Project Unplug 2022

This is the last of the posts in this series, because next year the big personal project is Unplug 2022, with its side helping of Depth Year ’22. I’m ready to go I think except for a couple of things for which I’d like to find software solutions. I wanted something to schedule my email inbox so it only downloaded messages on a fixed schedule – specifically once a day on weekends and twice a day on workdays. Turns out – that doesn’t exist, at least for the software setup I have. So I guess I just need to rely on willpower there if I don’t want to write a plugin myself.

So, let’s get the rules down – as much as a reference for me as for anything else.

Unplug 2022 is based on two key principles.

Much of the Internet makes me sad. It didn’t used to, but it does these days. So now the rule is laugh or leave.
Most of what is making me sad is genuinely pointless. Arguments between entrenched ideologues. Doom scrolling. A hundred tiny little needles that are – in and of themselves – harmless. But principle two is that triviality is suffocating and it’s time to give myself room to breathe.

I spend so much time just flicking between websites that I can spend an entire evening without having accomplished anything. And I don’t even mean ‘I haven’t done anything productive’. I mean that time has been spent but nothing has been bought with it.

The first thing I did in planning for this was executing an audit of what I spent my time on the Internet doing. I’ve been recording these stats for several months and they make grim reading:

Look at that Facebook usage. That is harrowing. Look at the mindless browsing on Amazon. Look at the time I’ve spent on the BBC or on the Gothenburg Post. Look at the time spent on Youtube – some of that is great stuff, but a lot of it is just… videos playing, flickering across my vacant eyes. When I look at the literal days I have spent on some of these websites, I can recall maybe a handful of hours of value.

So, I asked myself an important question. What, on the Internet, actually gives me that sense of value?

And only a few of things came back as answers:

Keeping up with friends. And I mean – People with whom I regularly interact. Not ‘some guy from high school who I only vaguely remember’.
Access to important information when I need it. But important information. Not ‘Do fruit bats ever have stress dreams about oranges?’ but ‘What is the specific solution to this programming problem I currently have’
Working on my meaningful projects, some of which live on the Internet and nowhere else.

On top of this there are some thing mediated by the Internet that I value. Spotify, Netflix and so on all give me access to things without asking anything of me. Although… we’ll get to that.

The truth is that I’ve already done a lot to improve my experience of the Internet. I think a lot of the Internet is profoundly corrosive to mental health. Platforms like Twitter and Reddit are genuinely toxic, and I blocked them at the system level a long time ago. Most news sites are desperately partisan with most journalists simply trying to advocate for their own politics as opposed to reporting the news. As Mark Twain once said, ‘If you don’t read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed’. So I blocked all the most obviously biased newspapers. The Guardian, the Daily Mail, Fox News, The Times and so on. Boardgamegeek has become an obnoxious and censorial battleground so I’ve blocked that – my own Discord bot gives me access to what I need from it. I’m tired of Quora trying to pretend it contains actual information so it’s blocked too. Whenever I found myself feeling sad, I remembered ‘Laugh or Leave’ and then fired up the Hosts file to block the site in question.

On top of that I’ve been using a suite of browser plugins and applications to curate my online experience. This is the set I’m entering 2022 with:

FB Purity, which makes Facebook so much more relaxing. You probably don’t realise how much the ads, sponsored posts and such are stressing you out when you browse the site. It’s actually borderline pleasant when you cut all of that out. It is still though a time-sink I don’t usually want sucking away at my week.
Highlight or Hide Search Results, which lets you exclude certain sources from Google or Bing. It’s a little bit frustrating to see Reddit appear in your search if you have it blocked, but this plugin fixes that nicely.
Time Tracker, which I used to generate the usage data above. Useful to see where you have been and whether you’re happy with how long you were there.
Unhook Youtube, which lets you remove comments, playlists, suggested videos, and a whole pile of other things. It means you only go to the video you want to see (or your subscriptions) without the site essentially trying to con you into wasting your time on trending content. Triviality is suffocating.
Cold Turkey, which lets you set websites on a blacklist or whitelist and then put yourself on a block. The premium version even lets you schedule the blocks so they automatically come into force.
Franz, which keeps me connected to people rather than to websites. It consolidates Discord, Slack and Facebook Messenger so I don’t need to keep idly clicking through each of them.
Custom New Tab URL, which lets you replace the busy ‘new tab’ screen with its trending videos and recent news. I have it so it just takes me to a simple HTML page with all my whitelisted sites.

