💾 Archived View for sdf.org › mmeta4 › about captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:36:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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WTF is this about?

This is about trying to increase awareness of what I call Our Global Predicament, which is that -- amazingly -- humans have become such a powerful force of nature that we're actually endangering nature and therefor ourselves, often by the same metrics we hold up as our greatest achievements.

Why Gopher?

A couple reasons. First, Gopher currently occupies an interesting niche in our inter-networked world. It's one of the most simple interactive protocols that's still usable on the modern Internet and therefore has a much lower energy/resource footprint than do most things running on web servers these days. Second, It seems to appeal to technical people that are skeptical of the increasing complexity and bloat of the modern Internet and see value in some of the simpler ways of the recent past. These are the people that I think are most receptive to viewing the past as a resource to harvest rather than an antiquated irrelevancy. History can run backwards.

About meta4:

I'm a 50-something guy with an engineering background. I first became aware of our impending transition to some as-yet uncertain way of living with diminishing fossil fuel inputs sometime in 2016; sort of a late "peaker". Since then I've been steadily reading though the likes of John Greer, Gail Tverberg, Daniel Quinn, Charlies Hall, Derrik Jensen, Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, David Fleming, Ugo Bardi, Dennis and Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Amory Lovins, Albert Bates, Kurt Cobb, Alice Friedemann, Michael Ruppert, Wendell Berry, Morris Berman, and countless others who have attempted to address what's really going on in this crazy world and what may be waiting for us around the corner. I previously self-hosted a gopher called Simple Machines; for energetic reasons I've opted to make use of pre-existing under-utilized gopher hosting.

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Contact info:  e  @  D  .  org
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Claim to Gopher fame: I coined the term 'phlog' back around 2003.