Digital minimalism

2026 Oct 31
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For a long time I have been a fan of minimalism in my physical life:
have few physical possessions, and try to do more with less. Four years
ago, I wrote this
blog post describing what I had in the 40-liter backpack that I
travel around with.

Physical minimalism, however, was an idea that came of age in the
2000s and 2010s and was responding to the challenges and the
opportunities of the 2000s and 2010s. I continue to believe that it is
valuable – though I recognize some arguments in the other direction,
notably that having the right kinds of physical things can make
more practical to have more self-sovereignty over your life. But I also
think that in the modern era, we need a new kind of minimalism:
digital minimalism.

Digital minimalism is about being intentional about ways that you
access digital technology, making each use a conscious choice rather
than something that you get sucked into by default. In this post, I will
describe some experiments that I’ve done in this direction.

Twitter (aka X) has always had a strain of toxicity to it, that has
been increasing in recent years. The platform is definitely
engaging, but it’s often far from informative, and the
ways in which it engages often do not make you feel good. But
this all seemed to hit a particular crescendo for me around the end of
2024 and beginning of 2025. Many things were happening at that moment,
but if you spent a lot of time on X you will likely remember a
particular one: everyone seemed to be suddenly becoming fans of
Adolf Hitler.

This is not even mentioning the time that Grok itself briefly
turned into “MechaHitler”.

Around the same time, “Crypto Twitter” was spiraling into a mood that
I saw described as “financial nihilism”: roughly, that the natural end
state of blockchains is gambling, this is good, and if you dislike this
and wish for something better then you are a stuck-up elitist prick.

Naturally, I had (and continue to have) my intellectual disagreements
with both of these trends. But on top of that, I also started to more
seriously pay attention to the fact that while the style of discourse on
the platform was engaging, it was not enlightening and
not making me feel good. And so for much of this year, I have
been doing an experiment in distancing myself somewhat from this chaos.
I did not leave X the platform, but I did leave X
the interface. Instead, I have been doing most of my
tweeting through Firefly:

Firefly is a multi-client that combines together X, BlueSky as well
as Farcaster and Lens (both partially-Ethereum-based decentralized
social media platforms). You can see tweets from all four platforms, and
you can make a tweet that gets auto-posted to all four platforms.

My primary goal in doing this was to support decentralized social
media, and to continue to engage with X but in a way that distributes
network effect rather than locking it in. But in my months of using
Firefly, I found that it also has a different effect: I feel much
better using it.

I suspect the primary reason is that while Firefly allows you to
tweet, and see other people’s tweets, it is missing one central part of
the X interface: The Algorithm™.

In particular, I suspect that in my time using the X interface, I
fell into the following trap:

1. See someone making a tweet supportive of Adolf Hitler.
2. Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the
   same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.
3. The Algorithm™ thinks: “This user seems to be a fan of Adolf Hitler.
   Let me mark that down as one of his interests.”
4. See ten tweets supportive of Adolf Hitler.
5. Click and look around with morbid curiosity, the same way that
   someone would morbidly stare if they saw for the first time a car
   accident where ten cars were crashed and burning at the same
   time.
6. The Algorithm™ thinks: … well, you get the idea.
7. See a hundred tweets supportive of Adolf Hitler.

Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the
Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and
a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such
movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid
they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how
The Algorithm™ works.

But even still, in those moments when I go back into the X
interface, I find myself logging back out and going back to Firefly. I
also find that my mind has changed. I find myself less interested in the
various battles that the intellectual titans on the platform seem to be
sucking every day of their lives into. Recently, I logged back in, and I
learned that the culture war issue du jour was that people were
stridently arguing about whether or not Mao was evil. When I saw this, I
had an emotional response that was sort of similar to what I think is
the common experience of being an adult, seeing some food or TV show or
game that you used to love as a kid, and realizing that you now find no
interest in it at all. I smiled, and immediately went back to enjoying
my day.

My verdict: I recommend more people try this. Explore ways of
greatly decreasing or scoping your social media use: use something like
Firefly, access X only on Tuesdays, whatever works for you. Get
the information benefits of the platform without getting sucked in to
the vortex, which does operate on you in powerful subconscious ways that
you may not realize.

Cell data minimalism

For a period of 100 days, I embarked upon a second experiment: I
lived my life with my phone always on airplane mode. I still used wifi,
but not my cell connection.

I had two goals in doing this:

1. Privacy. A phone connected to cell is an always-on
   tracking device. Cell companies are notoriously bad at keeping that data
   secure, and sometimes they
   themselves sell it. So there is a large chance that a trail of your
   location will end up in the hands of intelligence agencies, military
   contractors, advertising companies, and more.

