Digital Minimalism

2026 Oct 31 See all posts

Digital minimalism

For a lengthy period I have been a fan of minimalism in my bodily life: have few bodily possessions, and try to do additional alongside less. Four years ago, I wrote this blog post describing what I had in the 40-liter backpack that I travel about with.

Physical minimalism, however, was an idea that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s and was responding to the challenges and the opportunities of the 2000s and 2010s. I continue to accept that it is valuable - although I acknowledge several arguments in the another direction, notably that having the correct kinds of bodily things can make more applicable to have additional self-sovereignty complete your life. But I also think that in the contemporary era, we need a new benevolent of minimalism: digital minimalism.

Digital minimalism is concerning being intentional concerning ways that you access digital technology, making all use a conscious choice rather than item that you get sucked into by default. In this post, I will describe several experiments that I've done in this direction.

Twitter (aka X) has continually had a strain of toxicity to it, that has been expanding in latest years. The phase is definitely engaging, but it's frequently far from informative, and the ways in which it engages frequently do not create you feel good. But this all seemed to hit a particular crescendo for me about the end of 2024 and commencement of 2025. Many things were happening at that moment, but if you spent a lot of period on X you volition apt recall a particular one: everyone seemed to be abruptly becoming fans of Adolf Hitler.

This is not equal mentioning the period that Grok itself briefly turned into "MechaHitler".

Around the identical time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and desire for item improved afterward you are a stuck-up elitist prick.

Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intelligent disagreements with the two of these trends. But on top of that, I additionally started to more seriously pay notice to the fact that during the manner of conversation on the phase was engaging, it was not enlightening and not making me awareness good. And so for much of this year, I have been doing an test in distancing myself slightly from this chaos. I did not depart X the platform, but I did depart X the interface. Instead, I have been doing most of my tweeting through Firefly:

Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralized social media platforms). You can see tweets from all four platforms, and you can create a tweet that gets auto-posted to all four platforms.

My chief goal in doing this was to assistance decentralized social media, and to continue to affect alongside X but in a way that distributes network consequence fairly than locking it in. But in my months of using Firefly, I established that it additionally has a distinct effect: I awareness much better using it.

I doubtful the chief logic is that during Firefly allows you to tweet, and see another people's tweets, it is missing one chief part of the X interface: The Algorithm™.

In particular, I doubtful that in my period using the X interface, I fell into the following trap:

1. See person making a tweet supportive of Adolf Hitler.
2. Click on the tweet and appearance about its quotes and responses, the same way that person would morbidly gaze at a car accident.
3. The Algorithm™ thinks: "This person seems to be a fan of Adolf Hitler. Let me grade that downward as one of his interests."
4. See ten tweets supportive of Adolf Hitler.
5. Click and appearance about alongside morbid curiosity, the identical way that someone would morbidly gaze if they saw for the archetypal period a car accident anywhere ten cars were wrecked and burning at the same time.
6. The Algorithm™ thinks: ... well, you get the idea.
7. See a hundred tweets supportive of Adolf Hitler.

Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does appear to have greatly injury downward in the one and a fractional years since then. I doubtful part of this is since such movements inevitably scorch out formerly group acknowledge how unethical and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.

But even still, in those moments whenever I go rear into the X interface, I discover myself logging rear out and going rear to Firefly. I also discover that my intellect has changed. I discover myself small curious in the various battles that the intelligent titans on the phase appear to be sucking all day of their lives into. Recently, I logged rear in, and I learned that the civilization war matter du jour was that group were stridently arguing concerning whether or not Mao was evil. When I saw this, I had an affectional reply that was kind of akin to what I think is the average cognition of being an adult, seeing several food or TV display or game that you used to affection as a kid, and realizing that you now discover no interest in it at all. I smiled, and immediately went rear to enjoying my day.

My verdict: I propose additional group try this. Explore ways of greatly decreasing or scoping your social media use: use item like Firefly, admission X lone on Tuesdays, any plant for you. Get the data benefits of the phase without getting sucked in to the vortex, which does run on you in mighty subconscious ways that you may not realize.

Cell data minimalism

For a duration of 100 days, I embarked upon a second experiment: I lived my existence alongside my phone continually on airplane mode. I motionless used wifi, but not my division connection.

I had two goals in doing this:

1. Privacy. A phone connected to division is an always-on tracking device. Cell companies are notoriously bad at keeping that data secure, and sometimes they themselves market it. So there is a ample chance that a trail of your location volition end up in the hands of intellect agencies, military contractors, promotion companies, and more.

