sigmaleph

The reason this whole bandwidth thing (see previous post) bothers me a lot is that, look. I'm willing to do my part. If you give me a target to shoot for, weekly or daily or hourly limits or whatever is the actual problem in numbers, I will do my utmost to stay below it. I will switch all the time I was spending on Netlfix and YouTube to books, offline games, text-based websites, whatever. I will find ways to entertain myself. I will monitor my bandwidth usage. I have zero problem doing that! Because if you tell me "here's how much you can use" I can stay below it and be happy about it. Every mb I stay below my limit will make me feel good and prosocial.

But if your advice is equally opposed to streaming video in high quality and to back and forth text conversations, it seems like the takeaway you want me to get from it is "experience anxiety whenever you interact with the internet". And the internet is my main coping tool, both in general and during this particularly stressful time. It's how I keep in touch with friends and loved ones. It's how I can know what's going on during this pandemic. It's a good part of how I can pass the time at all. I can use it less, if 'less' is a number. Not if less is "y'know, just, less". I will try, anyway, but I don't know how well it'll work, because I don't know what "working well" means.

This reminds me a lot of how the messaging re: masks had people deeply suspicious, because you can't tell people "masks are useless" and "masks are important for people in need" at the same time. And, in fact, the former was a lie. This seems a lot like another flimsy lie fed to us in the hope that it will prompt the correct behaviour, and I would much prefer to be treated like a fucking adult and be told the truth instead.

And also, why in the goddamn fuck was your "conserve bandwidth" message spread as an image on social media rather than purely text.