Luddite Diaries #1

Enshittification is breaking me bro

Hey! Howdy, internet.

A couple of years ago (holy shit, that went by so fast—I'm not crying, you're crying), when my son was born, I decided to take a little break from socials and streaming content. This year, when I was looking forward to what I want to work toward in 2025, I realized that maybe the most at peace, present, and creatively fulfilled I've been in a long time was during this little Luddite cleanse. So I've decided to give it a go for January again to see if it still has the juice.

The rules are a little loose because, unfortunately, in this modern world of parenting, there's even an app for our daycare. But here are the core tenets I'm aiming for this time around:

1) No Social Media

This one is pretty plain and simple. I've been off the ole Twitter for a hot minute already since the Elon uprising, but I'm also cutting off Instagram, YouTube (the hardest one for me), and Facebook. Honorable mentions to Bluesky and whatever new site I'm dinking around with—you're outta here.

2) No Streamed Content

In 2024, I started slowly building up my physical/owned media collection, so I think this will be a good excuse to watch all these Blu-rays and break out the iPod. I wouldn't really consider myself a Spotify addict or anything, but I think taking the time to listen to all the music I own and have a deeper connection to will be a nice reset button to get away from "Chill ADHD Beats to Boost Your Productivity and Give You Immortality." This, of course, includes the aforementioned YouTube... my precious. That's going to be the hardest one for me, but two days in and I'm already not feeling the itch, so maybe I'm stronger than I think.

3) Experiment

I'm going to try to play around with some popular unplugging trends this year, but due to the whole child-having thing, I'm probably not going to commit to them for the whole month. The big one is trying out a dumb phone of some sort. I'll follow up with a more concrete plan for this in later entries, but for now, baby steps.

So there you have it—that's this year's basic guidelines. I honestly think you could do the same challenge and have a very different list than me. What grabs us and eats away at our time and mental bandwidth in this modern late-stage capitalist hellscape varies widely. For what it's worth, though, I think we could all stand to get some of the algorithmic feeds out of our day-to-day where possible.

Happy 2025. Drink water. Do justice. Walk humbly. Touch grass.

Normally, I'd post a Spotify recommendation down here, but instead, here's a peek at the slowly growing physical media shelf.

I'm also rocking my iPod Classic for the digital tunes I own from iTunes and Bandcamp. Oh, and I just got an iPod Shuffle (shout out to eBay) that I'm planning on using to throw podcasts on. Do podcasts break the spirit of no streaming? I'm going to say no because if it was something I could do on my laptop in 2010, it's fine.