Orphans of Netscape, part II
----------------------------

I started writing my recent post, "Orphans of Netscape"[1], with lots
of positive energy and conviction, and the first part of it came
together really quickly and easily.  But I found it difficult to
derive a good conclusion from the comparison between the orphans
of Apollo and Netscape which didn't come across as sounding a lot
more defeatist than the whole thing felt in my head.  I wrestled
with the draft for days without really making a lot of progress
on this front.  I became frustrated with how long it was taking
to get right (there's not supposed to be any sense of urgency
on the small internet, of course, but I had - and still have -
lots of posts that have developed unwritten in my head during my
recent quiet year or so that I'm now keen to get down "on paper",
so I supplied my own internally generated urgency).  So in the end
I tacked what I clearly felt at time were way too many caveats
and softening paragraphs on the end and posted it.  I didn't
really feel good about it and even wondered if I might take it
down the next day (something I can't remember ever doing before).
Instead I got quite a bit of positive feedback about it via email,
so decided maybe it wasn't as bad as I'd feared.

But there have been some less than wholly positive responses, too.
That sounds like a bit of a tortured euphemism, like "the war
situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage",
but I really do think that's an accurate characterisation, much
more so than calling them "negative responses", anyway.  A post
in Geminispace by Sunset[2] and a response to it in Gopherspace by
jns[3] are perfectly reasonable and thoughtful in pushing back a bit,
while still finding stuff to agree with, and I think these posts are
entirely worth engaging with, especially as I myself was not really
100% satisfied with my original post.  And it seems to be exactly
the parts of the original post that I was least happy with that
people want to push back against, which seems significant.  I think
everybody is more or less onboard with the comparison between the
generations which came of age during the space race and during the
early public adoption of the internet.  jns says the parallel is
"fun, compelling, and valid to some degree".  And nobody seems to
question the correctness of Sandra's initial insight, that there's a
generational cohort who (mostly) sees - and perhaps more importantly
who feels, acutely - this whole thing differently from (most of)
those who came before and after (exceptions in all directions,
never forget).  The question is what should we conclude/predict/do
in light of this insight.  So, I'll try explore that question a
bit more in this post.

But a quick update first.  You might remember that my original post
made reference to a mysterious other post in Gopherspace that I'd
read years ago and been influenced by but forgotten where to find.
Well, the author of said post, SDF user undo was one of the people
who reached out to me via email, so I've updated my original post
to link to their original post[4].  I just love how the small
internet works this way!

So, let's start with the potential shortcoming of my post which
is the most grounded in objective reality.  Part of my original
claim was that the smolnet population is dominated by orphans
of Netscape, or if not dominated by then at least that they are
over-represented there.  Following from that I suggested that one
of smolnet's functions was as a "retirement home" for said orphans.
I didn't claim that was its only purpose, or its most important one.
Well, maybe I claimed that implicitly by putting it as the first item
in a list of purposes.	If pushed I probably would have explicitly
weighted its value pretty highly.  Anyway, jns asserts that I'm
just plain factually wrong about this, and estimates that there
are actually more 20-somethings joining pubnix communities and
Geminispace today than there are orphans of Netscape.

This might well be true!  I certainly do not have my finger on the
pulse of Geminispace demographics; I have had my head stuck in the
sand for the past year or so (I am slowly but surely emerging, and
enjoying it).  Heck, just yesterday I learned about the Yestercities
community[5] for the first time, and as I was poking around the user
capsules there I found one by somebody claiming to have been born
in 2006!  That's younger than anybody I ever have met or ever
expected to meet in these spaces.  Considerably younger.  Maybe it
really is just my little corner of this space which is dominated
by orphans.  If people who have grown up in a world where the only
mainstream internet paradigm is smartphones and social media silos
are still finding something appealing in Geminispace, then that's a
(pleasant!) surprise to me and certainly runs counter to some of
the thinking in my previous post.  Huzzah!  The interesting question
for me is: what is attracting them here?

I don't ask that because I think that the smolnet has absolutely
nothing of value to offer to young people.  Far from it!  I never
meant to suggest that I believe that.  Of course the smolnet can
still offer something to people who have grown up in siloland.
Sunset passionately and convincingly sings the praises of the smolnet
(which she conceptualises as one part of a greater "Outernet",
which is a term I love!) as a clearly demarcated space where the
internet is about communication between genuine communities of humans
happening on their own terms, free from corporate control and from
the requirement to turn a profit.  She casts the commercial capture
of the internet as a repeat of processes which have happened before
throughout history even in non-technical contexts (and one of the
positive emails I got in response to my post noted that the same
process happened within numerous other technical contexts before the
internet, too).  I am in very broad agreement with her about this!
There's an informed perspective from which the smolnet is superior to
the mainstream internet which is based exclusively on considerations
which are timeless, and that perspective is in no way dependent upon
a special magic generational experience that nobody young can have.
No question.

