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<h1>Gemini Means Homogenization</h1>
<p>published: 2020-06-20</p>
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<p>Once upon a time, I got a job at a place we'll call Milk Monarch so that some future bootlicking employer has a harder time finding this post. I went to work there for one day and then, immediately upon returning home, went on the scheduling website and announced that I was quitting. There was simply no way I was going to work in ninety-degree heat wearing a visor and long heavy dress pants with <i>no breaks</i>.</p>
<p>But even if I tried to pull the autism card, there was no way that I could have possibly been given an exemption on those parts of the dress code. For the whole point of a dress code is to homogenize its employees as much as possible, turn former individuals into mere replaceable agents of whatever corporation they have the misfortune of having to work for. Doubly so during the Corona-chan party, when everywhere I go I am harangued into wearing a facemask that actually does little to protect me and just makes it hard for me to breathe. As much of my face as possible is hidden from the customer, my range of vision reduced to a small sliver as if I had been thrown into the depths of a fundamentalist Islamic country.</p>
<p>But, hey, at least it made it harder for people to see me cry, biting down the throes of a panic attack as I sprayed down trash cans!</p>
<p>I hate homogeneity. A collectivist pipedream, blending all the colors of the rainbow into the same shade of dirt I step over with my feet on my way to my favorite tree to read under. But this isn't my mother's garden. Nothing meaningful grows out of this brown, just holes ever-growing where worms slip under the earth and ants digging their colonies to be flooded when the rain comes.</p>
<p>"All people are born equal" is a lie. Some people are born with talents for art, some a predisposition for mathematics, others physically strong. People come in both neurotypical and <a href="../../2019/september/roophloch.html">neurodivergent</a> flavors. There are all kinds of races and ethnic groups and divisions and sub-divisions of all of them. And with the vast diversity of cultural practices and languages and food and celebrations... This world is a colorful place. So long as people are peaceful to each other, why would I want it to be any other way?</p>
<p>I can only exist in a world where I am the only one of me. Unique, differentiated, separate and yet a part of the world. Even if the homogenization were of myself, making everyone see things exactly the way I do, I would still refuse to live in it, for without the differences of other people, there would be no surprises, no spontaneity arising from a mind I cannot access. There would be no point in being, for there would always be someone better than me at being me.</p>
<p>If every website in the world looked exactly as mine does, although the JavaScript menace would be defeated (assuming they were all blogs), it would be just as boring of a world. It would be just like everyone having the same layout of house and the same furniture. Part of the fun of going to someone else's house is exploring the space that they live in every day, seeing how they've arranged their house to do the things they want it to do. Part of the fun of going to someone else's website is figuring out the layout, where everything is, what all the buttons do. And both websites and people's houses tell you so much about the person living inside: whether they're a clean freak or more relaxed on the hygiene issue, what color schemes they find pleasant, whether they're a minimalist or a maximalist...</p>
<p>Granted, things like colors or advanced layouts don't work in browsers without CSS support. But given the Chrome/Firefox near-duopoly on the mainstream browser market and the prohibitive time cost of developing a separate browser engine not based on one of the two, the vast majority of readers would have to go out of their way to use a browser without even basic CSS support. And not everyone likes to have JavaScript enabled (for good reasons, and websites worth their time will at least pleasantly degrade to a readable state without it). But to have the <i>option</i> to have these things to give one's site just that extra pinch of individuality, I feel, is an important part of- dare I say it- <i>user sovereignty</i>.</p>
<p>Proponents of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620001155/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt">the so-called "Small Internet"</a> build their sites and protocols around the concept that the only ethical filetype to serve is unformatted (aka sans-CSS or anything like it) plaintext, and that it is up to the client authors and the users themselves to determine how they want content to be displayed. According to the head developer, Solderpunk, himself:</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620001945/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification-modified.gmi">Authors should not expect to exercise any control over the precise rendering of their text lines, only of their actual textual content.</a>
</blockquote>
