Offline only
Sometimes you find something that just hits you square in the jaw. All the things that have been swirling around your head suddenly put into focus and arranged perfectly. Today, that thing is this wonderful post/experiment/manifesto by Chris Bolin: a page whose contents only reveal themselves when you're offline:
This page itself is an experiment in that vein: What if certain content required us to disconnect? What if readers had access to that glorious focus that makes devouring a novel for hours at a time so satisfying? What if creators could pair that with the power of modern devices? Our phones and laptops are amazing platforms for inventive content—if only we could harness our own attention.
I often think about that paradigm shift that happened at some point in Western culture. We went from going online to being online. Connecting to the World Wide Web required deliberate action, the dial-up tone the incantation that opened a portal from my small bedroom in a village in the middle of nowhere into a vast landscape that I barely comprehended and explored voraciously.
What did we win by turning that land into our home? Into the home of corporations that rent out its real estate for us to use, no strings attached, except for the million almost-invisible strings that twitch us this way or that, according to whatever makes spend more time clicking, scrolling?
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