But that perspective is *not* an easy "on ramp" to the smolnet.
You can only see that advantage by learning to question and see
through a huge and invisible system that pervades every aspect of
your life.  You have to be a magic fish who can see water, and who
can conceive of non-water!  It doesn't happen easily, it's not the
default perspective of intelligent people.  I grew up watching
commercialised television and never questioned for a second why
it was commercialised or if it could be otherwise.  The idea that
some of my favourite shows like G.I. Joe or Transformers (those were
cartoon series, once upon a time) were actually in and of themselves
advertisements for toys first and acts of story telling for the
sake of story telling second was so far beyond my understanding of
how the world worked that I had to read about it on the internet
as an adult twenty years later.  If you grow up with a heavily
commercialised internet, why would things turn out any differently?
Seeing through that stuff and learning to see the world in terms
of concepts like "capital" and "commons" is rare and unusual and
a lot of people never get there.  I would say that *most* people
never get there.  jns makes this very point themselves:

> You can't even explain this to most people, because they are so
> caught up in the reality manufactured by capital, that anything that
> clashes with that reality triggers a fight or flight reaction. Most
> people will either get defensive and dismiss you as some radical
> nut job or they won't want to talk about it at all

Part of the super power that the orphans of Netscape have, the
"X-ray specs" as somebody else put it to me in an email, is that
they don't need to pull off this big political backflip and adopt an
adversarial anti-capitalist worldview in order to look at a community
of freely associating humans communicating on their own terms outside
of corporate control without a profit motive and think "yes, this
is good".  They just *know* that it's good through their own lived
experience.  They had it and they miss it and they can recognise it
for what it is and its innate value even if they are politically
apathetic, even if they don't have "commons" and "profit motive"
and other such terms in the vernacular of their inner monologue.
Heck, they can see its value even if they are pro-capitalism!
There was *plenty* of anarcho-capitalist and libertarian political
philosophy on the early internet.  But without any direct experience
of being part of that kind of community, and without a political
stance that makes you question commercialism and corporatism as
a default reaction to seeing them, then what would motivate you
to seek something like smolnet/Outernet out, and if you stumbled
upon it what would stop you seeing it as strange and quaint and
backwards and slow and populated by nut jobs who think that stuff
you have done your entire life without a second thought is actually
the work of the devil?

You can squeeze some predictions about smolnet population dynamics
out of this attitude: that maybe the smolnet would be predominantly
built and initially populated by a large and rapid pulse of orphans
of Netscape, to whom its value was familiar and intuitively obvious,
who would be (relatively speaking) less politically engaged and
more politically diverse, and then that early founding population
would be slowly but steadily augmented over a longer timespan by
a trickle of younger people who would be (relatively speaking)
more overtly political and almost exclusively anti-capitalistic,
who turned up motivated by a perspective like Sunset's.  I think
this loosely matches what I imagined but didn't put into words when
writing my post.

But if jns is right and orphans are already a minority in
Geminispace, then there's less of a trickle of younger people coming
in and more of a genuine river.  And I certainly don't have the
impression that Geminispace is becoming super politicised, so the
reason there's a river and not a trickle isn't just because I've
underestimated how strong of a draw the anti-capitalist angle is.
Something *else* is giving people the eyes necessary to see the
rot beneath the surface of the mainstream internet.  Maybe I sound
totally clueless acting like that's a hard problem that requires a
powerful driving force or unique formative experience to achieve.
Maybe the toxic nature of living your whole life inside gamified
influencer silos and the attention economy is so obvious that even
people who grew up without exposure to anything else can still
come to see it for what it is.	Maybe you'd have to be terminally
jaded and cynical to doubt that this would eventually happen.
Maybe that's what I am.  In my defence, there was close to a decade
of time where saying a sentence like that would absolutely have
invoked the "radical nut job" response from almost anybody, and the
collective shrug of "meh" in response to the Snowden revelations kind
of left me with the impression that people would put up with just
about anything online.	I don't think you can *be* an online privacy
activist for decades without ending up jaded and cynical.  But if I'm
wrong about all of this, and more and more people from diverse age
groups and walks of life are starting to see the light and that's
driving them to the smolnet, then I am happily, gloriously wrong.
We can move "retirement home" a little further down the list of
this space's functions - but I see no need to remove it entirely.
I am convinced that it does play that role for a lot of people and
there's nothing wrong with that all.

