Theory and Practice in Activism

There’s a common confusion, often pushed by well-meaning #fashernistas, about how change actually happens. They love theory. They love to talk about change. But when it comes to doing, things go sideways. Why? Because good horizontalists know: theory must emerge from practice, not the other way around.

At the root of radical practice is #DIY culture. We don’t wait for perfect theory or academic approval. We get our hands dirty. We try things, we fail, we try again. Through this, we build theory that is grounded in reality, not floating above it.

The Problem with Top-Down Theory is that when you start from theory alone, disconnected from lived experience, you go ground and round in abstract circles. Then, inevitably, someone tries to apply this neatly wrapped theoretical package as a “solution” to the mess we’re in… and it breaks everything.

At best, this leads to another layer of #techshit to compost. At worst, it becomes academic wank, beautifully phrased but practically useless, imposed on grassroots organisers trying to get real work done.

We’re tired of clearing up after these failed interventions. Focus matters. Resources are scarce. Energy is precious. The practice-first approach, is why we’re doing something different with projects like:

#OMN (Open Media Network): building tools from the bottom up, with open metadata flows and radical trust.

#Indymediaback: rebooting a proven model of grassroots publishing that worked, updated for today.

#OGB (Open Governance Body): prototyping governance based on lived collaboration, not abstract debate.

All of this is theory grown from practice. None of it came from think tanks or grant-funded consultants. It came from kitchens, camps, squats, TAZs, mailing lists, and dirty hands. If you want to be part of this work, great. But please engage with it as it is. Bring your experience, your skills, your curiosity. But don’t dump disconnected theory on it. Don’t smother the flow with top-down frameworks or overthought abstractions.

We need people to join the flow of practice. Let the theory emerge where it’s needed, like compost, growing what feeds us. So: Start where your feet are. Build from what works. Trust the process of doing. And please, don’t push mess our way. We’ve got enough of that already.

Let’s build something real. Together.

#DIY #grassroots #4opens #KISS #deathcult #nothingnew

Why most radical tech is pointless, and why #indymediaback isn’t

Almost everything built in today’s alt-radical tech scene is, bluntly, pointless. Despite good intentions, most of it ends up feeding the endless cycle of #fashernista churn, flashy new platforms, bleeding-edge protocols, or encrypted communication tools nobody uses, built by isolated teams disconnected from real-world needs or history. This is the #geekproblem: a culture where novelty is fetishized, and social usefulness is an afterthought, if it appears at all.

Examples:

Secure scrolling tools: Every few months we see new chat apps, usually cryptographic fortresses with no communities. No one’s asking what these tools are for beyond vague abstractions like “privacy” or “freedom.” Tools without context.
Peer-to-peer silos: Projects like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) or many DAT spin-offs build entirely new social ecosystems that demand complete buy-in, rather than integrate into existing networks. What results is islands of lonely idealists yelling into empty timelines.
Protocol over people: Many Fediverse projects argue endlessly over specs like #ActivityPub or #Nostr, often prioritizing purity over pragmatism. What good is a protocol if no one actually uses it beyond a few devs congratulating themselves?

Why #indymediaback isn’t a pointless tech project, it offers something truly different. It is not “new.” It doesn’t pretend to invent a whole new ecosystem. It is an act of digital memory, a revival of the still-needed infrastructure that once helped build radical networks globally. #Indymedia worked. It published resistance. It distributed power. It was embedded in real communities and real movements. This is #nothingnew done right.

The #nothingnew approach mediates against the churn by reusing workflows, social trust, and existing cultural practices. It doesn’t ignore tech, it grounds tech. Examples:

#indymediaback uses simple publish-form-comment workflows, already familiar. No #AI, no #blockchain, no obscure identity layer. Just people posting and curating stories.

It connects to existing radical spaces: housing co-ops, street kitchens, climate camps—places where digital tools are needed right now, and where the point isn’t building a unicorn startup but having a place to publish the truth when the cops are lying again.

