This is a revolution, not a drill... ========================================== 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. -+-+-+- [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 -+-+-+-