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So, our good captain of the satellite in which we dwell has written a lovely homage to the Mare Tranquillitatis People’s Circumlunar Zaibatsu. As well as outlining the history of the Zaibatsu and the smol constellation of circumlunarspace server communities, this post by Solderpunk serves as an excellent manifesto for minimalist pubnix (smolnix!).
One of the singular virtues which I most admire in pubnix / smolnet is that we seem able to recapture the sense of duration. It is not unusual for Sundogs to implement infotech which is decades old. Just so, on smolnet how often do we stumble upon a carefully preserved archive of posts from bbs’s of the antediluvian 80’s. There is not merely poignancy to be enjoined from this. (But isn’t that enough?) As a demimonde, we often have a sense of thirst for innovation to be found therein. Yes, what we do here is *innovation*, a word long lost to Orwellian cant. But it is by recapturing memory in this way that we can discover gems in the “memory hole” which may hold answers for a more human future. And toward this palpable need, we have barely begun to work.
Apropos, skimming our Zaibatsu server a tad, I came across this heartfelt post from the cryogenic vaults of “sol_solaris”. It deserves wider study.
I hazard that many hereabouts can appreciate these sentiments, have harboured worry for posterity as humanity drifts aslumber into virtual nightmares. The importance of the archive in our day cannot be underestimated. What archives and libraries truly represent in this era is the hope of generation, the ridiculous and lovely faith that life can find joy and so deserves intimate cherishing. We few contrarians who understand this about communication and infotech are hence custodians of refugia. A refugium is an archive of and for the living. Like Noah, indeed! And what we carry in our capsules and stash in our subterranean rodent nests is the possibility that life can be comprehensible across timespace.
It’s not enough, I challenge, that we lolligag in the virtual. Infotech’s legitimacy rests in our ability to weave it into the long conversation of humanity and the Earth herself. Infotech must link persons, not data. We must relearn the art of knowledge, of giving just place of primacy to knowledge as a human thing. For that, we need the poignancy of time, of speaking with the bygone lives in respect and sympathy. We must dare to imagine a posterity and speak with them, let their silent attention on us send shivers up our spines. The cults of novelty cannot comprehend that anything of worth endures. Novelty’s flip side is disposability, and disposability is the praxis of mass-suicidal amnesia. And we have seen where that gets us. The curative to the cults of novelty and amnesia must be as basic, as refreshing, as water.
Many have of late compared the social media era to dystopias past, of Orwell, Huxley, Gibson. Just so. But viz a viz our odd little communities, I wager the most trenchant literary analogue to be that of Bradbury. Like the benighted proles of Fahrenheit 451, our lemming humanity is leaping and skipping into a deep morass of ignorance. QED. We have willingly sold our species’ heritage and hopes off for a mess of plastic pottage. And like the readers in Fahrenheit 451, the living books, who must revert to oral culture to preserve their lore, here we must decide what we can remember, and hope enough lives through to teach posterity, should they be so lucky to exist.
I know. It’s an insane proposition, that so much might rest on a few retronerds in an internet backwater. But it’s an insane situation. And this is the rôle which demimondes must play in dark ages. The proverbial seventh generations tug on our sleeves to ask basic questions they cannot answer alone:
What was worthy of the human in our foolish jaunt to the cyber?
What should not have been toyed with?
How does information erode knowledge and wisdom?
How can communication methods enhance us to wisdom?
How do we speak to each other in ways which enhance the commonweal?
How do we speak with generations to come?
How do we listen to generations passed?
What do we do with bad faith and bad actors?
How do we know good actors?
Why did we lose confidence in our species?
How might we prevent tragedies from ever and always repeating the “rhymes of history”?
How do we make friends beyond our walls of fear?
Why? Why all of this? Why do we be?
It goes on like this. They are tugging on our sleeves.
In the Orwellian language of modern Chinese vernacular, anything from before 1912, or even 1949, is 古 “ancient”. No one in the “modern era” wants to be ancient, old fashioned. To be marked as such is to court social death; and even literal death, when the stakes get high enough. Such is the language shame breeds. And shame’s language mortars stones of prison for memory. Those fools who hold to memory in dark ages must learn the subterranean wisdom of rodents to survive. Gophers, indeed!
All this verges on the ideological, and if so I earnestly repent. What I’m proposing here is counter to the language of grandiosity, truly. Intimacy is what is shredded by dark ages. Health of human community or ecosystem, it’s all the same. The solutions won’t be found in big ideas, in big politics, but in the smol. Small communities. Small local societies. Small burgeoning gardens and meadows. Small redoubts which may survive, even if only in intimate memory. And in these refugia, these archives of life, if nothing else, if we have done nothing right here, let it be said that we dared to live it out well. We fished for gems in this odd digital heritage. We said, “yes, this is precious. This must live”.
So happy birfday, I say, in my unabashedly twee idiolect. Happy birfday, Zaibatsu. The Zaibatsu may or may not yet exist in 5 years or 20. But what matters is what we birth here together. What matters is that we did “swim upstream” against the mandates of the mighty in an era of amnesia, anomie, atomism. It matters more than we can possibly foresee. Posterity tugs on our sleeves.
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