Happy Smol Earth day! --------------------- It was always my intention that one day, eventually, my long languishing smol.earth project would finally be officially and publically launched in some sense on Earth Day. However, last year I also promised not only my self, but actual real other people, people who had been giving me ideas and feedback and encouragement about that project, that 2025 would be the year I finally made smol.earth happen. Alas, Earth Day 2025 went flying by without me being remotely ready, probably to the surprise of nobody. I really didn't want to break that promise, though, and so I did in fact publish a manifesto on December 31st last year. I just kept more or less totally quiet about it, until now, when I am loudly announcing it to the world, even though the actual real date of publication sits truthfully at the bottom of it, an eternal marker of shame at my inability to stick to any kind of schedule. "Personal computing in the Anthropocene with eyes, minds and hearts wide open" is written in 8 parts, each painstakingly crafted to be 250 words or fewer. This means the whole thing clocks in at under 2,000 words, which means an adult native speaker of English really ought to be able to read it in under 10 minutes or thereabouts. I hope this is not too great of an imposition on the attention span of a modern reader. It's available to read via HTTP[1], HTTPS[2], Gemini[2], or Gopher[3], as you fancy. If something in it resonates with you and inspires you to do or write or create something, please consider linking back to the manifesto when describing that something (if somebody wants to make and donate a very nice, sedate 88x31 pixel button for doing this "in the traditional fashion" for the web versions, that would be lovely). Feel free to describe your work as "inspired by" or "in the spirit of" smol.earth, etc. It feels incredible to have this finished and published, like having finally been able to scratch away a yearslong brain itch. I'm not publishing it because I think it's perfect and I have all the answers. Rather, I'm doing so because I'm convinced that it would never become perfect even if I kept working on it for yet more years. The underlying sense of desperation and just-barely-avoiding-self-contradiction that I can't not see in the big picture aren't there because I haven't thought long or hard enough yet to find the perfect resolution. Rather, they're there because the very act of being a deeply ecologically and socially conscious "computer person" is fundamentally a very strained ideological marriage. The urge to do *something* is irrepressible. It's easy to do things which look or feel good on the surface, but it's extremely unclear what we can do which really stands up to dispassionate scrutiny, which is a very difficult kind of scrutiny for us to subject ourselves to because computer people are passionate about computers by definition. It's easy to end up feeling paralysed. I *have* felt somewhat paralysed, for years. Now I have arrived at an admittedly rather unusual stance which I don't expect to make sense for or appeal to everyone, but it makes sense to me, and I think it will allow me to continue being at least some kind of computer person, without feeling like I have failed to confront and take seriously my growing and very pressing concerns about personal computing in the Anthropocene. That alone makes it worth having written the thing. If it helps anyone else wrestling with these issues move forward in their own way, that will make having shared it openly even more worth while. While this manifesto is a profoundly personal bit of writing, I have chosen not to sign it, while at the same time obviously not making a secret of the fact that it's mine. This is an irrational decision that I might come to regret, or even reverse. The reason for it is simply that I suspect my handle is, for the majority of people who recognise it, closely linked with Gemini. I don't want any of the folks who seem to have some kind irrational hatred of Gemini (and that's not my slur for any- and everybody who isn't an enthusiastic fan, I really do distinguish the two) to see my name at the bottom of this essay and dismiss it out of hand due to that association. And I guess conversely, although this was less of a concern when I made the decision, I also don't want Gemini fans to start feeling uneasy about Gemini after reading this and coming to the conclusion that I've kind of gone nuts. Maybe this is cowardly, but, well, so be it. The decision not to sign the manifesto also kind of robbed me of the opportunity to acknowledge, in the document, those who helped to bring it about, and I do regret that, because while it was definitely accurate to characterise this manifesto as profoundly personal, it is also in no way something that I wrote, or could have written, alone. Let me try to make up for that here. An earlier incarnation, interminably long and unrelentingly bleak, was read by cat and I'm forever grateful to him for pushing through it. The final version, lighter in every sense, which is up there now benefited substantially from conversations with sundogs sloum and shufei, as well as with sunset (arcanesciences.com) and nat (njms.ca). Not only did they all help me improve the writing, but they also helped me form the necessary conviction that it was worth publishing, that there was something valuable and important lurking in there. Sloum also helped get me started with the HTML version and provided the dithered Earth image on the web version's landing page. Thank you all so much, friends. Finally, some of you might be thinking "okay, nice, a manifesto, and now what? What happened to that whole Smol Earth Compendium project and all the other ideas?". I will be frank that I have drastically scaled down my ambitions for what I'm hoping to do under the Smol Earth umbrella. It won't just be a single manifesto and that's it. But I think it probably will just be a series of documents like this one, published from now on I hope always on Earth Days, every few years. I hope those future documents will be informed and inspired by things folks do all over the internet in response to this one. [1] http://smol.earth/manifesto.html [2] https://smol.earth/manifesto.html [3] gemini://smol.earth/manifesto.gmi [4] gopher://smol.earth:70/0/manifesto.txt