I am writing this while I am fully disconnected from the world. Iran has been fully shut from the world after protests have started to rise up. Aside from internet, SMS services are fully shut off, and we can’t even message relatives via that.
And no, we can’t do any sort of proxying or TOR or any of that sort we are COMPLETELY SHUT from the international internet. Equivalent of pulling the cable of international internet from the routers. Something like North Korea.
It feels like a forced internet detox. Except that we can’t even access services that were beneficial to us. I recently wrote about abusing LLMs and this feels like a detox from LLMs as well. I feel like a part of my brain is missing. I guess this really proves that I was really offloading too much of my brain tasks to LLMs. I am actually using my brain, and it feels rather weird. And this is when actually learning things becomes useful. The first thing I would do before internet was shut off would be to consult an LLM when I didn’t know how to do a thing.
Aside from using LLMs, I can’t access anything unless I had them downloaded beforehand. This includes books, music, movies and so on. Thankfully a dear friend of mine, Nima had a good collection of books and media that he could provide me, and I am very thankful for his kindness.
The emptiness feeling
I would like to talk about this feeling more here. Because it is rather weird. I feel like some sort of numbness or incapability to think. I wrote about “missing thinking” and, I can feel it missing here. Maybe this whole series of events will force me to do some thinking again?
14 days later…
It has been about 14 days after the internet is disconnected, the government keeps promising that “soon” the internet will be connected again. The detrimental effects so far are devastating. Thousands of online shops are deactivated, and their sales are close to none. Many individuals are suffering a financial crisis because of not being able to connect to the outside.
I highly doubt that the internet will be reconnected soon enough. I am losing more hope day by day.
17 days later…
I have managed to connect to the outer world since for some reason my proxy works here now and then, the cellular data services seem to have very weird restrictions set on them. Still, I can’t access the internet as hassle-free as I used to. I haven’t been able to update my packages on my computers. Even though Iranian mirrors exist for Arch Linux, they are also not synchronized with the outer world. Every day in the news we get somebody claiming the internet will be back today or tomorrow but there is no trust and hope in them.
Life is a computer enthusiast and student is very disrupted, we haven’t been able to write the final projects for many courses because we can’t even do basic things such as read documentations online, download needed libraries and such.
The internet outage’s mental and financial toll on the society is visible, days stretch in boredom and uselessness for every member in the society. People can’t consume any sort of entertainment content of any sort.
I used to think that maybe internet detox would fix some of my life problems but after this forceful period of internet disruption I’m starting to doubt whether my problems where rooting from abusing internet. I don’t really do anything useful nowadays. Most of the people I know around me don’t as well. It feels like we are on some sort of unwanted, forced vacation that nobody likes.