alt Hacker NewsI live in Barcelona, and during last year’s blackout I wandered through the city. As I passed by the Baix Guinardó gardens, I came across something that felt like a "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" brought to life: the park was full of families socialising the old way, children running everywhere, the whole place buzzing with chatter and energy.
Later that day, walking home through darkened streets, I noticed small groups, maybe a dozen people at a time, gathered around certain spots. For some reason, a few closed shops still seemed to have working free Wi-Fi (backup generators, maybe), and people clustered there, drawn in like mosquitoes to light. Their faces glowed in the dark, lit only by their screens, and they stood in near-total silence. It’s hard to describe the feeling, it was surreal. You had to be there.
I’m no Luddite, but I went to sleep that night wondering how on earth we get ourselves out of this.
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In the past 3 years I got married and got a kid. Both mine and my wifes social situation went 180, and now we are one of those couples you saw in the park. The kids and kid problems become new shared interest, you meet bunch of people, with similar shared experience, and you end up connecting on other fronts as well. eg - I m in high rise, parking next to an interesting winter beater every day for 2 years, and now I know the guy because our wifes meet on the playground. Turns out he also likes 3d printers and CNCs and has many ideas :)
But even before this, through wife and her hobbies (dance, pottery etc) I had chance to meet many people and their partners and through them their friends etc. Then it becomes a choice whether you will get up and go see others or pick your screen.
>but I went to sleep that night wondering how on earth we get ourselves out of this.
I'm sure HN will suggest another layer of technology will fix all of this.
Yup, I'm a Spaniard and had a similar feeling. I'm pretty sure that, if the government had proposed an intentional weekly blackout, there would have been a large majority in favor.
I'm currently trying to reduce internet usage by a simple rule: no feeds (try to avoid places where I could even see them).
It's extremely difficult.
YouTube receives you with a feed, every social network as well, even the online version of a newspaper is arguably a feed. It's usually not possible to use a service without having one in frequent sight. Even my weather app tries its best to offer a feed of weather related news, the photo gallery app shows one of memories....
Have you ever seen those videos filming London streets in the 1970s? They are absolutely packed with groups of two or three people, not going places, but just standing there, chatting, as if they have nowhere else to be. It is something most of us have never experienced in any form and the change has happened over long enough timescales that we are used to our streets of strangers just going about their lives, the external world just a physical inconvenience to traverse as quickly as possible, not the real world where one just exists.