For a long time I have been a fan of minimalism in my physical life:have few physical possessions, and try to do more with less. Four yearsago, I wrote thisblog post describing what I had in the 40-liter backpack that Itravel around with.
Physical minimalism, however, was an idea that came of age in the2000s and 2010s and was responding to the challenges and theopportunities of the 2000s and 2010s. I continue to believe that it isvaluable - though I recognize some arguments in the other direction,notably that having the right kinds of physical things can makemore practical to have more self-sovereignty over your life. But I alsothink that in the modern era, we need a new kind of minimalism:digital minimalism.
Digital minimalism is about being intentional about ways that youaccess digital technology, making each use a conscious choice ratherthan something that you get sucked into by default. In this post, I willdescribe some experiments that I've done in this direction.
Social media minimalism
Twitter (aka X) has always had a strain of toxicity to it, that hasbeen increasing in recent years. The platform is definitelyengaging, but it's often far from informative, and theways in which it engages often do not make you feel good. Butthis all seemed to hit a particular crescendo for me around the end of2024 and beginning of 2025. Many things were happening at that moment,but if you spent a lot of time on X you will likely remember aparticular one: everyone seemed to be suddenly becoming fans ofAdolf Hitler.
This is not even mentioning the time that Grok itself brieflyturned into "MechaHitler".
Around the same time, "Crypto Twitter" was spiraling into a mood thatI saw described as "financial nihilism": roughly, that the natural endstate of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike thisand wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick.
Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intellectual disagreementswith both of these trends. But on top of that, I also started to moreseriously pay attention to the fact that while the style of discourse onthe platform was engaging, it was not enlightening andnot making me feel good. And so for much of this year, I havebeen doing an experiment in distancing myself somewhat from this chaos.I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave Xthe interface. Instead, I have been doing most of mytweeting through Firefly:
Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as wellas Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralizedsocial media platforms). You can see tweets from all four platforms, andyou can make a tweet that gets auto-posted to all four platforms.
My primary goal in doing this was to support decentralized socialmedia, and to continue to engage with X but in a way that distributesnetwork effect rather than locking it in. But in my months of usingFirefly, I found that it also has a different effect: I feel muchbetter using it.
I suspect the primary reason is that while Firefly allows you totweet, and see other people's tweets, it is missing one central part ofthe X interface: The Algorithm™.
In particular, I suspect that in my time using the X interface, Ifell into the following trap:
- See someone making a tweet supportive of Adolf Hitler.
- Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, thesame way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.
- The Algorithm™ thinks: "This user seems to be a fan of Adolf Hitler.Let me mark that down as one of his interests."
- See ten tweets supportive of Adolf Hitler.
- Click and look around with morbid curiosity, the same way thatsomeone would morbidly stare if they saw for the first time a caraccident where ten cars were crashed and burning at the sametime.
- The Algorithm™ thinks: ... well, you get the idea.
- See a hundred tweets supportive of Adolf Hitler.
Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, theAdolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one anda half years since then. I suspect part of this is because suchmovements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupidthey are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in howThe Algorithm™ works.
But even still, in those moments when I go back into the Xinterface, I find myself logging back out and going back to Firefly. Ialso find that my mind has changed. I find myself less interested in thevarious battles that the intellectual titans on the platform seem to besucking every day of their lives into. Recently, I logged back in, and Ilearned that the culture war issue du jour was that people werestridently arguing about whether or not Mao was evil. When I saw this, Ihad an emotional response that was sort of similar to what I think isthe common experience of being an adult, seeing some food or TV show orgame that you used to love as a kid, and realizing that you now find nointerest in it at all. I smiled, and immediately went back to enjoyingmy day.
My verdict: I recommend more people try this. Explore ways ofgreatly decreasing or scoping your social media use: use something likeFirefly, access X only on Tuesdays, whatever works for you. Getthe information benefits of the platform without getting sucked in tothe vortex, which does operate on you in powerful subconscious ways thatyou may not realize.
Cell data minimalism
For a period of 100 days, I embarked upon a second experiment: Ilived my life with my phone always on airplane mode. I still used wifi,but not my cell connection.
I had two goals in doing this:
- Privacy. A phone connected to cell is an always-ontracking device. Cell companies are notoriously bad at keeping that datasecure, and sometimes theythemselves sell it. So there is a large chance that a trail of yourlocation will end up in the hands of intelligence agencies, militarycontractors, advertising companies, and more.
