I just read this from Nokia's blog of all places[1]:

> A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP).

That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one of the many Rube-Goldberg machines behind these scrapers.

I take your point wrt, say, recommendation engines. But this is a bizarre and fascinating period we're living through right now. I don't plan to stop reading blogs and news any time soon.

1: https://www.nokia.com/blog/one-year-later-the-residential-pr...

People always say this like it’s a panacea but n=1, I did exactly that for about 5-6 months in 2024 after I quit Twitter and didn’t want to get sucked back in to endless election drama like in 2016.

For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day.

But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.

And after a few more months, I started to feel to absurdly detached from the real world that it started to become a problem in casual conversations and stuff just being so out of touch with everyone else’s collective experiences.

My boss referenced some big natural disaster or something that everyone knew about from the news and looked at me like I was crazy when I had no idea what he was talking about. Little awkward moments like that kept popping up, never a big deal but started to feel uncomfortable as they added up.

The tipping point was when Biden dropped out and I didn’t know about it for like three days and had to nod along when a friend mentioned it obliquely while I was internally like “uh wtf” until I had a second to Google it to get caught up.

All in all the net change in negativity/anxiety was pretty much a wash, the mind finds different ways to justify how it feels even after losing the ‘20s go-to of “doom scrolling” as the universal source of all life’s problems.

But feeling like an alien interloper posing as a resident of “America, Earth” tipped the scales into hurting more than it helped.

For better or worse we live in a highly interconnected world of immediate information delivery, there’s no quick fix to make that all go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.

I still miss a lot of the people I got to know on Twitter, and with hindsight that was probably more emotionally valuable than the negativity and addiction that came with the package (I know many/most of them have left by now too, so can’t teleport back to that point in time either). But that’s just life, it is what it is.

> As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks.

The assumption I had not was false.

Of course, not being exposed to negativity will make you more positive. But this advice strikes me as a request to plug my ears and close my eyes. Doing these things will not stop the negative things that are happening in the world, and having the information about it at least makes me more knowledgeable about the world and hopefully prepared for when something snaps and there is a crisis that affects me in the most unavoidable and unambiguous ways - in addition to the indirect effects I've been experiencing already.

No thanks. I went too much of life being a low information mostly non-voter. This is how authoritarians win, because too many people don't pay attention, don't protest, don't vote, don't express their disapproval.

My offline time is spent volunteering with asylum seekers. As an experiment, try actually caring about the people experiencing what you think of as meaningless online negativity.

That's true but it also seems to downplay how much elites + corporations have control over our society and somehow when people want to build a better world, you have to first explain the problems of the current world.

No thank you. I had ICE flood the streets where I live with poorly trained thugs with assault rifles recruited from the ranks of neonazis illegally assaulting, detaining and abusing citizens of my country because they had brown skin. They shot dead two citizens (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) doing what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.

I don't think you realize how ridiculous and out of touch it sounds to tell me to "disconnect" from politics to be less angry. I am extremely angry, and I will continue to let that anger fuel my choices until the vile bullshit that has infected this nation is gone.

Enlightening my ass. Tell that to the trodden upon and the dead. Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem. Tough shit if you don't like it.

Look at the replies. You’re telling junkies to stop using. It won’t work. This is addiction.

I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away.

You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.

I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.