Reminiscing About When Everything Sucked

...and was therefore better

To build off the final line of the previous post (the bit about Gemini becoming a pastime for a tiny cohort of supernerds): whenever I explain Gemini to a friend, they're immediately reminded of the early, pre-Google web. It's very tempting to remember the early web as a lost utopia of self-expression and information-sharing, where people ran their tiny sites for no other reason than because it was fun.

While that might _technically_ be true, the early web was also full of fake search results and ads that appeared behind your browser and then surprised you with porn after you closed it. Even if you could look past the slow connection speeds and the limitations of 1990s hardware, the actual content was often hidden behind an avalanche of crap, and the atmosphere was just unpleasant.

Imagine, for a moment, that those problems had never been solved. Imagine that searching had never gotten any more reliable, and that we never found a way to get rid of the most intrusive ads. Remember how you felt in 1999 or so, when someone told you you _had_ to do some task via the web? If you were in an office or school environment, try to remember the terrible 1990s web interfaces you had to use.

If that had remained the standard web experience, I can imagine users getting sick of it, logging off en masse sometime in the early 2000s, and getting on with their lives. And with that greatly reduced user base, maybe nobody sees the point of transforming the web into the unweildy universal entertainment platform we know and tolerate today. That's not to say the web would disappear entirely; it would just go back to being a way for nerds to host pictures of themselves blowing up grills or whatever.

This is just my dopey nostalgic fantasy, perhaps, but one which sheds some light onto why I'm so interested in Gemini. And also why I'm defensive of it despite being a fancylad artist with basically no technical background beyond a fondness for tinkering.

But also feel free to ignore all of this, because really I just needed to write a post so I can test out the script I wanna use to update this thing.

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