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I get very very frustrated by terms like "screen time" and "phone addiction" because it's a fundamental flattening of a huge, complex, textured landscape of social spaces, communities, games, audiovisual media, textual communication systems, automation, and productivity tools into "technology bad" - it's a dismissal of the complexity of the the global communications infrastructure from a boomer perspective.

But I also absolutely hate the whole "WiFi means Internet", "don't tell me it's not an app", "discord servers are actual servers, language is moving on" attitude. It's the same level of flattening, the same lack of interest in the actual shape and texture of this enormous machine we use every day.

We cannot say anything meaningful about all electronic communications except, perhaps, that they rely on petrocapitalism. We cannot say anything meaningful about "technology" as a whole, or even "high technology", except that it is, presently, captured by capital.

That said, if you *do* want to learn to repair the car that is the global communications network, I recommend two textbooks:

- Forouzan "Data Communications and Networking" (5ed.) covers the underlying physics and engineering of *what actually happens on the wire and in the air*. It remains the only traditional textbook I kept from my CS degree.

- Hunt "TCP/IP Network Administration" (3ed.) covers the TCP/IP stack, a bunch of protocols thereupon, and how UNIX systems interact with those protocols. It is *not* up to date on the vast superstructure we have built (HTTP/2, QUIC, etc) but it does give a wonderful framework for understanding why things are the way they are on the network. (And it does cover IPv6.)

It's true that experimenting with this on your own isn't free, but it's also not out of reach as long as you have a general purpose computer (like, not an Android or iOS phone).

If you can't afford another computer, you can spin up a free, small Linux VM on your own laptop or desktop and experiment that way.

If you can afford a two hundred dollar expenditure and a few dollars a month of electricity, you can get a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny or a Dell Optiplex Micro or two and hook them up to your home network. These are typically sold in lots from large corporate deployments, where they are used as small, efficient desktops for thousands of employees until they no longer quite work. They are then sold individually for about a hundred dollars each on eBay. I run my home network on two of these, plus some other nonsense you don't really need.

Because of exactly what we're talking about here, these acquisitions are modular; you can get one box, plug it in, and experiment until you can afford another, then plug that one into the same network and see how they interact.

Ultimately, it's probably a cheaper hobby than, say, Magic: the Gathering.

@noracodes especially these days, when you can virtualize almost everything.

@noracodes @7leaguebootdisk VMs add extra layers of complexity to networking. Probably better to start with physical hardware, if you can.