THE WEB VS GOPHER

The title of this piece is a farce. That battle was lost decades ago. The web 
little notes nor cares that gopher still exists. It was finished once it became 
apparent that gopher couldn't be monetized (or weaponized). But this is not 
necessarily a bad thing.

The web admittedly is a mess. This is apparent in that a company could build its 
entire business model on simply being able to search and index said mess. Yet 
the web offers much. It entertains, informs and amuses. It offers a vast array 
of services and opportunities. It offers socialization with family, friends and 
like minds. But it also harbors those that would thieve, deceive or do harm. It 
is plastered with advertising at every turn. Someone is always trying to pick 
your pocket or pick your brain. In essence, it is a near perfect mirror of human 
society.

If it mirrors anything, gopher is a library. Gopher was designed by academics as 
a distributed hierarchical means of storing, indexing and searching plain text. 
It is a quiet place with few distractions (shhhh). It has the functional 
equivalents of card catalogues, shelves, stacks, the Dewey Decimal System, 
periodicals, journals, books and archives. And just as real libraries persist in 
the modern world in spite of the web, so does gopher. Both have something to 
offer the web can't provide: singular simplicity of purpose...


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