MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

Two Realms

published: 1-23-2019

 

One of the main ideas of radical agorism I became aware to about a year ago was the idea of the Second Realm. When one thinks of revolution, of liberation, they think of two extremes: either there is a government, or there is no government. The idea of the Second Realm holds that a Strong Individual cannot exist in a State because their existence threatens the State and because the State threatens their own existence in return; the State will attempt to crush any threat to its authority, and the Individuals will attempt to destroy their oppressors. Neither side has much to gain in this scenario, and both sides stand to lose a lot: a few thousand Individuals are no match for a state military, and yet, if the State’s reaction is too harsh, the people who comprise its military might desert and compromise the State’s strength itself.

Thus, the best solution is to have two realms: the First, controlled by the State, and the Second, controlled by the Individual. Each leaves each other alone, avoiding needless bloodshed. People decide to become part of one or the other through their actions. Most who partake in the Second stay partially in the First- some because what they want or need cannot be found in one Realm alone, some to offer themselves as a bridge between the two as a service. Each Realm has their own separate territories, economic systems, etc. The eventual goal is to bleed out the First Realm until it completely collapses, leaving only the Second, but until then, it is our responsibility to carve out freedom where we can and help others to escape.

In the same vein, we can think of these spaces that we inhabit as a situation of Two Realms.

The only people I know of who regularly venture out of the First Realm are probably the ones who are reading this right now. And I don’t yet know of anyone who’s successfully managed to cut the First Realm- the clearnet, the HTTP space, the thing that we at the Zaibatsu take refuge from- completely out of their lives. I know that I can’t, at least not right now- school requires me to use Google products, and none of my meatspace friends are interested in the idea of darknets.

Can you imagine a world without JavaScript trackers or Google or whatever intelligence agency presides in your government?

Wouldn’t you want the people you love to flourish in such a world?

But in building the Second Realm here, as visiblink puts in their latest post, we must be careful not to contaminate this environment in which we thrive. This lack of tracking, this careful thought put into every post, these tight-knit communities- we must be careful to preserve these. If this means we wring the filth out of our souls on the clearnet so that we may shine clear here, then so be it. In addition, we leave some things at the door when we cross over from one Realm to the other. We don’t bring clickbait, or blatant attention whoring, or try to implement the anti-patterns and tracking here that we left behind in the First. If a mass of people suddenly becomes aware of Gopher and wants to join, whether through our actions or some other phenomena, we don’t recreate the massive silos with millions of users that we left behind- we encourage users to decentralize onto lots of other servers, and even set up some of their own in the process.

The only problem I see left, really, is what we’ll do when the floods start lapping at our gates. Tumblr’s ban of all NSFW content sent a plethora of new users to the fediverse, which quickly DDoSed some servers into oblivion and left others straining under the weight, and of those that stayed up, they had to deal with the thousands of accounts that gave no damns as to the established social conventions of the fediverse and just imported their own culture in. Let users in too quick, and we get Eternal Septembered, and then we turn into a ghost town when the things listed above that drew us in here fail to regal the attention of the still-First Realm-minded masses and they leave. Unlike the fediverse, however, registration on these Gopherholes is manual. You generate SSH keys and send the public ones in, and the admin sets you up and lets you in on their own time. That alone would deter a lot of the people who would contaminate this environment, since there’s no instant graitifcation of joining, and would give us time to acclimate the new people.

Of course, most of that’s moot when the Zaibatsu’s registrations are closed. But we must keep this in mind for the future, whether the Zaibatsu opens again or we ourselves move on and start our own little pubnixes.

If nothing else, take visiblink’s words with you: don’t contaminate these environments in which we thrive. Don’t bring the First Realm’s waste into the Second Realm.

We have heaven here. Don’t turn it into hell.