Anonymous SIMcards are not a sufficient solution, for two reasons: (i) your phone canstill be linked across its entire usage lifetime through its IMEInumber, and (ii) you leak all kinds of data that can be used toreconstruct who you are from your fine-grained movement patterns,internet access patterns, and modern AI makes it very practical touncover these patterns.
Hence, the best location privacy solutionis not having a cell connection at all (also, use GrapheneOS, and bevery limited in what apps you give location permissions to; I hadalready been doing both). - Mental health. Not having the internet at all forsignificant periods of time (when I'm outside) has been a good way of(re-)building the habit of surviving without it, and getting more mentalpeace and the space to think about other more healthy and productivethings.
On the whole, I consider the experiment to have been a success.During those 100 days, I violated the "no cell data" rule once literallybut not spiritually - I turned it on briefly to receive a confirmationcode that I needed in order to maintain that phone plan itself, and oncespiritually but not literally - when going on a remote and slightlydangerous hike, friends insisted that I bring along a few communicationdevices that they had for emergency comms and use them to check in onceevery few hours.
My largest inconvenience was a stretch of time I was in Singapore,when my inability to receive SMS confirmation codes meant that I couldnot log into Grab (the regional Uber equivalent). As a result, my foodoptions were more limited, and I had to take the subway instead of a careven in situations where that was much more inconvenient.
Since those 100 days, I have opened the cell connection occasionally,but so far I have broadly continued an "airplane mode by default"lifestyle.
For navigation, I used CoMaps, alocal-first mapping application that downloads OpenStreetMap data andthen shows you a map, gives you directions to get where you need, etclocally. My general review of CoMaps is that I find it worse than GoogleMaps for navigating the human world (restaurants, stores, openinghours...) but better for navigating the natural-ish world (it knows aboutmany trails that Google Maps does not, though it does occasionally failby claiming trails that do not actually exist, leaving me on oneoccasion pushing through hundreds of meters of shrubbery to get back tocivilization).
I also became interested in the concept of local world knowledgeapps. In principle, the data size of meaningful packs of informationabout the whole world is not that large. Compressed English wikipedia(without media) is only 27GB. OpenStreetMap's planet.asm is2.2 TB, though you can doubtlessly prune that down to 1-10% of its sizeand have everything you might conceivably need.
This month there was abounty (organized by Statuette; I contributed as one of the donors)to create local phone apps that try to make useful knowledge easilyaccessible offline.
Here are two of the apps:
Left: FieldAtlas. Right: Commonplace
My general impression is: right now, we are exactly on the cusp ofthese kinds of apps starting to make sense. Most of the participants inthe competition were trying to use on-device text LLMs to think for along time before coming up with an answer. My impression is that thisapproach was too slow: answering a single question would take anywherefrom 1 to 22 minutes. The best apps, on the other hand, used some kindof semantic search to show the user a search result from the localdatabase immediately, and then followed that up with a very small LLMwriting a text answer. This gives actually-good answers in a veryreasonable timeframe.
Finally, when you're out and about, especially if you have meetings,sometimes you do need to have internet when you're on the go. When youarrive at a place, you often need to contact a person you're meeting toconfirm their exact location or to get them to open the door. Whenyou're at one meeting, you often need to re-confirm details about thenext. If you don't have cell data, your only option is public wifi - andimportantly, the public wifi hotspot must allow you to connect withoutproviding an SMS confirmation code.
Different places are very different in terms of how friendly theyare. Here is a quick tier list, taken from places I've traveled to whileI was paying attention to public wifi availability:
- Taiwan (or at least, the Taipei area)
Taipeihas a huge number of public wifi hotspots. When I opened myphone to check when walking outside (or even when inside an Uber), therewas literally an over 25% chance that there was a hotspot I couldconnect to that was in range at that moment. Usually, these were eithermunicipal government wifi, or public wifi run by local convenience storechains. - Ukraine, USA, Canada, Singapore
Ukraine wasthe most surprising for me. In a surprisingly large number of places,across multiple cities, there were open hotspots available, some ofwhich did not even require a clickthrough. (If you're wondering if it'sresponsible for them to do this, given Ukraine's securityneeds, I suspect the answer is that they are primarily concerned aboutdecreasing the enemy's internet access near the frontline and on dronesflying at high speed through the air toward their cities, andstreet-level wifi is not really useful for either of those)
USA,Canada and Singapore were all similar: they had a very high number oftheoretically-public wifi hotspots in general, but a large portion ofthose hotspots were gated behind either SMS or some kind of login. Buteven still, a very significant number of open wifi hotspots wereavailable.
