Our general usage pattern is often characterized by heavy mobile application usage, cloud-based monolithic communication platforms, closed and proprietary systems to which we willingly impart our trust to manage private data and integrate with others of similar character.
The ever evolving infrastructure tends to elevate operational requirements and demand more expensive hardware with more frequent upgrades. For many of us, the pace feels anything but natural, leading to decreased patience and the tendency for intermittent task switching over sustained periods of concentration.
There’s a disparity between the time and energy involved in performing certain measurable work of identifiable success metric, and the time and energy spent on ceremony: internet lag, system performance bottlenecks, task switching, tool management, non-priority communication or notifications.
Has this disparity always existed? Most certainly, to varying extent. But I think the challenges have compounded quicker than the strategies for coping with them, which have either lagged or gone neglected. Or we simply accept the dynamic as something inevitable.
There’s a dilemma to this self-feeding cycle. Much of how we operate has long been fed by our very own habits, our peers, and the ecosystem created around this usage. My community overwhelmingly leans towards one set of hardware/applications/platforms, thus so must I. My career is such that the modus operandi is unavoidable. I would love to opt out of X or Y, but …
At some point did we not have more flexibility in these matters? But perhaps a series of subtle and less than conscientious choices have led us to the point where choice appears more of a luxury, and the cost of reversal insurmountably high.
I’m Vitaly Parnas, the founder of this mission. And I stand at the center of this dilemma with all its tension and conflict.
The first decade of this millennium I spent fairly engaged in all the platforms and usage patterns of my peers, everything seeming novel with not enough accumulated experience of their byproduct. Save for the fact that from the very days of their inception, I disliked the touch-screen phones at their aesthetic core - and I had largely avoided them through about 2022-3, mostly through means of either Blackberry phones or something simpler. I abandoned all social networking presence by around 2013, and a few years later permanently deleted my LinkedIn account.
I thus spent many years reducing my technology stack and communication means to an increasingly scarcer footprint, all the while gaining much mental freedom to write, undertake a series of technical and literature projects, further expand my languages, and travel more than I expected over a lifetime. Alas, my finances slowly ran thin, but more crucially, my avoidance of mainstream communication methods eventually alienated me from communities.
For most of the years between 2016 and the start of 2025 I lived as a sort of a digital nomad - travelling, pseudo-traveling, or residing in places, meanwhile devoted to many of the above activities. The alienation challenge thus felt temporarily acceptable and even somewhat attractive in a hard-to-describe sense. In the absence of a long-term sustainable strategy, though, I knew I’d ultimately have to make emotionally taxing adjustments and compromises.
That came when I settled in Israel a bit over a year ago at the time of writing. Here I found myself financially on the ropes, far more actively communicating with individuals and organizations, joining endless Whatsapp groups, connecting to Zoom and Google Meet conferences, rejoining LinkedIn and restarting networking from zero. I saw myself interfacing with the Google suite and other commercial, closed cloud-based workflows I had managed to avoid to a considerable extent over the years.
My smart phone usage has something tripled compared to the couple of preceding years when I readapted this technology. Had I even wanted to continue in the former direction, or supplement devices of ranging complexity, none of my existing dump-phones even supported Hebrew text.
And thus a series of my core principles suffered structural damage in the desire for networking, communication and collaboration beyond the frontiers of the digitally minimalist, open-source and alternative technology stack I’d assimilated over the years. My very identity seemed to come in direct conflict with my actions, all for the desire to make this country my home and feel part of a community. (I couldn’t see myself making such drastic sacrifices for just any arbitrary place.)
Quiet predictably, the symptoms I recall from my former life crept back into existence not in the satirical context of my writing, but in their gritty reality: increased caffeine, lack of spare time, anxiety, frustration and severe fatigue, to put it lightly. The dynamic of how I was used to interact with technology stood on the brink of a turmoil and felt dangerously unsustainable.
That’s the personal story. Now the proposal behind the initiative is not to suppress or deny the realities of modern connectivity, nor advocate for the kinds of drastic paradigm shifts I once eagerly undertook (which I acknowledge aren’t practical for most).
What I want instead is to bridge the two worlds - wherever possible, to whatever extent possible. That begins with examining the workflows we undergo daily: the technologies they involve, the critical paths, the bottlenecks - operational, material, psychological - and identifying where even modest adjustments might restore some balance.
Those adjustments might involve the FOSS (Free and Open-source) ecosystem, where capable and cognitively lighter alternatives to mainstream tools already exist and often go unnoticed. They might mean reducing workflow constraints, eliminating something superfluous, or replacing a part of online interaction with an offline counterpart. Sometimes that means reexamining how we interact with our devices. And sometimes, plain old-fashioned analog interaction is the way to reintroduce digital downtime.
Worth noting: the most fatiguing or resource-demanding element of the process chain frequently demands the least actual cognitive effort - once the right abstractions are in place.
The matter of mental health deserves attention. The symptoms I described earlier are not unique to me. They are widespread, under-acknowledged, and muscled out by the dominant conversation around productivity, which tends to optimize within the existing system rather than question. digimin is interested in that question.
The mission, then, is not a manifesto and not a prescription. It’s an ongoing investigation - into tools, habits, workflows, and the often overlooked buffer between the physical and digital constructs - conducted in the belief that reclaiming even a small part of that space is worth the effort.