Traveling offline in an online world

As QR codes, WeChat, and short-video platforms become nearly inescapable in daily life, a question arises: Can we live well without smartphones?

A new nonfiction book, A Happy Excursion Against the Digital Leviathan, offers a compelling answer through an extreme social experiment. Published by Guangdong People's Publishing House, the book records author Yang Hao's 134 days completely disconnected from the internet while traveling through 68 Chinese cities.

Yang, a cross-disciplinary artist and current PhD candidate in contemporary art at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, embarked on the experiment out of growing suspicion of digital life. With an average daily screen time of nearly seven hours, he decided to go "ancient", switching off his phone, abandoning his computer, and relying solely on paper maps, cash, and a pen as he traveled across contemporary China.

What unfolded was both absurd and revealing, which he records in the book. Unable to scan QR codes, use navigation apps, or book tickets online, Yang encountered the friction between digital convenience and offline reality: museums rejecting him for lack of reservation codes, struggling to hail a taxi in Meizhou, Guangdong province where ride-hailing dominates, and even being jokingly accused of money laundering when trying to exchange cash for a digital transfer.

Yet surprisingly, those 134 days offline became the most mentally focused and productive period of his life. Without the pull of notifications and algorithms, Yang shot over 2 terabytes of photographic material, read more than 40 books, wrote a 220,000-word draft of essays, and completed over 40 handwritten letters to his family.

The book interweaves technical critique with human observation, referencing thinkers like Byung-Chul Han and Alain de Botton while retracing historical routes — from Chinese writer Shen Congwen's Xiangxi waterways in Hunan province to the trails of Central Asian explorers like Marc Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin.

The book does not simply reject technology. Instead, through one man's radical offline journey, it asks a fundamental question that resonates in our hyper-connected era: "Without our phones, can we not only survive, but actually live better?"

Yang believes the most precious and important thing for human beings is to maintain their own uniqueness and subjectivity. "To preserve these qualities, one must maintain a certain critical mindset toward smartphones, the internet, and AI. After this experiment, I feel even more strongly that I need to keep a certain distance from them, so that I can retain my subjectivity, do what I truly want to do, and explore my own possibilities," he says.