After my plans for the immediate future were shaken up rather badly, I figured the only mature response was to escape into a book until things somehow got fixed on their own. The book I picked by looking at titles until one particuarly resonated with my present state of mind was How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.
I went in for something laidback and maybe even parodical but the book opened with a full frontal assault on what the author calls the attention economy and it gripped me in a way that no book has in years now. The book speaks about our present notions of productivity and its place in our life as well as the quantification of all of our waking moments, including our leisure. I'd need to take a break after every few paragraphs in the wake of realising how true these words rang for the world I find myself in. Most of these realisations were sobering but one brought a smile to my lips.
In Chapter 1, the author writes,
Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a “take” after having read a single headline.
As someone who's avoided social media successfully for many years now, this wasn't a statement I could directly relate with but what made me smile was realising that one of the platforms that I engaged with was the exact opposite of what was being described and decried here. Gemini.
The vast majority of content that I've come across on Gemini has no means of interacting with in a publicly visible manner. You can't like or comment. You can share but that too isn't quantified. You engage with content on Gemini by consuming it for yourself and this action has no public visibility. You can't mark it as read on some social cataloging site with your hot take review or leave a like which is like a weird digital equivalent of "Lokesh was here" carved onto a bench or tree and carries as much meaning. With Gemini, your primary interaction is to just have listened to what someone had to say. Not "marked as seen/heard/read", liked or shared but listened to and what a beautiful thing that is.
Reading this book has let a lot of my amorphous love for Gemini coalesce into clear thoughts. For instance, I now have some, hopefully, well articulated appreciation for the lack of reactionary buttons. When liking something is no longer reduced to the press of a button, it's you who must actually do the liking now. This demands effort and honesty from you, asking you to really engage with the content lest you like without even realising what it is you are liking. This also lets you pack into your liking the kind of nuance that no button could ever capture. You can like to varying degrees different parts of the content and even let it be tinged with other emotions and feelings that there most likely weren't buttons for. Your like can evolve over time as your understanding of the piece or you yourself change.
You might sometimes cease to like something or even come to dislike it but you thanfully don't need to go and hunt that one piece of content from the thousands that you liked just because it asked no more from you then the press of a button and undo that action lest you remain fingerprinted by that like by an internet that hates to forget. Your like is yours alone and can grow and change as you yourself do.
Another thought that managed to coalesce over the course of writing this piece is just why I have avoided Gemini capsules that do implement some form of likes or comments. Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal, quotes Aarom Cometbus [1] in his Career Advice [2],
Things that are treyf, you avoid, not because you hate them per se, but because in avoiding them you keep yourself from becoming like the people you hate.
Moxie then goes on to further explain,
Like Aaron, I have my own list of things that are treyf, not because I find them necessarily unenjoyable, but because they add up to something that I ultimately dislike.
Interacting with content on Gemini that you enjoyed demands more effort than traditional platforms. Writing a response post, discussing it on a mailing list or having a conversation on IRC doesn't carry the kind of immediacy that a quick like or comment carries but I like that interactions on Gemini are slowed down in this manner. They let these interactions stay with you longer even if it means that there are necessarily fewer of them. By staying longer, they usually tend to stay and that's something to be cherished.
There's also beauty in escaping metrics for even 5,000 likes is but a statistic while someone taking out the time to sit down and write back to you even though it wasn't made as convenient as it could be just to let you know that they could relate to or appreciate what you had to say can leave you smiling for a while. The thought does count, but the effort immeasurably more so.
I'm grateful that Gemini makes that opportunity more available by making other opportunities less so and it's something I now treasure the most about Gemini. That my engagements with it are personal, my interactions with it are private and both of them are memorable.
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CC0 low-key, 2021-10-10