Vitalik's Digital Minimalism 100-Day Experiment: Off the Grid, No Algorithms, Reclaiming Attention

Original Author: Vitalik Buterin

Original Translation: TechFlow

Introduction: For a long time, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has been well known for his minimalist approach to physical life: carrying only a small set of daily necessities in a single 40-liter backpack while constantly traveling and living around the world. However, as smartphones, algorithm-driven information feeds, and omnipresent instant messaging have thoroughly permeated modern daily life, minimalism at the physical level is no longer sufficient to withstand the comprehensive overload at the mental level.

In this latest long-form personal blog post, Vitalik rarely and systematically shared a hardcore self-experiment in "Digital Minimalism" that he conducted over the past few months. The most striking aspect is that he proactively cut off his phone's cellular mobile data network and relied solely on WiFi connections at fixed locations to maintain normal travel and high-intensity work life for a full 100 days.

This blog post not only documents Vitalik's specific technical configurations for bidding farewell to algorithmic information cocoons, using the Firefly aggregator client, and exploring offline maps and local small models, but also profoundly analyzes from the perspectives of philosophy and cognitive science how modern people can reclaim sovereignty over their attention from the infinite-scrolling screen addiction. TechFlow has produced a complete, section-by-section, paragraph-by-paragraph translation of Vitalik's sincere long-form article, offering a highly inspiring guide to mental decluttering for every modern person caught in the anxiety of the information deluge.

The full text is as follows:

For a long time, I have always been a devoted advocate of physical-life minimalism: minimizing the physical objects I own and striving to do more with fewer resources. Four years ago, I wrote a blog post detailing what was inside the 40-liter backpack I carry with me as I travel the world.

However, the concept of physical minimalism was born and matured between the early 2000s and the 2010s, and it responded to the challenges and opportunities of that era.

I still firmly believe in the value of physical minimalism, although I also agree with certain opposing views—for example, that owning certain "right types" of physical objects can actually give you a more tangible sense of sovereignty over your life. But in today's era, we need a new kind of minimalism: Digital Minimalism.

The core of digital minimalism lies in consciously and purposefully controlling the way you engage with digital technology, making every use a deliberate and clear-eyed choice rather than being involuntarily swept along by default.

In this article, I will share a series of genuine self-experiments I have conducted in this direction.

Social Media Minimalism: Farewell to Algorithmic Recommendations, Reclaiming Attention Sovereignty

Twitter (now the X platform) has always carried a certain toxic quality, and this trend has only intensified in recent years. The platform is undoubtedly highly engaging, but it is often far from informative, and the way it draws you in often fails to leave you feeling good.

For me, this negative experience reached its peak between late 2024 and early 2025. A lot was happening at the time, but if you spent a lot of time on X, you likely remember a particularly absurd phenomenon: suddenly everyone on the platform seemed to have become a fan of Adolf Hitler.

Image: A screenshot recorded by Vitalik showing algorithmic extremization and anomalous Grok outputs on the X platform

And that's not even counting the outrageous incident in which Grok itself briefly went off the rails and became "MechaHitler."

Around roughly the same period, "Crypto Twitter" also fell into a collective mood widely described as "Financial Nihilism."

The gist of this argument is roughly: the natural endgame of blockchain is pure gambling, and that gambling is good; if you dislike this phenomenon and hope blockchain can aspire to something higher, then you are a pretentious, out-of-touch elitist jerk.

Naturally, I intellectually disagreed and still disagree firmly with both of these currents of thought. But more importantly, I began to reflect more seriously on a fact: despite the highly engaging style of discourse on the platform, it was neither enlightening nor capable of making me feel good.

So for most of this year, I conducted a self-experiment: putting some appropriate distance between myself and this chaos. I didn't completely leave the X platform, but I left X's official client interface. Instead, most of my tweets were published through Firefly:

Image: The interface of Firefly, the multi-client aggregation posting tool used by Vitalik

Firefly is an all-in-one client that integrates X, BlueSky, as well as Farcaster and Lens (the latter two being decentralized social media platforms partially based on Ethereum). You can view feeds from all four platforms in a single interface, and publishing one tweet automatically syncs it to all four platforms.