Why copying #dotcons isn’t enough, in the #fediverse we so far have replicate Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram — Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed. This is useful, to a point. But all code is ideology. Copying capitalist infrastructure dose smuggle in capitalist logic. Copying invites the #deathcult right back in through the side door.

indymediaback avoids this trap. It doesn’t replicate any#dotcons logic or UX patterns. It revives a publishing common that worked before Silicon Valley captured this path. And more importantly, it’s embedded in a set of radical social practices: the #PGA hallmarks, the #4opens, and the messy, beautiful legacy of grassroots movements who already knew how to organize.

The value of #indymediaback isn’t just in tech. It’s in trust-based social continuity, the hidden glue of any working movement. Without this, you don’t have a radical tech project. You have a ghost repo on GitHub. That’s the central point, without real community, without continuity, without trust, radical tech is a dead end.

This is the carrot and stick we need now. If you care about the #openweb as a human value network, not just a protocol playground, you have to build things people can use today, and that people want to use, not because it’s encrypted or federated, but because it serves a purpose they already have.

This is where the wider #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. It’s not another protocol war. It’s a shovel to compost the inhuman mess we’ve inherited. It’s a framework built with the #4opens, to grow digital commons that don’t depend on VC, control freaks, or fashion. It’s where we build bridges between radical tech projects, rather than isolate ourselves in yet another Git-based castle.

In short, it’s a path of people over product, process over platform. We don’t need more “solutions.” We need to stop being prats, pick up the tools we already have, and start rebuilding.

Food for thought, and action.

Wilde Words for a Wild Problem: The Chattering Classes and the Death of Change

“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde

It’s always hard to speak honestly about the chattering classes. Not because the problem is obscure or unimportant, but because it’s hidden behind niceness, cloaked in progressive slogans, and too often protected by politeness, guilt, and institutional grant cycles. But speak we must.

The chattering classes, the mix of educated professionals, #NGO careerists, culture critics, fashion-forward academics, and media-savvy activists, are not driving change. They are managing it, diluting it, colonizing grassroots energy and recirculating it through dull, institutional filters.

They do this not maliciously but as a reflex. In Wilde’s terms, they are pretending to be good, and the world, trained in liberal optimism, takes them seriously. They dominate panels, edit the newsletters, organize the conferences. They speak endlessly about the margins, while quietly living in the centre.

“Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.”
— The Remarkable Rocket, Oscar Wilde

In truth, most of these “good society” types are indistinguishable in action, if not in aesthetics. Their personal brands vary, their #dotcons bios are carefully composed. But their analysis is safe, their tactics repetitive, and their outcomes ephemeral. They’re stuck in loops of reformism dressed up as revolution, always one funding cycle away from burnout.

And they smother movements, not because they oppose them, but because they embrace them too early, too publicly, too noisily. The creative spark of grassroots activity needs space, needs contradiction, needs the possibility of failure and disobedience. Instead, the chattering classes turn every new idea into a media campaign, a festival, a grant proposal, or a “community-led” platform.

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
— De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

We’re left with mimicry masquerading as solidarity. Empty gestures instead of difficult choices. A political ecosystem more concerned with optics than outcomes. And yet, the dilemma is many of these people are genuinely kind, they have good intentions, read the right books, quote the right writers. But they just simply don’t do risk or rupture or reality.

So, what is to be done about this “common sense” mess making? Two overlapping strategies might help find a path:

Build affinity first, not consensus, by creating small, trust-based crews with shared values and clear purposes. Don’t wait for mass agreement. Use common standards, not homogenized platforms, so these crews can interoperate, fork, and remix without needing central approval. Think modular, not mass. Connect without control.
Practice strategic exclusion (Gently) is a path. Positive discrimination has a place, but often gets captured by the same chattering class logic. Instead, centre the unfashionable, the practical, the socially messy. Make deliberate space for voices that don’t align with #NGO polish and academic gatekeeping. Create contexts where the well-meaning can listen, rather than lead.

And let’s not pretend that mockery has no power. Wilde knew that satire, when sharpened, could cut through even the most well-padded smugness.

“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
— The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

Well, maybe we can’t get into it, or maybe we simply won’t. The future we need isn’t one built on respectable panels and well-funded dead ends. It starts elsewhere. It’s messy, lived, and hard to quote in polite company. Let’s stop pretending to be good, let’s start becoming dangerous, together.

Pushing back AI hype and building better futures

This week, Dr. Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), co-author of The AI Con, delivered a much-needed reality check in Oxford, cutting through the fog of #AI PR myths and techno-dystopian smoke. In The Q&A by Professor Catherine Pope (Nuffield Dept. of Primary Care), the conversation explored how AI is being used not to elevate us, but to devalue human creativity, justify surveillance, and concentrate wealth and power in the bands of the #nastyfew

This wasn’t the normal breathless “future of work” keynote. It was a call to arms about the AI Con – What Are We Really Being Sold? Dr. Bender, known for coining the term stochastic parrot, highlights how AI hype isn’t just noise – it’s a strategy, to push unregulated, underperforming, resource-hungry technologies into every part of society. It turns complex problems into opportunities to extract data, deskill more workers, and justify more austerity.

We’re not being sold intelligence, we’re being sold plagiarism machines that mimic but don’t understand, synthetic text extruders trained to sound right, but to often hallucinate. Mathy-maths cloaked in prestige, built on broken benchmarks like the Turing Test – long since reduced to a measure of gullibility.

Anthropomorphism by design, responsibility by none, is insidious that AI systems are designed to mimic humanity. They pull users in through anthropomorphism, but when something goes wrong, no one is held responsible. Not the engineers, not the companies, not the funders. Just the user caught in the middle. As Dr. Bender and others have pointed out, there’s no “intelligence” in AI, just statistics, training data, and the motives of those who built it.

What’s Lost in the Hype?

“We used to do language translation better with fewer resources.”
“Cloud computing is a lie, it’s just someone else’s server burning through energy and water.”

These are the quiet truths ignored by AI boosterism. Dr. Bender laid bare the ecological, cognitive, and political costs:

Corruption pushing ecological waste: AI training and cloud infrastructure depend on water, energy, and mining—routed not where they’re sustainable, but where regulation is weak.

Erosion of trust: Models trained to sound authoritative spread confident falsehoods, degrading public discourse.

Security risks: Code generation tools are notoriously lax, riddled with hallucinations and vulnerabilities.

Dehumanisation of labour: AI doesn't replace bad jobs with good ones, it turns good work into mechanical “oversight” roles, where humans are paid to babysit broken systems.

And in health and care, where these technologies are increasingly being pushed, the stakes are life, dignity, and wellbeing.

What I have personal found is that Oxford is feeding its brightest minds into AI. As institutions bend to corporate funding and hype cycles, critique becomes harder, not easier. But critique is essential. This is a fight about who benefits, and who bears the cost.

Governance, the mess of AI tech-fix paths

Like the Luddites of the 19th century, we’re not against machines, we’re against machines used against us. The Luddites knew that the issue wasn’t the loom, it was who owned the loom. That’s why we need more conversations like this. Not just about what AI is, but about what kind of society we want. And more importantly, who gets to decide.

What could work on these tech pats is:

Smaller, dumber, domain-specific models where needed.
Open standards, not closed corporate APIs.
Tech built with consent, accountability, and ecological limits.
A refusal to let “innovation” be an excuse to undermine public infrastructure.

Above all, we need to centre people, not profit, humility, not hype. Very important not to be a prat about this.

#Oxford

This is what the #dotcons, control, is doing with the #AI mess. to us.

Metadata and the #OMN Path: Who Controls the Invisible Hand?

Capitalism’s invisible hand has always relied on hidden data. In the digital age, that data is metadata the overlooked, under-the-hood information that tells us who, where, when, how often, and what next. It doesn’t matter what you say or do if someone else controls the context around it. That’s where the power lies. Let’s be clear: the battle for metadata is the battle for the future.

Three Broken Paths

Capitalism: Metadata is hoarded by the #dotcons. Google, Meta, TikTok—they thrive on extracting context from your every click. It’s not about what you say, but what your patterns say about you. They sell this to advertisers, to governments, to anyone with enough cash. Capital controls metadata, metadata controls behaviour, and behaviour keeps the system in place. This is the tech-feudalism of today—soft fascism in algorithmic form.

