This week the wifi went down at my residence in Bali. I think it says a lot about the state of the world we live in right now that I felt immediately that this was a big hinderance to me. In some ways I think this is justified – the internet is how we stay connected when apart. I rely on internet over here to message and call friends back home without insane international dialling fees; it allows me to join meetings at my work and university despite being in a different country; and just generally I live a very digital life with all my notes and articles saved digitally, often needing internet to redownload when I want to view them. These are, I think, fair uses of needing wifi.

What I’ve found interesting is perhaps what we might call the unjustified uses of wifi. I typically buy a 3gb/month data plan when outside of Australia, and I find this is usually enough to get me through each month, more often than not with data to spare. 3gb does not stretch far: you certainly can’t watch many TikToks or Instagram reels on it, which I think we are often tempted to do when out and about waiting somewhere. I save data typically for travel: rideshare apps and using maps to figure out how to get somewhere. Most of the time it stays off. I’ve come to relish these periods of disconnection, where I don’t find out things instantly. Most people nowadays have come to expect near-instant communication with everyone, which has led to a real change in how we interact. Did people in the 1800s care how long a letter went un-replied? And if so, how long? Nowadays it feels like if someone doesn’t respond to you within 24 hours there are some kind of mind tricks afoot, when actually that person is probably just busy. My relaxation habits this week have shifted from passive engagement with TV shows or movies — which I simply don’y have the data to stream — to reading and games, which are the two forms of entertainment that also demand engagement. Instead of streaming the cricket, I’ve listened to it on the radio, which only uses 30mb/hour of listening.

I think a lot about how I engage with technology. I am very torn on this, because I’ve always loved tech and playing around with it. I love customising my laptops and diving into command lines and file structures to make it easier to work with a computer. Whenever I buy new tech I love digging into the specs and optimising money vs performance and I also enjoy going against the grain a little bit — I wrote my Honours thesis in LaTeX, a writing software typically used for Maths and Computer Science, just because I really like using it. I like to think this has played a part in who I am today — whereas some people are confident with tools and handyman stuff, give me a computer and a problem and I love digging around trying to fix it. Despite all this, I also feel like life would be a lot simpler if I owned less technology. If I spent most of my time with paper and pen, analogue radio, a home phone instead of a mobile. But I don’t think it’s using technology that’s the problem — it’s being ruled by technology that is. We are so often slaves to algorithms and big data companies that we lose sight of self-choice. I’ve actively tried to remove social media from my life because of this, and I find it a lot more validating to choose what I engage with. I’m choosing how I spend my time rather than having my time wasted away to better the bottom line of a large corporation. Often it is these things which influence the unjustified use of wifi, rather than the justified. I’m trying to focus more on the justified, but it’s hard in a world that constantly pushes us to the unjustified.

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