OK. That Does It! I'm Cancelling My Internet Account!

[MineralMan]

Here's why:

1. There are right-wingers everywhere on the Internet.
2. The technology and backbone of the Internet is owned by evil corporations and oligarchs.
3. You can't go anywhere on the Internet without being bombarded constantly by corporate advertising.
4. The Internet is a massive consumer of fossil-fuel-based computer hardware and drives global climate change.

But I'm not going to stop there. As a replacement for the Internet, I'm going to fire up my old Wildcat! BBS system. It's still on an old PC XT in my basement. All I have to do is plug that PC back in, boot it up, connect a phone line to its 9600 baud modem, and everyone can dial into it from any telephone number in the world. That was good enough in 1989 and it's good enough now!

I'll publish the phone number for it soon. Yes, I will.

Drop Out! Dial In! Log On!

[Torchlight]

1. Sounds serious

Good luck!

[PJMcK]

2. Good plan!

I think I still have my Commodore-64 and its accessories. One problem is that I no longer have a landline for my modem. I guess I'll get rid of my smart phone, too.

I'm serious.

[dchill]

3. I can dig it.

[brooklynite]

4. Don't forget to cancel all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions

Corporate media, environmental impacts of cutting down trees, etc.

[MineralMan]

6. Exactly!

[samnsara]

21. i did just that after trump** stole the election... I didnt come back above ground until

..Mike Flynn got busted.

[Hugin]

5. Actually not a bad idea.

A decade ago some neighbors of mine operated a small intranet of a few hundred users they called the Undernet.

I think it evolved from a BBS.

[MineralMan]

7. Before I took it down, I had upgraded my Wildcat! BBS to have

two phone lines. I even added live chat. If I was at that PC and two people were logged in, we could have a three way conversation! Radical!

[dutch777]

8. Yeah, what was Al Gore thinking when he invented the Internet anyway?

[sanatanadharma]

9. Those who are awake to "reality" are ...

Good for you.
Those who are awake to "reality" are asleep to mindless diversions from reality.

Those who are asleep to "reality" complain about woke-ness and don't recognize their own nightmares.

[empedocles]

10. Anything in particular put you over the edge MM?

[MineralMan]

11. Well, if I have to cancel Facebook and Twitter, I might as well

cancel the entire Internet. Amiright?

[TomSlick]

33. I've never had either a Facebook or a Twitter account and don't plan to.

I find the Internet has other and better purposes.

I remember dial-up. I don't miss it.

[empedocles]

13. Facebook gone for me, twitter if mush captures it. Need my search engines tho

[RKP5637]

12. I just got my crystal radio set out and I've been listening to Walter Cronkite!!!

No more Internet for me!

[MineralMan]

16. There you go! That's the ticket!

[keep_left]

31. Hey, you're the guy with the tube radio(s), right? Time to fire those up...

...shortwave, baby! Voice of Korea! Juche!

[MineralMan]

32. Yeah, but I also have a crystal set.

I've probably built 20 of them in my lifetime. My current one is an old-school one, with a galena crystal and a cat's whisker. Every once in a while, I put the antique headphones on and tune in a local AM station, just to remind me that people used to use them because they didn't have any choice if they wanted a radio.

Mostly now, though, I use an SDR dongle plugged into my desktop's USB port. Software controls it and I have a beautiful display on my spectrum analysis screen showing signals near the frequency I'm on. It can tune from 14 kHz to 3 gHz. The software can decode a wide range of signals, letting me explore most of the useful electromagnetic spectrum. It's fun. It's cheap. It's freaking amazing.

So, there's that. And yes, I have a few vacuum tube radios, just for fun and nostalgia.

[dixiechiken1]

14. Good idea.

[FSogol]

15. I'm going to hold my breath! I don't want to share the same O2 with Trumpy and his ilk.

[MineralMan]

17. Exactly. Do it until you turn blue!

[Lochloosa]

18. I know I have an AOL disc around here somewhere.

[MineralMan]

23. I'm afraid I used all of mine as coasters.

Actually, I was very active on CompuServe for a long time. I even had an area for my shareware software publishing business on there. CompuServe hosted my mineral specimen website early on, too. I abandoned that website, though, when it became practical to host it on the real Internet, though. I was active on the Politics Forum there as well for years. I never signed up for AOL, though. I did use GEnie for quite a while, though.

Dial-up was interesting. Thank goodness it's gone, though.

[Johnny2X2X]

19. +100

Insulating ourselves from other Americans with opposing views is a big part of how the United States is in so much trouble as a Democracy right now.

[usonian]

20. I do OK when the internet actually works.

I am signing up for the most advanced technology available here today. DSL. Verizon cell signal "breathes" so I have to go to airplane mode and back to get another tower. About 50 times a day.

That said, I use adblockers, and since ads are the cause of basically ALL the poisons of the internet, that would fix it overnight if everyone used one.

Please read "Surveillance Capitalism"

Very short explanation: Advertising made Quantity trounce quality. All the toxic behavior of major internet sites ("hate makes clicks" and so on.) is due to the need for quantity.

And why server farms the size of Delaware?

Because of ad surveillance profiling of users. Craigslist used to run on a dinky computer in Craig's closet. Without ad surveillance, vastly less computer power is needed.

THAT said, I use ZERO (anti)social media, but I use DU as a link aggregator for general news and Hacker News as a link aggregator for tech news. I read only what I *want* to see.

I try not to bitch without proposing a cure, and this is real simple.

[MineralMan]

22. Well, I didn't actually intend for this to be a serious discussion thread.

But, the need for cheap broadband internet access everywhere is high. You illustrate why that is so.

[usonian]

26. Humor can be a weapon for good.

Mark Twain is one of my heroes.

I basically opted out of the toxic internet long ago.

Everyone can have the same peaceful internet that I have in a few short steps (and deleting some accounts)

Humor, of course! I love it, but my humor can be so dry that people blamed me for the drought, so I think twice before posting.

[Pobeka]

24. I had a commodore 64 back in 85.

It could do 300 baud with a phone jack.

That was so AWESOME.

Dial up to BBS, even into work if I had to.

I have fonder memories of that commodore than a few folks I dated.

[MineralMan]

25. Never had one of those. My first PC was a PC clone.

In 1984.

[usonian]

27. Worst dial-up experience ever.

Top this! Newton message pad with some forgotten modem. I took it on a vacation trip ahead of an anticipated internet assault on my servers.

[MineralMan]

28. OK. I once filed a magazine article from COMDEX on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100.

300 baud internal modem. I had to connect to the phone in the motel by taking the base off the phone and connected using alligator clips. I wrote the article, using its built-in text editor.

All the same, the little Model 100 was pretty OK for its time.

[sl8]

35. TI Silent 700

I didn't use one, but used to take care of a few.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700

[hunter]

29. There's always Fidonet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

I never got any kind of welcome there, much less any traction. As I recall, it was a bunch of libertarian white guys. Maybe I didn't look around enough.

If anyone wants to go totally old school there's always amateur radio. It has a worldwide reach.

[MineralMan]

30. My BBS was connected to FidoNet in the late 80s, too.

Few of my users used it though. That was a long time ago, though.

[Wounded Bear]

34. IDK. 9600 baud? Those high speed modems can be dangerous...