   Anonymous SIM
   cards are not a sufficient solution, for two reasons: (i) your phone can
   still be linked across its entire usage lifetime through its IMEI
   number, and (ii) you leak all kinds of data that can be used to
   reconstruct who you are from your fine-grained movement patterns,
   internet access patterns, and modern AI makes it very practical to
   uncover these patterns.

   Hence, the best location privacy solution
   is not having a cell connection at all (also, use GrapheneOS, and be
   very limited in what apps you give location permissions to; I had
   already been doing both).

2. Mental health. Not having the internet at all for
   significant periods of time (when I’m outside) has been a good way of
   (re-)building the habit of surviving without it, and getting more mental
   peace and the space to think about other more healthy and productive
   things.

On the whole, I consider the experiment to have been a success.
During those 100 days, I violated the “no cell data” rule once literally
but not spiritually – I turned it on briefly to receive a confirmation
code that I needed in order to maintain that phone plan itself, and once
spiritually but not literally – when going on a remote and slightly
dangerous hike, friends insisted that I bring along a few communication
devices that they had for emergency comms and use them to check in once
every few hours.

My largest inconvenience was a stretch of time I was in Singapore,
when my inability to receive SMS confirmation codes meant that I could
not log into Grab (the regional Uber equivalent). As a result, my food
options were more limited, and I had to take the subway instead of a car
even in situations where that was much more inconvenient.

Since those 100 days, I have opened the cell connection occasionally,
but so far I have broadly continued an “airplane mode by default”
lifestyle.

For navigation, I used CoMaps, a
local-first mapping application that downloads OpenStreetMap data and
then shows you a map, gives you directions to get where you need, etc
locally. My general review of CoMaps is that I find it worse than Google
Maps for navigating the human world (restaurants, stores, opening
hours…) but better for navigating the natural-ish world (it knows about
many trails that Google Maps does not, though it does occasionally fail
by claiming trails that do not actually exist, leaving me on one
occasion pushing through hundreds of meters of shrubbery to get back to
civilization).

I also became interested in the concept of local world knowledge
apps. In principle, the data size of meaningful packs of information
about the whole world is not that large. Compressed English wikipedia
(without media) is only 27
GB. OpenStreetMap’s planet.asm is
2.2 TB, though you can doubtlessly prune that down to 1-10% of its size
and have everything you might conceivably need.

This month there was a
bounty (organized by Statuette; I contributed as one of the donors)
to create local phone apps that try to make useful knowledge easily
accessible offline.

Here are two of the apps:

Left: FieldAtlas. Right: Commonplace

My general impression is: right now, we are exactly on the cusp of
these kinds of apps starting to make sense. Most of the participants in
the competition were trying to use on-device text LLMs to think for a
long time before coming up with an answer. My impression is that this
approach was too slow: answering a single question would take anywhere
from 1 to 22 minutes. The best apps, on the other hand, used some kind
of semantic search to show the user a search result from the local
database immediately, and then followed that up with a very small LLM
writing a text answer. This gives actually-good answers in a very
reasonable timeframe.

Finally, when you’re out and about, especially if you have meetings,
sometimes you do need to have internet when you’re on the go. When you
arrive at a place, you often need to contact a person you’re meeting to
confirm their exact location or to get them to open the door. When
you’re at one meeting, you often need to re-confirm details about the
next. If you don’t have cell data, your only option is public wifi – and
importantly, the public wifi hotspot must allow you to connect without
providing an SMS confirmation code.

Different places are very different in terms of how friendly they
are. Here is a quick tier list, taken from places I’ve traveled to while
I was paying attention to public wifi availability:

1. Taiwan (or at least, the Taipei area)

   Taipei
   has a huge number of public wifi hotspots. When I opened my
   phone to check when walking outside (or even when inside an Uber), there
   was literally an over 25% chance that there was a hotspot I could
   connect to that was in range at that moment. Usually, these were either
   municipal government wifi, or public wifi run by local convenience store
   chains.

2. Ukraine, USA, Canada, Singapore

   Ukraine was
   the most surprising for me. In a surprisingly large number of places,
   across multiple cities, there were open hotspots available, some of
   which did not even require a clickthrough. (If you’re wondering if it’s
   responsible for them to do this, given Ukraine’s security
   needs, I suspect the answer is that they are primarily concerned about
   decreasing the enemy’s internet access near the frontline and on drones
   flying at high speed through the air toward their cities, and
   street-level wifi is not really useful for either of those)

   USA,
   Canada and Singapore were all similar: they had a very high number of
   theoretically-public wifi hotspots in general, but a large portion of
   those hotspots were gated behind either SMS or some kind of login. But
   even still, a very significant number of open wifi hotspots were
   available.