Chinese Communism: Here, the state doesn’t outsource metadata - it owns it. Surveillance is centralised. Social credit systems reduce people to patterns and can be used to penalise deviation. The state controls metadata, metadata controls capitalism. It’s the digitised return of the command economy.

Liberalism: Wants to privatise metadata to the individual, to revive the mythical free market of rational actors with perfect information. But this is a fantasy—metadata’s power comes from aggregation, and no individual can match corporate or state capacity to hoard it. The liberal path leads to a slightly less abusive cage.

Anarchism and the Commons: A Fourth Way

What does anarchism want? It wants the social conditions for free association. It wants autonomy, not just individual, but community autonomy. The #4opens and the #OMN (Open Media Network) are an explicit political project to create this.

Open data: everyone can see and use.
Open metadata: the tail behind the content, telling you where it came from and how it’s been passed around.
Open process: how decisions are made is visible and changeable.
Open code: tools are modifiable and forkable.

The #OMN doesn’t pretend metadata isn’t powerful, it’s built around that power. But instead of hiding it, it makes that power visible, shared, and accountable. We’re not encrypting metadata into irrelevance. We’re composting it into trust.

Commons vs. the market, capitalism uses metadata to target, extract, and sell. We use metadata to share, trust, and build. The #OMN proposes a radical shift to replace the market with metadata commons. In capitalism, knowledge is hoarded for advantage. In the commons, it is shared for coordination. The market’s “invisible hand” becomes the commons’ visible knowledge, messy, partial, human, but rooted in mutual aid, not profit.

Hard vs. soft power, the #OMN doesn’t rely on cryptographic “hard” security. It builds “soft” trust:

You don’t need perfect encryption, you need networks of relationships that resist capture.
You don’t need top-down control, you need reputation, memory, and care.
It’s not about preventing all bad things, it’s about making good things easier to grow, and bad things harder to scale.

Yes, if the state turns fascist, they’ll try to use metadata against us. But they already do. The #OMN doesn’t pretend to offer perfect protection. What it does offer is a head start in building the infrastructure for resistance, before the rubber truncheons arrive.

This matters, metadata will happen, no matter what you do. You can’t opt out. You can only choose where the power flows:

Capitalists?

States?

Individuals?

Or communities?

We choose the commons.

Not in theory, but in practice. We’re building systems that work today, in browsers, on the streets, and in activist circles. This isn’t just tech. It’s a strategy. It’s a shovel for the compost. It’s a way to make new life from the old system’s rot.

A conversation on #OMN issues around metadata

Soft and Hard Process: Lessons from the Rainbow Shopping Mission

One of the most fascinating things about Rainbow Gatherings isn’t the food, the music, or even the politics – it’s the process. The invisible culture of how things get done. Spend some time in a Rainbow kitchen, or go on a mission for food supplies, and you’ll start to see two very different ways of organising humans in action. One works. One fails in beautiful and frustrating ways.

The shopping mission: A Case Study

Let’s say you’re headed to market to buy food for the kitchen. A crucial task. You need energy, coordination, and collective intention.

Rule one: don’t tag along with someone else’s crew. Form your own.
Why? Because crews are organisms, not schedules. Going with an existing crew means walking into dynamics you didn’t help shape. You’re a guest, not a co-creator. You may have opinions, but no influence. Frustration is inevitable.

But go with your crew, formed from bonds of trust, shared experience, and a bit of laughter, and suddenly the chaos flows smoothly. You’re not fighting inertia, you’re moving together. This logic applies everywhere at Rainbow, from the kitchen to the fire circle to the compost pit.

Hard vs Soft Process

What we’re seeing here is the tension between hard organising and soft organising.
Hard Process

Open to all

Formalised roles

Meetings, plans, rules

Transparency as a virtue

Bureaucracy by default

This is what liberal society champions. It looks democratic, fair, and scalable. But in practice, it often just surfaces those who already have confidence, cultural capital, and practice at dominating spaces. In hard structures, the most forceful voices rise. The quieter, the hesitant, the new—these are drowned out or self-censor.

