[HN Gopher] Tired of AI, people are committing to the analog lif...
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Tired of AI, people are committing to the analog lifestyle in 2026
Author : andy99
Score : 54 points
Date : 2026-01-18 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Wow CNN's website is awful. They only let me accept tracking
| cookies, then threw 'subscribers only' at me.
|
| I'm not sure I'll ever click a CNN link again.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Change the subdomain to lite for a more text-oriented
| experience. https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/18/business/crafting-
| soars-ai-a...
|
| There might be a browser plugin to automatically do this, like
| exist with old.reddit.com.
| treetalker wrote:
| This JavaScript (make a bookmarklet) should open the latest
| archive.ph snapshot of any page you're on: java
| script:window.open('https://archive.ph/newest/'+location.href.s
| plit('?')%5B0%5D,'_blank')
| latexr wrote:
| Indent the line with two spaces so it's rendered as code.
| treetalker wrote:
| Thank you!
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you're running ublock, [edit: after accepting] just block
| the elements - kill the dark overlay, kill the big subscribe
| box that slides in at the bottom. There's nothing else.
|
| CNN still doesn't have much worth reading, certainly not this.
| This isn't a real trend, this is a party a friend of the author
| threw.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| I still think the internet could undergo a "collapse" and rapidly
| shrink to something resembling the 2000's internet. The
| enshitification of everything is quite literally, "mining out"
| the value of the internet, hollowing everything from below. At
| some point, nothing is believable and putting your "content"
| online amounts to giving it away. Eventually, the users _will_
| walk away and suddenly the whole affair falls apart.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Some have walked away from the worst sites already but the
| majority are undiscerning and if they haven't left by now I
| don't think anything will be different in 2026.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > the majority are undiscerning
|
| this has always been true, and might be a real reason to have
| public standards?
| sph wrote:
| It's not gonna collapse. It can only grow bigger; the entire
| world economy runs and depends on the internet.
|
| Rather, what will happen is a bunch of us will willingly stop
| participating and stepping away from the technological
| singularity. A bit like the Amish, this time not for religious
| reasons. Let the urbanites enjoy their AI-generated virtual
| realities, with work, sex, and food from the comfort of your
| phone, competing for fewer and more bullshit office jobs
| creating more addictive apps; I just want to live on a farm
| with solar panels, grow tomatoes and write code for fun.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| > I just want to live on a farm
|
| > with solar panels, grow tomatoes
|
| > and write code for fun.
|
| Back in 2000 I cudda made a song outta that, recorded it to
| mp3, and uploaded it to Napster.
|
| 25 years later? aren't many places to upload naked audio to.
| zcw100 wrote:
| Why have I been seeing people use "enshitification" so much
| lately? Yes I know where it comes from and what it means. It's
| like Cory Doctorow is the new Noam Chomsky of IT and
| enshitification has replaced "manufactured consent".
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Because it's such a great word! It names something we have
| all begun to see but didn't have a name for.
| memco wrote:
| Even enshitification suffers enshitification.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| My belief is that its rise to popularity is a result of the
| underlying concept being something that everybody has been
| feeling for a long time, but lacked a word that could serve
| as its face in a satisfying manner. It's snappy and encodes a
| certain frustration and anger with the state of things that
| isn't conveyed as well or as succinctly with other terms.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The 2000s internet was way bigger than the 2026 internet. Every
| google search pulls up the same 50 sites now, and the first
| page will be split between just two sites, as if I needed 6
| slightly different Amazon links about a book I was googling.
|
| In the 2000s you could literally use google to scrape for open
| camera feeds; it was just internet-grep. Random people had
| extensive pages about their random hobbies. The actual internet
| was buried when the search engines decided to ignore queries
| and guide traffic, and eventually mostly disappeared. Back then
| there was _more_ variety on youtube; there was _more_ variety
| on myspace than is now on facebook.
|
| People spend more time on the internet now, but it's just
| scrolling versions of the same 20 stories of the day linked
| from the same 50 sites on the same 5 social network feeds. Even
| those 50 sites are all owned by the same 10 people, which means
| you get between _one_ and _two_ self-interested perspectives on
| those 20 stories. The rest of the internet is filled with slop
| and the rest of your feed (from real people you don 't even
| really know) is repoasts that they imitated from seeing them
| updooted somewhere else. It's positively claustrophobic.
|
| The catch is that they eliminated public space and made
| unmediated communication suspicious and borderline illegal, so
| where are you going to go? Find somebody on an app to hang out
| with? Watch some netflix? Isn't that still the internet? Make
| your kids put down their phones and talk to you? How are you
| going to have a party if you don't post it on facebook?
| squidbeak wrote:
| > The 2000s internet was way bigger than the 2026 internet.
| Every google search pulls up the same 50 sites now ...
|
| Poorer discoverability through search doesn't mean the
| internet is smaller.
