I’ve adopted Richard Stallman lifestyle long ago, primarily by refusing to use a smartphone. I also don’t have an account on the major social media, never buy anything online (to the point that someone once gave me an Amazon shopping voucher but I didn’t start to use Amazon anyway), pay cash whenever possible, use Protonmail, don’t store anything in the cloud, and obviously use Linux. Also, my browser is configured to throw away every cookie after every session. I am probably still far from Richard Stallman’s level of attention, but so far I’ve been very happy with this lifestyle; the level of online annoyances is very low.
If you feel comfortable answering: what type of career are you able to sustain? When did you begin this career? If you did not already have your current set of occupational/professional contacts, how plausible would you guess it would be to come by them in the present day within your current lifestyle?
I am a post-doc in academia, which probably helps with the no-smartphone thing because people in academia are quite accustomed to communicate by email anyway (I’ve never worked outside academia). Absurd as it may seem, me not having a smartphone is surprisingly difficult to notice, because even if someone notices that I never extract smartphones from my pocket, no one is going to directly ask me why I don’t obsessively check the phone. I know many people (colleagues included) who are probably still assuming that I had a smartphone, even if they just know that I don’t use their favourite message app. And I don’t deliberately lie to them; I just avoid to introduce myself as “weird person without smartphone” from day one.
As for the third question, most of the professional contacts in academia are from in-person networking at conferences, and of course I go to conferences (maybe I told a small lie, it’s not literally true that I never buy anything online… I make a small exception for air travel tickets and reservations in foreign hotels, since they are very difficult to purchase offline and I can’t avoid going to conferences, but these are expenses that I must report anyway to get the refunds).
I’m also a postdoc, and my institution more or less requires having a smartphone because you can’t do anything without their proprietary 2-factors authentication. The other proprietary thing that seem mandatory is Zoom, have you found a way to escape from it?
Well, I actually don’t have the first problem since my institution still uses the old username + password login procedure (for other things needing 2FA like Protonmail I use a free desktop program to generate the keys). They also prefer Google Meets or MS Teams to Zoom. Both are nonfree, but at least they work directly in the browser and I don’t have to install nonfree software on my laptop.
I’ve adopted Richard Stallman lifestyle long ago, primarily by refusing to use a smartphone. I also don’t have an account on the major social media, never buy anything online (to the point that someone once gave me an Amazon shopping voucher but I didn’t start to use Amazon anyway), pay cash whenever possible, use Protonmail, don’t store anything in the cloud, and obviously use Linux. Also, my browser is configured to throw away every cookie after every session. I am probably still far from Richard Stallman’s level of attention, but so far I’ve been very happy with this lifestyle; the level of online annoyances is very low.
If you feel comfortable answering: what type of career are you able to sustain? When did you begin this career? If you did not already have your current set of occupational/professional contacts, how plausible would you guess it would be to come by them in the present day within your current lifestyle?
I am a post-doc in academia, which probably helps with the no-smartphone thing because people in academia are quite accustomed to communicate by email anyway (I’ve never worked outside academia). Absurd as it may seem, me not having a smartphone is surprisingly difficult to notice, because even if someone notices that I never extract smartphones from my pocket, no one is going to directly ask me why I don’t obsessively check the phone. I know many people (colleagues included) who are probably still assuming that I had a smartphone, even if they just know that I don’t use their favourite message app. And I don’t deliberately lie to them; I just avoid to introduce myself as “weird person without smartphone” from day one.
As for the third question, most of the professional contacts in academia are from in-person networking at conferences, and of course I go to conferences (maybe I told a small lie, it’s not literally true that I never buy anything online… I make a small exception for air travel tickets and reservations in foreign hotels, since they are very difficult to purchase offline and I can’t avoid going to conferences, but these are expenses that I must report anyway to get the refunds).
I’m also a postdoc, and my institution more or less requires having a smartphone because you can’t do anything without their proprietary 2-factors authentication. The other proprietary thing that seem mandatory is Zoom, have you found a way to escape from it?
Well, I actually don’t have the first problem since my institution still uses the old username + password login procedure (for other things needing 2FA like Protonmail I use a free desktop program to generate the keys). They also prefer Google Meets or MS Teams to Zoom. Both are nonfree, but at least they work directly in the browser and I don’t have to install nonfree software on my laptop.