I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we're actually on the cusp of something exhilerating and terrifying
~ someone, 1999
Old habits die hard - and the Internet is a place of bad habits. Thank you to Gemini, it's architects and their work, for bringing to life this online space. I don't know if this experiment in my own Gemini server space will amount to much, but I hope at the least I may contribute something useful that lives up to the kind of digital communities I would like to see.
It seems to me as though we're surrounded by content in many forms - on the web and elsewhere, the majority of it commercial and extractive. We trudge through wild, otherwordly media ecologies daily, where we perhaps haven't always taken the care to document, map and communicate what are the poison berries and what are the fruits. How much better it would be if we could cultivate these ecologies as well as inhabit or pass through them? If another world is possible, I would hope it would be one where we can reconfigure our connections and our relationship via media and digitality in different ways, particularly where those connections are mediated by computational technology - here I feel there is a lot of potential beyond content where the 'tip of the iceberg' is still way beyond the horizon.
Through gemini and other forms of indie media, what I'd really like to see more of is some of the types of functionality that are often wrapped up and sold as a commercial or data-surveillance proposition finding alternative, weird and socially-rooted variants in a non-commercial, community setting; tools and information systems about our world that overcome the coercions of capital, surveillance, political manipulation and data extraction. Locally-rooted, sustainable, radical tech communities. That's my Internet daydream - hello gemini.
~ flow