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Six years of gopher

Today is the sixth anniversary of my phlog! For some reason, this year I am totally on top of noticing my various online anniversaries coming far enough in advance that I can prepare a little fanfare. I did it for the fifth anniversary of the Zaibatsu back in March, and I'll do it again in June for the fourth anniversary of Gemini. It blows my mind that I've been active in both gopherspace and Geminispace simultaneously for longer, now, than I was active in gopherspace alone. That doesn't match up at all with how large those times loom in my mind, but I guess that makes sense when we consider how active I was then, and how active I have been lately.

My 2023-03-10 post "Five years a sundog - Happy birthday, circumlunar space!"

I wrote posts previously marking my first and third anniversaries in gopherspace. For the third, I noted that I had 195 posts in total, but that I had made 108 by my first anniversary, meaning I'd made more posts in my first year than the second and third combined! Well, excluding this one, six years in I'm up to 257, which means I made more posts in the second and third years combined than in the three years since then. That's not an encouraging view, from the birds' eye perspective.

My 2018-05-10 phlog post "A year of gopher"

My 2020-05-10 phlog post "Three years of gopher"

But, really, these numbers are a silly thing to be paying attention to anyway, and after this paragraph I pledge never to do this kind of tedious introspection regarding my posting rate ever again. Nuts to this! Quality over quantity, for one thing. But for another, looking at the last three years as a unified block of time is severely misleading. I spent a good chunk of that time in a really bad headspace, though that situation was more or less entirely limited to personal use of computers or the internet. That sounds weird, but it's true. My life was otherwise fine, at least as much as life in 2021/2022 was "fine" for anybody. I was fully functional, professionally and privately, I did stuff and and went places and met people and I got plenty out of all that. It was just that most days I genuinely couldn't face the prospect of opening my laptop and checking my email, never mind anything more socially demanding than that. I have, obviously, managed to turn this around of late. I am surprised by how suddenly and with how much enthusiasm I have managed to do this, but it's not at all unwelcome. I'm wary of overdoing it and burning out again, but right now I honestly feel pretty good. I have written more posts in 2023 so far than I did in all of 2022 or in all of 2021, and it's not even June yet. So I don't think my phlog is in terminal decline, far from it. If anything, I feel like it is about to enter a new phase.

In the post I made for my third phlog anniversary, I noted that my originally stated goal for the phlog was to "put some structure to various swirling thoughts I've been having for years on the state of the internet", and opined that I hadn't done a very good job of sticking to that goal. To be honest, I no longer remember exactly what mental goalposts I set for myself in this regard, six years ago and ~17,000 kilometres away. And I don't remember why I felt three years ago that I hadn't lived up to them. But right here, right now, today, I feel like I have discussed "the state of the internet" to death, probably several times over, and while I certainly still care about it, while I'm definitely still going to talk about it from time to time, I sure as hell no longer want it to be the central, defining, organising topic of my online existence. It's not what I want my phlog to be "about".

I came to SDF and to gopherspace in 2017 in lonely desperation, wondering if I was the last sane hacker on the planet, fleeing a surface net where it genuinely was much harder than it is today to encounter technically proficient people anywhere who were frankly and openly airing the sentiment that something was deeply rotten in the state of the internet, and when you did find someone doing that, they were doing it using a smartphone and a centralised, commercialised social media platform, leaving you wondering if they actually truly believed a word of it. My online experience, thankfully, is not like that any more. I've found communities, and I've helped to build communities, where the thoughts I used to be afraid to say out loud are mainstream and unremarkable. There are a lot more people walking the walk these days, the idea of active resistance rather than mere grumbling has real currency. I don't feel alone anymore, and I'm very grateful for it.

It's not that the internet has gotten better - if anything, I am astonished at how much worse things have gotten since 2017. It's not that I think these communities I am now happily a part of are the solution, or that they are going to birth the solution, or even that there is ever going to *be* a solution. I just no longer feel crazy, paranoid, delusional for thinking that there is a problem in the first place. I no longer feel the need to jump up and down and wave and shout and try to get people to notice things and agree with me. I'd just be preaching to the choir at this point, and the choir is already much bigger than I ever thought it would be. I would rather relax a bit and start using and enjoying all the cool communities and tools at my disposal for their own sake, secure in the knowledge that plenty of other people clearly do see the value in them, and that even if they remain marginal spaces in the big picture, they are probably going to continue to grow in the coming years. They might grow slowly and intermittently and with occasional backsliding, but I'm convinced they will grow, and that their growth will be well served by using them in ways other than endlessly repeating their foundational mythos.

Over the years, my phlog has also slowly transitioned from shorter, more casual, informal posts about a variety of things toward having a definite tendency for long, ranting, unsolicited essays of vast scope and grave tone focussed either on computing and the internet, on the environmental sustainability of industrial civilisation into the very long term future or, increasingly, the intersection of those two things. I want to reverse this trend! It's not that I don't like writing the very long, sombre essays (although it sure takes a lot of time and energy). That style of writing actually comes pretty naturally to me, and if anybody is reading this post now, I guess that means at least some people enjoy reading it, too. The reason I want to swing back in the other direction is that the years of heavy rumination have actually borne some pretty substantial fruit for me recently. I have experienced two pretty major revelations this year, and they have seriously scratched some deep mental itches for me. I have not done a good job of sharing those revelations yet, though I hope to do so. They are there, under the surface, not exactly deep under the surface, but certainly unrefined and burdened with a lot of extraneous, distracting, possibly even false stuff, in some of my posts from earlier this year - "Orphans of Netscape", "Do you even compute, bro?" and "One billion, one continent" - but they deserve shorter, clearer, plainer formulations.

My 2023-01-11 post "Orphans of Netscape"

My 2023-01-22 post "Do you even compute, bro?"

My 2023-01-31 post "One billion, one continent"

These revelations aren't concrete, practical solutions to specific real world problems or anything exciting like that. They are just big shifts in my mental framing of many of the things I regularly think about, new perspectives for my inner monologue, perspectives which leave me less frustrated, less confused, less uncertain, feeling less like the things I am thinking and doing in one sphere are contradicting things I am thinking and doing in other spheres. I feel more mentally internally consistent, and that alone is super valuable to me. I feel like I have finally succeeded in untying some tricky brain knots that I've been fumbling with for years. I feel relieved and relaxed. It was worth all the rumination! But now I wanna lean into that relieved and relaxed feeling, at least for a while, and write shorter, lighter posts more often. I'm looking forward to it. It doesn't mean no more long thinkpieces ever again, or not thinking about very long term sustainability any more. Just less of that, and more of other things.

If you've read this far, thanks for indulging some self-absorbed naval gazing on my part. Hopefully it takes me another three years at least to do one of these again. Even bigger thanks to everybody who has actually been reading my phlog for six full orbits of the sun. Big shout out to everybody else in gopherspace whose phlog turns six this year - that's at least cat, jynx, tfurrows and tomasino. Class of 2017 forever!

Yes, yes, I know it's navel gazing, not naval gazing. It's a vintage Slashdot reference, you insensitive clod.