💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 6-18.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 12:35:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow

I'm still getting used to getting my info from a wider variety of channels. I used to get a lot of stuff via Twitter, some things from email (from my family), some things from bookmarks and from search. Now I've added geminispace, Cohost, Mastodon. I'm reading more. Where am I finding the time? I'm scrolling less.

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A week or two back I found an essay by Erin Kissane boosted into my Mastodon feed. Opening with a quote from Christopher Alexander's _The Timeless Way of Building_, Kissane writes that,

At the core of Christopher Alexander’s work is the belief that the shape and character of our spaces cannot help but influence the events that repeat inside them. The characteristics of the built environment don’t explain everything—the enveloping cultural context is a massive force—but they explain a lot.

Over the past 20 years, this is very much what I’ve come to believe about the shape of the things we’ve built online.

In her work life, she writes, she's trying to become attuned to how what we build online shapes how we act within them. But then she inverts the argument, writing that,

I keep getting sidetracked into the opposite formulation—how repeated behavior shapes our spaces, how rituals turn to hauntings, how buried things keep erupting into the present.

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It's 2023. I'm writing my thoughts semi-anonymously online.

It's 1998. Look in through the dim, third-story window, and I'm hunched in front of a 14" CRT, a coiled phone cable snaking from my 486 into the wall. I'm connected at 33.6 kbps. I'm writing my thoughts semi-anonymously online.

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We shape our structures and afterward our structures shape us.

Some days, it feels incredible that we can shape our structures, the infrastructure put in place to watch us, prod us, harvest and sell our information. But then I look at what Twitter's become since the Musk takeover, from something resembling neutrality to a den of racism and bigotry, all of which is tacitly, or maybe even explicitly, sanctioned.

Resignations. Firings. It doesn't really matter. Teams, it's said, take on the character of their leadership. If that's the case, I'm impressed that Twitter's held on as long as it has.

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Some days it feels incredible that we can shape our structures, and then I log into this tilde and write gemlog entries in vi, or open lagrange and explore geminispace, and, well,

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Why am I still writing in an online journal, a quarter century after I started? What are these reverberations? Who am I looking for, and what am I trying to work out?

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The question at the heart of this is why I feel I need to talk about myself and the minutiae of my life to strangers, regardless of period or protocol. The easy answer is that, having been inspired by the original net.diary of mc, and the journals of my online friends of that era, it seemed like something exciting to try my hand at. But here I am, twenty five years later. What's the draw?

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The secret heart of every panopticon is not the all-seeing-eye, but the confessional.

I keep a journal offline. A small notebook. Tarot readings and interpretations. This isn't something I believe at a mystical or spiritual level. For me it's been an attempt to poke at my subconscious mind. There is a period of my life where my memories are dim. Snatches. Fragments. The details jumbled. I spent many years, decades, trying not to think about it, trying to forget. Denying any of it even happened. Shame is a hell of a pressure. It would've been easier to just say what happened. Name people as they are.

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When I do tarot, I focus my mind, pose a question, draw three cards. What it was, what it is to me now, what it will become.

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All of this a process of searching, of reaching. I do the same thing when I write: I start off with an idea about something, and through the process of writing and editing, I hope to clarify and further my understanding.

I've had one memory come back. A small one, a nothing-memory. But it was buried. So much else is, too. I keep hoping to coax out other things, the scenes and happenings I've denied and denied and denied.

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Every few weeks, I draw three more cards. Every week I try to update this gemlog. I keep up my journal on the small web. Work on other writing, too. My poems recently have turned increasingly autobiographical, though I'll always deny self-as-speaker.

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Kissane writes about hauntings; people into tarot talk about how certain cards follow them. The latter is absurd, of course. There aren't braids of energy flowing through the universe, forcing The Moon into your draw. But probabilities being what they are, imbalances occur. My draws are often Swords-heavy. I return often to the period of my life when I was first trying to heal. When I told myself I was good; where the years between have proven decisively otherwise.

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What's the online world going to look like in 2050? In some ways similar to what we see now. There will be things we can't predict - try explaining to someone in the 90s how a website full of boomers and the people who hated you in high school enabled the Rohingya genocide, the elections of fascists - well, okay, perhaps it's not so far-fetched. And parts of it will look incredibly familiar. The online may increasingly be the network of traffic between applications and bots and whatever else, but at its heart it is the electronic fabric between people.

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Here in my body, I want to be more human in service of a less painfully haunted world. I want ways of being together that let us pay our respects and build different kinds of power. I want to practice being free.

There's an alternate universe where my early life was happier, where I wasn't bullied and shamed. Where I got to be an ordinary teenage nerd. Maybe in that life I'm less timorous, follow through on some of the bold plans I've long since set aside.

Whenever I write about pain, I feel a sixth sense: I'm always aware of the people who've had it worse, always questioning myself about just how bad I really had it. But, as well, I'm always envious of the people who had it better, for whom life is a series of experiences of varying intensity, but for whom the negatives don't begin to touch what others I've known have felt. I wonder how these people live their lives online. Not as the haunted ghosts of the machine, but its spirits. Ethereal. Flitting, flickering. For whom all of this is a conscious choice. Who come at will. Who can log off. And who exit as they please.

gemlog