💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 6-11.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:13:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I've been reading Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" And I'm struck by the way he writes, persuasively, that one of the weapons capitalism uses against the populace is the normalization of the perception of a lack of alternatives: the presentation of a small, pre-approved list of options, from which, we grumble, we guess we ought to pick the least worst. From our position, it seems like things will never change. Inevitability, we are told, is inevitable.
I've been thinking in terms of this politically, with the upcoming US elections, though in this case, the least-worst option isn't even in the same league as the worst, let's be absolutely clear. And I've been thinking of this in terms of what we collectively refer to the online - the ecosystem of apps and protocols that collectively make up our lives outside of our immediately physical spaces.
Social media now feels inevitable, permanent and endless. Facebook has existed in our collective consciousness for almost two decades. Instagram next year will be fifteen. Part of that inevitability might be the poisoning of search. Before social media, we were given HTML, JavaScript (and slightly later, CSS): the equivalent of erector sets, at least in terms of basic components, instructions barely to be seen. We made websites because "online", at that time, popularly, meant the web; and on the web, the basic unit is the website. Sure, a lot of people who used the web never made websites, but a lot did; if you saw a site you liked, and thought, "you know what, I can do that," there was nothing stopping you from doing so. Angelfire, GeoCities, Tripod, were all free; if you had friends, maybe they'd host you; if you were fancy, you could get a domain and put everything online yourself.
And there's still nothing stopping you now. Except that Google and Bing rarely surface anything other than "trusted" corporate garbage, or answers from Reddit, or, worse, answers from Quora. And how do you even put together a website today, anyway? There's a weird disconnect, a vast gulf, between the sites we see via search (which are essentially the combination of WordPress plus a theme and plugins, the raw source rarely touched by hand) and the sites we see if we visit neocities. But who even knows to visit neocities? I think I first heard about it in the late 2010s from a Twitter mutual, now vanished, who mentioned she had a site. I visited the site, and neocities itself, and was honestly a little disheartened by what I found: a vast array of "I'm starting my site!" pages with no updates, the few finished ones done up in garish pixie puke and glitter cursors that felt (and feels) more like a way of cosplaying an age that happened before you were born rather than an actual attempt at making something in community with others.
(I'm grumpy today - what they really are is deeply subversive, pushing against homogeneous design norms that would force us all into a hero page/hamburger menu/mobile-first mindset.)
This is definitely unfair, but I'm tired, though I will say I've ever now and then I stumble onto a site that reminds me of the web as a creative medium, rather than just a conduit for taps and searches. Something with an undercurrent of passion. Something that says somebody needed to make this.
Both the suppression of personal websites and their homogenization via 1990s GeoCities design cliches feel like inevitability, though I'll always take the latter, because at least it means people are trying. And I think the former is a kind of outcome of popularity, because right now it's estimated that more than half the planet is online (in some sense). When I first went online, it would've been around fifty million. Total! Across the world! Maybe part of the decision to make things and leave traces came from the sense of the online as both a second and separate world. Certainly I got this sense in the era where I called BBSs: each system was unique, tailored to the sysop's tastes and put online according to their schedule (most ran on dedicated lines, but some were only available at night!). BBSs were something you sat down to. The web, up until the smartphone, was something you sat down to. It was permanent (sort of), it was durable (well...), and it was distinct. If you had a bad day online, you could simply walk away. You weren't assaulted by thousands of notifications flashing across your screen.
If hundreds of millions, and then billions, of people coming online is what finally convinced corporations that this was a thing worthy of extraction, it's hard to see the current state as the result of anything other than corporate pressures. What would a web designed for actual people look like? I mean, in a real sense, not that mealy-mouthed "design pages to be useful to people :) :)" Google design guidance bullshit. Well, we used to have it. And now it's largely gone, hidden beneath a thousand sites stuffed with reviews for shoes or air purifiers or whatever, each filled with Amazon affiliate links, placed to try to juice search rankings and catch a few bucks in random partner dollars.
When I first used Gemini I was struck by the simplicity. I remember reading about it on HN and seeing all the complaints, and after using it a bit, deciding that Gemini wasn't for them, but it was at least for someone. For me and for many. You can't do a lot of things (inline links, choose styling, etc), but you can do the rest of it easily. Making a page is incredibly simple. Putting it online less so, if you go the self hosting or tilde route (thinking in terms of how ordinary people would find it), though options like gemlog.blue and midnight.pub exist, and make things easy enough.
But I've been struck by the last year and a half by just how anti-corporate this space is. Part of that has to be attributed to the lack of popularity - how many people are active in this space, thousands? Maybe low tens of thousands? But even amongst these limitations and the starkness of the space, there's been a genuine creativity that doesn't look like roleplaying a teenager in front of a Gateway PC circa 1997. There's a Reddit-style site, there's word games, there's personal journals/blogs; there's technical documents too, and people's personal photography, and lots else. Gemini, despite its hard limitations, has proven that we can break free from the penned-in, trough-fed future corporations would give us, that all we need are tools, other people, some free time, the absence of noise.
I think that last time is really important. Would Gemini have taken off if it had been flooded, immediately, by Best Plumber Des Moines 2024? Pages and pages of garbage SEO copy that make us feel like a mark, rather than a part of something? All the shit that gets returned to us by Google is repellant. It certainly doesn't make you feel closer to anyone. Or make you want to make your own website. Two decades ago, searching for any particular topic was likely to land you on someone's personal site, often with an (obfuscated) email, or a guestbook, in case you wanted to drop them a line. Now it feels like we're in the middle of a vast expanse of buildings. The windows are on, but you can't see any people. The glass doors are polished within an inch of their lives. You're thirsty and there are speakeasies but you can't for the life of you remember where they are.
The early web thrived because of the people who made it. Gemini has thrived (in its limited, quiet way) because of its people, too. What will be the next big, people-centric part of our online life? I don't know. But I suspect that, like Gemini, it will come at us sideways. It'll offer some kind of radical change in how we conduct our electronic lives. And it'll feel wild and different, because it will be: we've become so used to being the internet equivalent of cattle that we've forgotten there really can be another way. A people-first internet, one that treats corporate interests and intents as damage, and routes around it. Open source software, maintained by regular people, will be central to this. Software, infrastructure, life in the public interest. It seems subversive and almost impossible today. But seismic change always feels like such. No earthquake till the ground's moving.