Combatting the Digital Noise

Noise that follows me everywhere

The constant noise of notifications, pop-ups, and ads threatening to overwhelm my already-thinly-spread brain makes me question the point of technology.

Constant screams of ‘Look at me!’ ‘Listen to my opinion!’ ‘Buy my product!’ feel like a hundred razor-sharp hooks trying to sink their little teeth into my mind with every scroll down almost any online page, including freaking cooking recipes. My online presence is already very trimmed, but the latest website I left because it was too loud for me was Substack. I couldn’t handle it.

Digital landscape is fast approaching the full circle: AI generated content made by AI tools, consumed by bots and data miners. At this point, it doesn’t even matter that a large amount of online content is AI-generated: humans can’t tell the difference anymore. I saw this on LinkedIn the most.

There are no quality filters on the overwhelming content production. Anyone can self-publish virtually anything, which is both a blessing and a curse, depending where you look. And the amount of AI slop on sites like Medium (my previous blogging home) is staggering.

If internet genres like ‘brain rot’, ‘worst Karens’, ‘rage bait’ or ‘hurtcore’ exist, shouldn’t we pump the brakes on this whole online thing?

Content creators sometimes go to extreme lengths to get eyeballs on their content, and no amount of algorithmic feed curation was able to save me from it. I had multiple reasons to quit social media, but this was one of the strongest. The Internet was always full of dark corners and has a whole underworld layer, just like the physical world. But now it seems even its once colorful surface has turned into a Mad-Max-style hollowed-out wasteland.

Cherrypicking my exposure to digital noise

Judge me all you want, call me old, call me backwards… I don’t care because I’m too busy saving my peace of mind.

No dumb-phone yet, but careful curation

No social media. I quit those years ago when Covid first hit, and it did wonders for my mental health.

My only remaining vice is an occasional bout of YouTube Shorts. I tried weaning myself off those with intermittent success, but from time to time, I come across the video to make me quit cold turkey, the kind of video that encapsulates the horror and pointlessness of spending my time on Shorts. When this happens, I usually go months and months before I start to relapse.

Avoiding ads: Domestic edition

You what has no ads yet? My kitchen table. Playing Freecell with an actual deck of cards is much more fun when it’s tactile. Paint by numbers? Gluing those little diamonds into intricate pixel art images? Painting my nails? Braindumping on paper? Poorly tending to my poor plants? Laundry!

These days, I’ll do almost any domestic activity rather than suffer through ads on various apps every five minutes. Mercifully, quieter places like Fika exist.

Avoiding ads: Digital edition

I came to the conclusion that shielding myself from online bullshit comes down to rather drastic reduction of apps, switching to open-source apps, and making tough decisions on where to pay for ad-free services.

‘Garbage in — garbage out’ rings true - we’re defined by the content we consume, the people we hang out with, and by the stuff we buy with our hard-earned money.

I want to have more choice in what I consume, which means I need to make some effort on two fronts:

• Preventing unwanted content entering my life. In my case, this entailed deleting some apps and canceling lots of subscriptions.

• Actively seeking out specific content that I want to expose myself to, ideally with some purpose. I see purpose in learning things or looking at calming pleasing things, but I was unable to tame algorithms on Medium or Instagram to do my bidding. With YouTube, I try to seek out specific creators and their long-form videos, and think twice before I click on any suggested content.

After a long time with no “scrolling apps or sites”, I started to miss something that I could read on my short commute or in a doctor’s waiting room, so I reached out to Gemini to suggest some avenues. I gave Gemini my specifications: I don’t like apps like Facebook, X, Bluesky, or Instagram, and I dislike interfaces and UX of Reddit or Threads that my friends recommended to me. Gemini crunched this input briefly before replying:
“You are not looking for a social network.”
I frowned: “What am I supposed to do? Go back to RSS feeds?”
“Yes,” said Gemini, and proceeded to recommend Readwise to me.

Enter the Readwise Reader

I was immediately intrigued. I tried Pocket, a similar service, ages ago but never stuck with it. When I went on the Readwise website, I found they recently introduced a beta version of their Reader app. I read the description and it sounded like everything I wanted. I got it and never looked back. This is not an advert post, both Readwise and Readwise Reader have generous free trial periods, so if you also want to escape from the noisy enshittified wasteland of the digital world, I recommend giving them a try.

Thank you for reading this far. Take care!

Credits:
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash