I joined Geminispace in November 2020 with a goal to curtail my problematic Internet usage, to replace Reddit and Hacker News with books and the occasional gemlog. It was the middle of the pandemic, my life was online, and I was addicted to the dopamine cycles. It worked, for a week or two. I can't say it stuck, and I can't say I can be surprised.
I yearn for the days when I read books, not watched television. When I took walks, not checked Reddit. When I blogged, not Tweeted. When I ate only plants, never animal products. When I used XMPP, not Signal. When I carried a laptop, not a cellphone. When I used Tor, not the clearnet. When I cycled, not flew. When I hugged humans face-to-face, not over Zoom. When an old Chromebook was all I needed, not a shiny new Mac.
These are not those days. And yet...
Books make me smile, so does television. Am I wrong to submit to the DRM leash, knowing full well the owner is selling my data?
I like walks. I do not like Reddit. Why am I on Reddit? Do I enjoy it on some level? I suppose this one is nothing more than compulsion, and yet it and the orange site fill my brain with idle noise when it is reaching overload. But this is a self-fulfilling cycle, isn't it? Perhaps I would not reach overload quite so easily without the information pollution from Bad Sites (BS).
Blogging demands perfection from me. Tweeting, by its nature, does not. Despite this I can expect far more eyeballs on my tweets than on my blogs. Getting attention on my blog (or gemlog) ironically relies on signal boosts from Hacker News and Reddit. Getting attention for tweets is automatic once a sufficient follower count is attained. Perhaps these two are better together-- using Twitter to link to new blogs hosted on my own website. Is this too ironic to be practical? Surely it is no worse than relying on other people to do the tweeting.
Sometimes I miss being vegan. I had health complications; despite my best efforts I needed B12 supplements due to physical symptoms of B12 deficiency. I still don't eat birds or mammals. I don't know if that's "good enough".
I like using XMPP, but not everyone I know agrees. Signal is also free software, and for telephony it works better. I use both on a daily basis, often with the same people. Is that wrong? I don't like centralization but it hardly seems a crime.
I resent my cellphone on both freedom and attention grounds alike. Other people resent me for never picking up my cellphone since I keep it on permanent do-not-disturb :-) Is there value in the small acts of resistance?
Tor scares me.
Cycling can't practically take me from Toronto to San Francisco and back. But what of the carbon footprint? Maybe it'd be better to stay in Toronto after all.
Don't blame me for the pandemic.
I like my Rockchip Chromebook. I also like my M1 Mac. Both run Debian GNU/Linux nowadays; this gemlog is being written from my bare metal Debian install on the Mac. For a few months I was running macOS part time since I wanted the fast build times this machine had to offer, but that was eating at my soul. I've now put on my kernel hacker hat and switched the machine to Linux full time. Part of my soul has been recovered. But the greed is clear -- I had no need to run Linux on the M1 before I had an M1, and I purchased an M1 machine for the purpose of porting Linux to it. There is a circular paradox, the lonely past time of the reverse-engineer. I have no solutions, only questions.
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