Soft Process

Based on trust and relationships

Closed but not exclusive

Grows from what already exists

Nurtures rather than commands

Invisible until you’re inside

Soft organising is suspicious to many. It feels messy. It looks unaccountable. But it works because it builds from care. You know who you’re working with. You know what they’re good at. You aren’t managing people – you’re collaborating with them. And this is crucial: soft organising grows strong crews. You don’t recruit with a megaphone. You spot someone passing by, ask them to chop carrots or build a bench, because you’ve already seen them do something well. They come with a task in mind, and they stay because the connection is real.

Why soft builds better, hard, the insight: you can’t build anything strong using only hard organising. But soft organising can grow hard structures, when needed, and make them resilient. Hard organising, on its own, creates brittle forms. They might stand up, but they rarely endure. And when they fall, they leave no roots. They just vanish.

Soft organising builds roots. Deep ones. It surfaces overlooked skills, creates space for powerful people to step back, and gives new talent a chance to grow. It creates a culture where people can show up not with a résumé, but with presence and intention. From there, you can build all the structure you want. It will be flexible, not rigid. Adaptive, not defensive.

Learning from “Disorganisations” intentional communities, activist camps, temporary autonomous zones like Rainbow – these are spaces that function on the edge of collapse. Yet somehow, they often succeed in surprising ways. That’s because they use soft process to survive, even if they don’t always name it. Yes, they can be a mess. But they’re also laboratories. In their dysfunction, you’ll find hidden patterns that work: invisible flows of trust, leadership without authority, accountability without enforcement.

If we want to build humane, liberatory systems, whether tech, political, or social, we need to start here. Not with hierarchy. Not with paperwork. But with relationships, trust, and the soft skills most of our society has tried to forget.

Soft is not weak. Soft is the soil. It’s where the hard stuff grows.

Note: this is kinda dysfunctional, but It’s how things work, we need to balance these two things.

America was always violent -You likely just have not noticed

The thing most liberals forget is that Americans are a notoriously politically violent bunch. From the Boston Tea Party to armed labour uprisings, from the Black Panthers to white vigilantes, from state crackdowns to citizen riots – the American story has always been soaked in political violence, the “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, all that was deliberately erased, rewritten, smoothed over, sold back as Disney-branded rebellion or CNN documentary tragedy. Out of sight, out of mind, out of options. That was the bipartisan strategy from Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Obama. Not to resolve pressure, but to suppress it.

The return of reality, is what we’re seeing now, this isn’t some “unprecedented crisis.” It’s a return to form. It’s the American normal that elitists have been desperately trying to keep hidden under plastic for decades. The only thing that’s changed is this: There’s no longer any outlet for the pressure, no trusted media, no real opposition party, no economic ladder, no commons to gather in, just debt, anxiety, and screens.

What now shocks the political class isn’t the chaos, it’s that there’s no release valve except their own collapse. They’re not afraid of the people rising up, They’re afraid that the state will be held accountable, and lose.

We were at this moment before in the USA, when the new deal was a white flag, let’s go back for a moment, FDR’s “New Deal” wasn’t a gift, It was a surrender, after 50 years of exploitation by the robber barons and their cronies, the country was on the brink. Labour revolts, communist organizing, anarchist movements, real threats to the state, were everywhere. FDR was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. The New Deal was a bargain: “Here’s a little back. Don’t take the rest.” It worked, temporarily. But only because people still had leverage.

Now? Every President since has mostly just tried to keep the lid on, offering less and less in return, and weaponizing the “culture war” as a distraction. By the Clinton era, the deal was done.

Deregulate the economy.

Outsource everything.

Privatize everything else.

Turn politics into a spectacle.

Keep the pressure building—but never release it.

And now here we are, in a real mess, with a poisoned society from 40 years of #deathcult worship, the political class are now standing naked before the onrushing #climatechaos and social break down, stripped of their sacred robes.

Spiritual poison: stripped rituals, atomized families, forgotten connections.
Social poison: movements fractured, solidarities lost to infighting.
Civic poison: institutions hollowed out, education turned to obedience training.
Media poison: truth for sale, journalism devalued, platforms turned to weapons.
Cultural poison: every feeling a product, every hope a commodity, every act of care reduced to an app.

