#gemini

Gemini is Useless

Gemini is useless: it can't do nearly anything that HTTP/HTML can, its design ignores most of the progress in web technology over the last 30 years, and its feature set is so minimalist that it forces the user far outside their normal experience of what the web should be like. Using Gemini, initially, feels disorienting and pointless.

This is how I view Gemini's value: "The Useless Tree" of the internet. Gemini's obscurity and lack of utility means that there are no analytics, no metrics, no ways to go viral, to monetize people's attention, build a career or even a minimally-functional web platform. No sane business would build on top of Gemini, and that is exactly why it is capable of having the character that it does. It is a "resistance-in-place" to the existing web, the attention economy and surveillance capitalism. While the existing web becomes increasingly centralized and commercialized, Gemini will remain as it is, frustrating anyone trying to extract value out of it.

Gemini can only serve this role by virtue of its simplicity and austerity. Once it is formalized, it won't add any new features. This may annoy users, who are used to a constantly developing and "improving" web, but its lack of new features provides are what allows it to be a genuinely different space online, one that challenges not just our attachment to specific platforms, but our basic relationship with the modern web and technology itself.

gemini://alex.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-01-08-useless.gmi