Digital minimalism
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 years ago, I wrote this blog post describing what I had in the 40-liter backpack that I travel around with.
Physical minimalism, however, was an idea that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s and was responding to the challenges and the opportunities of the 2000s and 2010s. I continue to believe that it is valuable - though I recognize some arguments in the other direction, notably that having the right kinds of physical things can make more practical to have more self-sovereignty over your life. But I also think that in the modern era, we need a new kind of minimalism: digital minimalism.
Digital minimalism is about being intentional about ways that you access digital technology, making each use a conscious choice rather than something that you get sucked into by default. In this post, I will describe some experiments that I’ve done in this direction.
Twitter (aka X) has always had a strain of toxicity to it, that has been increasing in recent years. The platform is definitely engaging, but it’s often far from informative, and the ways in which it engages often do not make you feel good. But this all seemed to hit a particular crescendo for me around the end of 2024 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 a particular one: everyone seemed to be suddenly becoming fans of Adolf Hitler.
This is not even mentioning the time that Grok itself briefly turned into “MechaHitler”.
Around the same time, “Crypto Twitter” was spiraling into a mood that I saw described as “financial nihilism”: roughly, that the natural end state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick.
Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intellectual disagreements with both of these trends. But on top of that, I also started to more seriously pay attention to the fact that while the style of discourse on the platform was engaging, it was not enlightening and not making me feel good. And so for much of this year, I have been doing an experiment in distancing myself somewhat from this chaos. I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X the interface. Instead, I have been doing most of my tweeting through Firefly:
Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as well as Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralized social media platforms). You can see tweets from all four platforms, and you can make a tweet that gets auto-posted to all four platforms.
My primary goal in doing this was to support decentralized social media, and to continue to engage with X but in a way that distributes network effect rather than locking it in. But in my months of using Firefly, I found that it also has a different effect: I feel much better using it.
I suspect the primary reason is that while Firefly allows you to tweet, and see other people’s tweets, it is missing one central part of the X interface: The Algorithm™.
In particular, I suspect that in my time using the X interface, I fell into the following trap:
Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.
But even still, in those moments when I go back into the X interface, I find myself logging back out and going back to Firefly. I also find that my mind has changed. I find myself less interested in the various battles that the intellectual titans on the platform seem to be sucking every day of their lives into. Recently, I logged back in, and I learned that the culture war issue du jour was that people were stridently arguing about whether or not Mao was evil. When I saw this, I had an emotional response that was sort of similar to what I think is the common experience of being an adult, seeing some food or TV show or game that you used to love as a kid, and realizing that you now find no interest in it at all. I smiled, and immediately went back to enjoying my day.
My verdict: I recommend more people try this. Explore ways of greatly decreasing or scoping your social media use: use something like Firefly, access X only on Tuesdays, whatever works for you. Get the information benefits of the platform without getting sucked in to the vortex, which does operate on you in powerful subconscious ways that you may not realize.
For a period of 100 days, I embarked upon a second experiment: I lived 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:
On the whole, I consider the experiment to have been a success. During those 100 days, I violated the “no cell data” rule once literally but not spiritually - I turned it on briefly to receive a confirmation code that I needed in order to maintain that phone plan itself, and once spiritually but not literally - when going on a remote and slightly dangerous hike, friends insisted that I bring along a few communication devices that they had for emergency comms and use them to check in once every 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 could not log into Grab (the regional Uber equivalent). As a result, my food options were more limited, and I had to take the subway instead of a car even 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, a local-first mapping application that downloads OpenStreetMap data and then shows you a map, gives you directions to get where you need, etc locally. My general review of CoMaps is that I find it worse than Google Maps for navigating the human world (restaurants, stores, opening hours…) but better for navigating the natural-ish world (it knows about many trails that Google Maps does not, though it does occasionally fail by claiming trails that do not actually exist, leaving me on one occasion pushing through hundreds of meters of shrubbery to get back to civilization).
I also became interested in the concept of local world knowledge apps. In principle, the data size of meaningful packs of information about the whole world is not that large. Compressed English wikipedia (without media) is only 27 GB. OpenStreetMap’s planet.asm is 2.2 TB, though you can doubtlessly prune that down to 1-10% of its size and have everything you might conceivably need.