This should worry the #nastyfew who are propping up this political class. We, the people, are still numbed, distracted, transactioned, algorithmically isolated, so still we can barely even imagine a world otherwise. And still the pressure builds, the worst mistake they’ve made is believing they can just keep doing this, that there are no consequences, that people will always submit if fed enough Netflix, fentanyl, and Uber Eats.

But history doesn’t work that way, when a government wages war on its people… Eventually, it loses, not because the people are strong, but because the government is brittle. The lie of modern technocratic rule is that you can govern without trust, coerce without violence, suppress without blowback. That myth has shattered now, collapse is a trajectory, not a theory.

So what now? We need to rebuilding beyond collapse. This is where our work comes in. #OMN, #indymediaback, the #openweb they’re not just nice ideas, they’re survival infrastructures. We can’t wait for a revolution that will never be televised or appear in our algorithmic feeds. We can’t expect institutions to reform themselves. We need:

Public spaces without paywalls

Media systems without gatekeepers

Tech that serves people, not platforms

Governance that comes from below, not above

This isn’t just political, it’s existential. Either we rebuild from the rubble of this poisoned world, or we get buried beneath it.

The choice isn’t “radicalism” or “reform.”
It’s resistance or thoughtlessness.
Collapse or commons.

You decide.

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

Everyone knows we are in a mess, but most people are too distracted to do anything to change the current path. We’ll keep on this path – scrolling, clicking, consuming – because the current mess we live in is incredibly skilled at hiding consequences.

The environmental cost is buried under greenwashing. BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” Shell sponsors art galleries. Apple makes claims about “carbon-neutral” devices—then glues batteries shut to prevent repair. Meanwhile, rare earth extraction, e-waste, and fast fashion destroy ecosystems from Congo to Cambodia.
The labour cost is outsourced, invisibilized, atomized. Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles to keep pace with surveillance timers. Foxconn installs suicide nets around dorms. Uber calls drivers “partners” while avoiding all responsibility for their lives or livelihoods.
The mental health cost is reframed as personal failure. You’re anxious and burnt out? Must be your mindset. Try a mindfulness app. Maybe eat better. Maybe “grind smarter.” Meanwhile, the structure of your life—precarious work, information overload, climate dread, is never questioned.
The social collapse is blamed on the “irresponsible poor” or “divisive politics.” Communities are gutted by austerity, housing is hoarded by speculators, but you’re told it’s your neighbour’s fault—immigrants, the unemployed, the other political tribe. The system throws fuel on every fire, then lectures you on “civility.”

Every crisis becomes your problem, not the system’s. This is because the #deathcult we unconsciously worship doesn’t just produce stuff, it produces numbness, distraction, and above all, thoughtlessness. A never-ending now, stripped of memory and consequence.

And the moment you try to pull back the curtain? There’s a brand, an #NGO ready to sell you “resistance” too. It’s a system designed to make rebellion feel like a clone lifestyle choice.

A t-shirt with a slogan.
A rainbow flag slapped on a weapons manufacturer.
A “climate justice” conference sponsored by Shell.
A new Netflix docuseries about the thing you’ll forget by next week.

#KISS resistance requires more than outrage, we don’t just need better tech or better politics. We need:

Better attention — to what's real and what's propaganda

Slower thinking — against the churn of hot takes and algorithms

Reclaimed time — stolen back from platform metrics and work schedules

Spaces for consequence — where the impacts of our actions (or inactions) are visible, shareable, accountable

That’s why #DIY infrastructure, the commons, and openness, matter. That’s why we reboot the #openweb, with the #4opens, with the #OMN, with peer-to-peer tools, and with each other. And we need to do this before thoughtlessness becomes all we have left in the #mainstreaming mess.

Tech princes and the #deathcult

What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework: “Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.” Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed social groups.

Closed algorithms.

Closed hardware.

Closed governance.

