The Engagement Rehab
by Ploum on 2025-02-27
I’ve written extensively, in French, about my quest to break my "connection addiction" by doing what I called "disconnections". At first, it was only doing three months without major news media and social networks. Then I tried to do one full year where I would only connect once a day.
This proved to be too ambitious and failed around May when the amount of stuff that required me to be online (banking, travel booking, online meetings, …) became too high.
But I’m not giving up. I started 2025 by buying a new office chair and pledging to never be connected in that chair. I disabled Wifi in the Bios of my laptop. To be online, I now need to use my laptop on my standing desk which has a RJ-45 cable.
This means I can be connected whenever I want but I’m physically feeling the connection as standing up. There’s now a clear physical difference between "being online" and "being in my offline bubble".
This doesn’t mean that I’m as super productive as I was dreaming. Instead of working on my current book project, I do lots of work on Offpunk, I draft blog posts like this one. Not great but, at least, I feel I’ve accomplished something at the end of the day.
Hush is addicted to YouTube and reflects on spending 28 days without it. Like myself, they found themselves not that much productive but, at the very least, not feeling like shit at the end of the day.
I’ve read that post because being truly disconnected forces me to read more of what is in my Offpunk. My RSS feeds, my toread list and many gemlogs. This is basically how I start every day:
I’ve discovered that between 20 and 25% of what I read from online sources is from Gemini. It appears that I like "content" on Gemini. Historically, people were complaining that there was no content on Gemini, that most posts were about the protocol itself.
Then there was a frenzy of posts about why social media were bad. And those are subtly replaced by some kind of self-reflection about our own habits, our owns addictions. Like this one about addiction to analytics:
That’s when it struck me: we are all addicted to engagement. On both sides. We like being engaged. We like seeing engagement on our own content. Gemini is an engagement rehab!
While reading Gemini posts, I feel that I’m not alone being addicted to engagement, suffering from it and trying to find a solution.
And when people in the real world starts, out of the blue, asking my opinion about Elon Musk’s latest declaration, it reminds me that the engagement addiction is not an individual problem but a societal one.
Anyway, welcome to Gemini, welcome to rehab! I’m Ploum and I’m addicted to engagement.
I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.
I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!