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<title>Collectivism - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<h1>Collectivism</h1>
<p>published: 2020-09-19</p>
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<p>More and more I wonder exactly how much of myself is separate from other people.</p>
<p>When a radical feminist (which I am not) speaks of <em>individualism vs collectivism</em>, what they most certainly actually mean is <em>atomization vs enmeshment</em>. The social reality of things, where the vast majority of people both before and after the Industrial Revolution are unable to provide for one hundred percent of their needs themselves and thus have to interact with and rely on others to fulfill what they cannot themselves. Hyper-atomist as I am, I am still yet enmeshed in the social structures of my family, of my workplace, of my college. I still must rely on a ride to get to work on time, whether it be from my father or scheduled with the local bus company. I still must work in order to get money to buy the food I need to live. I still must comply with just enough laws and regulations in order for the police (city, state, country) to turn a blind eye to me as they pass overhead on their way to find someone to arrest and keep the jails full.</p>
<p>I have had many dreams of Rennica, an underground world almost completely severed from the world above, self-sufficient. The only reason to come out, to come up, would be for leisure, for pleasure, to experience something unable to be created down there in the depths. To explore a world one no longer had any obligations to.</p>
<p>I lie awake at night, wondering how much of my works I can truly call original. Can <em>any</em> artist claim to be truly original? Everything is inspired by something else, even if the original action, original actor, original event is obscured and unable to be sussed out from the new work. Nothing, save for completely random noise, is <em>ex nihilo</em> anymore, and even then, random noise must have a <em>seed</em> for the algorithms to use.</p>
<p>I lie awake at night, wondering how much of <em>myself</em> I can truly call original. Everything, in a sense, is reactionary, because <strong>everything is a reaction to something else</strong>, even if that something else is no longer the reason for perpetuating it. My borderline autistic obsession with privacy started as a reaction to my parents' overbearing surveillance of my private life. My anarchism started as a reaction to the inane leadership at the Girl Scout Camp I attend every year (well, except for this one), only truly calling it that once I was introduced to the word by one of the adults who also disagreed with the leadership. (We both got in trouble that year; I was forced to lie low for a few years, and she never returned to camp.) My love for writing was originally a reaction to watching my father spend hours on end typing into his school-issued Macintosh, a writer himself (who will readily wax poetic to anyone who will listen about how much he hates <em>Twilght</em> because it delegitimatized the vampire genre).</p>
<p>Hell, even this post itself is a <a href="https://www.bitchute.com/video/nvcJqLbsUbE/">reaction to a video I watched earlier today</a>. Had I not watched it, I probably would have spent the evening I wrote this playing video games or agonizing about the upcoming work weekend or the narrative speech I have two weeks to record a video of myself giving.</p>
<p>Maybe this is part of why I have had such an anti-internet streak lately (in my private life): in order for me to be here for you to read these words, I have to comply with an ISP, a hosting provider, and a domain registry; I have to publish in a format readable by browsers; I have to set up my server in a specific way in order to be accessible. And for what? To become a single brain cell in a larger organism, a part of a global hivemind, a node open for surveillance. The network drowns me in the dime-a-million opinions of others who I will never meet, inundates me with horrors that never would have plagued me had I not been scrolling on my damn phone. Human minds were not made to interact with so many masses of people. My brain does not have room for them all. Each person blends into one another, a faceless endless stream of throwaway jerkoffs. And I, by being here (although the effect is lessened by my refusal to use social media), am enmeshed into it.</p>
<p>But I digress.</p>
<p>When I speak of <em>individualism vs collectivism</em>, I mean the very simple fact that I am not others. If I can experience it or cannot access it, then it is not a part of myself.</p>
<blockquote>
"...if you are the one who is looking at something, then that something is not you. So right away, in one fell swoop, you know what you're not: you're not the outside world. You're the one who is inside looking out at that world."<br /> - Michael Singer, <em>The Untethered Soul</em>
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<p>I sometimes wonder what qualifies as "real life", as the "real me", as the life that "matters" (as if there could ever be such a thing).</p>
<p>Is the little Minecraft person on the TV screen the real me? But I cannot feel the bricks under my feet, the winter breeze in the snow-covered biome, the crunch of my bones as I fall off a building-in-progress on accident. I can see the TV and the controller in my hands and the console resting on its shelf. That must not be it.</p>
