Dennis Bystrov felt lonely, even though he was always talking to people. The Montreal computer programmer was chained to his computer, using it constantly to socialize when he wasn't working on it. He missed his wife and kid.
He complained to his friend Michael Taylor over lunch. If only, he said, he could get away from his computer, even just for one day. What if he could be sure he wouldn’t be missing important messages from his cyber-friends because they would all be taking the day off as well?
At first, Taylor thought it was a crazy idea. But eventually, he and Bystrov hatched the idea for World Shutdown Day, which became an Internet movement involving tens of thousands of people. On Saturday, March 24, if Taylor and Bystrov have their way, computers all around the world will go dark and the Internet will look a little emptier.
It’s an experiment, Taylor explains: The goal is to find out how other people feel about their computer-dependency. And to discover how many people would be willing to cut the cord for a 24-hour period. So the site, shutdownday.org, includes two buttons that allow you to vote on whether you can or can’t give up your computer for a day. As of press time, roughly 48,000 people had already confirmed: “I CAN.” But another 7,000 had confessed to their powerlessness over the plastic-and-metal overlord.
Taylor says he hopes more people who have visited the site but haven’t actually clicked the “I CAN” button will take part on Saturday.
Will New Yorkers actually stop typing and have a conversation—using, you know, their tongues—on Saturday? Jen, a barista at Think Coffee on Mercer St., hopes so, because the cafe is usually full of faces reflecting the glow from laptop screens. “It would be kind of nice to have people interacting, instead of just being on their laptops,” she says.
David Polinchock, “Chief Experience Officer” (CXO) of the very cyberish-sounding Brand Experience Lab based in Manhattan, says he’ll try to take part in Shutdown Day. “But I’m not sure I’ll be successful,” he admits. And he may cheat, because he can use his phone to check email and surf the Web.
“Like many of my peers, I do spend too much time on the computer and can easily get sucked in after ‘only checking one email,’” Polinchock says via email. “It’s an interesting challenge for people who are so used to being ‘on’ all the time.”
“I don’t always realize how much time I spend on the computer,” Polinchock confesses.
Not everyone is excited about Shutdown Day. “My first instinct is to flinch,” says blogger, writer and sex guru Rachel Kramer Bussel. “I just can’t imagine a whole day. I could imagine half a day maybe.” But, she admits, she’d feel better about it if she absolutely knew nobody would be trying to contact her online during her stint of cyber-deprivation. Even then, “I would feel really antsy about it.”
Kramer Bussel has friends who freak out as though she may have fallen down a well if she doesn’t answer their emails within a day. She does all her work online, and productive time is mixed in with messing around.
Five minutes in the “real world” are like 10,000 years online. Civilizations rise and fall, philosophies flourish and collapse under their own contradictions. Most of all, your own reputation can turn from crap to gold and back again—several times. Step away from the Internet for a day, and you may come back to find everybody else’s tag clouds have gone carnivorous. And people are speaking Urdu.
Kramer Bussel worries that if she leaves the blogosphere alone too long, she’ll have missed her chance to respond to someone else’s point. If you don’t parry someone’s thrust right away, the conversation will move on and you’ll have lost the argument.
At first glance, it seems weird for a computer-free day to bill itself as “one of the biggest global experiments to take place on the Internet.” Taylor says he and Bystrov didn’t have the budget to market the event, except on the Web. And since their target audience was people who use the Internet, it made sense to reach those people online.
They chose to have Shutdown Day on a Saturday because they figured few people would be able to stop using computers for a day during the work week, Taylor explains. Maybe people will think about whether they should even be using computers on the weekend, he adds.
As Shutdown Day gained steam over the past couple of months, pockets of resistance started to form online. “Boycott International Shutdown Day!” tech journalist Peter Rojas wrote on his blog at Engadget.com. He vowed to use computers “Twice as much on March 24—even if that means grabbing two machines and typing with our fingers and toes at the same time.”
Asked whether he considers himself a computer addict, Rojas responds defensively: “I give up computers all the time. I went on vacation and didn’t take a computer with me for three weeks.” Shutdown Day “is not necessarily a bad idea, it’s just ... hold on, someone’s IMing me.”
After some frantic typing noises, Rojas comes back to the phone to denounce the stereotype that people can’t turn off their computers. “There’s a new class of creative tech professionals. This stuff is integrated into their lives, and it’s not something that’s preventing them from living their real life.” For every person who forgets to eat or bathe during a 36-hour Everquest marathon, there are hundreds who surf in moderation, says Rojas. His anti-Shutdown Day post was “tongue in cheek,” but in any case, “you don’t need to do much to boycott the shutdown.”
“Any excuse people can find to drop out from anything that they find oppressive or boring or dehumanizing or that they feel pressures them in any way” is a good thing, says futurist and podcaster RU Sirius. “It’s always cool that there’s a counterculture to whatever the prevailing big thing is.”
Taylor spent 15 to 16 hours a day staring at a computer screen when he worked in the stock market in London. Now he’s taking an “extended vacation” in Montreal. “Neither of us would want to stop using computers,” he says. “We recognize that computers are an essential part of life these days.”
But Taylor wants you to think about your computer dependence, and where it may be heading. In five or 10 years, “we’ll spend too much time in the virtual world and forget about what’s happening in the real world.” Listening to him talk, I get a mental image of people jacked into their virtual reality programs, not noticing their apartments are on fire, eventually suffocating on rancid smoke while on a VR beach, like the heroine of Cyberella: Forbidden Passions.
Recently, one of Bystrov’s friends in Russia had a power failure. His two kids were playing with a game console and a PC and had no clue what to do without electricity. Their parents suggested they try playing hide and seek, but they couldn’t figure out which game controllers it required.
“There’s a real world out there,” Taylor insists.
The symptoms of computer dependence are pretty stark, according to a checklist at Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack’s site, www.computeraddiction.com. If you feel a sense of euphoria at your computer, and you crave more computer time and can’t tear yourself away from your computer, you could be an addict. Or if you lie to the people in your life about your activities, you’re either an addict, or having cyber-sex with a hyperthyroid acrobat in Alabama.
Also, physical signs like dry eyes, carpal tunnel, missed meals and “failure to attend to personal hygiene” could point to a problem, Orzack’s site says. I know, from personal experience, that when I start IMing in my sleep, it’s time to cut back.
How will we even know if Shutdown Day succeeds? People can come back to the site and testify about their experiences. But Taylor also hopes that if enough people walk away from their computers and play strip ping-pong or hopscotch, we’ll be able to tell from the sharp drop in the Internet traffic.
Bystrov and Taylor “won’t get even close to the numbers they would need to show any sort of significant difference,” says Rojas. “They would need to get millions of people to participate.” The event is like online petitions: “It’s not going to go anywhere.”
Shutdown Day is “ultimately pointless,” says Sirius. “Nearly everybody will probably have the Internet implanted inside them somehow in another 10 or 20 years.” Some people may resist having the mark of the cyber-beast inserted in their heads, but they’ll be like people who live without credit cards today—you can’t even stay in most hotels without a credit card. “Resistance is futile, puny humans!” Sirius concludes.
Charlie Anders is co-editor of She's Such A Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology & Other Nerdy Stuff (Seal Press).
