This is about trying to increase awareness of what I call Our Global
Predicament, which is that -- amazingly -- humans have become such
a powerful force of nature that we're actually endangering nature
and therefor ourselves, often by the same metrics we hold up as our
greatest achievements.
Why Gopher?
A couple reasons. First, Gopher currently occupies an interesting
niche in our inter-networked world. It's one of the most simple
interactive protocols that's still usable on the modern Internet
and therefore has a much lower energy/resource footprint than do
most things running on web servers these days. Second, It seems
to appeal to technical people that are skeptical of the increasing
complexity and bloat of the modern Internet and see value in some
of the simpler ways of the recent past. These are the people that
I think are most receptive to viewing the past as a resource to
harvest rather than an antiquated irrelevancy. History can run
backwards.
About meta4:
I'm a 50-something guy with an engineering background. I first
became aware of our impending transition to some as-yet uncertain
way of living with diminishing fossil fuel inputs sometime in 2016;
sort of a late "peaker". Since then I've been steadily reading
though the likes of John Greer, Gail Tverberg, Daniel Quinn, Charlies
Hall, Derrik Jensen, Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, David Fleming,
Ugo Bardi, Dennis and Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Amory Lovins,
Albert Bates, Kurt Cobb, Alice Friedemann, Michael Ruppert, Wendell
Berry, Morris Berman, and countless others who have attempted to
address what's really going on in this crazy world and what may be
waiting for us around the corner. I previously self-hosted a gopher
called Simple Machines; for energetic reasons I've opted to make
use of pre-existing under-utilized gopher hosting.
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Contact info: e @ D . org
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Claim to Gopher fame: I coined the term 'phlog' back around 2003.
