Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain

I have been offline for a week, hurry up I need to share my experience online!

I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.

Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.

Escaping the internet on a luxury trip doesn’t disprove political conflict… it just shows how privilege can opt out of reality and sell the experience as clickbaity insight.

I had a similar experience when I stopped using Twitter. I only go back because a friend of mine posts there and I really like his posts. Occasionally I flip to my Following or For You tabs and they look incredibly sophomoric. It's 40 and 50 year olds using teenager memes and tropes. Then I realized, that a similar sort of mechanic applies on Hacker News so I decided to aggressively killfile users who annoy me one way or another. Now, most HN comment sections have a bunch of comments missing but the remainder are surprisingly decent.

The downside is that I now interact with HN a lot more, which I was hoping would not happen.

Ignoring the obvious contradictory nature of the post (a trip to a place that is generally so expensive and time consuming that only the wealthy leisure class can access it yields polite people), what is the alternative to the fast news cycle?

I've been toying with different solutions over the years but haven't found anything great. Magazine subscription to something like the Economist? Weekly Sunday paper subscription?

How to keep up on the news without being jerked around by the engagement machine?

I'm on a tropical island vacation and still checking HN. The typical tropical tummy troubles leave me with some time to fill reading tech news, and I don't see any problem with it. I appreciate the general lack of political stuff on US political stuff HN (except the comments).

You can have good internet on remote island chains for $50/month with Starlink. Today, being without is as much a choice there as it is here.

Electronic devices are very effective distraction tools, especially phones. Companies and apps leverage our psychology and biology to get our attention, but we can take control of what we interact with—and if we remove the hooks, they won't be able to exploit them anymore.

What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which apps can be installed, how often they can notify or distract us, and so on.

A very basic step is using an app blocker. The ideal solution would be a phone with a local AI that is aligned with my personal preferences and instructions.

For example, it could deliver news just once a week from outlets across the entire political spectrum, eliminate social media entirely, and surface only important emails and messages at the most appropriate times.

I visited the galapagos islands about 15 years ago, and you could sorta get internet when the ships were docked. Enough for me, back then, to check my emails and make sure there were no crit-sits or urgent issues to handle, and then return to admiring the sunset, blue footed boobies, seals everywhere, albatross sitting next to a fish monger in isabela waiting for the fish head to be thrown as a snack.

Nice times.

does going on vacation for a week count as “disappearing”?

> Contrary to the national security threat machine’s picture of a country at war with itself, we all got along so swimmingly that the idea of a civil war or anything like it struck me as laughable, as did the notion that the statistically insignificant number of politically-motivated killings, though real, said anything at all about the vast majority of real-world Americans.

This line of thinking drives me crazy, especially from someone like Ken. Just because a bunch of privileged Americans were friendly with each other while enjoying an amazing time in nature doesn't immediately negate the very real problems going on in the US.

Good start.

Now do it for three months. Every year.

Been doing that for 25 years now, and the only regret I have is that I should have started earlier.

I've been trying to migrate back to command-line-only applications to get a facsimile of this.

I don't think that command-line tools are better in any kind of "objective" sense, but I find that if you live primarily within tmux + neovim (and maybe Codex/Claude if you want to be super cool), then it's much easier to not be distracted by the rest of the world.

Nowadays, when I do work I will have a full screen terminal window open. I have an utterly gigantic 85" 8K TV as my "monitor" and I will have an ungodly number of tmux splits, but importantly I don't think those splits are distracting from actually doing work. At some point I will figure out how to get the dbt Cloud `preview` functionality working locally and I think I can avoid the vast majority of any of my work requiring a browser.

Sometimes it does kind of feel like I'm just being a hipster by using a lot of tools that have existed since antiquity, but I think they do a good job at not being distracting.

I could perfectly survive with gopher://magical.fish, IRC, Mosh, and https://lite.cnn.com and https://text.npr.org at 2.7KBPS speeds.

IRC -> Bitlbee.org public servers -> XMPP and more

gopher://magical.fish -> huge gopher portal. Gopher://sdf.org and a few more than proxies to Gutenberg and the like.

Mosh -> decent SSH speeds.

For fora and asynchronous chats, Usenet and Fido/DoveNet.

Music? Podcasts? Download these before, and store them. Also, books and phlog posts are far lighter and you can seek around freely, and you can read stories in a much faster way.

And, if any, tons of stations still have short wave channels, both in English and in Spanish.

I just got rid of my smartphone, which forces me to spend a lot more time thinking when I am not at home. Would highly recommend.

You could also go to jail for a week. No internet access there (at least there isn't supposed to be ....)

The article doesn't deliver on the headline of why the author disappeared. At no point is the motivation for going to the Galapagos disclosed.

I bet everything will get partisan right after if they got stuck on that island. Or stay for a year. This is delusional.

Wealthy people have lots in common regardless of politics.

Being able to ignore fascists is a privilege.

I have to wonder why the author bought a round-trip ticket?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively researching and buying backpacking gear and soaking up tips for next spring. I am massively looking forward to being on a mountain alone for a few days with only a Garmin inReach Mini as my link to the outside world, gonna be nice to disconnect like that.