It’s not possible for someone in my job to live entirely off the Internet. Or even to limit myself to a handful of sites. At least, for now – maybe that’s a longer term goal to explore. Much of my professional obligation as an academic is simply ‘to remain informed’. So, during work hours I will permit myself to use the Internet freely in pursuit of that goals. But outside of work hours, Cold Turkey will be switched on and from that point I am offline except for whitelisted websites.

My phone and tablet have had their browsers removed, and instead what I have is an ‘apps only environment’. I need online banking, grocery deliveries and so on. There is much about modern life that is only available digitally. But none of my mobile devices will permit me to waste my time with triviality. I’ve gotten pretty good actually at simply not mindlessly taking my phone out of my pocket when I’m traveling. I need it with me (for one thing, access to public transport is a lot more difficult without it) but I don’t need to let it control me. I’d rather stare out of a window than into my handheld nightmare rectangle.

Oh and of course I’ve long since switched off all push notifications. If you haven’t done that yourself, it is the single biggest and yet cheapest investment into your own quality of life you can make.

The second prong of this project is the Depth Year part, and many of you will already know that I went through one of those and found it very valuable. So I’m going to do that again, because I think it pairs nicely with this approach. Broadly I’m going to follow the same rules as I did in 2019 except with a few tweaks. These are my rules:

No new books until I finish every book I own
No more movies until I watch every movie I own
No new TV series until I’ve watched every show on my media centre
No more games (video or tabletop) until I play all the ones I currently have
No new musical artists until I’ve listened to all the albums my current artist roster has released.

As before, I don’t need to actually ‘watch or read to completion’. But I need to make a spirited effort. At least 50 pages of a book. At least half an hour of a movie. At least two episodes of a television series. At least two hours of a game. If it turns out not to be for me, then it’s fine – it means I’ve still gotten it off the ‘todo’ list. After Depth Year 2019 I instituted a ‘three out, one in’ rule for buying new video games and it’s been broadly successful. Every game I completed gave me a ‘credit’, and three credits meant I could buy a new game. Games I abandoned after giving ‘a spirited effort’ gave me a third of a credit. I’m in credit debt at the end of 2021 – to the tune of 3.66 credits – but that just means I’ve bought one more game than I have earned. That’s pretty good over two years, and I’ll earn a lot more credits back this year if all goes to plan. It’s a nice balance of giving things a fair shake of the stick and also not making myself miserable through a rigid completionist mindset.

There are though some exceptions to the rules above:

I can format shift. Paper books I own can become ebooks and ebooks can become audiobooks. PC games can become Switch games and vice versa. It’s a bit of a grey area as to whether a board game can become a digital app, but I’ll play that by ear.
If there are games or books I need to buy for work (for specific projects) I can still do that, but only if they come from a work budget code.
I will retain my Humble Choice subscription (because the plan I am on is gone forever if I cancel it) but I can’t unlock any of the games.
I will still pick up weekly freebies from the Epic Game Store, but I’m not allowed to play them.
And if Persona 5 Royal does get its long rumoured PC port, I’m allowed to get that since I have seriously toyed with the idea of buying a Playstation just so I can play it. That’s not just ‘buying for the sake of buying’. This is something I would have instantly bought and played if Atlus Games would just play ball.

So, that’s what you’ll be reading about in the next year if you choose to stick with me. I’m a lot more confident about managing the Depth Year part of this than I am the Unplug part, but I will document the experiment and let you know how it goes!