Logging off isn't the only answer

Inspired by “Notas sobre la desconexión digital,” by Marta G. Franco · September 27, 2026

Some people suggest turning off your phone to reconnect with the world, and a day without notifications can do you good. What's curious is that even a break from digital life has become something to sell: we pay someone to give us, for a few hours, a reprieve from the very things we've been taught we can't live without.

That contradiction is what drew me to Marta G. Franco's essay. She asks us to look beyond our screens and our individual exhaustion. Next to “How can I spend less time on my phone?” she puts a bigger question: “Why does so much of our lives depend on platforms we have no control over?”

Going offline doesn't cost everyone the same. For some, it's as simple as putting the phone in a drawer. For others, staying connected means access to work, transportation, money, documents and essential services. Selling digital abstinence as a universal test of self-discipline makes little sense when the freedom to log off depends on actually having the option.

We also tend to lump together the internet and the dominant platforms. A network of pages, protocols, files and people can still be an extraordinary place. An interface built to keep us scrolling, with ads wedged into every spare moment and decisions made by systems hardly anyone can examine, is something else.

That's where the small web comes in. A blog with RSS, a mailing list, a well-run forum, a community server, a pubnix or a personal homepage doesn't need to compete with the reach of a giant social network. Its promise is smaller and maybe more honest: a place where people can read, publish, talk and come back whenever they like.

The independent internet takes work. Someone has to maintain the servers and write the community rules, and not everyone wants to learn DNS or backups just to join a conversation. If we want alternatives that last, we'll have to make them welcoming without expecting every visitor to become a system administrator.

Treating all this as a battle between the disciplined and the distracted is another trap. Blaming users for the time they spend online suits the companies that design products to fight for their attention. We can change our habits, and we can also demand interoperability, data portability, responsible moderation and the right to decide how our tools work.

So maybe the answer is to take back the ability to choose where we want to be online, spending less time on what drains us and supporting what makes our lives better. It takes work and brings conflict, and it also brings the quiet joy of finding that not every corner of the web has to feel like a shopping mall.

I prefer that question to any promise of a digital detox: if the internet we know wears us down, what can we do together to make the next one better?

Credits, authorship and thanks

Essay that inspired this piece: “Notas sobre la desconexión digital”, by Marta G. Franco, published on Redes nuestras on September 27, 2026.

Rights: The publication lists the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license (attribution, noncommercial use, and share-alike).

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Thanks: My sincere thanks to Marta G. Franco for such wonderful inspiration. Her essay reminds us that we can criticize today's internet without giving up on the possibility of building a better one.