Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • linen

    a white linen dress
    similar to the undergarments 
    of ladies far back in history 
    perfect to haunt the bog in 
    I let you notice
    it's the only thing on me
    and step outside
    the breeze on my skin
    tingling 
    you follow as I run
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Life, before the titans

    There’s one thing I wish you all could understand.

    The way Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon owns the world? It doesn’t have to be that way. It used to not be that way. Their ascendancy should’ve been illegal.

    I was on the FOSS bandwagon before those companies took over the world. I belatedly fell off it and drank the proverbial iPad Kool-Aid in 2021 (and have also gotten into the equally proprietary, just more openwashed, "alternative" called Android in the years since) but I don't think that was a good decision on my part.

  • For quite a while now, I hate computers.

    Now, I grew up tinkering with computers. And I grew up in the contemporary milennial hacker culture around them. We believed in the internet as this vast open space in which we freely share information, connect with people allover the world and ultimately use it as a tool for social revolution.

    I spent my 20s when open source cryptography became a defensive weapon of the people against the post 9/11 surveillance state and believed that the same technology that enabled platforms like wikileaks will ultimately limit the power a stat ewill ever be able to enact over us. Fuck we were so naive. We all ignored the elephant in the room. We ignored the fact that all this technology existed in a small niche, carved out in the gaps between the capitalist giants. Piggibacking on their infrastructure. We ignored that we started to work for tech companies. That big tech began to assimilate our free software projects.

    We ignored all of this because we believed (and many still do) what all white people believe. That WE will make the worls a better place. That WE, the priests of the cyber temple, have the ultimate power over all power. Our computers were our shrines, our hackspaces our Mosques and our idols our golden calves.

    And at large, even the critics within the tech spaces still believe that lie.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Why I de-Googled

      In this article, I want to explain why I'm a staunch de-Googler, that is, why I carefully avoid all Google products and services. It isn't easy to do this in the modern world, because Google has become so entrenched in our lives. Dumping Google has far-reaching consequences, so there really has to be a good reason to do it.

      I usually write about how to de-Google, not why. I've generally assumed that my motivation was obvious. At least, I assumed that anybody who landed on my website already wanted to de-Google, and was interested in ways to go about it.

      But clearly it isn't entirely obvious, because people keep asking me why on Earth I would take this traumatic, hugely disruptive action. So what, exactly, is wrong with Google?

      Where do I even begin?