💾 Archived View for reptilic.us › log › 2021-04-10.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:09:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
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Over the last week or so, I've been trying to get into the habit of checking the news via Gemini every morning, before I ever open a web browser. For the first few days, it seemed like an interesting novelty - gosh, it sure is nice reading without distractions, and so on - but most of the news stories lately have been either incremental vaccine updates, or Elon Musk putting computers into monkeys. So, dystopian yet boring. That isn't Gemini's fault, of course, but it certainly sharpened the contrast when we finally got a big dumb news story that any idiot can understand:
"Whoa, Prince Philip died?"
Now, I'm no royal-watcher, and as far as I'm concerned, this is an irrelevant non-story about weird inbred frog-people. That said, it was still technically breaking news, and I learned about it on this weird breakaway micronation protocol. It's an interesting feeling, like you've just had an experience that could be dramatized in a tech company's Super Bowl ad: "What if innovation... could change how we read the news?"
But instead of an ad, it's your actual life, and an idea of what a post-web world might look like is slowly coming into focus. For now, that's just my idle daydream of humanity wriggling out of Bezos's tyrannical grip and going the hell back outside. But it also goes back to my escape pod thing: when the web finally becomes nothing but bots recommending shit to each other, I've got an alternative way of finding out which celebrities are dead without having to watch cable news.
This is admittedly a pretty stupid reason to be excited about a new internet protocol, compared to all the actual work people are doing to make Gemini the sort of useful resource that has news feeds and dictionaries and recipe collections. But we're all -kinda- here so we can name-drop this obscure thing that we're into, and so we can rationalize our stubborn refusal to do things the normie way.
For real:
Gemini is groping towards a synthesis of the contradictory impulses to be more online than anyone, and to log off and have some damn time to yourself. We're gonna need to resolve that one eventually no matter what, and nobody else seems to even be trying, so from my perspective, writing these posts makes sense.