Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

Freedom in the Telegraph

Following yesterday’s excitement regarding Freedom’s appearance in BoingBoing and Lifehacker, the Telegraph (UK) has an article about the software.

A new tool promises to help computer users lacking in willpower by banning them from the internet and email for set periods.

Freedom, which is free to download, disables a computer’s internet connection for up to three hours at a time.

The only way to over-ride the block is to re-boot the computer, a time-consuming task that should deter users from breaking their self-imposed bans.

The programme is designed to help procrastinating computer users, particularly those who work from home, to resist the temptation to constantly check sites like Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia, as well as their email accounts.

Fred Stutzman, the developer behind the programme, said that he was motivated to build Freedom by his own lack of self-control.

…other people have been dismissive about the internet addicts who feel unable to go cold turkey on their own.

“There is already a product available to eliminate online distractions from your work time: it’s called ‘willpower’, wrote a commenter called Brownie on the Lifehacker blog.

Mr Stutzman’s response to the critics? “I don’t disagree with them - in a perfect world we’d all be able to limit our Internet use, TV watching and chocolate-chip-cookie consumption. The reality is that when we’re faced with a deadline, something like Freedom can help, and there’s no shame.”

This is officially too funny. I love the internets.

I find the chorus of derision bizarre - are we meant to believe that the snarks on lifehacker all have outstanding willpower? If they do, why are they using their time to write comments on a product they’re not interested in using?

[...] period and the program then shuts off your network connectivity until it elapses. I heard about it here and the Daily Telegraph has published a link to it [...]

@Brendan I agree. I think we like to imagine that we’re in control, but the reality diverges.

I wonder how much time you spent checking the postings and their comments before you fired up Freedom!

I need Freedom now; I want to check and respond to all the snarks but I have work to do. I admit to no self control.

Hey: your app is both badware (disable the connection: come on — if that’s not reducing the capability of your machine, I don’t know the definition of bad) and useful (OK: necessary, needed and Thank you so many times by the way) — but the derision is hiding that you came across an important, counter-intuitive result in psychology. Journos facing anything that doesn’t match a set of prejudiced over-simplification (aka “an angle”) are like a chicken in front of a golf ball.

The fact is: that’s not new. It’s called “burning your boats” and not “burning your helicopters” because when the idea was discovered, boats were the high-tech feature.

Bertil, I take your point - but one thing we might want to consider is that connectivity itself is badware. The computer as device-of-production is really a legacy concept - our computers are media platforms (through onboard software like video codecs, and through the web - youtube, etc). To expect that we’re able to manage the more mundane aspects of production in the face of this very hot media is almost too much to ask. I think we need to start thinking about how to configure our environment for production.

In my research into productive writing I’ve come across full-screen writing utilities - I think Scrivner might be the one. That is a great example, a piece of software that backgrounds all the rich affordances. Freedom is essentially this concept, taken one step further with the lockout. It is a brute-force transformation of the machine, but one I think we need to start exploring.

[...] Unit Structures – Freedom in the Telegraph Like the patch, except for interwebz addicts! Via ODubz (tags: humansandinternet lifehack ToDo) Posted by ANP on August 26th, 2008 filed in Rando | Comment now » [...]