I think a lot of the hostility people have towards Gemini comes from the frustration they have when they consider the absolutely massive scale of the modern web. Can a community of FOSS activists really fit the square peg of the modern web into the round hole of user-friendliness? Probably not. And I think on some level they understand this. Will governments around the world force user friendliness on major tech companies? Maybe, but probably not to the extent that satisfies us.

Browsers are a natural monopoly. The reason is scale. Modern browsers are just too fucking big. Bob from Seattle isn't taking down Google with his neato "classic browsing experience". Nobody uses Bob's browser.

So how do you rid the web of its surveillance scripts, telemetry-filled browsers, bad UX decisions, unnecessary bloat, manipulative algorithms and lowest-common-denominator pandering? Well, Gemini says you don't. This is where people get red in the face. How could you possibly give up the good fight!? Just visit websites that aren't trash! Well, sure. I do visit blogs that treat me well, but there's a reason most of the web is garbage. Because garbage makes money. Individual consumer decisions make up an aggregate of consumption behavior that shifts the market towards certain development patterns. "Surveillance capitalism" could also be called "you get unlimited entertainment for free, and in exchange I keep the receipts" capitalism. That's a pretty good deal for most people. And that's why the business model keeps getting copied. It's scalable, popular, practical, and yields the highest number of consumers of your product. It would literally be irrational for a business NOT to do this. When you block 30 trackers on someone's recipe page, you're taking a square peg and trying to force it into a round hole. That isn't a recipe page, but a tracking page that happens to have a recipe on it. Making it "work" is contrary to its intended purpose.

So Gemini basically asks the question "what if we made a protocol that is architecturally predisposed to being user-friendly?" Gemini is a thought experiment in making a tool that's for a particular thing, for a particular group of likeminded people. What if instead of accepting dependancy on a browser duopoly, the protocol allowed anyone to hack up a browser in an afternoon? What if the protocol was designed to make surveillance capitalism an impossible business model? What if instead of trying to turn the corporate web into FOSSweb and bringing everyone into web utopia, developers created their own web that caters to user-friendly experiences for the niche minority of people who actually care about all that high-minded moralizing?

So is Gemini useless? Maybe for you. But I found interesting blogs and I use the Lagrange client, which is very pretty. I enjoy reading peoples' thoughts on philosophy, economics, science, environmentalism, all kinds of things. And for the first time in decades, I feel like I'm actually surfing the web again, as I browse feed aggregators and click on random links, digging through post after post on all kinds of cool things. And it feels like a relaxing break from having to worry about what scripts may be on the sites I browse. I just click and go.

Will Gemini show me 4k videos of puppies being carried around in strollers at the park? No. Gemini will never fill that part of my browsing habits. But does it have to? Consumers have become so domesticated in their mindset that one tool has to do it all. Once the tool turns out to work against you, you find yourself choosing between living in modern society or becoming a hermit. There is value in letting a hammer just be a hammer, and not trying to tape a saw on top of it.