That sounds like a good place to start. Take it one step at a time. You can even start with just an offline morning a week. You said you like reading books so that’s one thing you can do in those times. I’m sure you have other hobbies or tasks you can do that don’t require digital devices.

Unfortunately most intentional communities don’t last very long and many are cult-like, overly collectivist or based on (what I would consider) wacky ideologies. There’s a few that have lasted and seem reasonable but I haven’t looked into them much yet and doubt I would be able to visit them. My ideal has some overlap with back-to-the-land movements but it goes further in that it strives to ultimately get away from the internet, cars, drugs and other modern tech. I’m not aware of any intentional communities specifically trying to do that.

Seems like a decent example of a question that people fall either side of yet isn’t too politically charged

Yeah. And now we have a study when someone says “Source?”

Yes, they allow books. But unfortunately you wouldn’t be able to join them unless you hold their specific religious convictions.

My hope is that intentional communities can form that support each other so that they are not subject to strong competitive pressures that practically necessitate anti-consumer practices and the use of modern technology that does more harm than good. The central principles would be belief that doing things the natural way is (almost always) best and that societal wellbeing is largely unrelated to efficiency, economics and material goods once the basic needs have been met. No other religion or beliefs would be required. Through their positive example these communities would influence the rest of the world in the right direction too so that we might not become extinct.

To this end I started https://lemmy.today/c/StopTech and https://lemmy.today/c/ParallelSocieties. I’m working on groups on other platforms as well and trying to start a community in the real world.

Yes I think you’re right

I definitely think the Amish way of life is happier, healthier and more beneficial to others than American life for the past 100 years. But the way they managed that is by rejecting modern technology with very little picking and choosing like using radios but not phones or cars but not planes. I’m sure when they do pick and choose (e.g., I heard some use pesticides like Roundup) it will usually have negative consequences (see Roundup).

But unfortunately the Amish will die along with everyone else if there isn’t a global stop to technological progress. Forming anti-tech communities is an important step in the right direction but awareness of the issues needs to spread to most people on the planet - and fast.

Whether or not a search engine uses AI doesn’t necessarily say anything about its privacy. DDG already processes your queries and passing the query through an AI doesn’t affect your privacy as long as the AI model is not affected in any way and the query isn’t kept for future AI purposes. But you’re right there’s generally a negative correlation between AI and privacy and also a positive correlation between people who care about privacy and people who don’t like AI, so there’s probably a correlation between DDG users and anti-AI people. However I think you meant to say “selection bias”.

AI got a lot better in recent years because of transformers and the multi-head attention mechanism. Some more major breakthroughs will be made with a bit more time that will greatly boost accuracy and efficiency. Technology progresses exponentially so advances will get more and more common. One example of how LLMs are currently getting more efficient is DeepSeek’s improvement of sparse attention. There are trillions of dollars being thrown at these problems and they’re racing as fast as they can because there’s an arms race as well as heavy market competition.

I’m afraid you can’t just take the good parts of modern technology without the bad. You either let everyone have access to modern tools and we go extinct or you limit access to a small group who will have total control over everyone else. Or simply get rid of the technology. The sweet spot wasn’t 1999, it was before we had TV dumbing us down, before we had microplastics making us sick and before we had cars destroying local communities.

Me neither but we have to leave our comfort zones

Reject modernity, embrace nature

I think you mean answering questions, not search. Search would be giving you links or quotes from existing documents and nothing more. With time AI is going to get a lot better at everything. And it will become less wasteful so the environmentalist reasons not to use it will fade. The only thing that can keep people from using it indefinitely is understanding its devastating consequences for society and human existence.

The road is behind us but there’s more of it before us too

The AI is autistic

Believe me they’re hard at work trying to fix that. I’m hoping it takes them a long time but I don’t count on it.

Exactly my point.

It certainly adds convenience when you want quick answers. But the road to dystopia is convenient.

Removed by mod

The censorship, yeah

No