💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2022 › 202212 › 20221216-specialization-and-stewardship.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:48:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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My wife and I play a lot of board games together: a relatively new pastime for me, as growing up I rarely played them after my elementary school days. She owned several board games already before we got together, and we've more than doubled our collection in the intervening years.
Board games undoubtedly have their merits: they're creative, they're tactile, they encompass a wide range of game genres, and once printed and packaged, they consume no further resources. However, they have a downside: any given board game can often only support one style of game. If one wants to play a different genre, one usually must purchase a different board game.
Carbon emissions and industrial byproducts contribute significantly to climate change, but another phenomenon harms not only the environment but our own economy: waste. People in developed countries throw away a lot of things every day, things that are still viable but are no longer wanted or needed: unsold food from restaurants and grocery stores, vintage clothing that's gone out of style, old electronics that are incompatible with the latest technologies, discarded plastic wrap and packaging, expired household chemicals, etc. To me, these things all have something in common: they're all highly specialized to fit one narrow purpose or another.
Specialization is both the blessing and the curse of the modern world. Without it, many of the amenities we've come to expect wouldn't exist, from fast and safe travel to the abundance of foodstores to computers themselves. However, by definition, specialization means that the tools and processes we create have very small ranges of use, and application of any one outside its designated range is at best useless and at worst a hindrance. If a very specific capacitor goes bad on my computer's motherboard and that capacitor is no longer in production, it's very likely I will have to buy an entire new motherboard. One failed component on a smartphone leads to its entire demise, and one essential but discontinued part of a vehicle can doom it to a scrapyard. Entire food production lines have been brought to a halt because of one missing ingredient; meanwhile, the failure of single components inside aircraft have led to deadly crashes and hull losses.
While I live in a large city, I don't have to travel far to reach very rural farmland, and many antique shops in the area are filled with old farmhouse equipment from the early part of the 20th century. I find myself amazed at their simplicity: most are single pieces of wood or metal, cleverly shaped and sharpened to perform a large variety of tasks. They're not as efficient as the combines and mills of today, but they're far simpler, easier to maintain, and robust in their purpose.
To the original point, some of my favorite games involve nothing more than a pair of dice or a standard deck of playing cards. They're simple and unassuming, easy to create or replace, but the number of card and dice games is practically endless. Almost any group of people can pick up a deck of cards and find a game they enjoy playing with it.
I've noticed that many people on Gemini also appreciate simplicity and adaptability. Many come from the world of Gopher, a protocol that started out life as a simple directory service but has evolved into a lively and varied community. And Geminispace itself, with the protocol's ability to authenticate users, has already built many services that rival the basic functionality of several Web platforms, if not their flashy stylesheets or attention-grabbing layouts. I myself use Gemini for everything from news to to-do lists, social discourse, and even games. The flexibility, and thus the power, of this tool is not to be understated.
On a global scale, there's been speculation that good stewardship of the planet might inevitably require a reduction in the modern world's standard of living. I suspect that's true, but if it is to be successful, I believe it will have to be from the bottom up. We, as individual participants in a free market, have a responsibility not to spend and consume resources excessively, especially resources that are single-use or purpose-built. Companies only create what people buy, and one's wallet is one's greatest means of influence. It's a difficult thing to do when both corporations and governments appeal to our desires for safety, efficiency, comfort, gluttony, lust and entertainment. But a top-down approach won't change individual people's minds: that only leads to people finding extralegal means to satisfy those desires. I believe a better approach is to help each other learn to control those desires in the first place.
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[Last updated: 2022-12-16]