Also,I learned that Toronto has a fraternity (or sorority) that seems to benamed after SBF. - Austria, Hungary
Both halves of Charles I'sold empire are similar. There are many hotspots, but the great majorityof the public ones require an SMS confirmation code to log in. I couldfind properly open wifi, but on several occasions it took trying quite afew hotspots and walking around for a while. - Switzerland
Despite its general reputationfor privacy, Switzerland ranked at the bottom for me. Almost all publicwifi hotspots require an SMS confirmation code. In my first 1.5kilometers walking through the downtown, I found only two that do not: arandom shoe store, and Starbucks, which lets you connect for 10 minutes,and then longer if you enter a confirmation code that you receive byemail.
Web minimalism
Recently, I have been starting to do more and more things withoutrelying on user interfaces inside of websites at all. The last few timesI updated my IPFS hash on ENS, I did so through a command-line tool thatan AI wrote for me. Many of the payments that I make through privacyprotocols, I now make through the kohaku-clitool.
Sending through kohaku-cli. Today, the CLI is even cleaner andeasier to use; no need to specify the value twice and know what a tailcall is.
Websites and web applications, especially web applications for doingcrypto things, are dangerous for several reasons:
If you access a web application, you end upre-downloading the application from the server thousands of times, andyou are fully trusting the server each time. If the server getshacked even one of the thousands of times that you open the site, youmight be screwed. Regular old-fashioned applications (where youexplicitly click "download") are better than this: you only need totrust the server to not be malicious or hacked at that exact momentonce.
Websites and web applications are by default very bad forprivacy. When you access a website, it can see your browser(including version number), your operating system, your screen size, andonce you start acting hundreds of other data points (eg. mousemovements, button click patterns) that quickly identify you. Websitesoften send user data (and metadata) to all kinds of third-partyproviders, from CDNs serving scripts to analytics companies, and thisall happens by default.
As we've seen with social media, web applications craftedby third parties with commercial interests may not have your interestsat heart. Fine-grained UI decisions may be dark patternsoptimized to extract, whereas what you want is bright patterns that areoptimized to enlighten and educate and protect you.
So what's the alternative? Basically, bring back the UnixPhilosophy, but make it better and much more user-friendly withlocal AI: speak English to tell your computer what to do rather thanBash.
At its core, the Unix philosophy was simple: make simple, modulartools that each do one thing and one thing well, and that are designedto talk to each other through the most universal interface (text). Youas a user have extremely fine-grained choice about how to make thedifferent programs fit together. UIs, on the other hand, combine manyfunctionalities into one single opaque tool produced by a singledeveloper. At their apex, UIs turned into "super-apps", which greatlyconcentrate power in the application developer and have complex andunintelligible internal workings, magnifying security risks. With LLMs,we can go back to the Unix philosophy approach, putting the fine-graineddecision-making power back into the user's hands, but without thedownside of everyone needing to become a programmer.
Conclusion
Physical-world minimalism, of the style that became popular in the2000s and 10s, was made possible by a new wave of technology: computersand the internet. A single computer could substitute for dozens ofphysical things. As a result, you could live a life of much greatersimplicity and freedom, with just a laptop, a few sets of clothing, andbasic charging and hygiene equipment. Physical minimalism was muchharder before the internet; it was doable, but would entail a much morecomplex lifestyle commitment. After the internet, the costs of a morephysically minimalistic lifestyle greatly dropped.
With the last ten years of progress of software quality, togetherwith modern AI, I would argue that we now have the wave of technologyneeded to similarly enable the next wave of minimalism: digitalminimalism. We need social media less than before, because you can talkto the bot for information instead (and for human connection, there'sstill the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to people inreal life). We need the internet less than before, because there's somuch more you can do purely locally and offline. And we need the webless than before, because you can do much more, and more conveniently,though either command-line tools or custom-made user interfaces, and AIcan help you use or craft both. And these things are all happening atexactly the time that the flaws of these previous paradigms - and, forthat matter, the flaws of using AI in the wrong way - are reaching theirapex, and so a digital minimalism is becoming more and morenecessary.
Each person's path to digital minimalism will be different, as eachperson has different needs. But I highly recommend everyone try reducingtheir digital clutter in at least one important way, and if you like theresult then keep going.
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