Living on ARM

date: Wed Oct 6 04:36:20 UTC 2021

A reply to Calpico's Midnight Pub post

Which can be found here: gemini://midnight.pub/posts/651

I went through exactly what you are currently experiencing just a few short months ago. No, you aren't phony, and your feelings are completely valid, if not somewhat unactionable. I'll explain.

tatterdemalion says it best in this thread by talking about "render unto Caesar." The web at large is a polylithic, rotting beast, supposed to live only because it makes money. In many places it has long since lost the luster and life that the old style internet had so plentifully. So, in the name of necessity, we render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. We have to pay stuff online using the WWW. We have to use modern emails that are actually accepted through spam filters. We have to use vaguely modern systems to go to school, take tests, work at home, and generally participate in the society that we are invariably trapped in. We cannot escape this without significant effort and the modification (or desertion) of our individual societal integration. So in the vast majority of cases it's easier to just let it be and avoid it when you can.

I've been a part of the smolnet as part of soviet.circumlunar.space for almost a year now. And before that I stopped all other social medias but mastodon. At one point I thought it was surely because I was turning into a crazy leftist "DESTROY CAPITALIST INFRASTRUCTURE REEEEEE" kind of person. I was worried about that. I later realized that it was, truly, an overwhelming fatigue with the status quo in the internet as we know it today.

I'm writing this from a Raspberry Pi. I was browsing Midnight Pub on Gemini when I found this. I have more or less stopped playing most of my video games (which is crucial for me is like the camaraderie you seek on the web is for you) because they don't interest me anymore. I have few reasons if ever to use Windows, and I'm sure as hell not buying yet another brand new PC to use a crappy OS they're forcing on everyone. (I've been on Win11 for months at work using it as a test bed to see if the rest of the fleet was okay to be upgraded... nope that OS needs another year at least, and some of our hardware might not even make the cut).

Long post short.. You're fine. This reaction is actually fairly common when people discover the smolnet. And you'll find that if you really do enjoy the smolnet you might wind up using simpler tools on computers, or perhaps simpler, cheaper computers in general. A major hallmark of this entire concept of a "smol web" is to take back computing and make it homey and understandable again. If that means typing blog posts into an i3 terminal on a computer the size of a McDonald's chicken nugget box, instead of my bigass gaming tower.. so be it. I enjoy this more and I feel more genuine.

The most important thing you can do now is to internalize how you feel and then figure out what the most ergonomic way is for you to honor those feelings while not immediately cutting the cord and freaking out and abandoning society. The world needs more thinkers and helpful people in alternative social circles and places; the world doesn't need more crazy hippies prophesying doomsday.

Best of luck out there.

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