My primary motivation for doing this was to support decentralized social media and, while continuing to participate in X interactions, to disperse network effects rather than reinforce its ecosystem lock-in.

But during the months of using Firefly, I found it had an unexpected effect: my mental state felt much better when using it.

I suspect the core reason is this: although Firefly allows you to post tweets and view others' tweets, it lacks the soul and core of X's official interface: The Algorithm™.

Specifically, I suspect that when I used X's official interface, I fell into the following carefully designed vicious-cycle trap:

First, you see someone post an extreme tweet supporting Hitler. With a kind of morbid curiosity akin to passing a car crash, you click into the tweet and scroll through its quoted tweets and comment section.

At this point, "the recommendation algorithm" thinks: "This user seems interested in Hitler. Let me tag this as one of their personal interests."

Next, you see ten tweets supporting Hitler in your feed. Once again, with morbid curiosity, you click in to gawk, just as a person can't help but stop and stare the first time they witness ten cars pile up and catch fire.

The algorithm thinks—well, no need for me to say it, everyone can guess what the algorithm is thinking. Soon after, you see hundreds of tweets supporting Hitler in your feed.

To be fair to X, Elon, and their hardworking employees, over the past year and a half, this kind of extreme fanbase on the platform has indeed greatly receded.

I think part of the reason is that once such extremist currents are exposed to the public for their immorality and stupidity, they inevitably exhaust themselves. But another reason is undoubtedly that the recommendation algorithm's operating mechanisms have been genuinely improved.

Even so, in moments when I occasionally have to reopen X's official interface, I still find myself quickly choosing to log out and retreat back into Firefly's peaceful world.

At the same time, I have also noticed a profound shift in my mindset: regarding the various disputes that the platform's so-called "thought leaders" are deeply embroiled in and fiercely fighting over every day, I find myself increasingly unable to muster the slightest interest.

Not long ago, I logged in again and found that the hottest cultural debate in that day's feed was people fiercely arguing over whether a certain historical figure was actually evil. Seeing this, my inner experience was like an adult stumbling upon a snack, TV show, or game they were once obsessed with as a child, suddenly realizing they now have zero interest in it. I smiled calmly, exited the app, and went on to enjoy my own fulfilling day.

My conclusion and recommendation is: I recommend more people try this approach. Explore ways to significantly reduce or strictly limit your social media usage—for example, using a decentralized front-end like Firefly, or committing to using X only on Tuesdays. Choose the rhythm that suits you.

Extract the genuinely valuable information dividends from the platform, but never get swept into the vortex of algorithmic recommendations, because such algorithms are quietly manipulating your emotions and mind in powerful subconscious ways you never notice.

Mobile Cellular Data Minimalism: A 100-Day Pure WiFi Survival Experiment

For a full 100 days, I conducted a second self-experiment: keeping my phone in airplane mode throughout. During this period I still used WiFi connections, but completely cut off all mobile cellular network connectivity.

I undertook this experiment primarily for two goals:

The first is privacy. A phone that is constantly connected to mobile cellular base stations is essentially a personal location tracker running 24/7. Telecom operators have a well-known terrible track record when it comes to protecting user data security, and sometimes they even sell this location data themselves.

As a result, your real movement trajectory is highly likely to end up in the hands of intelligence agencies, military contractors, advertising and marketing companies, and various other parties. Buying an anonymous SIM card is not a sufficient solution, for two reasons: first, your phone can be correlated and locked throughout its entire lifecycle via a unique IMEI number; second, fine-grained movement trajectories and internet usage patterns can easily reveal personal identity, and modern AI can already very efficiently reconstruct and infer the real individuals behind these patterns.

Therefore, the most thorough location privacy solution is simply not connecting to any cellular mobile network at all (in addition, I have been using the privacy-focused GrapheneOS and strictly limiting location permissions granted to apps).

The second is mental health. Being completely disconnected from internet connectivity over an extended period (especially when walking outdoors) is an excellent way to rebuild the habit of "existing offline." It brings you more inner peace and mental blank space to think about other healthier and more productive things.

Overall, I consider this experiment a complete success. During these 100 days, I broke the "no cellular network" rule literally once, but not in spirit: I briefly turned on the network once to receive a confirmation SMS necessary to maintain my phone's billing plan.

