time on news sites that I would have liked but I fixed that when I got back home. The news sites I regularly frequented were added to the same block-list that hosts Reddit and Twitter. It means I feel a little unmoored from the world, but I’m also sure that’s a temporary thing. Anxiety is not activism and all that. In this I’m just following through with a feeling I’ve had for quite some time, which is that the idea we must be ‘informed citizens’ is a myth. The news cycle is entertainment – ghoulish entertainment in most cases. It doesn’t inform. It distracts. Spend your entire year watching and reading the news and you’ll have, at best, a surface level understanding of a thousand different things. And sure, every so often you’ll be able to say ‘Oh yes, I see how this thing that happened six months ago relates to this thing that is happening today’, but it’s not like that will do anything except give you a little rush of dopamine. As David Cain says over at Raptitude – read three books on a topic and you’re more informed than 99% of the people out there opining on it.
When I got back from Scotland, the blocks and everything came back and if anything I just felt relieved. My various sigils and protective amulets no longer really feel like they’re designed to keep me out of the Internet. They feel like they keep the pounding tides of absolute bullshit from getting in to my house.
So, I’m still doing Project Unplug for another month although I think this will be the last in its current form. But what’s going to happen from this point onwards is a change in how I execute upon the idea. I know what I don’t want now, and I’m going to be extremely aggressive in (not) achieving it. I’m switching from the idea of a whitelist to a blacklist. I don’t find myself listlessly clicking between sites any more, but I do find myself still gravitating to certain locations. Blocking at the hosts level is great – the regular sense of ‘Oh look, I can’t access this page’ untrains your muscle memory. Looking at my time-tracker at the moment, it’s pretty clear what should be blocked – Facebook, Youtube and the various online shopping sites I make use of during the course of a month. They disproportionately dominate my time during the hours I have let myself use the Internet. Instead, I am going to make them available only on a tablet that I keep away from the computer. Or possibly on a rickety old laptop I keep in a bag at the back of a cupboard. Some of them I am only going to permit when accessing my work computer which is a comfortable 40 minutes away in most situations.
I see value in Facebook – it’s where a lot of my friends are. And as long as my relationship with Facebook is mindful, I have no issue with it being in my life. Similarly with Youtube, and online shopping, and all these other things. They have value. But that value needs to be curated in order to be sustained, and sometimes that curation comes from ensuring moderation through friction. It’s too easy to check Facebook, and so part of the solution is to add intentional inaccessibility to the resource.
One thing that I have absolutely failed at though is in my pledge to check email only twice a day. The email client still stays open most of the time. I do close it on weekends and in the evenings, but during the workday I’m not sure it’s yet possible. Something to work on.
Depth Year 2022
The Depth Year continues mostly without incident, although as was the case last time there are some tax implications that come with Meeple Like Us and I do occasionally need to disperse what few loose funds have accumulated in the bank account. As such, I bought a few games for review purposes but on the same basis as in 2019. They are on my shelves but they are not available to me.
It’s been harder to pick games for MLU as time goes by. For one thing, as you know, we’re still not quite in the phase where we’re producing regular content. Still working on that. But also – man, board games are pretty boring now. So when I do pick stuff up, it’s almost always with an eye to the past or in those few occasions where something new (and usually gimmicky) has caught my attention. I’ve never looked at a board-game that uses egg-timers as active components for example, so I picked up Kitchen Rush. That’s got some interesting accessibility considerations. That kind of thing. But I am so unmoved by the slate of regular releases that it is genuinely a little unsettling. Have they really gotten less inventive over time, or was most of my early exposure to gaming a consequence of confirmation bias?
Aside from that bureaucratic necessity, the Depth Year progresses as it has before. And it’s yielding the same positive results. Those might change when I shift the emphasis of Project Unplug but I don’t think so really. That’s mostly a reshuffling of execution, rather than intention. It’s not like I’m going to suddenly unblock Twitter and let the full weight of hype-culture crash down upon me. And even if I did, I think it would be fine… I think I’ve successfully inoculated myself against it. My threshold now is ‘Does someone I trust recommend it to me?’, and that’s a difficult barrier to cross. And it’s why, for example, my list of things that I wanted during the Depth Year has been marked by solidification rather than transience. In 2019, things flitted onto and off of my wishlist like butterflies. Now they attach themselves and stay there like lampreys. Only one new thing goes on it this month, and it’s Hard West 2. That was recommended to me by a friend, but also I completed the original Hard West and liked it enough to be interested in a follow up.
One of the things that I’m getting done this year is making a big dent in my gaming todo list, as I discussed in the last newsletter. Further curation (and playing) has brought my long-term backlog down to 92 games, and at the current rate I can probably get that down to the low twenties by the end of the year. I won’t complete them all, of course, but if I do hit 100 completed games what it’ll mean is that there were about 60 that I played for a bit and then felt like I’d gotten enough out of. That’s enough to clear the backlog entirely, but sometimes other games float into my attention from outside that list.
In 2023 my ‘three out and one in’ rule will hopefully mean I never have a backlog again. At least, as far as video games are concerned.
The board game backlog, on the other hand… well. Let’s not worry too much about that for now.
As has been the case for pretty much the entire duration of the pandemic, where I really feel like I’ve fallen down is in reading. In 2019 I managed, in addition to everything else I was doing, to read a book a week for the whole year. The past three years have been ‘a bit over a book a month’. That’s not bad, statistically speaking. The ‘median reader’ only manages four books a year, and the ‘mean reader’ is a touch under 12. So even in this I’m doing better than average. But I’m not concerned about this in terms of ‘How much more do I read than most people’. It’s mostly because I really enjoy reading and I just don’t make time for it.
But one aspect of that is I think the move to Sweden. Not in terms of how much less time I was spending commuting but because in Brechin I was surrounded by books. Two thirds of the contents of my bookcases were books (and the rest were games). When we moved here I had to get rid of most of them, and the ones I kept were ones with sentimental value or books I had read that I thought were good enough to keep forever.
I have huge numbers of digital books on my kindle, but it doesn’t feel the same. I like physical books so much more than ebooks, and one thing being surrounded by books meant was there was always a little seductive siren call. ‘You haven’t read me yet! Run your fingers across my spine! Open me up and smell the paper! Don’t you want to dive into me?’
(Yes, I think books smell sexy, okay? I also think board games smell sexy and the first thing I do when opening up a game for the first time is stick my nose in the box and sniff it all in. Don’t judge me. YOU’RE NOT MY SUPERVISOR)
You don’t get that with a Kindle. What you get is a library that is more interested in getting you to buy new books than it is helping you connect with the books you already have. God knows how bad it would have been if I had one of the ad-supported ones.
I love my bookcase of books. It is so well curated it basically shines. But it’s full of books I have read, and few that I haven’t. And that’s not nearly as seductive.
That’s it for this month, see you all next month I hope!