And on the flip side, the things that should be protected, our intimate conversations, our location, our health data, are often wide open to surveillance capitalism and state control. What the current “common sense” dogma gets wrong? What is missing is the idea that mainstream tech culture, privacy absolutists, and many crypto/anarchist types:

Almost all good social power comes from OPEN.
Most social evils take root in CLOSED spaces.

When people organize together in the open, they create commons, accountability, and momentum. They make movements. When decisions are made behind closed doors, they breed conspiracy, hierarchy, abuse, and alienation.

It’s not just about what is open or closed, it’s about who controls the boundary, and what happens on each side. If we close everything… If we follow the logic of total lockdown, of defaulting to encryption, of mistrust-by-design… then what we’re left with is only the closed. This leads to a brutal truth, the powers that dominate in closed systems are rarely the good ones.
Secrecy benefits the powerful far more than the powerless. Always has.

So when we let the #openweb collapse and treat it as naive, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re giving up the last space where power might be accountable, where ideas might circulate freely, where we might build something together.

Examples: When openness was lost. Let’s talk about a real-world case of #Diaspora vs. #RSS. 15 years ago, Diaspora emerged with crypto-anarchist hype as the alternative to Facebook. It was secure, decentralized, and… mostly closed. It emphasized encryption and privacy, but lacked network effects, openness, and simple flows of information.

In the same era, we already had #RSS, a beautifully open, decentralized protocol. It powered blogs, podcasts, news aggregators, without permission or centralized control. But the “Young #fashionistas ” of the scene shouted down RSS as old, irrelevant, and too “open.” They wanted to start fresh, with new protocols, new silos, new power. They abandoned the working #openweb to build “secure” ghost towns.

Fast-forward a decade, and now we’re rebuilding in the Fediverse with RSS+ as #ActivityPub. The same functionality. The same ideals, just more code and more complexity. That 10-year gap is the damage caused by the #geekproblem, the failure to build with the past, and for real people.

So what is the #geekproblem? At root, it’s a worldview issue. A failure to think about human beings in real social contexts. Geeks (broadly speaking) assume:

People are adversaries or threats (thus: encrypt everything),
Centralization is evil, but decentralization is always pure (thus: build silos of one),
Social complexity can be reduced to elegant protocols (thus: design first, use later).
But technology isn’t neutral. It reflects ideologies. And if we don’t name those ideologies, they drive the project blindly.

A place to start is to map your ideology, want to understand how you think about openness vs. closedness? Start by reflecting on where you sit ideologically, not in labels, but in instincts. A quick sketch:

Conservatism: Assumes order, tradition, and authority are necessary. Values stability, hierarchy, and often privacy.

Liberalism: Believes in open society, individual freedom, transparency, and market-based solutions.

Anarchism: Rejects imposed authority, promotes mutual aid, horizontal structures, and often radical openness.

None of these are “right,” but understanding where you lean helps clarify why you walk, build or support certain tools. If you’re building tools for the #openweb, these questions matter:

Do you default to closed and secure, or open and messy?

Who do you trust with knowledge—individuals or communities?

Do you believe good things come from control, or emergence?

These are sociological questions, not just technical ones, maybe start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies. Where do we go from here? Let’s bring this back to the openweb and the projects we’re trying to build, like:

#OMN (Open Media Network)

#MakingHistory

#indymediaback

#Fediverse

#P2P tools (DAT, Nostr, SSB, etc.)

All of these projects struggle with the tension between openness and privacy, between usability and purity, between federation and anarchy. But if we start with clear values, and an honest reflection on the world we want to create, we can avoid the worst traps. Let’s say it plainly:

Not everything should be open. But if we close everything, we lose what’s worth protecting.

Let’s talk: What do you think should be closed? What must be kept open at all costs? What’s your ideological instinct, and how does it shape your view of the #openweb?

Capitalism is a hostage situation -Not an economy

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That’s not a functioning economy, it’s not freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.

This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that engineers artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.

But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was often local and participatory.

The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.

This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.

It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.

Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:

Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.

Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.

Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.

Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.

OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.

The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t just gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.

The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.

You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.

#OMN #MakingHistory #4opens #openweb #p2p #indymediaback #geekproblem #commons #decentralize #cooperative #foss #degrowth #resilience

UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated

Real world tackling the #geekproblem

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.

