We soak the hours from each box of Everyday into the sludge of the Internet. Perhaps, it would be befitting to call the better known buggers as TheyTube, Crowdface and Instasham.

I wonder how this consumption affects me. Am I really me or am I decent approximation of Just Another Netizen? I see people falling down the tunnel of their phones—is that me? I wonder what I would do, how would I think if all of those other voices were silent? My current jean size is from a time when they were.

I'm going to go find out.

Kicking off today at sundown, I've got a 50-day countdown that'll end on New Year's Eve for this exploration. I'll be cutting my daily Internet usage to ten minutes a day, just long enough to pay bills and kick off any website updates via a SSH shell.

What does this apply to? Basically, EVERYTHING that I do online: anything in a browser that's not localhost, webmail clients, streaming TV/audio—it's important to keep the spirit of what I want to achieve as opposed to queuing up content for offline usage. And again, I'm uploading to my site, though this whole thing is about the inputs.

However, I do have a whitelist:

• Family messaging;
• Cricut functionality for my own designs;
• System updates and other automated events like weather and Garmin.

I'm not going without a computer entirely—maybe I'll shelve my hardware for a month in 2022! Rather, I'm just shooing all of the gnomes that have climbed onto my computers so I can think clearly! These voices from the little speakers are far too loud. When I emerge from the wilderness on New Year's Eve, I can choose as to whether I want to go all-in on things like Facebook or seek something else.

(Though they make no reference to my approach, I was inspired to do all of this after watching a podcast episode that was right in my wheelhouse: Jase Won’t Stop Interrupting HIMSELF & the Misery of Zuck's Creepy, Dystopian Metaverse.)