<p>Is the fictional character in a book I like the real me? But I cannot feel the winds at my fingertips, the strange smell of the dilapidated home I live in, the cheap soda burning my throat. I can see the e-reader in my hands and the words on the pages within. That must not be it (even though he is my namesake).</p>
<p>I take a break from writing and go upstairs to refill my waterbottle. Sitting in the kitchen is my father's new dog, already weighing more than twice as much as she did when he drove halfway across the state and back to get her. In the living room is my mother, engrossed in some cheesy soap opera, knitting needles in her lap, project already forgotten. Taking off on his bike outside is my brother, worried he will be late to his Wednesday night youth group at one of the myriad local churches.</p>
<p>I can gaze at their bodies, at their movements. I can listen to the words that they speak (or bark). But nothing they do I can influence. None of their thoughts I can access. I am my own Inside, and they are all the Outside in relation to myself.</p>
<p>I am an <em>individual</em>.</p>
<p>There are more than seven billion individuals on this planet. <a href="../april/outside-intro.html">There are more than seven billion versions of reality.</a> Were we all part of one whole, as frustrates me to no end when occultists chant it over and over like a mantra, I would think it possible to combine two consciousnesses, to merge two Insides into one. But given a set of twins who spend each moment of their waking lives together, going through the same actions and experiences, raised the same, both will be different individuals. Both will inevitably differenciate, as they are <em>individuals</em>, not a collective.</p>
<p>If I cannot access the mind of another person, if I cannot puppet a body other than my own: how can I be responsible for the actions of another person I have had no contact with? <strong>How can I be held culpable as a member of a group when I did not ask to be a part of said group, when I have no choice to disassociate from it or associate with another, when I do not actively identify as part of it?</strong></p>
<p>A male who does not sexually harass or harm females or act in grossly misogynist manners towards them is not my enemy. A heterosexual person who does not seek to restrict me from expressing my lesbianism is not my enemy. A neurotypical person who lets me exist autistic as I am and does not prevent me from self-regulating my sensory input is not my enemy.</p>
<p>An individual who does not seek to bind me to some collective but recognizes that I am a separate I is not my enemy.</p>
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<title>It's Just A Goddamn Protocol, Not Your Saving Grace (ROOPHLOCH 2020) - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<h1>It's Just A Goddamn Protocol, Not Your Saving Grace (ROOPHLOCH 2020)</h1>
<p>published: 2020-09-26</p>
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<p>This post will never make it onto Solderpunk's <a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2020.txt">ROOPHLOCH 2020</a> listing, and that's okay. While this site technically <em>can</em> be served on port 70 thanks to <del>Gophernicus</del> <em>pygopherd</em> on the Raspberry Pi in my basement, the fact of Gopher forcing the file selector ("0" for plain text, "1" for directories, "h" for HTML, etc) to be part of the URL pretty much guarantees that sooner or later there's going to be a link that makes a client try to parse an image as HTML or something equally ridiculous. I'm not going to rewrite my entire site to use absolute links just to satisfy a tiny sliver of a sliver of a percent of potential readers.</p>
<p>Recently, the people of Gemini have been throwing a shitfit on the <a href="https://archive.md/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/date.html">development mailing list</a> over the idea of serving anything other than unformatted plain text on dear port 1965. The reasoning, as it goes, is that somehow Gemini and gemtext are supposed to go hand-in-hand, one complementing the other, and so gemtext must be the only document type available on the Gemini protocol. Any attempt to offer more than the barest of Markdown is <a href="https://archive.md/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/002667.html">"WWW decadence"</a>, regardless of whether or not the formatting is actually decadent or just quality-of-life measures.</p>
<p>"Decadence". What an absurd notion! Is it decadent to want accessibility text? To structure tables in a logical manner: as <em>actual tables</em>, not just preformatted text that gets mangled come a screen width less than expected? To offer a default stylesheet so that one doesn't burn their eyes out with most browsers' default of black text on white? (<a href="https://archive.md/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/new-color-scheme.html">That default is bad for your eyesight, by the way.</a>)</p>
<p>It is no secret that I am quite critical of Gemini's prevailing culture of <a href="../../../poetry/g/gemini.txt">"no bloat at all costs"</a>, so I will try not to repeat myself <em>too</em> much. What a shame that such a beautiful protocol- mandatory transport security, simple request structure, an emphasis on one-off requests instead of a long-lived connection that streams data to you forever- is hamstrung by such a drab, self-burying, <em>collectivist</em> community.</p>
