Friday Friday Links: Quitting the Internet, Terms of Service Hacktivists and the Beauty of the Irrational

Welcome to Chelsi’s Number One Super Happy Fun Link Time, a weekly collection of cool discoveries from around the Web. Most times they’re links that aim to get you thinking differently about communication, collaboration, culture, and life in general. Other times, LOLCAT ATTACK! Submissions are welcome, and you can send them through one of the usual suspects.

Offline: How’s it Going?

I’m trying to decided whether Paul Miller, Senior Editor at The Verge, is brave or crazy. Perhaps it’s a little of both. Three months ago he decided to give up the Internet for an entire year — possibly longer. He’s documenting the entire journey on a computer without wifi, and transferring his polished pieces to his colleagues via thumb drive. Here’s an excerpt of how it’s going so far:

“The first two weeks were a zen-like blur. I’ve never felt so calm and happy in my life. Never. And then I started actually getting stuff done. I bought copies of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Aeschylus. I was writing at an amazing pace. For the first time ever I seemed to be outpacing my editors.

Without the internet, everything seemed new to me. Every untweeted observation of daily life was more sacred. Every conversation was face to face or a phone call, and filled with a hundred fresh nuances. The air smelled better. My sentences seemed less convoluted. I lost a bit of weight.

Three months later, I don’t miss the internet at all. It doesn’t factor into my daily life. I don’t say to myself, ugh, I wish I could just use the internet to do that. It’s more like it doesn’t exist for me. I still say ugh, I have to do that — it’s just not the internet’s fault.

But now that not having internet is no longer new, just normal, the zen calm is gone. I don’t wake with the sunrise while chirping birds pull back the covers. I still have a job. I feel pressure and stress and frustration. I get lonely and bored. My articles aren’t always submitted on time. Sometimes my sentences aren’t good.

I’m just stock Paul Miller. No more Not-Using-The-Internet custom skin; I’m just myself. And it’s not all sunshine and epiphanies.”

Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. At least, that’s what the team behind Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (ToS;DR) claims. In an attempt to change that, these individuals have banded together to create awareness around online rights.

Reads the site: ToS;DR aims at creating a transparent and peer-reviewed process to rate and analyse Terms of Service and Privacy Policies in order to create a rating from Class A to Class E. We need more legal expertise, please also join the working-group. We also need people to contribute source code. Everything is JavaScript and JSON. The data is freely available (CC-BY-SA) and ready to be used for other tools, like browser extensions. 

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The Beauty of the Irrational

“It’s kind of…feeding my soul,” said Ryan Sandes of running the 5 day, 84km Fish River Canyon Hiking Trail each year. “We always feel like we’ve got to be rational about things…instead of just doing it for pure enjoyment…for the sake of doing it.”

This short film, produced by African Attachment, is full of gorgeous footage of Namibia, as well as inspirational messaging. My favorite:

“I’ve realized that the canyon’s always going to be greater than me. It’s a land mass– it’s always going to be bigger or more mighty than I’ll ever be ,so I’ve made peace with that. This attempt is about moving forward. This whole experience for me is about living in the moment.”