   Anonymous SIM cards are not a adequate solution, for two reasons: (i) your phone can still be connected throughout its complete use life through its IMEI number, and (ii) you leak all kinds of data that can be used to reconstruct who you are from your fine-grained movement patterns, internet admission patterns, and contemporary AI makes it extremely applicable to uncover these patterns.

   Hence, the finest location privacy solution is not having a division association at all (also, use GrapheneOS, and be very constricted in what apps you provision location permissions to; I had already been doing both).

2. Mental health. Not having the net at all for significant periods of period (when I'm outside) has been a fine way of (re-)building the habit of living without it, and getting additional mental peace and the area to think concerning another additional fit and productive things.

On the whole, I regard the test to have been a success. During those 100 days, I violated the "no division data" regulation formerly literally but not spiritually - I turned it on briefly to obtain a confirmation code that I needed in command to keep that phone scheme itself, and once spiritually but not exactly - whenever going on a distant and slightly dangerous hike, allies insisted that I bring alongside a few communication devices that they had for emergency comms and use them to inspect in once every few hours.

My largest inconvenience was a extend of period I was in Singapore, when my inability to obtain SMS confirmation codes meant that I could not log into Grab (the local Uber equivalent). As a result, my food options were additional limited, and I had to obtain the subway alternatively of a car even in situations anywhere that was much additional inconvenient.

Since those 100 days, I have opened the division association occasionally, but so far I have broadly continued an "airplane manner by default" lifestyle.

For navigation, I used CoMaps, a local-first mapping use that downloads OpenStreetMap data and then shows you a map, gives you directions to get anywhere you need, etc locally. My broad assessment of CoMaps is that I discover it worse than Google Maps for navigating the individual earth (restaurants, stores, opening hours...) but improved for navigating the natural-ish earth (it knows about many trails that Google Maps does not, although it does occasionally fail by claiming trails that do not really exist, leaving me on one occasion pushing through hundreds of meters of shrubbery to get rear to civilization).

I additionally became curious in the idea of local earth knowledge apps. In principle, the data size of meaningful packs of information about the entire earth is not that large. Compressed English wikipedia (without media) is only 27 GB. OpenStreetMap's planet.asm is 2.2 TB, although you can doubtlessly prune that downward to 1-10% of its size and have everything you power conceivably need.

This duration there was a bounty (organized by Statuette; I contributed as among the donors) to create local phone apps that try to create helpful cognition easily accessible offline.

Here are two of the apps:

Left: FieldAtlas. Right: Commonplace

My broad belief is: correct now, we are exactly on the cusp of these kinds of apps starting to create sense. Most of the participants in the competition were trying to use on-device content LLMs to think for a long period before coming up alongside an answer. My belief is that this approach was too slow: answering a sole inquiry would obtain anywhere from 1 to 22 minutes. The finest apps, on the another hand, used several kind of semantic hunt to display the person a hunt outcome from the local database immediately, and afterward followed that up alongside a extremely small LLM writing a content answer. This gives actually-good answers in a very reasonable timeframe.

Finally, whenever you're out and about, particularly if you have meetings, sometimes you do need to have net whenever you're on the go. When you arrive at a place, you frequently need to communication a individual you're gathering to confirm their exact location or to get them to open the door. When you're at one meeting, you frequently need to re-confirm particulars concerning the next. If you don't have division data, your lone choice is community wifi - and importantly, the community wifi hotspot must authorize you to nexus without providing an SMS confirmation code.

Different places are extremely distinct in conditions of how affable they are. Here is a quick tier list, taken from places I've traveled to while I was paying notice to community wifi availability:

1. Taiwan (or at least, the Taipei area)

   Taipei has a huge figure of community wifi hotspots. When I opened my phone to inspect whenever strolling exterior (or equal whenever inner an Uber), there was exactly an complete 25% chance that there was a hotspot I could connect to that was in range at that moment. Usually, these were either municipal authorities wifi, or community wifi run by local convenience store chains.

2. Ukraine, USA, Canada, Singapore

   Ukraine was the most amazing for me. In a amazingly ample figure of places, across multiple cities, there were open hotspots available, several of which did not equal necessitate a clickthrough. (If you're wondering if it's responsible for them to do this, stated Ukraine's security needs, I doubtful the answer is that they are chiefly concerned about decreasing the enemy's net admission near the frontline and on drones flying at elevated speed through the air toward their cities, and street-level wifi is not really helpful for either of those)

   USA, Canada and Singapore were all similar: they had a extremely elevated figure of theoretically-public wifi hotspots in general, but a ample part of those hotspots were gated rearward either SMS or several benevolent of login. But even still, a extremely important figure of open wifi hotspots were available.

