💾 Archived View for reptilic.us › log › 2021-06-08.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 11:07:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I ask it in the least-hysterical way possible, but seriously: do you think the CIA cares about gemini? I haven't noticed anyone plotting any half-assed coups or tiki torch rallies, but I also haven't been looking. I have no idea if there'd even be a reliable way to do that here. But gemini's a semi-obscure internet thing that appeals to privacy dorks, and that's probably enough to make it seem suspicious.
Agencies like that have a long track record of inserting themselves into completely inconsequential bullshit, blindly casting around for some useful piece of intelligence. It's hardly unimaginable that they'd be poking around this weird corner of the Unglamorous Internet, hoping to turn up someone saying something actionable about something. Well, not this specific corner, but the protocol more generally. Here, you'll find nothing but paintings and old man complaints.
Maybe I just expect someone to turn up to do some sort of dreadful imperial business because the internet has consistently been described as a "frontier." And what is a frontier? It's some place that's new to us (though not to whoever was there before us), where we can pull out value and send it back to Civilized Places. We send some weirdos and masochists out to "subdue" the new frontier, displace whoever was there, and get it built up enough for civilization (as in, capital) to move in and displace the weirdos in turn.
All the pot-bellied beardos running early websites imagined themselves as frontiersmen, staking out their little homesteads on the World Wide Web and fortifying them against the Web's hostile conditions. In his own mind, this was a more enlightened frontiersman: instead of displacing the natives, he was building a new frontier outside of the physical world, with room for everyone! Unfortunately the rest of the cycle carried on as normal, with money and civilization moving in and pushing out the frontiersmen, who quickly discovered no, there was not in fact room for everyone in whatever it was they had built.
And of course, for much of the cycle I just described, intelligence agencies were skulking about, listening to "chatter" or whatever. Why wouldn't they be? It's the perfect place for radicalizing and entrapping simpletons, or for seeking out exciting new US interests to secure away from whoever currently has them. I'm sure the web becoming civilized has really streamlined that entire project. And if the price of civilization and its niceties is an inescapable digital panopticon, I can see why a certain strain of antisocial nerd would be ready to misremember Huckleberry Finn and light out for one of these crazy new protocols.
Now, I say all this, but the CIA is also full of Ivy League fancylads. They considered Abstract Expressionism a tool for fighting communism, and funded international shows via phony "foundations" set up by billionaires with intelligence connections. There is no reason to think they've stopped doing shit like that. So if you're reading this, please note: I am ready to sell out and paint stuff for you. Clearly I have ideas. Please contact me in a cool spy way.