is offline the new luxury?

Ava: The internet isn’t inherently or uniformly negative, so don’t reduce “being online” to scrolling through social media.

Online can be …

What a medium is capable of doing and what it is primarily used for under real-world conditions are not the same thing. Today’s internet may be capable of things the internet of many years ago could never do, yet much of what it actually does has regressed to the logic of television – in Postman’s sense.

So, to me, offline has become the new online. People once went online to encounter those unlike themselves and to engage with radically different perspectives and the world of the early internet user felt vast. But the technology-driven capitalist order has since been enclosing everything, and the internet generation of the past decade has been no exception. This is especially unfortunate because the internet is, by nature, anti-enclosure, and its inhabitants were once the people most likely to imagine a genuinely different future. Now, returning offline to look for the alternative has become the only way out.

Time to get on the bus

2026.07.16