This is a revolution, not a drill...
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Sorry, this turned out to be longer than I expected. I guess some ideas
just cannot be squeezed down to 140 characters :P
I have recently been working with asbesto [1] at putting back online
medialab [2], a historical pubnix server which has been up and running
since 1999 and that we intend to keep running with the original
software. And I have received comments from several people saying "Oh,
that's great! The good old days are back! Oh, it's so cool to use
vim-6.0.11 and bash-2.05b! Oh, and gopher reminds me of my days in
College when navigating the Internet was so exciting! Oh, this Small
Internet thing will get us back to the time when the Internet made sense
and the world was right! Oh that's so exciting! Oh...! Oh...! Oh...!".
My reaction to those comments is simple and straight: "Oh! These people
have most probably missed completely the depth and breadth of the
revolution that The Small Internet represents [3]..."
The Small Internet is basically a revolution. It is not a nostalgic
re-enactment of "Ye Internet of auld". First and foremost because in
1996 the Internet (and digital communication in general) sucked quite a
lot, in many different ways: it was accessible only by the small
minority of users who could pay the phone bills or enroll on a degree at
a good university; it was mostly run by proprietary and pricey
closed-source software; and it consisted of a wealth of hardware that
was much less powerful and much less sustainable both from social and
energetic points of view.
The Small Internet is essentially a revolution. It is not a pointless
luddite attempt to reject the modern world, because progress is so wrong
and we should strive to come back to an ideal "Golden Age" where things
made sense. Actually, I would definitely not like to come back to 1996
since my computing life at that time sucked quite a lot, in many
different ways. I was still stuck on a fantastic CPC464 bought 10 years
before, and I could definitely not afford a 486 or a 386. I did not have
a modem, and even if I did it would be pretty pointless with a bare-bone
CPC. I did not have a community of CPC users around, and no way of
getting in touch with an existing one somewhere else. I had studied UNIX
tools for a couple of years (mainly thanks to some old books) without
having ever had the chance of sitting in front of a UNIX shell and
trying them out. I had written C and FORTRAN programs without having the
possibility of compiling them to see if they worked (compilers for CPC?
Hard to find outside the UK and pricey like hell, so BASIC it was...).
So please: 1996 belongs to the past, and should remain there for good.
It's 2019, and yes, The Small Internet is indeed a revolution. The Small
Internet is an effort to prove that, with the amazing technology
accessible today to hundred millions people, we can achieve far more and
far better.
We can do much better than downloading 15MB of Javashit to visualise a
10-line table with the trains departing in the next two hours. We can
just download the actual content, which would be no more than half a
kilobyte.
We can do much better than wasting 1000 quids to buy the latest
hardware, just to run a much more bloated version of the same silly
stuff we were using 10 years ago. And then throw our shiny new hardware
in a landfill two years later, because there is a newer, more bloated
version of the same shit we were using 12 years ago that demands more
computational power. We can use simpler and neater tools.
We can do much more than spending hours in front of a computer just to
ignore 99.99% of a useless stream of irrelevant rumblings, littered with
kittens and pups smiling and shaking hands. We can access a wealth of
data and information, learn new things, reach new audiences, fight new
battles for freedom, improve ourselves and others.
We can do much more than using pre-built black-boxes which we cannot
tinker with. We can construct our own software, distribute it freely,
modify the software written by others, and share knowledge and
experience to allow others to explore new possibilities.
We can do far more and far better than being treated as products
ourselves, being told what we need to buy and how much to pay for it,
and being traded and sold like tractors or chairs. We can build
human-sized communities who care for each other, and prosper by means of
sharing knowledge, experience, innovation, technology, and culture.
The Small Internet is a fantastic revolution, which aims at building a
better Internet for tomorrow, for everybody. We are the avantgarde of a
new sustainable way of using technology to empower people rather than
exploiting them.
Anybody is welcome to join, but beware: The Small Internet is a train
that goes forward, not backward.
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[1] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/1/~asbesto
gopher://medialab.freaknet.org/1/asbesto/
[2] Hinezumi Medialab Shipwreck, Inc.
gopher://medialab.freaknet.org/
[3] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~katolaz/phlog/20190123_small.txt
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/1/~slugmax/cgi-bin/slerm?thoughts-on-small-internet.post
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~katolaz/phlog/20190219_fomo.txt
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~emar/phlog/on-connection-speeds.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~moji/phlog/20193001-boundaries.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/manifestos-r-us.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/the-zen-of-pubnix.txt
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~katolaz/phlog/20190205_ecosystem.txt
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