I’ve pulled the plug on the Internet. After a few months of being offline, these are my findings:

• Love DAB radio; even in a region with only one English station, it’s enough to get my news. Very grateful for BBC!
• Great to exercise the power of boycott and say “fuck you” to shitty ISPs. In the US, most ISPs support the republicans. And most ISPs worldwide do not accept cash payments (thus support the oppression of forced-banking).
• Very grateful for some¹ public libraries with truly open and anonymous wi-fi. (¹ some is stressed b/c sadly most public libraries outsource Internet to shitty big corps and are elitist enough to deny wi-fi to those who lack a GSM subscription [i.e. those who most need wi-fi], and some libs also block egress Tor [indeed they are naïve about how liability and accountability works])
• Web enshitification has less of an impact when just getting the web in small doses as a periodic library visit.
• No more wasting time doom scrolling.
• Money saving. Broadband costs are unreasonable in most parts of the world.
• Sending postal mail instead of e-mail is liberating, as it cuts Microsoft out of the loop (almost all businesses and gov offices use MS email). Also fun to typeset letters in LaTeX.
• ArgosTranslate enables offline people to machine-translate documents. This is great for privacy anyway, because it’s a bad idea to trust the cloud with translating personal docs you get in the mail.

Shortcomings -- and what we need to make this lifestyle easier:

• Severe lack of offline apps. In the 90s and 2000s when many people had spotty access, apps were more accommodating of that. There are no Mastodon, Lemmy, or Kbin apps to facilitate offline reading and writing, and periodic syncing.
• Most websites are now designed to assume everyone has 24/7 access. Coupled with an unhealthy and short-sighted hostility toward bots, webpages are rich with JS. They are a shit-show to download and tend not to make content easily fetchable for later consumption.
• Can be tedious to find open hotspots outside of libraries where you can make enough noise to make a VOIP call. (UPDATE: fortunately hospitals tend to have open wi-fi access and generally no noise constraints. Some libraries have a lobby where VOIP calls can be made)

I could really use a way to synchronize posts and messages (XMPP, Lemmy, Mastodon, e-mail) with a smartphone, and then to synchronize the phone with a PC. This would really cut down on having to lug a laptop around. An Android app would serve the most people, but it’d perhaps be easier to implement on a linux-based phone like PostmarketOS.

Advice if you want to try unplugging, in baby steps

A non-stop broadband contract with continuous billing setup is designed to be inconvenient to stop. Perhaps there is a threat of startup costs if you want to return to their service, and pains of returning equipment. Bear in mind they are exploiting your auto-pilot comfort by giving startup discounts to new customers but not to their loyal boot-lickers. You can probably save money if you’re willing to bounce around to other providers anyway.

Find a cheap prepaid mobile data package and make your phone a hotspot. Or if you are more advanced get an LTE USB modem that plugs into a router that supports a GSM uplink. “Cheap” in this case does not mean cheap per meg -- it means cheaper per month if you can greatly reduce your consumption by doing things like killing the graphics on your web browser. If you have enough discipline you can get by on ~5gb/month for probably around $5—10. It’s enough for basic comms.

When your 5gb (or whatever) of mobile data runs out, don’t topup right away. See how long you can hold out. Use the library wifi. I would have a week of offline time after my data runs out before topping up. Then each cycle that timespan grew. Now I have been offline for months.

Prepaid mobile broadband is a good middle step because you are not pushed to stay on an auto-pilot plan. It’s actually the opposite.. you have the inconvenience of topping up each time you need to continue your access, which is perfect for a progression into offlineness.