💾 Archived View for skylarhill.me › posts › gemini-is-magick.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 20:40:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A "yes, and" for Degrowther's post about Gemini.
Gemini, in spite of its apparent “lack of utility”, is an excellent demonstration of degrowth principles practice: we don’t need to use very much technology (read: energy and non-renewable resources) to have a worthwhile internet. The experience of browsing gemspace could as easily be implemented on a mesh network composed of low-power, easily-to-repair machines as it is on our current internet infrastructure.
The Tech Learning Collective offers a series of excellent free foundation courses/lessons in basic Linux sysadminning. The very first lesson is a magickal ritual designed to enchant your device with a vision of a better technological future.
(As an aside, I view the use of magick from a psychological perspective; it's placebo, it's imagination, but that's exactly what makes it useful.)
The author of the ritual, Zach of the Solarpunk Magic Computer Club, has this to say about this possible future:
Solarpunk builds a future where nature and technology integrate in a sustainable balance, and humans tend to them while living in supportive, non-hierarchical or hateful communities. As Solarpunk describes a world of support and balance, it feels to me inherently anarchist. And because this world is one where nature and technology merge into one, it also feels inherently animist.
In animism lives the idea that all things contain spirit and agency, and if you are quiet and giving you can become aware of this spirit, this power, radiating around you—much like we can hear the soft buzz of electricity rising from the subway lines beneath the sidewalk, or almost feel the diary entries, songs, pictures and other snippets of memory travelling through our bodies in the arc of a radio wave.
I didn’t want to speak only in the flouncy abstract, and so I offered up a personal Solarpunk future vision. Which is that computer code does not change too drastically through the years, we can all learn the basic syntax of programming languages and have a few that we are familiar with as a type of dialect or slang. And the society we live in today is pushing out so much smart technology, with computers and Wi-Fi connections built needlessly into toasters and doorbells, and so much of these devices are meant to be disposable.
So in the future, we will scavenge the tossed out appliances and know how to speak with the software bundled inside, and we will rearrange and hack them for new, beautiful uses. A person in the future will remove the water sensor from a tossed out cell-phone and solder it into a small computer they installed in the bottom of their flower pot. And so this sensor that was designed originally to better void the warranties of phones, is now configured to sense when the soil is dry, then send a message to its owner asking them to water their violet.
And in this future, the plantowner will invite a friend over for spaghetti dinner, and this friend will know both healthy leaf-coloration and basic Python and can see the “smartpot” needs to be adjusted. And so with a small computer they’ve fashioned from scavenged parts, the friend plugs directly into the violet to make a few tweaks to the homemade code. Then the two friends discuss the code change as naturally as they discuss what gives the spaghetti sauce its wonderful punch. (It’s ginger.)
And it strikes me that this animistic way of looking at technology also prescribes degrowth from our current status quo. Seeing ourselves, technology, and nature as all united inherently demands a certain degree of humility. To see yourself in unity with nature is to recognize your place within a larger system. Such a mindset defies anyone who would attempt to "conquer" nature or "exert dominion" over it, rather than work in partnership with it.
This applies to our relationship to technology, too. We seem to view technology as a way for us to overcome our limitations, to achieve new heights of power and capability. In other words, we seek to become gods through our technology, rather than merely more effective humans. And the really interesting thing is that this mindset sees technology as something inherently separate from us. Technology is the Key to Greatness, the Thing What Makes Us Powerful. But really, a healthier relationship with technology would acknowledge its humanness. Technology is just something we do as people. It lets us be a little better at everything we already do, helps us find a little more fulfillment in our short but beautiful lives.
So I think that Gemini is the hedge witchcraft to the Web's towering, monolithic wizardry, the Tom Bombadil to Big Tech's Saruman. Sometimes you really do need a wizard -- preferably a good one, like Gandalf. (If I'm gonna carry this metaphor too far, maybe the Fediverse is Gandalf?) But solutions like Gemini are for small people, and their small problems. Gemini is for your tiny monkey desire to tell stories around the campfire, or share ideas in a coffeehouse. It runs on the ancient laptop you repurposed into a server. It runs on a cheap Raspberry Pi. It's human-sized -- that's why I like it so much.