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2021-10-16 - Fighting a tyranny, becoming a tyrant (on future of Gemini)

The title of this entry might seem puzzling or overly-dramatic, and maybe it is. I'm only human, after all.

I just wanted to throw my couple of cents into the recent discussion regarding what the future has in store for Gemini, or rather, what future we as a community are willing and ready to make for it.

The tyranny

It's an old story. Some decades ago people came up with a brilliant idea: computers can form networks. And now we're stuck with surveillance and JS-based attacks.

Okay, there was more than that to it. A lot more, in fact! Let's start with intentions, shall we?

Behind every great endeavor there is some intention, some vision for the future it could bring. With the Internet, it was an idea of connectivity and informational exchange. We could connect computers and do things. We could talk to out distant relatives and friends, we could educate ourselves! Humanity could unite under this digital umbrella and finally there would be mutual understanding, trust and peace. Humanity will be one.

Too much pathos? Maybe. But if you ask me "what was the intention behind the Internet?" I would repeat the last sentence verbatim, and I will be true to myself in doing so, because I'm fairly sure: _this_ was the dream.

Where did that dream bring us? You know the answer. You probably wouldn't be here reading this now if you didn't know the answer.

The Internet has become a tyranny. I'm not the first to have this observation: you have to literally fight with it to use it in a safe, flexible and efficient manner. The bloat, the surveillance, the overstimulation, the ubiquitous tendency to monetize everything at the expense of quality. HTML is made to do what it was never supposed to do. For some, Internet is now Facebook. For almost everyone, browsers are now browser.

When did it get wrong? Well, I believe the answer is roughly this: the humans are flawed, and the technology is not neutral.

The first part of this premise is, probably, too obvious to explain. We have cognitive errors to be taken advantage of. We have mental shortcuts to exploit. We are too curious to resist clickbait, too lazy to double-check information, too meek to not take the free product just because it doesn't align with some "ideology". And (partly due to all the same reasons) we live in a society driven by profit.

As a result, we are forced to use the global technology that is geared against us and we are almost unable to opt out, because it is getting too intertwined with how our life operates economically, socially and legally.

The second part of the premise may seem controvercial: as far as I'm aware, there's a wide belief that technology is neutral, but I beg to differ.

Technology is crafted by humans, for humans. Without humans, there would be no technology as we know it. I mean to say that humans craft technology to achieve a certain goal, in a certain way, with a certain consequence. There's the intention. There's also the unintended: the by-products of the technological process, because (again!) we are flawed and we can't foresee for sure how our technology operates and what it results in.

Is a military drone neutral? A nuclear bomb? They have a certain goal in mind, and their consequences are known. Whoever has access to said technologies now also has a choice: whether to use them or not. Their behavior is now affected by the mere presence of technology, _and_ by their essence.

Television is not neutral. It's not just a rectangular monitor which is of course tame because we could always opt to not turn it on! No sir, it was created specifically to be turned on, and watched for hours at end. Over time, it was developed in a certain direction: to be even more immersive, even more seducing, even more irresistable. It was designed to be as hard to opt out from as possible.

"But we, many of us, had opted out!" I hear you exclaim. Of course we did. The old tyrant was merely replaced by the new one. An even more immersive, pervasive, inescapable exploiter of our weakness - the Internet.

Was that what the creators of the first drafts of HTTP had in mind?

The resistance

Long story short, the initially benevolent Internet was hijacked by those who (consciously or not) designed it in a way that would eventually turn it into a tyrant: perhaps the least neutral technology of today.

In every dystopian story there is some movement of resistance. I'm not only referring to Gemini of course, there's a lot more to it, but Gemini is surely a part of it. The goal of this resistance is not to destroy the Internet (that would take much more to be done), but to merely resist its' allure and - finally - implement what was the original intention: exchange of information and forming of a human community, without someone to restrict or benefit from it all. We're in a good position because we have the lessons of the Big Internet laid bare before us. We know what went wrong and we know what to do to not repeat the mistakes. That's how the Gemini protocol was designed: to be as simple as possible, as restrictive as possible to be useful for the goal. Such was the _intention_.

Becoming a tyrant

Humans are flawed, the lessons often get forgotten, and suddenly - people want Gemini to be able to do _more_. Some want inline images. Some want HTML support, table support, Markdown support. Some want all of the above. Why not? It's possible, after all. Why not have colors? If we have colors, why not have images? Animations would be cool. I'd like to have my shopping cart stored somewhere. Look, a dynamic Gemini page! Did I mention CSS? Look, _a_little_bit_ of JS wouldn't hurt, why don't we just...

With the Internet, it all escalated quickly. With Gemini, it can escalate just as quick, even quicker, because we have much more technology available now. After all... We _can_ do it. It _can_ be done.

The question has already been uttered: if Gemini turns into the Internet, then what's the point of having it?

Let us pause and think about this: as a smolnet community, what do we actually resist? Google? JavaScript? The Internat at large? Let's dig deeper. We oppose unabashed adoption of functionality for the sake of it. We have certain values, certain intention, I will dare say - certain ideology, which for us outweighs the gimmicks we could incorporate. We abstain from things for a reason. We understand the law of diminishing utility, and that there's such thing as "enough".

When we fight the tyranny, aren't we slowly turning into the tyrants? I just want to say - let's be careful. The Internet is viral.