<p>But this is already how the web works. Users have the option of using browsers that don't support CSS or JavaScript, or disabling them if said browsers <i>do</i> support those, or using <a href="https://add0n.com/stylus.html">extensions</a> to <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/">control</a> <a href="https://noscript.net/">these</a> <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/">at will</a>. The same cannot be said of Gemini browsers. Even <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620002252/https://github.com/MasterQ32/kristall/blob/master/README.md">Kristall</a>, which yours truly has <a href="../../../tutorials/kristall-haiku.html">contributed to</a> and considers the best of the "Small Internet" browsers, only allows control over a relatively tiny subset of CSS. I don't "expect to exercise any control" when I code my site, only suggest a default stylesheet so my website doesn't look like trash by default.</p>
<p>I must admit that here is where the oh-so-beloved terminal fails. For every site at its most functional looks the same, takes on whatever color scheme I have applied to my system at that moment. Remnants of a layout dependent on the bloated parts of CSS or JavaScript, like the infamous several pages of bullet-point navigational menus in Lynx, don't count because they detract from the site instead of serving it. But I am an outlier case. Lynx only takes up a tiny fraction of a percent of browser share. I know going in that I am most likely going to get a second-class experience. <b>I can accept the breakage of poorly-coded sites if that means I can surf the web without fear of anything nasty</b> (a boon Solderpunk will later claim only for Gemini).</p>
<p>Solderpunk, in his <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620002844/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/cornedbeef/why-not-just-use-a-subset-of-http-and-html.gmi">most recent post</a>, talks at length about why he is developing a new protocol instead of trying to reclaim the web. His main point is that he specifically wants a place where all content looks and acts the same by default, where all gemsites (or whatever term Gemini sites are called now) are defanged and neutered and cannot possibly do any harm to the reader.</p>
<p>A noble goal, to seek to protect users- except that this forces <i>homogenization</i>. All content looks the same visually. There is nothing graphics-wise to differenciate one author from another, one gemsite from another. Everything churns into the same putrid-brown sludge of walls of text. Although I may generally dislike the denizens of Neocities for some reason or another, at least when I go <a href="https://neocities.org/browse">browse through</a>, I feel like I'm taking a tour through fairyland and not a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620153035/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka">Soviet-era slum</a>. <b>(EDIT 2020-08-26: This is mainly only true for browsers that faithfully follow the spec of "one document per request". <a href="https://github.com/RangerMauve/agregore-browser">Agregore</a> is a graphical browser with Gemini support that renders my site just like how it's <i>supposed</i> to look, CSS stylesheets and all. Also, the <a href="https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mayvaneday.art/index.html">Mozz.us Gemini-to-HTTP proxy</a> seems to do this as well.)</b></p>
<p>Solderpunk argues that there is no point in trying to carve out, as he calls it, a "SafeWeb" from HTTP/S because there is "simply no way to know in advance whether fetching any given https:// URL will yield SafeWeb content or UnsafeWeb content." One can either use browser extensions, as I mentioned earlier, to neuter or wrangle into submission sites on mainstream browsers or use a browser that doesn't support "UnsafeWeb" sites. <i>Or</i> just build a protocol where one doesn't always have to be on the defensive, like Gemini.</p>
<blockquote>Safeweb status is inherently unstable by virtue of being a subset of something greater - people will start off building SafeWebsites but then later decide that "SafeWeb plus just these one or two extra tags that I really want and promise to use responsibly!" is "SafeEnoughWeb".</blockquote>
<p>But this is true of everything network-wise. Anybody on the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620004115/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/">Gemini mailing list</a> can attest to the constant attempts to stuff more functionality into the damn protocol, like content uploading and inline content, and Solderpunk's desperate vetoing of these. What is to stop someone from saying "fuck it" to the official spec and creating an addition to the <code>text/gemini</code> format or the protocol itself and then developing a server and client that supports it? Is it "SafeEnoughGem" then? Compliant clients will refuse to respect anything the spec does not like, just as my "dozen third-party plugins" will refuse to respect anything I do not like.</p>
<p><b>There is no such thing as a permanently safe web protocol.</b> Remember Gopher? It's possible to serve an HTML page with JavaScript and CSS embedded over Gopher. Graphical browsers will treat it the same as if it were HTTP. Obviously, as it stands, Gopher would have troubles with server-side applications out-of-the-box, but it's not impossible to add support to a server-side application to make a Gopher site just as heinous as the HTTP/S everyone so claims to hate.</p>
