Less Internet, Local First

There existed means in the past that helped transmit information through wireless communication. The bird that was the logo of current X, formerly Twitter, was precisely that. Specifically, pigeons were used - trained pigeons could have letters tied to them and be sent flying to desired regions. If this isn’t wireless communication, then what would it be?

Of course, pigeon telegraphy wasn’t strictly radio communication, so it didn’t fall within the category of wireless communication that modern people think of. However, humans, being fundamentally social animals, have created countless communication methods while evolving in directions that pursue survival benefits through interaction. Wireless networks and the internet also belong to these methods. People in the past employed various methods to transmit knowledge. They could fill libraries with books and send their addresses, or lend out books. There were also methods of education through educators like teachers, and ways of writing on paper and scattering it on the ground or nailing it to wooden boards set up for people to see. During the early days when the internet first emerged, people said that all these activities would become possible through a single PC, calling it an innovation of knowledge and a leap to a new dimension.

This revolution truly went beyond making all the above activities possible through a single PC. Because it fundamentally possesses the property of ignoring spatial constraints, it has been applied in ways no one could have imagined. Pornography can be distributed free of charge, logistics can be circulated through unofficial channels, nonsense that draws people’s attention can cause information chaos, and when combined with smartphones and SNS, it can seriously harm people’s sociability. I guarantee there were few who thought of Instagram and SNS addiction during the early days of the internet.

In just over 30 years, the paradigm of all intellectual activities has changed. Humanity in the recent past employed creative thinking at the methodological level to acquire knowledge and information, learning and honing their technical skills. In contrast, modern humanity is desperately finding creative methodologies to reduce the total amount of dopamine and to select less but more refined knowledge and information. Of course, not everyone finds the brain damage resulting from the combination of smartphones and the internet unpleasant and tries to distance themselves from it. Rather, people like you who are reading this, who feel the need to disconnect themselves from this, belong to a smaller minority. Paradoxically, there’s no need to calculate how much significant effort is required to break free from dopamine addiction. This is because we already have humanity’s greatest calculator - the computer - in our hands and in our rooms.

The essence of computers lies in being calculators that produce output for input, and the essence of the internet lies in being a means of information transmission. Isn’t that so? Modern humanity no longer remembers their essence. Computers are now nothing more nor less than internet access devices for people. My iPhone 15 Pro Max model is equipped with an A17 Pro chipset, which possesses tremendous computational power that surpasses the computing ability of past high-performance PCs by orders of magnitude. The Mac Studio helping me write this text is an M1 Max model, full-chip GPU model with much superior computational performance, and my other Linux computer is equipped with Intel’s 13th generation i7, 32GB RAM, and 3070Ti GPU, so there are no impossible tasks for personal use. My current Mac computer can run open-source LLMs locally, and my Linux machine can run Stable Diffusion. Here we must ask: Are all these things - indiscriminate shopping pages, web services, cloud services, Instagram - truly necessary for us?

At least in my opinion, phone calls and email are sufficient. Right after the Cold War ended, many people wrote paper letters, attached stamps, and sent them to their hometowns. It took several days to send and weeks for replies to arrive. Nevertheless, while many people certainly had anxious times of endurance, there were no problems with communication itself. But people today become anxious and worried when they can’t check responses immediately after sending a messenger and tens of minutes - not days - pass. How did it come to this? Surely we can still make phone calls and still have the option to send emails and wait.

I found answers to various problems arising from the intensive development of computers and the internet in reality and computers. Do computers equipped with high-performance processors made with modern processes require cloud computing? One of my computers boasts server performance superior to past Intel Xeon processors, yet do I still need to use AWS? Of course, temporarily, depending on the utility gained when calculating capital advantages and disadvantages, that might be the case. But what I’m trying to say is that we can accomplish most things even without the internet. Soon, the server for this website will be performed by my local computer. The place of unnecessary SNS has already been taken by email, handwritten letters, and phone calls. Since I have means to show and transmit photos to people I love, Instagram is meaningless. Cooking and eating food is better than online ordering, and in the same context, while indiscriminate online commerce is harmful, computing for the purpose of developing thoughts and calculating financial profit and loss is beneficial.

At some point, I began calculating thoroughly when shopping. I calculate and measure everything through a perpetual Excel license. Prices and interest rates, opportunity costs, return on investment, comparative advantages, etc. Numerous types of calculations that would have taken quite a long time with past computers are now performed in very brief moments on the computers in our hands. Are you experiencing this revolutionary development of processors? Or do you delegate all calculations to the cloud without directly performing anything with your own machine? Why can’t we do this? Why do we have computers equipped with such highly developed processors yet don’t perform direct calculations and instead spend money on web service companies, depending on external computing resources? Why does Meta have control over your interpersonal relationships? Why don’t you have what you should rightfully do and possess yourself?