<p><a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-24__How_We_Should_Grow.txt">"We need to keep the Small Internet from getting too big too quickly."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt">"We are the mice living in the foundations of the Internet."</p>
<p>"We voluntarily restrict our use of CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth."</p>
<p>"We prefer small cohesive groups of people."</a></p>
<p><em>Who the fuck is "we"?</em></p>
<p>Am I required to sign some form waiving away my individuality in order to use the Gemini protocol? Am I required to join a religion, <a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2020-07-27__A_Book_Of_Proverbs.txt">be preached to about how I need to cut myself down</a> into <a href="../../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">something so small</a>? Must I bend over backwards to satiate the presentational whims of every person who wants to visit this site?</p>
<p>I realize now that <strong>it is not the protocol that is the problem. It's the <em>people</em>.</strong> HTTP/S is technically fine; it is the commercialization and the centralization that makes it so repulsive. If the entire WWW was Neocities-esque home pages full of glitter graphics and weird ramblings about niche topics and there was no Facebook or Twitter to be heard of, if there was never a JavaScript, then I sincerely doubt that there would be such a frenzied push against "bloat".</p>
<p>Gemtext simply does not cut it for me. At the very <em>least</em>, I need inline links. I don't want my posts to be littered with constant breaks in the middle of paragraphs in order to link to something, or to have constant <code>[1] [2] [3]</code>-esque footnote markers that require a reader to memorize numbers that <em>might</em> point to something interesting and constantly jump back and forth between the actual post and the footer with all the links. I want parts of poems to be able to subtly link to other pages (explaining a reference, or citing a source of inspiration) without links to destroy the artistic impact or just be a clunky distraction. These are not choices I make for personal aesthetics; they make this site more accessible for people with attention deficiency disorders.</p>
<p>Exalt Gemini for its lack of stylesheets or inline images? <a href="gemini://mayvaneday.art/index.html">View this website</a> in the <a href="https://archive.md/https://github.com/RangerMauve/agregore-browser">Agregore browser</a>. It looks exactly the same. Same stylesheet, same layout, same functionality. Were it not for the simplistic interface, I might believe for a second that it was just another tab open in Brave. The only difference is the protocol the data went over.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://archive.md/https://sawv.org/2020/09/18/fall-2020-gemini-tech-discussions.html">Currently, numerous Gemini clients exist that display Gemtext as plain text or as rendered text. Most Gemini client developers would not add support to render HTML. Eventually, the number of Gemini browser developers might diminish, leaving only a few "modern" Gemini browsers. And of course, the HTML fans on Gemini won't be satisfied with having only a limited subset of HTML. They will advocate for some CSS and eventually for some kind of client-side programming language.</a>
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<p>"Eventually"? It's already here. One just needs a client that supports it, like Agregore. There is no point in debating on a mailing list whether or not HTML should be "allowed"; discussion basically amounts to pandering to a faceless collective: "Hey, can I have permission to do something that you have no power to stop me from doing anyway?"</p>
<p>What a weak will one must have, to let someone they will never truly meet dictate their decisions.</p>
<p>One already has the choice to browse the WWW with a browser that does not support CSS or JavaScript if one finds those things abhorrent. The problem with this is having to deal with commercial sites like Amazon or "web apps" like Google's online office suite. Institutions like my college or my workplace can force me to use sites like these to remain enrolled or on the payroll (aka not be fired). But nobody is pointing a gun to your head and saying you have to read Joe Shmoe's blog about his hobbies or whatever.</p>
<p>Would you die without access to the information on a <code>js;dr</code> page, or a non-gemtext one for that matter? Then assess whether you value your life or your ideological purity more. The amount of people I see who espoused "#MeToo" and then went on to tell me that I must vote for the senile rapist Biden or else Orange Man Bad is going to do Orange Man Bad things indicates to me that you most likely have no qualms about compromising your values anyway.</p>
<p>So what if Gemini technically supports JavaScript? It's a <em>data transmission protocol</em>. What would the alternative be? A fashistic restriction of what kinds of data can be sent over the pipe? So much for "user sovereignty".</p>
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