Offline Forever Quotes

But going offline forever, leaving behind everything I’ve built, wasn’t an option I ever considered. When people ask me where I’m from, I usually say, “The internet,” and I’m only kidding a little bit. This is my home, and I wasn’t about to be driven out of the only place I’ve ever felt like that, even if it was a digital one. This isn’t a story about how we become evacuees. This is a story about how we become resilient.

Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can't peek over anyone's shoulder. You can't tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you're not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online, you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself. Online, you can discover that the current literary star of the moment is actually so problematic that all of her works should be canceled forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed constantly online.

Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder. You can’t tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you’re not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online, you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself. Online, you can discover that the current literary star of the moment is actually so problematic that all of her works should be canceled, forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online.

We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be. Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end. (You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.) In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave.

Aware of the new technologies that were out there, I also recommended the use of laptop computers for flight crew management and control. The use of the on-orbit displays and controls made possible through the laptop, when ultimately instituted, has since paid for itself many times over. I also recommended we use offline computers such as ThinkPads to aid the shuttle during ascent and entry so that we could freeze the guidance, control, and navigation software if necessary. That idea too was rejected. To those who regularly turned me down, I always asked, “So, do you have a better idea?” This time around I asked thirty-two folks, none of whom returned a single suggestion.