# Links for 2019/04/14

# Links for 2019/04/14

April 14, 2019 · 2 minute read

Posted in: web gopher politics

### Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web

#### [A simple gopher client for Gnome, written in Vala][0]

This is in early stages, but it works fine for most gopher sites. I would like
to find time to help out with it.

[0]: https://notabug.org/rain1/gopher

#### [Shizaru, an opinionated web server][1]

This is a web server written in golang that attempts to "serve no evil" by
imposing strong opinions on pages that it serves. The default opinions focus
strongly on a "fast, safe, simple, clean, respectful" web.

[1]: https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/shizaru/

#### [Neocities Districts][2]

An old-fashioned topical index of a set of web pages. We need something like
this for the gopherverse, honestly.

[2]: https://districts.neocities.org/

#### [Water.css][3]

A simple CSS stylesheet with no classes that you can just drop in to semantic
HTML to give it a modern style without boilerplate.

[3]: https://kognise.github.io/water.css/

#### [Pondering what's between gopher and the web][4]

By the author of shizaru, above. What limitations of gopher can we overcome
without it degenerating into the modern web?

[4]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/pondering-whats-inbetween-gopher-and-the-web.txt

### The modern web and its politics

#### [Status as a Service][5]

I really strongly disagree with the author's position that status competition on
social media is basically inevitable and therefore good. But I do like the depth
of analysis of how different social media platforms have tried to serve as
sources/stores of social status. The challenge for sustainable social media is
to attract and keep users, while tamping down on status competition and status
inequality, in the manner of traditional hunter-gatherer societies.

[5]: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

#### [Counting the Countless][6]

How data science, as effectively an intensification of capitalist racist
patriarchal bureaucracy, threatens marginalized people in general and
transgender or nonbinary people in particular.

[6]: https://reallifemag.com/counting-the-countless/

### Politics generally

#### [Utility threatens to sue critic over drinking water complaints][7]

South Carolina news. Not sure if this is more "blaming the victim" or "shooting
the messenger".

[7]: https://www.thestate.com/news/local/environment/article228970169.html

#### [Stick to the Plan][8]

A discussion of centralized planning – how megacorps are, effectively, planned
economies, and how their success shows that socialist planned economies could
work – if we had a socialist society to implement it.

[8]: https://thebaffler.com/latest/stick-to-the-plan-james

#### [Bill McKibben Book 'Falter' Details Possibility of Human Extinction][9]

And, of course, if we don't achieve socialism right away, we're doomed. It's no
longer "socialism or barbarism", but "socialism or extinction".
[9]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/