<blockquote>All of this is an <i>insane</i> quantity of tedious and error-prone work in order to do a bad job of replicating what simple-by-design protocols like Gopher or Gemini offer at a drastically reduced cost of entry: a clearly defined online space, distinct from the web, where you know for sure and in advance that everybody is playing by the same rules.</blockquote>
<p>You may have a point, Solderpunk, about Gemini being "psychologically liberating" since one does not have to defend themselves, since the interface for every site is the same, since implementation of servers and clients is comparatively easy. <i>For now</i>. Had I not already known the full control an HTTP/S website affords me and only <i>now</i> joined the internet as an author, I might have gone with Gemini for its ease-of-use. But you will not be the benevolent-dictator-for-life forever. All good things, all golden eras, come to an end eventually. One day you may find Gemini becoming the same bloated protocol you sought to flee if enough developers want it so. One day you may find your ant colonies flooding.</p><p>From the <a href="../../../nomad.md.asc">Nomadic Manifesto</a>:</p>
<blockquote>...there is no permanent safe haven for us in this world. We are condemned to wandering forever.</blockquote>
<p>I would rather have a dangerous, potentially devastating, liberation than a safe sanitized serfdom. I would rather have my body intact and have to learn how to defend it than have everyone's limbs chopped off so nobody can hurt each other. And I would rather have a billion sworn enemies than have even one person forced to be the exact same as me, than I be forced to homogenize myself for the sake of another person's safety.</p>
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<h1>"Free speech" kinda sucks, actually</h1>
<p>published: 2020-06-16</p>
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<p>Today, through the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000557/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/i-logout.cz/1/bongusta/">Bongusta Gopher aggregator</a>, I stumbled upon a person who pretentiously calls themselves <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000816/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/aussies.space/1/~freet/phlog/">"The Free Thinker"</a>, fresh with hot takes such as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000421/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2020-05-31The_Best_Thing_About_Gopher_is_that_its_Unencrypted.txt">"actually, transport security is bad because it prevents me from using my shitty machines; damn everyone else"</a>. While occasionally they make a salient point, the majority of their phlog consists of either crap I don't care about or crap I don't care enough to point out why they're wrong about.</p>
<p>But I can't bring myself to feel any sort of negative feelings about them, for I see a lot of myself in them. From their writing, they know they stand against the majority's opinion on any given subject. They have ascended beyond caring. They have ideas they know others will find idiotic, and dare to have them anyway.</p>
<p>But what is the "free" in "free thinker" supposed to mean, anyway? Free as in gratis, since their posts aren't behind a firewall (and thanks to Corona-chan, I don't have to pay for the transport of bits and bytes into my home network, either)? Free as in freedom, Stallman's variety, where I don't have to use any proprietary software to reach their server, to read their words, where I can remix them as I see fit and scatter them on the wind like dandelion seeds?</p>
<p>Or maybe it's "free from overt outside influence".</p>
<p>Can speech ever truly be free? For it costs calories to move my mouth, to make my lungs push out air to form words, to move my fingers on a screen. Nearly negligible, or otherwise there would be no such thing as obese internet celebrities, but there nonetheless.</p>
<p>Maybe one would define "free speech" as speech done without fear of censorship by anybody else. On the surface, one would feel inclined to support this. If it is technologically impossible for one to be censored, then one could "speak" without the fear of a government or any other body of people proclaiming themselves to have power over others silencing their words before they reached anybody else or stopping the signal once it had.</p>
<p>There is such a place where this is possible. It's called the ZeroTalk forum on ZeroNet. And it's an absolute cesspool of people covered by all of a hysterical liberal's favorite words. Racists, fascists, peddlers of fake news, misogynists, transphobes, homophobes... If it's on a bingo board of things Orange Man Bad has been called the past four years, one is certain to find that kind of person shitting up ZeroTalk.</p>
<p>This can be mitigated to a limited degree. Several blocklists, including MOAB by the not-a-cesspool-dweller Styromaniac, give ZeroNet peers the ability to filter out the worst of it. But blocklists only work by user ID or zite address, not by keyword (at least, last time I checked). And ZeroNet has none of these enabled out-of-the-box. The default experience for normie newcomers is to be instantly flooded with pretty damn close to the worst humanity has to offer.</p>
