💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2021 › 202110 › 20211021-doing.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A few days ago, a message on the OrbitalFox Gemini mailing list included a link to a project called "Publishing as Protocol"^. The post caught my attention because of the language of the page, which was excerpted in the message: an abridged version follows.
"Publishing As Protocol... aims to explore the relationship between self-organizational models and technological sovereignty. ... [T]his framework will gather together existing and speculative examples from both institutional (cultural) and technological (hacktivist) practices to reflect on how we publish, gather and organize under (and around) platform capitalism."
This introductory text might as well have been Greek to me. After reading it several times, I'm still not sure what the goal is, other than simply reiterating the terms used in the introduction itself. I assume it has something to do with self-publishing and how it relates to expressing freedom online, but I'm not certain. And to be frank, I don't have a lot of interest in finding out.
I might just be an ignorant old guy out of touch with the world, but exercises like this don't appeal to me like they did ten years ago. I used to be obsessed with the pursuit of learning and researching how people interact with each other to form societies. Observing people and their relationship to the world was a pastime of mine in my college days, though I did not pursue sociology or philosophy as a degree. Today I'd rather just interact with people and let the mechanisms sort themselves out.
This is especially the case with Gemini. I'm not here to write a Ph.D about the evolving nature of the community. I'm here because I want to share my thoughts and content with other people, using a medium that I control and that is much more personal than social media.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of studying how other people interact and how that builds community norms. However, I feel that far too many people occupy themselves with that kind of thinking these days. People spend so much energy trying to calculate ahead of time exactly how their words or actions will affect people, how those effects will affect the people who see the effects on people, how perceptions of the actions will after the effects, how potential future moralities will color views on their actions--the list of considerations is endless. In the end, all it does is cause people to not want to engage in the bustle of everyday life, and criticize those who do.
I don't want to over-analyze every minute detail of my life. I've reached a point in my life--post-university adulthood--where if I were to do anything of substance in my life, I'd better do it now. And to do that, I need to overcome my inhibitions and my trepidation of going about my day without endless introspection, and just live the life I want to live.
After all, if we all only wrote about what other people write, no-one would write anything at all.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]