   
   
   Also,
   I learned that Toronto has a fraternity (or sorority) that seems to be
   named after SBF.
   
3. Austria, Hungary

   Both halves of Charles I’s
   old empire are similar. There are many hotspots, but the great majority
   of the public ones require an SMS confirmation code to log in. I could
   find properly open wifi, but on several occasions it took trying quite a
   few hotspots and walking around for a while.

4. Switzerland

   Despite its general reputation
   for privacy, Switzerland ranked at the bottom for me. Almost all public
   wifi hotspots require an SMS confirmation code. In my first 1.5
   kilometers walking through the downtown, I found only two that do not: a
   random shoe store, and Starbucks, which lets you connect for 10 minutes,
   and then longer if you enter a confirmation code that you receive by
   email.

Web minimalism

Recently, I have been starting to do more and more things without
relying on user interfaces inside of websites at all. The last few times
I updated my IPFS hash on ENS, I did so through a command-line tool that
an AI wrote for me. Many of the payments that I make through privacy
protocols, I now make through the kohaku-cli
tool.

Sending through kohaku-cli. Today, the CLI is even cleaner and
easier to use; no need to specify the value twice and know what a tail
call is.

Websites and web applications, especially web applications for doing
crypto things, are dangerous for several reasons:

1. If you access a web application, you end up
   re-downloading the application from the server thousands of times, and
   you are fully trusting the server each time. If the server gets
   hacked even one of the thousands of times that you open the site, you
   might be screwed. Regular old-fashioned applications (where you
   explicitly click “download”) are better than this: you only need to
   trust the server to not be malicious or hacked at that exact moment
   once.

2. Websites and web applications are by default very bad for
   privacy. When you access a website, it can see your browser
   (including version number), your operating system, your screen size, and
   once you start acting hundreds of other data points (eg. mouse
   movements, button click patterns) that quickly identify you. Websites
   often send user data (and metadata) to all kinds of third-party
   providers, from CDNs serving scripts to analytics companies, and this
   all happens by default.

3. As we’ve seen with social media, web applications crafted
   by third parties with commercial interests may not have your interests
   at heart. Fine-grained UI decisions may be dark patterns
   optimized to extract, whereas what you want is bright patterns that are
   optimized to enlighten and educate and protect you.

So what’s the alternative? Basically, bring back the Unix
Philosophy, but make it better and much more user-friendly with
local AI: speak English to tell your computer what to do rather than
Bash.

At its core, the Unix philosophy was simple: make simple, modular
tools that each do one thing and one thing well, and that are designed
to talk to each other through the most universal interface (text). You
as a user have extremely fine-grained choice about how to make the
different programs fit together. UIs, on the other hand, combine many
functionalities into one single opaque tool produced by a single
developer. At their apex, UIs turned into “super-apps”, which greatly
concentrate power in the application developer and have complex and
unintelligible internal workings, magnifying security risks. With LLMs,
we can go back to the Unix philosophy approach, putting the fine-grained
decision-making power back into the user’s hands, but without the
downside of everyone needing to become a programmer.

Conclusion

Physical-world minimalism, of the style that became popular in the
2000s and 10s, was made possible by a new wave of technology: computers
and the internet. A single computer could substitute for dozens of
physical things. As a result, you could live a life of much greater
simplicity and freedom, with just a laptop, a few sets of clothing, and
basic charging and hygiene equipment. Physical minimalism was much
harder before the internet; it was doable, but would entail a much more
complex lifestyle commitment. After the internet, the costs of a more
physically minimalistic lifestyle greatly dropped.

With the last ten years of progress of software quality, together
with modern AI, I would argue that we now have the wave of technology
needed to similarly enable the next wave of minimalism: digital
minimalism. We need social media less than before, because you can talk
to the bot for information instead (and for human connection, there’s
still the old-fashioned solution: going out and talking to people in
real life). We need the internet less than before, because there’s so
much more you can do purely locally and offline. And we need the web
less than before, because you can do much more, and more conveniently,
though either command-line tools or custom-made user interfaces, and AI
can help you use or craft both. And these things are all happening at
exactly the time that the flaws of these previous paradigms – and, for
that matter, the flaws of using AI in the wrong way – are reaching their
apex, and so a digital minimalism is becoming more and more
necessary.

Each person’s path to digital minimalism will be different, as each
person has different needs. But I highly recommend everyone try reducing
their digital clutter in at least one important way, and if you like the
result then keep going.