Exploring the net again
I've been dissatisfied for a while now with the state of the internet, vast corporate data forts, walled gardens ruled by drug addict billionaires trying to squeeze every last cent out of people. I've occasionally got a lot of short bursts of time on my hands at my new job, so I have been reading more books lately. Specifically I've been making my way through William Gibsons "Sprawl" trilogy, I'll say Count Zero wasn't anywhere near Neuromancer (it remains my favourite book) but it introduced a bunch of interesting things, the loa specifically tickled something in my head. I've always dug the idea of a fusion of mysticism and technology, rituals and code.
The third book in the series, Mona Lisa Overdrive, takes the two previous books and expands on them. One character, Gentry, a cowboy, is obsessed with mapping the shape of the net. Reading MLO combined with my attempts at living on a different kind of net, I began to think of the net outside the data forts. By pure coincidence I encountered a URL that had the protocol "gemini://" on one of my smallweb blogs I follow. Being a curious tech nerd, I started looking into it and it seems there's a whole different protocol of net out there, with it's own structures and ways to access. I hadn't thought about different protocols in over a decade, HTTP and HTTPS being so ubiquitous meant I was blind to the possibility of something else. I'm testing out a client called amfora right now, it feels like a lot of gemini capsules (equivalent to websites) are dead but there's some stuff here and honestly it feels.. human.
This little experiment has instilled a desire to look at other ways of "mapping the shape of the net". What other protocols are out there I wonder.