The work we need is bridges building, let’s try this ere “P2P news app” built on #dat Hypercore/Hyperswarm is exciting. Yes, it’s similar to Nostr in structure: distributed relays, client-side aggregation, unstoppable flow. But as with Nostr tech isn’t enough. We are social creatures. A usable system needs:

Clear use cases rooted in human relationships – not just tech possibilities.
User-facing front-ends that invite participation, not gate it.
Interoperability with existing protocols (ActivityPub, ATProto, etc.) to avoid siloing.
Bridges between architectures – e.g. client-server ↔ P2P – so that real-world adoption is gradual and survivable.

The good news, the wider #OMN project is already a sane path forward, with a #KISS hybrid path. The plan is in bridging #P2P and client-server as a way out of this. Something like:

A lightweight server bridge that serves data to client-server users (ActivityPub, fediverse, legacy web),

While simultaneously feeding a P2P mesh, with each peer storing and distributing redundant objects,

So that over time, client-server becomes the bootstrapping layer, and #P2P becomes the long-term archive + resistance layer.

“Data is just object flows – how the user gets the object is irrelevant technically.”

This is the kind of thinking that gets us out of the traps, by moving from protocols to people. This isn’t just about code, it’s about culture. The #geekproblem won’t be solved by more architecture diagrams, it needs movements that embrace imperfection and prioritizes social use, visible, working front-ends people can contribute to and understand, documentation and tooling that builds capacity in others, not silos around the brilliant few.

What next? For the devs:

Can the p2p-news-app codebase be modularized to plug into #OMN projects as a data backend, even in a basic way?

Can we bridge shared data objects across protocols (e.g. post metadata flows from P2P → ActivityPub), even if janky at first?

Can we prototype a simple but cross protocol usable frontend, the examples is the work on #makeinghistory and #indymediaback, that lets non-geeks see and touch the network they’re part of?

Yes, for the movement, keep things messy but moving. Avoid dead ends by always asking:

"How does this empower non-technical users to organize, document, and publish together?"

Keep the tech grounded in the social fabric, the activists, journalists, organisers, and rebels this is all meant to serve. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I can help,” please step forward. There’s space in wider tech/social #OMN and #MakingHistory for everyone, coders, writers, designers, testers and storytellers.

Let’s build bridges, not silos, let’s build tools people can use, not just tools geeks can admire, let’s do this together.

Where’s the Resistance to Algorithmic Monopolies?

The big question need to be highlighted: where will pressure for meaningful regulation of #dotcons algorithmic monopolies actually come from?

Right now, it’s hard to see. Lawmakers generally have a poor grasp of the real problems, decades behind on both the tech and its corrosive social consequences. Most legislation we get is either pre-packaged by lobbyists from the #nastyfew controlled platforms causing the harm, or superficial and narrow, #fashionista focus on headline optics like “online harms” or “child safety,” instead of addressing the deeper crisis of algorithmic control, attention addiction, and social fragmentation for control.

Even worse, and this needs to be said loudly, the civil society institutions that should be resisting this mess are captured. Charities, #NGOs, media orgs, #geekproblem digital rights groups. Whether for funding, publicity, or simple convenience, they’ve tied their missions to the very tools they should be questioning. Rather than building alternatives or even naming the deeper problems, they instead focus on “using platforms better” or “more ethically”, which only serves to legitimise the #techshit they should be dismantling for composted.

This is classic #mainstreaming. It’s how radical energy gets drained, redirected, and eventually used to feed the system it once opposed. Meanwhile, into the vacuum of real critique and action steps, conspiracy-driven nonsense and cynical populism to feed the cycle.

This is why grassroots and native #openweb spaces like the #Fediverse matter, not just as “alternatives” but as active resistance. They are places where we can build different logics, embed different values, and avoid replicating the same centralising, manipulative dynamics.

It’s also why we have to defend these spaces, especially when they’re messy or imperfect. Because if we don’t build and protect something better, we’ll be left with a fight where even the so-called opposition is simply more of the same problem.

Composting the EU Tech Mess: From #NLnet to #Eurostack