Why am I here (in Geminispace)?

2023-06-23

A preface: I’m severely out of practice wrt writing. This feels kinda meandering, the ideas don’t seem to flow that well and I’m not even sure it makes that much sense. It’s also uncomfortably woe-is-me and humourless. So… sorry, I guess?

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I think it makes the most sense to frame my perspective by examining my relationship to various modalities of social being. So here it goes:

Meatspace

Since becoming an adult, my life outside of the walls of my home has been dominated by two institutions: my country’s unemployment system and the patchwork of publicly-accessible mental healthcare providers.¹ Dealing with these two institutions often involves interacting with a revolving door of relative strangers who can have extraordinary control over one’s life, and it’s not unusual for that power to be exercised at a whim; particularly for someone who is not already in the best shape mentally, this can focus the mind in certain ways.

My experience of the outside world is mainly characterised by feelings of anxiety and shame. I have a keen awareness that others can perceive me as blunt and intimidating; this is a problem for the more obvious reasons of not wanting to make someone’s day worse for having interacted with me, but also because alienating one of my handlers is a threat to my fiscal viability and my access to treatment. My amotivation and constant forgetfulness give rise to almost complete dysfunction of me-𝘲𝘶𝘢-adult, which is a consistent source of shame; anxiety about feeling further shame results in trying to mask the dysfunction when meeting new people, but that further shame is exactly the result when whatever facade I construct is inevitably shattered. My lack of emotional resiliency (caused in part, I believe, from constantly dedicating emotional resources to dealing with shame and anxiety) can result in overreactions and outbursts, contributing to yet more shame and feeling anxious about interacting with other people.

Unsurprisingly, these are things that make connecting with others very difficult for me, particularly in the context of an ever more atomised society. You may be wondering at this point: “Right, so you have difficulty dealing with other people face-to-face? Isn’t this kind of what the internet is 𝘧𝘰𝘳?²”

The Web

Initially I stopped using Facebook for the sake of my mental health. Over time, however, abstention became less about self care and more an intentional political choice. I gradually became more convinced about the perniciousness of Facebook’s (et al.) business model and the noxious effect of their operations on social and political fabrics around the globe. I remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal as being the first time I felt like I grasped the extent of the political power that platforms like Facebook had accrued, their vulnerability to manipulation and their willingness to be an instrument-for-hire so long as it was profitable.³ My opposition to social media usage has only become further entrenched as an adult; my experiences in meatspace have made me almost obsessive about wanting to control information flows as they pertain to me, fearing what kind of decisions might be made about me if certain information is disclosed.

Something that’s stuck with me is likening the modern Web to Bentham’s Panopticon. It’s a nice shorthand, but the analogy isn’t quite apt: whilst both may instil in its subjects the idea that they might be observed at any time, and whilst both might be instruments of Foucauldian disciplinary power, there is a transparency to the Panopticon that is missing from the Web. The inmates can reasonably infer who is watching them (gaolers), how (the observation tower), why (enforcing discipline) and what will be done with that information (punishing those who do not comply). On the Web, the observers are numerous and diverse (surveillance capitalists, Five Eyes and other state intelligence services, trolls looking for the latest “lolcow”, those keen to misunderstand and ready to dog-pile, potential employers, and on and on) and a comprehensive view of their intentions cannot be known 𝘢 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘪.

A combination of my fear of the surveillers, a desire to adhere to my values and rampant social atomisation make the Web a place I don’t feel comfortable participating. More than that, even as a read-only consumer, the cognitive overhead of navigating the Web whilst trying to negotiate the unlimited variety of privacy traps is exhausting.

Geminispace: a refuge?

A few weeks ago I watched a presentation by James Tomasino at May Contain Hackers 2022 called [𝘙𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘣 𝘉𝘭𝘰𝘢𝘵]. I was vaguely aware of Gopher but had never heard of Gemini or the “Small Internet” so I thought I’d give it a watch. The description of a space away from the crawlers and indexers, explicitly anti-tracking and pro-community, felt like it was exactly the sort of thing I’ve been looking for; Gemini in particular seemed perfect with TLS being a mandatory component of the protocol. With the content lightweight enough for usage over Tor to be practical, it offered the opportunity to create an identity genuinely untethered from meatspace me.

Initially a strong appeal was the hackability brought by Gemini’s simplicity, but my first few days of browsing were honestly inspiring. The ability to create fresh identities could be more than just a salve to my neuroses; reading posts like those of [daintyeco] and [winter] made me realise it was an opportunity to express and discuss thoughts and feelings that I previously felt too personal to be possible to express. And seeing the threads of back-and-forth between gemlogs makes me feel like there’s a real opportunity for real solidarity out here.

I don’t know if I’m ultimately going to find what I’m after. There’s a good chance that at some point the novelty will wear off and I’ll have trouble finding the motivation to keep reading and writing. I’m also aware that this isn’t really as private a space as I’d like: there are HTTP proxies, crawlers don’t have to respect 𝚛𝚘𝚋𝚘𝚝𝚜.𝚝𝚡𝚝, and in absolute terms Geminispace isn’t even that small. Nevertheless, it seemed (and seems) like a leap worth making.

=> 𝘙𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘣 𝘉𝘭𝘰𝘢𝘵 | daintyeco | winter

Fin

Thanks for reading my first post! I hope it wasn’t too… self-indulgent and pathetic? I realise that many people’s reaction to the first section might range from incredulity to outrage; given my insane privilege and the manner in which I continue to squander it I feel like I’m not really allowed to complain about my material circumstances, but I see it as important context for understanding the rut in which I find myself.

I want to thank everyone who gave me a warm welcome on the BBS. It was a really nice first experience of Geminispace, and definitely motivating!

Footnotes

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[1] I don’t want to be too down on either; without them I almost certainly wouldn’t be writing this.

[2] Excepting Avenue Q’s contribution to the discussion.

[3] In retrospect it shouldn’t have taken me so long to figure it out.