The possibility that perhaps I'm wrong about the empirical question
of just how big a slice of the smolnet the orphans of Netscape
represent was not really the main thrust of jns' response, though.
The point that I suspect they would consider the most important one
was actually about the value and importance and power of dreams,
presented succinctly in three sentences:

> Our visions of the future were (and are) not some naive dream of
> an unattainable future. Our dreams shape the future, and if we want
> a brighter, better future, we had better be able to dream brighter,
> better dreams. We can't hope to build a better future if we can't
> even envision it in the first place. These dreams are essential.

I am actually 100% onboard with this!  In fact, I hope to publish
something solarpunkish in the near future which leans pretty heavily
on this very attitude.	Dreams can certainly inspire and motivate
real world change for good even if they never come to fruition
themselves, and that's certainly an argument against stopping
dreaming entirely.  I never meant to suggest that I had stopped
dreaming entirely, but I also never explicitly said anything like
"I am deprecating my old unrealistic dreams for the following shiny
new ones", so maybe it was kind of implied that I had.	Maybe this
is why I couldn't shake the feeling that the post carried an air
of defeatism, or at least acquiescence, which I didn't really feel
in my heart.

I don't think that believing dreams in general can be important
or even essential means that there's no such thing as a naive
or unattainable dream.	Some dreams function better than others
for the purpose of bringing about real change.	Some might even
be counterproductive.  I think maybe there's a "golidlocks zone"
for dreams.  But what Sandra's original post helped me to see
clearly wasn't even that the kind of internet I dreamed of was
impossible anyway.  It was that it was a niche, minority dream,
that most people would not perceive my dream world as a dream world,
that most people do not perceive the technosocial status quo as
a nightmare.  When that's the situation, the feasibility of the
dream itself is irrelevant.  Maybe that's semantic nitpicking,
maybe "the dream" is supposed to encapsulate all the prerequisite
shifts in social attitudes for it to come true.  If that's the
case, then I suppose I just really do believe a lot of Utopian
internet dreams from the late 90s or early 00s are unattainable.
Dreaming of those things in 2023 feels like dreaming in 1993 that
the majority of people would stop consuming commercial television
and radio and just read books instead.

I still believe a better future can be built.  Maybe letting go of
the last vestiges of some of my earlier dreams was easy precisely
because they don't really fit so well into how I think about the
future these days.  I used to think within a framework where the
future of the internet and the future of the world were more or less
one and the same thing.  For the orphans of Netscape, the internet
was the most important thing in the world!  But these days I think
a better future for the world is a future with less internet, not
different internet.  Well, less *and* different, but the "less"
is the bigger part.  Perhaps.  And all the parts of this better
future which involve the internet are themselves the smaller part
of the whole future picture.  I am fully aware of how vague and
handwavey all that sounds.  I don't apologise for that because,
well, I'm still in the very early stages of this ideological pivot.
But I know I'm still dreaming!

One last time, for emphasis in closing: I'm not at all "down on the
smolnet", and I'm certainly not abandoning it.	I plan to be more
active in it this year than I was last year, a lot more active.
I believe the smolnet could very plausibly grow to ten times its
current size, maybe even a hundred times its current size.  It would
still be niche if it did, but it might become a kind of visible,
recognisable, familiar niche, a niche that isn't completely unheard
of by and incomprehensible to people outside of it.  Something like
retrocomputing or amateur radio.  Something big enough to support
real-world clubs and events, at least in large population bases.
It can be a thriving little "dreamworld on the side" for the small
slice of people who are inclined to perceive it as such.  I don't
think it devalues it at all to believe it's unlikely to be much
bigger than that.  If you believe it *can* be much bigger than that
and you're fired up to work hard to help make that happen, then,
sincerely, more power to you!  I'm not opposed to that in any way.
I am always happy to be proven wrong when I get pessimistic about
something.  Heck, that's the great part of being pessimistic!
When you're wrong, it's good news. :)

[UPDATE 2023-01-23]: Wholesomedonut has offered the perspective[6]
of somebody who has made their way into Geminispace, seemingly
happily, without being an Orphan of Netscape *or* a raging
anti-capitalist.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/orphans-of-netscape.txt
[2] gemini://arcanesciences.com/gemlog/23-01-13/
[3] gopher://gopher.linkerror.com:70/0/phlog/2023/20230113
[4] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/undo/archive/t001
[5] gemini://cities.yesterweb.org
[6] gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~wholesomedonut/gemlog/2023-01-22.gmi