This month there was a bounty (organized by Statuette; I contributed as one of the donors) to create local phone apps that try to make useful knowledge easily accessible offline.
Here are two of the apps:
Left: FieldAtlas. Right: Commonplace
My general impression is: right now, we are exactly on the cusp of these kinds of apps starting to make sense. Most of the participants in the competition were trying to use on-device text LLMs to think for a long time before coming up with an answer. My impression is that this approach was too slow: answering a single question would take anywhere from 1 to 22 minutes. The best apps, on the other hand, used some kind of semantic search to show the user a search result from the local database immediately, and then followed that up with a very small LLM writing a text answer. This gives actually-good answers in a very reasonable 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 you arrive at a place, you often need to contact a person you’re meeting to confirm their exact location or to get them to open the door. When you’re at one meeting, you often need to re-confirm details about the next. If you don’t have cell data, your only option is public wifi - and importantly, the public wifi hotspot must allow you to connect without providing an SMS confirmation code.
Different places are very different in terms of how friendly they are. Here is a quick tier list, taken from places I’ve traveled to while I was paying attention to public wifi availability:
Recently, I have been starting to do more and more things without relying on user interfaces inside of websites at all. The last few times I updated my IPFS hash on ENS, I did so through a command-line tool that an AI wrote for me. Many of the payments that I make through privacy protocols, I now make through the kohaku-cli tool.
Sending through kohaku-cli. Today, the CLI is even cleaner and easier to use; no need to specify the value twice and know what a tail call is.
Websites and web applications, especially web applications for doing crypto things, are dangerous for several reasons:
If you access a web application, you end up re-downloading the application from the server thousands of times, and you are fully trusting the server each time. If the server gets hacked even one of the thousands of times that you open the site, you might be screwed. Regular old-fashioned applications (where you explicitly click “download”) are better than this: you only need to trust the server to not be malicious or hacked at that exact moment once.
Websites and web applications are by default very bad for privacy. When you access a website, it can see your browser (including version number), your operating system, your screen size, and once you start acting hundreds of other data points (eg. mouse movements, button click patterns) that quickly identify you. Websites often send user data (and metadata) to all kinds of third-party providers, from CDNs serving scripts to analytics companies, and this all happens by default.
As we’ve seen with social media, web applications crafted by third parties with commercial interests may not have your interests at heart. Fine-grained UI decisions may be dark patterns optimized to extract, whereas what you want is bright patterns that are optimized to enlighten and educate and protect you.
So what’s the alternative? Basically, bring back the Unix Philosophy, but make it better and much more user-friendly with local AI: speak English to tell your computer what to do rather than Bash.
At its core, the Unix philosophy was simple: make simple, modular tools that each do one thing and one thing well, and that are designed to talk to each other through the most universal interface (text). You as a user have extremely fine-grained choice about how to make the different programs fit together. UIs, on the other hand, combine many functionalities into one single opaque tool produced by a single developer. At their apex, UIs turned into “super-apps”, which greatly concentrate power in the application developer and have complex and unintelligible internal workings, magnifying security risks. With LLMs, we can go back to the Unix philosophy approach, putting the fine-grained decision-making power back into the user’s hands, but without the downside of everyone needing to become a programmer.
Physical-world minimalism, of the style that became popular in the 2000s and 10s, was made possible by a new wave of technology: computers and the internet. A single computer could substitute for dozens of physical things. As a result, you could live a life of much greater simplicity and freedom, with just a laptop, a few sets of clothing, and basic charging and hygiene equipment. Physical minimalism was much harder before the internet; it was doable, but would entail a much more complex lifestyle commitment. After the internet, the costs of a more physically minimalistic lifestyle greatly dropped.
With the last ten years of progress of software quality, together with modern AI, I would argue that we now have the wave of technology needed to similarly enable the next wave of minimalism: digital minimalism. We need social media less than before, because you can talk to the bot for information instead (and for human connection, there’s still the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to people in real life). We need the internet less than before, because there’s so much more you can do purely locally and offline. And we need the web less than before, because you can do much more, and more conveniently, though either command-line tools or custom-made user interfaces, and AI can help you use or craft both. And these things are all happening at exactly the time that the flaws of these previous paradigms - and, for that matter, the flaws of using AI in the wrong way - are reaching their apex, and so a digital minimalism is becom