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 title: Embracing Offline-First Technology
 date: 2022-05-07 00:00:00
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Remember when using The Internet was a _chore_? You had to wait for
_hours_ before the one family computer was free, and when you
finally _did_ get on it, everything was so damn slow you had no
choice but to exercise a degree of patience _no_ child should be
capable of. Email, The World Wide Web, multi-user dungeons, chat
rooms... everything that we did had an air of mystery and
excitement to it.

## Oh, Memories

I loved it, and it wasn't long before that mystery turned into
curiosity, and that curiosity turned into education, and then
finally a career.

The Internet of the nineties and early aughts made me who I am
today, but _that_ place no longer exists. Somewhere along the way
it became something... else. The Wild West was tamed, and the
signal eventually gave way to noise. Corporations capitalized on
the instant access to their ~~victims~~ customers, and the
attention economy was born.

I write a lot about my relationship with modern technology [0]. As
a member of the generation that grew up _during_ the proliferation
of The Internet, I have a very confusing set of childhood memories.
Ones where I spent all my time outside, while somehow _also_
spending all my time in front of a computer.

I think the isolation of The Internet to the beige box in our home
office kept my relationship with it pretty healthy. I got to learn
and explore, experiment and tinker, but at the end of the day my
connection with it was cut off. It wasn't in my pocket, or on my
nightstand, or _in my television_.

It was _over there_.

A place I could _visit_, but not _live_ in.

## Start With "No"

Like many people, I have a habit of oscillating between two
extremes when faced with an unhealthy habit: I'm either living
somewhere in the 19th century, or I'm living in the future. There's
no real in-between, and like fad diets and self-help books, the
resulting whiplash between the two states ultimately leaves me
feeling empty and untethered (and, in many ways, worse off than
before I started).

So, over the past few months, I've been slowly formulating my own
personal guidelines around how I use technology in the healthiest
and most beneficial way possible. Okay... _guidelines_ is a bit of
a stretch.

In reality, it's more of a singular rule; a pre-made decision to
keep me balanced and—perhaps more importantly—sane:

**When given the choice between an "online" solution and an
"offline" solution, prefer the offline one.**

## Finding Balance

Somewhere between smart phones and smart fridges, we lost the plot.
Nobody _needs_ an Alexa-powered kitchen faucet, or a wireless oven,
or any of the other "smart" crap being peddled to us every day.
Adding **The Internet** to an everyday piece of technology doesn't
make it more powerful, it just makes it more fragile, addictive,
and expensive.

To paraphrase an oft-quoted scene from Jurassic Park, **"our
scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they
didn’t stop to think if they should."**

It's taken me a while to get here, but thanks to the ubiquity of
data-hungry and privacy-invasive platforms, I have started to
default to an offline-first stance when judging the value of
technology. Don't get me wrong, there really _is_ value to be found
on Ye Olde Interwebs, but it should be used as a tool, not a way of
life.

--

_This is post 008 of #100DaysToOffload [1]_

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[0]: http://flower.codes/2022/05/02/i-hate-my-smartphone.html
[1]: https://100daystooffload.com/
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