<p>Do not misinterpret me. I am not calling for censorship. But what is "censorship", anyway? Some, including the aforementioned ZeroTalk denizens, might define censorship as "anytime someone chooses not to hear what I have to say". Under that definition, blocklists are a form of censorship as they are a blanket mute of anything a list of posters has ever posted. But if the cost of removing this "censorship" is to have to choose between seeing the same uninspired string of racial slurs ad nauseam or leaving said community to opt out, well, <i>hasta la vista</i>, baby.</p>
<p>Ideologically, I know that peer-to-peer is superior to client-server for the reasons I laid out <a href="../../2019/june/second-class-citizens.html">a year ago</a>. Client-server inherently disadvantages those without the financial resources to pay for a VPS or the technical knowhow to run their own server behind ever-restrictive ISPs. And peer-to-peer is a lot closer to apocalypse-ready since most P2P systems don't require a connection to the outside world for base functionality. (Although I don't see how one bugging in would get much in the way of communication without others to be traveling and spreading their data around...)</p>
<p>But my personal experience sometimes finds me preferring client-server and the control it gives the person running the server. On ZeroNet, owners of interactive zites can't easily remove submitted content, if at all. They can only suggest to other clients seeding that specific zite to hide certain users' content.</p>
<p>This may seem desirable at first glance. But imagine that you are an owner of a small forum on ZeroNet about a niche interest of yours. Vidya, electronics, outdoor extreme sports, sub-sub-subcategories of a certain political ideology, doesn't matter. You and a handful of others are civil and self-policing and pleasant to each other. But one day the spammers find it. They spew slurs and ads everywhere. It takes you a while, but you manage to pull together a decent blocklist and make a sticky post advising visitors to use it to get back to normal, maybe even submit it to MOAB so the rest of ZeroNet benefits.</p>
<p>But congratulations! Your zite is now forever mutilated. You can delete the spammy content from your side, but so long as those spammers are connected to the same trackers everyone else is using, new visitors will use them in pulling your zite to their machine, and the spammers' user-submitted content will come along with that.</p>
<p>On a client-server forum, the admin would just ban said spammers, delete their content, and blacklist said IP addresses from registering again (if on a network with IP addresses, that is). Communities on client-server models have greater control over what speech they are allowed to tolerate. If said servers are on darknets like Tor or I2P, they have even greater freedom to decide their own rules, for the masking of their geographical locations and the extra transport security provides a pretty damn good (but not infallible) protection against government interference. This does not have to be limited to a single server; a chat on Matrix could be spearheaded on one server, with users from other servers joining, but the admin would still have ultimate control (last I remember; they might have changed it) over who stays in the chat and who gets kicked or banned. Peer-to-peer systems that rely on invites from someone already in the forum being joined, like Briar, have greater control than ZeroNet's free-for-all system over who gets in, but once a peer gets compromised or lets a bad apple in, it becomes downright difficult to purge bad actors if not impossible.</p>
<p>Self-determination is one of the greatest things I put value on in this life. (I will not call it a "right", for technically rights do not exist without the power to protect them, but that is a pondering for another post.) An individual should have the ability to decide who they associate and disassociate from and be able to do so at will (given the consent of those being associated with, of course; no such consent is needed for leaving). A group should have the ability to decide their own rules for operation and grant who they feel trustworthy the power to enforce them.</p> <p>I am not advocating for centralization. Far from it! I do not want the entire internet to become just Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and Google. But I see the people I read quite frequently proclaiming the virtues of "user sovereignity" without also acknowledging the sovereignity of the, for lack of a better term, "usee". If this site had comments, would I not be justified in moderating them so that I would not become host to filth? Should I be disallowed from preventing known spambots and attackers from accessing my site? Am I unreasonable, as "The Free Thinker" would assuredly label me, for requiring decent levels of transport security to protect my words and your eyes from man-in-the-middling?</p>
<p>Would <i>you</i> allow random people to walk into your house and let out a steamy crap on your carpet? No! You control (or, I sure hope you do or can) who comes into your abode. So why is it okay when it happens on the internet? Let those who want to roll in filth build their houses of mud and manure, and let those who aspire to excellence build their cathedrals and sacred meeting places. And when some from both agree to meet each other and listen to what each has to say, let them build showers to meet each other halfway.</p>
<p>(Innuendo not intended.)</p>
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