| blakesterz wrote:
| "It's hard to quantify just how widespread the phenomenon is, but
| certain notably offline hobbies are exploding in popularity."
|
| Assuming this is an actual trend that is actually "exploding"...
| I wonder what this means for the short term in the AI industry?
| Could we see a drop in users and then a big popping of the
| bubble?
|
| That does seem like a really big assumption though.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article)
| to me sounds like it might correlate more with the number of
| TikTok videos about knitting than the hours spent knitting.
|
| The article almost encourages this interpretation, although I'd
| praise it for at least acknowledging the "performance" part.
|
| It seems to mash consumerism, commercial Social Media and GenAI
| into one though.
|
| Still, I try to see the positive side, and I think there
| certainly could be such a trend.
|
| No idea if it's just a small part of people going against the
| grain, or a broader shift.
|
| Regarding media addiction, there is a pattern that would be
| kind of similar, the large cohort of elderly people who are
| addicted to media and the commercial web, compared to the
| comparatively smaller portion of younger people falling victim.
|
| Among my "elder millenial" friends, I can only say that
| abstinence from doomscrolling and modern tech (especially
| smartphones and SM) seems to correlate with integrity and
| smartness.
| nospice wrote:
| > The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the
| article)
|
| Also, "knitting kits" were not a thing for most of my life.
| You'd just buy yarn needles and yarn. This is not some kind
| of a craft where you need dozens of implements.
|
| The kit is pretty much a product of the TikTok / YT
| influencer era. Indeed, a typical kit will often contain
| needles, yarn, and a... link to a video you can watch:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Knitting-Kit-Beginners-
| Acces...
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| It fits into a broader pattern of hobbies turning into
| trends, and then products, I guess.
|
| Social Media and E-commerce + dropshipping, optimized
| supply chains etc brought it to a new level though, in all
| kinds of domains.
|
| Audio equipment, musical instruments, sports or home
| accessories, for example.
| carlesonielfa wrote:
| People having offline hobbies is healthy and completely
| separate from AI providing real value to society.
|
| If the AI industry takes a hit because people are returning to
| offline hobbies, it's a signal we've been building the wrong
| things.
| baal80spam wrote:
| It's "exploding" in the same way like "quiet resignation" was
| "exploding". In other words - it isn't.
| nphardon wrote:
| This seems ubiquitous (in baby steps) in my social circles. I
| think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the
| troubling implementations of ai like flock, and other
| surveillance implementations, spotify and their distortion of
| music, and their investment into ai military drone tech, etc. and
| how wrapped up politics has become in everything. Its a bad time
| to have a browser in your pocket.
| boarsofcanada wrote:
| I don't know how ubiquitous it is in my circles, but I have
| noticed a lot of folks in their 20s and 30s tell me they only
| buy paper books, never Kindle. I started buying only the latter
| years ago because of the convenience and lack of a need for
| storage, but have recently switched to getting everything I can
| (digitally) through the library and the Libby app.
| nphardon wrote:
| We have also seen the Boomer's cannibalize themselves, even
| my 7 year old can see that her grandma's screen addiction is
| a very scary thing and something to be avoided; very
| cautionary. The Boomer's inability to defend themselves
| against the algorithms is a wild case study in screen
| addiction.
|
| I think AI is just a tipping point and an easy target.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| I've stopped with Kindle books (or e-books in general). It's
| been a while. But my kindle got destroyed by my then 3 yr old
| going all crazy on it. The screen just froze and nothing made
| it unfreeze. I was moving towards paper books anyway. So I
| just did not buy another Kindle.
|
| From new reports it seems Denmark is rolling back a lot of
| e-learning/screen usage. I hope the same comes to pass in the
| US. My daughter gets an iPad for her high school and while
| its locked down it is incredibly distracting. It is also
| restrictive. You can't read your notes and make summaries and
| write your own interpretation of what you've read without
| switching context between apps. As a whole I think its a bad
| option for learning.
| turnsout wrote:
| This seems like a predictable pendulum swing. I love AI, but I
| also love the phenomenon of people turning more toward IRL and
| tangible activities.
|
| Anecdotally, I have friends who have recently bought turntables
| out of the blue and gotten into vinyl. Other friends who never
| had any interest in my analog cameras are asking about film. My
| wife has even switched from scrolling Instagram at night to
| working on a crossword book with a pencil.
|
| None of them have put it exactly this way, but in divisive times,
| I think social media is just exhausting. And now you can't even
| really tell what's real.
| xnx wrote:
| Fake trendspotting for ad views.
| chihuahua wrote:
| "For me, it meant ditching my three iPhones, one MacBook, two
| even bigger desktop monitors [...]"
|
| Is it so unusual for "desktop monitors" to be bigger than a
| MacBook that it needs to be pointed out?
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(page generated 2026-01-18 23:01 UTC)