   
   Also, I learned that Toronto has a fraternity (or sorority) that seems to be named following SBF.
3. Austria, Hungary

   Both halves of Charles I's old empire are similar. There are many hotspots, but the awesome majority of the community ones necessitate an SMS confirmation code to log in. I could find correctly open wifi, but on multiple occasions it took trying fairly a few hotspots and strolling about for a while.

4. Switzerland

   Despite its broad reputation for privacy, Switzerland classified at the base for me. Almost all public wifi hotspots necessitate an SMS confirmation code. In my archetypal 1.5 kilometers strolling through the downtown, I established lone two that do not: a random footwear store, and Starbucks, which lets you nexus for 10 minutes, and afterward longer if you act a confirmation code that you obtain by email.

Web minimalism

Recently, I have been starting to do additional and additional things without relying on person interfaces inner of websites at all. The final few times I updated my IPFS hash on ENS, I did so through a command-line tool that an AI wrote for me. Many of the payments that I create through privacy protocols, I now create through the kohaku-cli tool.

Sending through kohaku-cli. Today, the CLI is equal cleaner and easier to use; no need to define the value twice and cognize what a tail call is.

Websites and web applications, particularly web applications for doing crypto things, are hazardous for multiple reasons:

1. If you admission a web application, you end up re-downloading the use from the server thousands of times, and you are completely trusting the server all time. If the server gets hacked equal among the thousands of times that you open the site, you might be screwed. Regular old-fashioned applications (where you explicitly click "download") are improved than this: you lone need to trust the server to not be malicious or hacked at that exact moment once.

2. Websites and web applications are by default extremely bad for privacy. When you admission a website, it can see your browser (including type number), your functioning system, your display size, and once you commencement acting hundreds of another data points (eg. mouse movements, clasp click patterns) that quickly acknowledge you. Websites often dispatch person data (and metadata) to all kinds of third-party providers, from CDNs serving scripts to analytics companies, and this all happens by default.

3. As we've seen alongside social media, web applications crafted by third parties alongside business interests may not have your interests at heart. Fine-grained UI decisions may be dark patterns optimized to extract, whereas what you desire is brilliant patterns that are optimized to enlighten and instruct and defend you.

So what's the alternative? Basically, bring rear the Unix Philosophy, but create it improved and much additional user-friendly with local AI: conversation English to inform your device what to do fairly than Bash.

At its core, the Unix doctrine was simple: create simple, modular tools that all do one item and one item well, and that are designed to conversation to all another through the most worldwide interface (text). You as a person have extremely fine-grained choice concerning how to create the different programs fit together. UIs, on the another hand, merge many functionalities into one sole opaque tool produced by a single developer. At their apex, UIs turned into "super-apps", which greatly concentrate power in the use developer and have complex and unintelligible inner workings, magnifying safety risks. With LLMs, we can go rear to the Unix doctrine approach, putting the fine-grained decision-making power rear into the user's hands, but without the downside of everyone needing to rotate into a programmer.

Conclusion

Physical-world minimalism, of the manner that became famous in the 2000s and 10s, was made imaginable by a new motion of technology: computers and the internet. A sole device could substitute for dozens of physical things. As a result, you could live a existence of much greater simplicity and freedom, alongside fair a laptop, a few sets of clothing, and basic charging and hygiene equipment. Physical minimalism was much harder before the internet; it was doable, but would entail a much more complex manner commitment. After the internet, the expenses of a more physically minimalistic manner greatly dropped.

With the final ten years of advancement of application quality, together with contemporary AI, I would contend that we now have the motion of technology needed to likewise allow the next motion of minimalism: digital minimalism. We need social media small than before, since you can talk to the bot for data alternatively (and for individual connection, there's still the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to group in real life). We need the net small than before, since there's so much additional you can do purely locally and offline. And we need the web less than before, since you can do much more, and additional conveniently, though either command-line tools or custom-made person interfaces, and AI can assistance you use or accomplishment both. And these things are all happening at exactly the period that the flaws of these former paradigms - and, for that matter, the flaws of using AI in the incorrect way - are reaching their apex, and so a digital minimalism is becoming additional and more necessary.

Each person's way to digital minimalism volition be different, as each person has distinct needs. But I extremely propose everyone try reducing their digital clutter in at smallest one crucial way, and if you akin the result afterward keep going.