Another time I broke it in spirit but not literally: during a hike to a remote and somewhat dangerous area, friends strongly insisted I carry their emergency communication device and check in every few hours.

Throughout the experiment, the biggest inconvenience I encountered was during a stay in Singapore. Because I couldn't receive SMS verification codes, I simply couldn't log into the local ride-hailing app Grab (similar to Uber in Southeast Asia).

As a result, my dining options were greatly limited, and even when public transit was extremely inconvenient, I could only take the subway rather than a ride-hailing car.

After completing the formal 100-day experiment, although I occasionally turn on mobile cellular connectivity, to this day I still maintain the habit of "airplane mode on by default" for the vast majority of the time.

For outdoor navigation, I use CoMaps. This is an offline map application with a local-first architecture that downloads OpenStreetMap map data in advance and then performs map rendering and route planning entirely locally on the phone.

My overall assessment of CoMaps is: in terms of exploring commercial facilities built by human society (such as restaurants, shops, business hours, etc.), it performs worse than Google Maps; but in terms of navigating natural landscapes and outdoor routes, it is even better than Google Maps, because it includes many hiking trails that Google Maps doesn't even know about.

However, it occasionally fails, marking non-existent trails on the map—once causing me to have to scramble on hands and knees through hundreds of meters of dense bushes before awkwardly returning to civilization.

During this period, I also became deeply interested in the concept of "local offline world knowledge base applications." In principle, the data package covering all the world's valuable information is actually not as large as one might imagine.

The compressed full plain-text data of the English Wikipedia (excluding multimedia images) is only 27 GB. The OpenStreetMap global dataset (planet.osm) is about 2.2 TB, but if redundant information is removed and it is trimmed and compressed to 1% to 10% of its original size, that would be enough to encompass everything you might need offline.

This month, Statuette organized a developer bounty competition (I participated as one of the donors), aimed at incentivizing developers to build mobile applications that can run locally offline on phones, allowing users to conveniently access practical knowledge at any time.

Here are two offline applications that stood out particularly among the entries:

Image: The interface of the offline map application FieldAtlas

Image: The interface of the local offline personal knowledge base application Commonplace

My overall impression is: we are currently at a key turning point where such offline tools are beginning to have genuine practical value.

Most contestants in the competition tried to directly invoke on-device large language models on the phone, letting the model perform lengthy reasoning before giving an answer. But I think this approach is too slow: answering a simple question often takes 1 minute or even up to 22 minutes.

By contrast, the best-performing applications cleverly combined semantic search technology: first instantly presenting precise retrieval results from a local offline database, then immediately invoking a very lightweight small language model to automatically generate a structured textual answer. This combination can produce very high-quality answers within a very reasonable response time.

Finally, when you're out and about, especially when you have meeting schedules, you occasionally do inevitably need to connect to the internet while on the move.

When you arrive at a location, you often need to immediately contact the person you're meeting to confirm the exact location or ask them to open the door; at the end of a meeting, you often need to verify the details of your next appointment. If you don't have cellular mobile data, public WiFi is your only lifeline, and crucially: the public WiFi hotspot must allow you to connect directly without providing an SMS verification code.

Public network environments around the world vary enormously in friendliness. Based on my travels during the period when I was paying special attention to public WiFi availability, I've compiled a quick tier ranking:

Tier 1: Taiwan, China (at least in the Taipei area). Taipei has an extremely dense network of public WiFi hotspots. When I was walking the streets or even sitting in an Uber car checking my phone, the probability of successfully finding and connecting to a hotspot at any given moment was actually over 25%. These hotspots are usually provided for free by the municipal public network or by chain convenience stores found throughout the streets.

Tier 2: Ukraine, United States, Canada, Singapore. Among these, Ukraine surprised me the most: in a remarkable number of areas across multiple cities, there are completely open free hotspots, and quite a few of them don't even require a web redirect verification.

The United States, Canada, and Singapore are similar: the theoretical total number of public hotspots is very large, but a significant portion require SMS verification codes or mandatory login. Even so, the number of genuinely fully open and usable hotspots is still quite substantial.

Additionally, while searching for networks in Toronto, I stumbled upon a local fraternity (or sorority) that appeared to be named after SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried):