Tag: geekproblem

AI didn’t break the web. The dotcons did – AI just turned up the volume

Every few months another AI company executive suggests that their latest Large Language Model possess values, ethics, judgement, emotions, or even a form of consciousness. The latest example is claims around Claude, where discussion has drifted toward the idea that the system possess “a functional version of emotions or feelings.” This is a good moment to step back and look at what is actually happening.

They are software, very sophisticated software, certainly. Useful software, maybe. Sometimes surprisingly capable software, but software nonetheless. The current generation of LLMs works by processing enormous amounts of human-produced content and generating statistically probable responses based on patterns found in that content. What people mistake for intelligence is the reflection of our own intelligence. What people mistake for morality is often the reflection of our own moral language. What people mistake for emotion is the reflection of our own emotional expression. The machine is mirroring us.

The #geekproblem strikes again – a recurring problem in technological culture is the blinded tendency to mistake technical processes for social processes. If you spend enough time around code, it becomes tempting to imagine that social problems can be reduced to technical ones. That human complexity can be transformed into engineering complexity. That ethics can be encoded, governance can be automated, community can be replaced with platforms. This is not a new mistake.

For decades, we have watched technologists claim that algorithms can replace editors, platforms replace communities, markets replace politics, and code can replace governance. The result has been a mess. Now the same pattern is repeating with AI. Human judgement emerges from lived experience, social relationships, culture, responsibility, memory, and consequences.

Ironically, the real danger is not that these systems become conscious, the danger is that people increasingly behave as if they already are. The public relations narrative coming from many #AI companies encourages this confusion. The more human-like these systems appear, the easier it becomes to sell products, attract investment, and generate media attention. The result is a kind of digital anthropomorphism.

People begin treating software as trusted friends, therapists, advisers, teachers, and companions. Meanwhile, the actual human institutions that should provide these functions continue to weaken. This is a familiar pattern from the #dotcons, rather than building stronger communities, we build stronger platforms. Rather than strengthening relationships, we optimise engagement. Rather than supporting public institutions, we create private substitutes. The technology becomes a replacement for the social fabric it quietly helps unravel.

The deeper issue is that morality does not exist in isolation, ethics is not simply a set of rules, it emerges through social processes. People learn morality through families, communities, traditions, cultures, institutions, and struggles. We argue about values by negotiating differences. We face consequences for our actions. We inherit stories and experiences from previous generations. This process is messy, often contradictory. But it is fundamentally social.

An AI system can reproduce ethical language because ethical language exists in its training data. It can discuss justice because humans discuss justice. It can talk about compassion because humans write about compassion. But discussing a value is not the same thing as possessing it. Repeating ethical language is not ethical behaviour. Generating moral arguments is not moral agency.

From an #OMN perspective, the important question is not whether machines are becoming human. The important question is whether humans are becoming less social. The #openweb was built around the idea that people communicate with people. The current AI boom increasingly promotes a future where people communicate with machines that imitate people. That should concern us.

Not because the machines are evil, not because AI is an existential threat. But because every step in this direction risks reinforcing the existing trend toward isolation, atomisation, and #stupidindividualism. The challenge is not to fear AI, it is to keep social processes social. To remember that governance requires communities. That ethics requires accountability and culture requires participation. That intelligence without social context is simply computation, machine can generate words, but people can create meaning.

https://kolektiva.social/deck/@jpl99@vivaldi.net/116691642387749842

People add a lot of mess, this toot is a diagnosis of a small shift, but it’s thinking is trapped inside a narrow, liberal property lens on what the internet is and was supposed to be. What’s being described as a “split” between a Free-For-All quarry and gated communities is what happens when you assume the web was primarily about enforceable intellectual property contracts in the first place. That framing already accepts the #dotcons worldview – that value is created by ownership, extraction, and legal enclosure.

From an #openweb and #OMN perspective, that was never the path. The early web (and the cultures that fed into it – FOSS, mailing lists, blogs, wikis) wasn’t held together by copyright enforcement. It was held together by norms: reciprocity, attribution, sharing, trust, and rough social accountability. That’s much closer to the #4opens than to IP law. Open code, open standards, open data, open process – not because the law enforced fairness, but because social relations did.

What #AI scraping has broken is not a legal equilibrium, but a fragile social one that the #dotcons had already been hollowing out for decades. They didn’t rely on “fair use” or reciprocity – they relied on enclosure, centralisation, and extraction, #AI simply accelerates that logic. So yes, “anything reachable by HTTP becomes fuel” is accurate – but the mistake is thinking the alternative is stronger copyright walls or more contractual gating, that deepens enclosure. The split you describe is real, but it’s not new, and it’s not caused by #AI, it’s the endpoint of a long enclosure of commons → platform capture (#dotcons), trust → contracts, sharing → surveillance + monetisation and public space → login walls.

The current AI mess is not the origin of this, it’s just a new layer of extraction sitting on top of the #mainstreaming mess. From an #OMN view, the interesting question isn’t how to reassert IP over scraping. It’s how to rebuild social and technical spaces where contribution, context, and reciprocity matter again – where value isn’t just extracted but circulated in ways communities can govern.

AI is not an existential threat to the #openweb, it’s an asshole amplifier inside an already broken system. The real loss we need to compost isn’t only copyright protection, it’s the erosion of the social commons that made openness meaningful in the first place.

The EU tech sovereignty plan

The European Commission has published its new Tech Sovereignty Plan. On the surface this sounds promising. Europe talks about reducing dependence on foreign tech giants, strengthening digital autonomy, and supporting open source. These are all things many of us in the #openweb world have been arguing for decades.

But when you look at where the money and attention actually go, a different picture emerges. The plan allocates vast resources to semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, AI, and data centres. Open source gets a much smaller slice of the pie, and native #openweb like the #Fediverse barely registers at all. The one mention is support for decentralised social media, highlighted through the Commission’s continued use of Mastodon. (Digital Strategy)

The problem is that this isn’t new, as the European Commission has already been running a Mastodon server for years. Extending account creation to more EU institutions is not a strategic breakthrough, it is clicking a button that could have been clicked years ago. If this is the flagship example of support for social communication sovereignty, then the ambition is criminally limited.

The issue is that the Commission still does not understand that social infrastructure is infrastructure. We hear endless noise about sovereign AI, sovereign cloud, sovereign chips, and sovereign data centres. Yet the FOSS code and communities through which citizens actually communicate, organise, publish, collaborate, and build are treated as an afterthought.

The result is a contradiction – Europe recognises that depending on foreign cloud providers is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign AI companies is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign semiconductor supply chains is a strategic weakness. Yet dependence on a handful of US-owned social platforms for public discourse apparently remains acceptable. Who needs sovereignty over communication anyway?

The #openweb blind spot is the normal long-running #geekproblem in institutional form. Policymakers see infrastructure as technical systems. Servers, processors, storage, networks. But the real value of the internet was never the hardware, it was always the social layer built on top. The #openweb succeeded because it created shared public spaces based on open standards. Email. RSS. Blogs. Forums. Early independent media. Later, federated systems like ActivityPub.

The Commission’s sovereignty agenda focuses on plumbing while ignoring the public spaces that the plumbing exists to support. Without investment in #4opens social protocols, community governance, and public communication infrastructure, Europe is building sovereign pipes that still carry people back into the same #dotcons corporate platforms.

Open source without communities is the unspoken problem. The Commission talks about open source as a strategic asset for European competitiveness and sovereignty. That’s welcome as far as it goes. But open source is not simply a collection of code repositories, it survives because communities maintain it. The danger is that Europe treats open source as a procurement strategy rather than a social ecosystem. Buy some software, fund a few projects, write a strategy document, then assume the problem is solved.

Real digital sovereignty requires long-term investment in communities of use, admins, mods, maintainers, governance, interoperability, and public institutions that can steward shared infrastructure over decades. Even many open-source advocates point out that procurement rules, short-term funding cycles, and “open-source washing” continue to undermine the ecosystem. (FSFE – Free Software Foundation Europe). You cannot buy sovereignty off the shelf.

From an #OMN perspective, the weakness in the Tech Sovereignty Plan is that it remains trapped inside an industrial understanding of technology. Technology is not just hardware, technology is not just software, technology is social relations embodied in tools. If Europe wants genuine digital sovereignty, it needs to invest in:

  • Open social protocols.
  • Federated communication infrastructure.
  • Community-owned media.
  • Public digital commons.
  • Open governance.
  • Long-term stewardship of shared resources.
  • The social institutions needed to keep these systems alive.

Without this, “tech sovereignty” is another industrial policy aimed at creating European versions of existing #dotcons platforms. That may reduce dependence on Silicon Valley, but it does not necessarily increase freedom.

“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

Beyond “sovereignty” is the deeper question – not whether Europe controls its technology stack. The deeper question is whether citizens control the systems that shape their lives. The Commission is slowly beginning to recognise the importance of open source. That’s a positive step. But as things stand, social communication sovereignty remains a tiny footnote in a strategy dominated by chips, cloud, AI, and data centres.

For the #openweb, that is the wrong way round, the future of “digital sovereignty” is not simply owning the infrastructure, it is owning the public spaces built on top of it.

Compost “digital sovereignty”, build working commons

The problem with the #EU Eurocracy on social and tech issues isn’t usually only malice, it’s institutional incompetence. They struggle to understand grassroots digital culture, the #openweb, commons-based governance, and the social realities of how technology actually works.

That leaves us with a choice. We can try to engage, push, educate, and help them become a little less incompetent. Or we can focus entirely on tearing down existing institutions.

The danger with the second path is obvious. Vacuums rarely stay empty. If progressive and grassroots voices walk away, the people most ready to fill the space are the nationalist, authoritarian, and right-wing forces already waiting in the wings.

This isn’t just an #EU issue. It applies to most #mainstreaming institutions. They are often failing, slow-moving, and trapped in outdated assumptions. But abandoning them entirely doesn’t automatically lead somewhere better.

The challenge is to build alternatives like #OMN and the #openweb while also applying enough pressure, education, and challenge to stop existing institutions from becoming even worse.

Not a comfortable path, but likely the least dangerous one.

#OMN #OpenWeb #Fediverse #ActivityPub #TechSovereignty #EU #OpenSource #DigitalCommons #4opens

Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess

This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but they gave them state power, institutional infrastructure, and ideological legitimacy.

What they built was not simply a set of policies, it was a social programme we are still trapped inside more than forty years later. The push was simple and devastating citizens became “taxpayers,” public services became “handouts,” collective investment became “inefficiency,” and the commons became a problem to be solved through privatisation.

Decades of postwar social infrastructure – built on the understanding that some things are too important to be left to markets – were dismantled, defunded, and handed over to private interests -the very same interests funding the political projects carrying out the dismantling.

This is what #OMN means when we talk about enclosure. Not just land enclosure, but the enclosure of everyday life itself: Water, housing, transport, education, healthcare, communication and culture. Everything turned into a commodity.

Neither Thatcher nor Reagan created this mess, the project was carefully engineered. Reagan established a President’s Commission on Privatisation which drew up extensive plans to strip public assets and services. Thatcher pushed through mass privatisation of utilities, council housing, and national industries while selling the process as “popular capitalism.”

Behind them stood an entire ideological machine of the Heritage Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Reason Foundation, and countless university economics departments and corporate-funded policy groups.

Their role was to make radical upward redistribution sound like neutral common sense, and they succeeded. Even the language changed “tax burden,” “efficiency,” “choice,” “reform,” “flexibility.” Every word quietly carrying the ideology.

The method itself was brutally simple – cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Create public deficits. Use those deficits to declare public services “unaffordable.” Privatise the resulting wreckage. Transfer wealth upward. Starve public institutions until they fail, then point at the failure as proof they never worked.

The cruelty was not accidental, it was structural. Thatcher’s Chancellor openly described mass unemployment as “a price worth paying.” Reagan’s administration treated social devastation as collateral damage in the restoration of elitist power.

The results were not abstract, from 1948 to roughly 1979 in the United States, productivity and worker wages rose together. After Reagan, productivity continued climbing sharply while wages largely stagnated. Workers produced more wealth than ever before, but a growing share of that wealth flowed upward into capital accumulation rather than wages or public goods.

The mess this created was Labour’s share of national income steadily declined while housing costs rose, debt exploded, unions collapsed, and public infrastructure deteriorated. Debt became the mechanism keeping society functioning: mortgages, credit cards, car loans, student loans, payday lending. Daily survival increasingly depended on borrowing. Higher education shifted from a public good into a privatised commodity. Healthcare became financial extraction. Housing became speculation rather than shelter.

The language was “freedom.” But the freedom being expanded was the freedom of capital. None of this was racially neutral. Reagan’s “welfare queen” narrative deliberately racialised poverty to fracture working-class solidarity. The actual fraud case behind the story was tiny compared to the propaganda built around it, but the myth worked politically because it redirected anger downward rather than upward.

The so-called “War on Drugs” targeted Black communities while harsher sentencing laws entrenched mass incarceration. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic was ignored for years because many of the people dying were treated as disposable by political elites. Thatcher’s government supported sanctions-busting trade with apartheid South Africa while denouncing the ANC and treating Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.

These were not side issues, the neoliberalism story required enemies: welfare scroungers, criminals, radicals, immigrants, trade unionists, the “undeserving poor.” Every enclosure needs someone to blame for the damage enclosure causes.

In the rich west the programme attacked wages, unions, and public services. Abroad it was openly violent. Reagan’s administration funded and armed the Contras in Nicaragua despite international condemnation. US-backed regimes across Latin America carried out massacres, disappearances, and systematic repression while being framed as defenders of “freedom.” Thatcher supported Augusto Pinochet long after the scale of torture and repression was well known.

The noise was consistent and on going as liberation movements became “terrorists,” dictators aligned with Western capital became “allies,” and democracy mattered only when it protected existing power. The same logic still dominates global politics today.

What was lost was not only economic, the postwar social settlement – however flawed – rested on the idea that some things belonged to everyone and should be collectively protected:

  • healthcare,
  • housing,
  • education,
  • water,
  • transport,
  • welfare,
  • culture,
  • democratic infrastructure.

These systems were not gifts from benevolent elitists, they were won through the struggle by labour movements, cooperatives, mutual aid traditions, socialist organising, and community solidarity. Thatcher famously claimed:

“There is no such thing as society.”

This was not only rhetoric, it was a political programme. Destroy people’s belief in collective action and you destroy their ability to resist enclosure. This is where the #OMN critique of the “tragedy of the commons” matters. People are capable of managing commons collectively, history is full of successful examples, what neoliberalism destroys are the social conditions that make commons possible:

  • trust,
  • reciprocity,
  • accountability,
  • long-term stewardship,
  • community responsibility.

When competition replaces care, extraction replaces stewardship, hyper-individualism – what we call #stupidindividualism – erodes social fabric itself. The tragedy becomes real because the conditions needed to avoid it are systematically dismantled.

Understanding this matters not for nostalgia, but for navigation. The crises surrounding us now: housing collapse, ecological breakdown, inequality, democratic decay, loneliness, food insecurity, social fragmentation, mental health crises, are not random failures. They are predictable outcomes of forty years of #neoliberal wrecking. The mess this created is functioning largely as designed, prioritises elitist capital accumulation above any social wellbeing.

The liberal centre cannot solve this because it operates inside the same logic, technocratic management of decline is not transformation. Real alternatives require rebuilding #KISS commons-based infrastructure, not only as abstract ideals, but as practical trust infrastructure. This is the work of composting the current mess and growing alternatives from within the ruins.

Thatcher claimed there was no alternative, she was wrong. But building alternatives means being honest about what was destroyed, who destroyed it, how they destroyed it, and why the same logic still dominates today. This honesty is where rebuilding begins.

Women taking about oppressors

With this in mind, let’s recap on what Thatcher and Reagan built, its not just bad policy, not just inequality, its a full #deathcult – the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism so committed to short-term greed and #stupidindividualism that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations human life depends on. Forty years of hard indoctrination that doesn’t just fade away its – normal is walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.

The #nastyfew – platform owners, landlords, corporate lobbies, think tank networks – didn’t win through merit. They won the #classwar temporarily, by capturing institutions, rewriting rules, and flooding the #mainstreaming with their logic until it felt like gravity.

The #dotcons – Facebook, Google, X/Twitter and the rest – are the digital continuation of the same enclosure. Corporate platforms built on data extraction, presenting themselves as neutral public spaces while converting human attention and community into profit. The #closedweb is just privatisation with a friendlier interface.

And the #climatechaos bearing down on us is not a separate crisis. It is the #deathcult arriving at its logical destination.

Real alternatives are built from the bottom, not handed down from the top. The #openweb – internet infrastructure built on open standards, community control, and the #4opens (open code, open data, open standards, open process) – already exists as working infrastructure, built by thousands of ordinary people, not governments or corporations. Then we have the #fediverse, #activitypub, #FOSS, #indymedia – these are not utopian visions, already built, from the ground up, by people practising #DIY politics for real.

The #geekproblem is when this gets captured – when technical control replaces social trust, when complexity becomes a barrier rather than a tool, when #techchurn burns through community energy without building anything lasting. The antidote is #KISS – keeping it simple, human, and rooted in real relationships.

The #NGO path – professionalised, funder-friendly, managed dissent – is #mainstreaming with a radical badge on, it defuses rather than builds. The #fashernista tendency prioritising the look and language of activism over the unglamorous work of building lasting structure is #fluffy blocking in performance clothing.

What actually works is #grassroots organising grounded in trust, horizontal process, and the willingness to #compost failure breaking down what didn’t work into fuel for what comes next rather than hiding the mess or repeating it. As the #OMN path puts it: broken institutions need rebuilding as commons, not as managed services or branded campaigns.

The #deathcult is real, the mess is real, the #nothingnew reminder is useful – these cycles have happened before, and ignoring that history is how we walk straight into the same traps again. But so is the ground we already stand on, sart there.

#OMN #Neoliberalism #Thatcher #Reagan #OpenWeb #4opens #Commons #MutualAid #FoodSovereignty #ClimateChaos #Mainstreaming #Deathcult #Dotcons #BuildingAlternatives

Composting the mess of digital security in activism – We need to talk about this, offline

The online tools we “common sense” rely on for organising and campaigning are genuinely dangerous, and I find that paralysing. This isn’t paranoia, it’s a practical reality that urgently needs addressing. Until we do, offline working groups are one of the few reliable ways to unblock the mess.

Where we actually are now… Disappearing, encrypted chat outside the #dotcons is one of the few spaces that feels even marginally safe. But even then, safety depends entirely on who’s in the room, which means those spaces need to stay small, focused, and constantly tended. The moment trust becomes uncertain, the space becomes a liability.

The result, for me personally, is that I currently have no viable online tools left for outreach. Everything leaves traces, so all that remains is slow, word-of-mouth. The legal reality we need to talks about offline, almost everything posted on #dotcons platforms leaves a digital fingerprint – metadata, timestamps, IP addresses, connection logs, account linkages. In practical terms, nowhere on these platforms is truly safe to post anything sensitive.

The specific danger that doesn’t get named often enough is this: if someone who was loosely connected to a campaign later commits a crime in the name of that campaign, the person who posted most visibly can end up legally exposed – even if they had absolutely nothing to do with what happened. The evidence trail is strong, easily misinterpreted, and the legal system is not neutral, it has historically been used as a tool of repression by those with power and resources against those without. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a pattern with a long, well-documented history.

This means high-volume posting, public organising on corporate platforms, and mixing open campaigning with less legal internal discussion in the same spaces isn’t just tactically sloppy, it has destroyed people’s lives.

Two paths: closed and open, people have been campaigning on digital security in activism for years, and the basic framework is straightforward – there are closed paths and open paths, and we need both working without the current aggressive #blocking that creates so much damaging mess.

  • For closed working groups – small, trust-based, sensitive – use whatever, non #dotcons tool the group agrees on and trusts. Signal is the obvious everyday choice: it’s not perfect, but it’s practical, easier to understand, and good enough for most internal communication when used carefully.
  • For open working groups – anything involving outreach, public-facing organising, and building broader community – the answer has to be #4opens common tools. Not a fragmented collection of proprietary apps that each create their own data trail and dependency. The digital splintering of activist spaces across dozens of incompatible, corporate-owned tools is itself a security problem, as well as an organisational one. #KISS.

As our lives are more directly touched by repression what we need is real conversations – across campaigns and communities – about #4opens web security in practical activism. Not a geek seminar, not a jargon-heavy toolkit nobody reads, but an honest, accessible discussion about:

  • What the actual risks are and who they fall on
  • Which tools are appropriate for which purposes
  • How to keep open organising genuinely open without handing surveillance infrastructure a dangerous map of our work
  • How to support the people most exposed – those who post publicly and visibly – so they’re not carrying legal risk in isolation.

The #geekproblem here is real, too many of the existing resources are built by and for technically confident people, and leave everyone else either confused or falsely reassured. We need socially safe security culture that works for normal people doing necessary work.

On a side note: I wish people would stop blaming me for the problems they create themselves LINK

The #encryptionist detour

Let’s look back to before the #Fediverse, to be honest about the last two decades of #openweb failure, for a long time we got pulled off the path. Not only by enemies, but by a mix of fear, fashion, and half-understood technical “solutions” that felt right to fearful people at the time.

The rise of the dogmatic, blinded #encryptionist mindset came out of real conditions of mass surveillance revelations (Snowden era), common sense #neoliberal distrust of states and corporations and the real harms of our worship of the (same neoliberal) #deathcult of the #dotcons

Encryption mattered – and still does – private space matters, protection matters. But what happened next at this time is where things went wrong – we shifted focus from necessary tool to blinded totalising path. For the #geekproblem and its fashionista followers – encryption shifted from being a tool in the stack to the answer to everything.

Instead of asking what should be public? – what should be private? And how do we build shared, accountable space? We got a flattened answer of “make everything encrypted and trustless” that sounds good to the blinded fear filled crew as It feels “safe”. But if you are not blind, it obviously undermines the foundations of the #openweb we were working to reboot, the #openweb isn’t built on secrecy – it’s built on shared visibility, trust, and negotiation.

This was mess, enter #blockchain and #DAO – the peak of the detour, this is where the #fashionista layer really took over. Into this already confused path stepped #blockchain, #NFT’s and #DAO governance models of token economies. The mess making was wrapped in smoke and mirrors language of decentralisation, autonomy and trustlessness to “fixing governance”.

But look at what they actually did – financialisation of everything, instead of building commons, we got tokens, ledgers, “market” incentives leading to speculation. This is a very easy to see failed imagination of market logic reintroduced through the back door of wealth = power, not in any way new, it’s smoke and mirrors to hide the same old system the native #openweb path was supposed to move beyond. This detour directly contradicts gift economies, commons-based governance and trust-based collaboration, it was used to push this needed path out of sight.

    It’s the normal mess of fear based #stupidindividualism – governance avoidance disguised as governance. DAOs didn’t in any way solve governance, they simply avoided it as real governance is messy, social, contextual, rooted in trust and relationships. DAOs tried and failed to replace this with hard voting mechanisms, token-weighted decisions and rigid rules. That’s not in any way useful governance, that’s automation of power to remove the human layer instead of engaging with it, its pure #geekproblem that our #fashionistas were to blind (or self-interested) to see past.

      This is the same problem we are repeating today (still in embryo) with the current new crew taking over pushing the #openweb reboot – this time its not only encryption, but it’s the same mess of shifting focus away from what actually matters, the same distraction.

      What can we compost from the last mess, to shine light on this path, back in the day people were busy writing whitepapers, launching tokens, debating protocol layers. Were they should have been building communities, maintaining infrastructure to grow trust networks to support real-world use #KISS This misdirection of focus, resources and energy is the recurring damage as attention is diverted away from the soil layer into tiny self-interested abstract cliques that never root.

        The #geekproblem and the #NGO loop feed this mess, as the fashionista class capture does not happen in isolation. It is amplified by two reinforcing dynamics – the #geekproblem – preference for technical certainty over social mess, belief that systems can replace relationships, discomfort with ambiguity and lived complexity. The #NGO layer with its need for fundable, legible “solutions”, preference for clean frameworks – over messy reality, career pathways built on producing narratives, not outcomes.

        Put these together, and you get complicated “solutions” that look impressive, but don’t work in practice. Back then we had a decade of drift we need to not repeat now. Back then we ended up with over-engineered systems nobody uses, governance models disconnected from lived communities and fragmented efforts chasing the next “solution”. This weakened focus on building actual alternatives, meanwhile, the #dotcons carried on consolidating power.

        The reality check for today is we built a pile of #techshit, and we are doing the same now with the current takeover crew of the #Fediverse. The last time because we failed to compost the accumulated outcome of the mess of abandoned projects, broken promises, conceptual clutter we still have the current confused direction. We need to now compost this historical mess, as keeping pretending this is fine is part of the problem, it’s not fine. But – and this matters – this “shit” doesn’t need to be useless, it’s compost.

        The native path we didn’t take (but still can), was always simpler, and still is, to build in public (#4opens), separate public and private space (#KISS), focus on trust, not “trustless”, grow from real communities, not closed cliques.

        We need to develop governance as lived practice, not only code, this is what #OMN and #OGB are pointing toward – human networks first, tech as support, not driver, openness as default for shared knowledge, privacy where it actually matters. If we’re serious about a future – it is to stop chasing totalising tech fixes, stop “common sense” financialising community, stop pretending governance can be automated and start growing from the soil up. And most importantly shift from control → collaboration, from abstraction → grounded practice to shift from narrative → lived reality.

        The point is the #encryptionist turn wasn’t (only) evil as it was a reaction to real harm. But it became a dead end when it tried to replace the social with the technical. What we need to lean from this to shift the current mess is if we want a real #openweb we don’t need more “solutions”, we need to get our hands dirty again to compost the mess to make soil to plant something much more real that can grow.

        #openweb #4opens #OGB #OMN #geekproblem #techshit #KISS

        The Crew – Paths to Growth?

        So what path should we be focusing on to balance this current oligarchy mess. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is decentralized, grassroots, focused on an “open process” rather than a fixed, top-down control structure, it’s a governance model:

        • Continuous ecological process, as navigation through lived memory rather than a set of static rules.
        • Decentralized & community-driven, from users, producers/creators, and admins, aiming to balance out central authority.
        • Federated coordination, strong transparency were no one has to agree, but reasoning and actions are publicly visible to produce accountability for public mess making.
        • The #4opens Principles – building on open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
        • Emergent structure, grows organically through “lived collaboration” and social federated tech flows #OGB (Open Governance Body).

        The #OMN is a path to growing an alternative to corporate-controlled platforms (#dotcons), a “public-first” digital commons.

        People resist is visible structure

        Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

        Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip.

        In most social/political movements, the hard questions – how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve conflict – are deferred. If people think about this at all – First you win power, then you figure out how things will work. That “later” rarely comes, or when it does, it arrives shaped by hierarchy, bureaucracy, and control.

        The #OMN paths flips this. It starts at the micro level of how do a group of people share space? How do they make decisions without bosses? How do they deal with conflict, mess, bad behaviour, uneven effort and how do they build trust that actually holds under pressure? These are not abstract questions, they are everyday problems.

        And this path – at its best – has decades (centuries, really) of paths with real answers like messy consensus processes, affinity groups, mutual aid, horizontal organising, temporary structures that form and dissolve as needed. None of it perfect, all of it is grounded. This is why grassroots activism works in real situations: disaster response, grassroots organising, protest camps, community projects. Because it doesn’t wait for permission or perfect conditions. It already has tools for acting now.

        The messy bit is it’s not magic, let’s not romanticise this. Horizontal organising is hard, it’s full of friction. You get informal hierarchies, dominant personalities, avoidance of conflict until it explodes and burnout leading to #blocking of uncomfortable but necessary conversations. This is the same “poisonous people” problem you see in every movement. #4opens grassroots activism doesn’t remove it – it exposes it – and that’s actually the point. Instead of hiding dysfunction behind formal power, horizontal spaces push it into the open where it has to be dealt with. Or not – and then things fall apart, which is also a kind of clarity. In #OMN language, this is #compost, the mess isn’t a failure. It’s raw material.

        Why this matters for the #openweb – most digital infrastructure is built on the opposite assumption. The #dotcons model says to centralise control, extract value, smooth over conflict, optimise engagement, hide the mess. It “works” – but only by disempowering people and communities. The #openweb path, if it’s going to mean anything, has to go the other way:

        • decentralised
        • messy
        • trust-based
        • human-scale
        • and able to function anyway

        That last bit is where we can learn from anarchist practice, because building federated, grassroots media (like #OMN, #indymediaback, Fediverse spaces) is not just a technical problem, it’s a social one. The tech already basically works, the people part doesn’t – yet. Micro practice is the missing layer – What we keep hitting is the gap between having tools (#ActivityPub, servers, platforms) and having cultures that can use those tools effectively

        You can spin up a server in an afternoon, you can’t spin up trust, shared norms, or collective process nearly as fast. This is where activist/anarchist thinking helps – not as blinded ideology, but as a toolkit:

        • how to run meetings that don’t collapse
        • how to distribute responsibility without losing coherence
        • how to handle conflict without defaulting to bans or dominance
        • how to balance openness with resilience

        These are the problems that keep blocking #openweb projects. It’s about the clash: horizontal vs “common sense”. One of the biggest tensions is this is people default to vertical “common sense” – someone should be in charge, decisions should be quick, authority should be clear. And in moments of stress, that instinct feels right, but over time, it reproduces the same power structures we’re supposedly trying to move beyond.

        So we get a cycle of start horizontal, hit friction, fall back to informal hierarchy, burn out or fragment then repeat. Balancing this cycle requires conscious practice, not just good intentions. For #OMN, this isn’t theory, it’s practical. If we want a functioning, grassroots media network:

        • we need working horizontal processes
        • we need ways to mediate conflict and #blocking
        • we need to actively compost dysfunction instead of ignoring it
        • we need to balance “fluffy” inclusion with “spiky” clarity and direction

        Otherwise, the social layer collapses long before the tech does. And then the #dotcons win by default, not because they’re better, but because they’re simpler in the short term.

        The real opportunity here is to combine #KISS activist micro-practice (how people actually work together) with #openweb technology (how systems interconnect at scale). That combination is rare, and powerful. It gives us a path that is:

        • grounded (not abstract)
        • scalable (but not centralised)
        • resilient (because it expects mess)
        • and actually usable by normal people, not just #geekproblem specialists

        This path isn’t useful because it promises a perfect future, it’s useful because it takes responsibility for the present. It asks – how do we make this work, here, now, with these people, in this mess? That’s the question the #openweb needs to answer, and if we don’t answer it, the answer we’ll get is more of the same, more #closedweb, more #dotcons, more #deathcult normality.

        If we do answer it – even imperfectly – we start to build something else, something that grows not by control, but by practice.

        #OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

        #OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

        #techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn

        The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky

        #RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.

        #reboot is the necessary reset of the #openweb – stepping away from the dead ends of #techshit and #dotcons to rebuild human-centred, trust infrastructure using tools like #activitypub and the #fediverse, guided by the #4opens.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=reboot

        #postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #Oxford is a grounded example of real-world contradiction – where elitist power (#mainstreaming, #NGO, #deathcult) coexists with genuine grassroots community, making it a test bed for grassroots #openweb organising and the #4opens path.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Oxford

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA

        In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p

        In the #OMN view, #opensource is not just a licence – it’s a political commitment to transparency, shared ownership, and community control over code, data, and process.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opensource

        The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb

        #openprocess means decisions and governance happen visibly and participatorily – not behind closed doors, so people can see, challenge, and shape outcomes.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openprocess

        #opendata means data that is freely accessible and shareable – controlled by communities rather than locked inside corporate silos.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opendata

        In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open

        #OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN

        The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB

        In the #OMN story, #nothingnew reminds us that cycles of co-option and failure have all happened before – and ignoring this history is how we repeat mistakes.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nothingnew

        In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO

        In the #OMN path, #neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of markets over people – normalising greed and eroding solidarity into the logic of the #deathcult.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=neoliberalism

        #makinghistory is the practice of communities reclaiming storytelling – building open, living archives rather than leaving history to those in power.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=makeinghistory

        In #OMN usage, #mainstreaming is how radical ideas get absorbed and neutralised – keeping the language while stripping out real challenge.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mainstreaming

        In the #OMN path, #KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a political stance against the #geekproblem – rejecting unnecessary complexity as a form of control.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=KISS

        #indymediaback is a call to rebuild grassroots, community-controlled media as an alternative to both #dotcons and hollow #NGO media structures.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=indymediaback

        In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag

        #grassroots means bottom-up organising rooted in real communities – accountable to collective need, not institutions.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=grassroots

        The #geekproblem is the tendency to replace human trust with technical control – embedding narrow values into systems that shape everyone’s lives.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=geekproblem

        In #OMN, #FOSS is a political commitment to collective ownership of technology – not just a licensing model.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=FOSS

        In #OMN language, #fluffy describes feel-good politics that avoid conflict – prioritising comfort over any real change.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fluffy

        #feudalism describes the emerging digital structure where platform owners extract value like lords from dependent users.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=feudalism

        #fascism is what happens when the #deathcult drops its mask – authoritarian control to defend failing systems.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fascism

        On the #OMN path, the #fediverse is practical #openweb infrastructure – decentralised, federated, and not owned by corporations.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fediverse

        #encryptionist describes the tendency to prioritise technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Encryptionist

        #dotcons are corporate platforms built on data extraction and control, presenting themselves as neutral while enclosing the commons.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

        In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

        The #deathcult is the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism – sacrificing social and ecological survival for short-term fear drivern greed.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

        In the #OMN story, #compost means breaking down failure and mess into fuel for new growth.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

        In #OMN, #closedweb is controlled, extractive digital infrastructure where users have no power.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

        #climatechaos describes the accelerating breakdown driven by the #deathcult, beyond manageable “climate change.”
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

        #classwar is the ongoing conflict between the #nastyfew and the communities they exploit – often hidden by #mainstreaming narratives.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

        #capitalism is the dominant system turning everything – relationships, nature, culture – into “profit”.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

        In #OMN, #block is the reflex to shut down challenge – preventing the messy work needed for real change.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

        #blinded is being unable or unwilling to see beyond #mainstreaming and #dotcons logic.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

        #fashernista describes performative activism that prioritises appearance over substance.
        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

        #dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

        The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

        In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

        The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

        #classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

        #capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

        In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

        #blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

        #fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.

        https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

        If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.

        These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure

        #openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam

        #4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default

        #grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

        This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.

        The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.

        #deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

        #neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

        #dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

        #closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

        #mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

        #NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

        #classwar – underlying structural conflict

        This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.

        The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.

        #geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

        #techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

        #encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

        #KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

        This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.

        Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.

        #stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

        #postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

        #fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

        #spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

        #block – reflex rejection of challenge

        #blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

        #fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

        This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.

        The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.

        #fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

        #activitypub – the protocol glue

        #RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

        #p2p – people-to-people first, tech second

        #FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

        #opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

        These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.

        Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.

        #OGB – structured, open governance

        #openprocess – again, because it’s that important

        #DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

        Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.

        Practice & Direction (how we move).

        #reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

        #indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

        #makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

        #nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

        This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.

        Grounding Example Layer

        #Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

        #PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

        Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.

        The Meta Layer (how to use this)

        #compost – break down failure into growth

        This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:

        bad behaviour → learning

        failed projects → patterns

        conflict → structure

        Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.

        The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.

        The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point

        One of the constant pressures we face in #OMN and wider #openweb spaces is the urge to “tidy things up.” People arrive, see a messy landscape of hashtags – #geekproblem, #deathcult, #dotcons – and their first instinct is to fix it, define it, standardise it, make it neat and legible. That instinct feels sensible, but is also the #geekproblem.

        The hashtag ecology we’ve been growing over the last decade is designed to be messy. Not as a failure, but as a feature. These tags are not rigid definitions; they’re handles – entry points into ongoing conversations. They hold space rather than close it down. Different people can use the same tag slightly differently, argue over it, stretch it, even misuse it. That friction is not a bug. It’s the composting process.

        This is where the #geekproblem shows up hard. The default technical mindset is to treat language like code: define variables, eliminate ambiguity, enforce consistency. In living social systems, that approach kills more than it fixes. You don’t get clarity – you get dead structure. A taxonomy that excludes instead of invites.

        But – and this matters – pure chaos doesn’t work either. If everything is noise, only insiders can hear anything. New people can’t find a way in, and the whole thing collapses into a closed loop. The compost stops producing anything useful. So the question isn’t “mess or order?” It’s how to grow balanced living structures.

        Dead structure says: this is the correct meaning, this is the right way to use it, anything else is wrong. Were living structure says: here’s how this is being used, here are examples, come play and meaning emerges through use. That’s the difference between a locked-down platforms and the #openweb. One enforces clarity from above, the other grows understanding from below.

        Think of it like ecology. Compost isn’t just random waste – it’s a process. Layers, breakdown, transformation over time. Healthy systems have patterns and flows, but they’re never fixed. Forests change. Rivers shift. Nothing is static, but nothing is completely formless either.

        The same applies here we don’t need to “clean up” the hashtag mess. We need to use it better by repeating patterns, so people can follow threads, tell stories that embody the tags, let contradictions surface and be worked through and resist the urge to prematurely close meaning. This is basic #KISS, but it’s a hard lesson. Keep it simple doesn’t mean make it simplistic. it means don’t over-engineer what needs to stay alive.

        So yes, the mess has value. It creates space for people to build differently, to step outside the rigid frames of the #dotcons and their algorithmic control. It’s how we hold open a commons instead of collapsing back into platforms.

        But remember, if everything is compost, nothing grows. If everything is fixed, nothing lives. #OMN sits in that tension, not cleaning up the mess, not drowning in it – but composting it into something people can actually use to make change.

        “Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

        The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away

        Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years – because that’s what it is – a con.

        The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, capture, and profit.

        The old #openweb got fenced in, and most people, especially polite liberal society, went along with it. So we need to talk about the return and the problem. Now we have a shift of the #mainstreaming is flowing back toward the #openweb, that should be a good thing. But there is a problem: people don’t leave the #dotcons behind when they move, they bring the culture with them.

        What we’re seeing is a flood of the same patterns – extractive behaviour, ego performance, status games. Not from one “side,” but from everywhere. The habits built inside the #dotcons don’t magically disappear just because the platform changes.

        So the real issue isn’t technical, it’s cultural. If we don’t actively mediate this influx, we won’t rebuild the #openweb – we’ll just recreate the same broken systems in slightly different code.

        So why do I talk so much about compost, and mess not being the problem. Mess is necessary, but only if it composts – if it breaks down into something fertile. Right now, we’re mostly just piling it higher.

        This is where projects like #indymediaback and #OGB matter. They’re not perfect, but they are native to the #openweb path: grounded in trust, process, and the #4opens rather than control, branding, and capture.

        The question isn’t whether #mainstreaming is good or bad. The question is: how do we hold the cultural line so that what grows is something genuinely different? Because if we don’t, the #dotcons don’t need to defeat us. We’ll blindly rebuild them ourselves.

        So why do I argue we can’t just leave the #dotcons? This is where people get it wrong, every time the #dotcons tighten control – censoring, tweaking algorithms, shifting rules – the reaction is the same: leave, build the #openweb.

        Yes, build the #openweb, but the idea that we should stop organizing inside the #dotcons right now? That’s a trap, because billions of people are still there. The conversations, the communities, the movements, they haven’t magically migrated. Walking away doesn’t free those people, it abandons them, leaving the space to be shaped entirely by the #deathcult and the forces already in control.

        This is #nothingnew. The #dotcons are #closedweb infrastructure. They serve power because they were built to serve power. Expecting anything else is misunderstanding the system. The real question has never been: are these platforms good? It’s: what do we do, given that this is where people are?

        The #geekproblem and the exodus fantasy, is a persistent fantasy – a classic #geekproblem – that if we just build better tools, people will come. They won’t, not on their own. A clean exodus to the #fediverse or any #openweb space doesn’t happen because we post about it. Movement-building has never worked like that, people move through relationships, trust, and shared struggle – not technical superiority.

        So if you abandon the spaces where people already are, you cut those pathways. The #OMN approach has always been simple to use the #dotcons as a bridge, not a home, seed organizing where people already are while focusing energy on building the #openweb in parallel to clearly keep your foundations in the #4opens.

        This isn’t about purity, it’s about effectiveness, don’t fall into #stupidindividualism, the idea that personal withdrawal is more important than collective reach. This is about infrastructure and grounding, if the #dotcons can switch you off at any moment, they cannot be your foundation.

        That’s why we need:

        • indymediaback as publishing roots
        • activitypub and the #fediverse as distributed infrastructure
        • OMN as a bridge between cultures and spaces

        This is the practical expression of the #4opens: not just open code, but open process and open trust. Don’t build your house on someone else’s land, but don’t stop talking to the people still living there either. Stay in the fight, when the #dotcons clamp down, it’s not a surprise, it’s a signal of what they are, and what they’ve always been.

        The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down, while continuing to show up where the people are.

        Build the #openweb, stay in the fight, keep it simple #KISS

        Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?

        Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product.

        And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom fighters”, that’s modern tech dev. On the other side: the wreckage of #web02. Decades of promises, buried under #dotcons centralising everything that matters. Open source didn’t save us either – too abstract, too inward-looking, too lost in the #geekproblem to function in real life.

        Yes, #ActivityPub cracked something open, a glimpse of a different path. But let’s not kid ourselves funding is still torched on hype cycles. Blockchain yesterday, AI today, the same ash. Meanwhile, the only things that actually work come from #DIY culture: unfunded, unglamorous, ignored.

        And academia? If it worked as claimed, the world would already look different. Instead, we get theory imposed on practice, over and over, making a mess and calling it insight.

        The system is built to fail, its risk-averse, paperwork-heavy and detached from reality. Perfect for proposal writers, perfect for box-ticking, useless for building. So where does that leave us? Here – build anyway – #OMN and #MakingHistory aren’t about shiny ideas, they’re about the grind, making tools people can actually use in real communities. Most open projects don’t fail because they’re wrong, they fail because they never leave the bubble, they don’t connect, don’t flow. They don’t live.

        So yeah – press the #reboot button. Keep it messy, but make it real. Messy is fine, empty isn’t. Stop trying to fix funding with more control, that’s how you feed the grafters. Do this instead:
        – Fund real work
        – Distribute trust
        – Make everything visible

        Fund the compost, not the shiny plastic by backing people already growing things, let trust flow sideways, not upwards. That’s how you starve the grafters without strangling the builders.

        Comparing Decentralized #openweb Protocols

        Gates vs Bridges: the obscure politics of the #geekproblem

        In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.

        • RSS is a bridge.
        • Closed APIs are gates.

        This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.

        This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.

        The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.

        When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.

        So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.

        A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).

        On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).

        We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?

        #openweb #4opens #OMN

        Let’s try and simplify the #OMN

        The #OMN Framework: The Five Functions (#5F)

        The #OMN is simple flows, not platforms, it’s a way of thinking about media as flows of objects moving through a network. People shape the flow, you can find a more technical view to read after here. A human-scale, federated media infrastructure built on #FOSS practices and the #4opens:

        • open data
        • open source
        • open process
        • open standards

        It doesn’t start with features, apps, or ideology, it starts with flows. Imagine the network as:

        pipes and holding tanks

        Content (objects) flows through them, communities decide how that flow is shaped. Nothing magical, nothing hidden. This matters because:

        If people can’t picture how a system works, they can’t govern it.
        And when systems become opaque, power centralises.

        So #OMN reduces everything to five simple functions:

        1. Publish

        (Add a drop to the flow)

        Publishing is simply adding an object:

        • a story
        • a post
        • media
        • data

        to a stream.

        • No automatic amplification
        • No built-in authority
        • No algorithmic boost

        Publication is contribution, not domination.

        2. Subscribe

        (Connect the pipes)

        Subscription is how flows connect:

        • people
        • groups
        • topics
        • instances

        This replaces:

        • platform logic → “you are inside us”
          with
        • network logic → “this connects to that”

        No opaque ranking, you decide which pipes you connect.

        3. Moderate

        (Filter and route the flow)

        Moderation is not censorship. It’s sieving.

        Flows can:

        • pass through
        • be filtered
        • be slowed or prioritised
        • be contextualised

        Trust is:

        • local
        • visible
        • reversible

        Different communities can apply different filters to the same flow.

        This is a feature, not a bug.

        4. Rollback

        (Drain and reset the flow)

        Rollback is how systems recover:

        • remove past content from your stream
        • undo aggregation decisions
        • correct mistakes
        • respond to abuse

        Without rollback:

        • errors become power struggles

        With rollback:

        Accountability becomes procedural, not punitive.

        5. Edit Metadata

        (Shape meaning downstream)

        Content is not rewritten – it is contextualised.

        Metadata can include:

        • tags
        • summaries
        • trust signals
        • warnings
        • translations
        • relationships

        This is where meaning is created.

        Not by algorithms, but by people.

        The Holding Tank

        Underneath it all is:

        a simple storage layer

        • a database
        • stored objects
        • moving through flows

        No “AI brain” or hidden feed logic, just data shaped by social processes.

        Why This Matters

        Most current systems bundle everything together:

        • identity
        • publishing
        • distribution
        • moderation
        • monetisation

        This creates centralised control, even when systems claim to be “open”.

        OMN does the opposite:

        It separates the core functions.

        This makes the system:

        • understandable
        • auditable
        • forkable
        • governable

        #NothingNew by Design

        This model isn’t new, it mirrors systems we already understand:

        • plumbing
        • electrical grids
        • packet-switched networks
        • version control

        That’s intentional.

        Systems people understand are systems people can govern.

        From Platforms to Commons

        The #5F is the smallest possible set of actions needed to run a media network:

        • Publish
        • Subscribe
        • Moderate
        • Rollback
        • Edit

        Everything else:

        • feeds
        • timelines
        • notifications
        • UI/UX

        …is just interface, nice to have but not essential.

        The Point Is – The OMN is not about building a better platform.

        It’s about building:

        infrastructure for a democratic digital commons

        Simple flows.
        Social mediation.
        Human control.

        Not control systems, but trust systems.

        In One Line

        #OMN is plumbing for the #openweb. #KISS

        To simplify the Open Media Network (#OMN), we focus on its core goal: creating a human-scale, community-governed media infrastructure that isn’t controlled by big corporate platforms. As we outline to understand and “simplify” the #OMN is a simple workflow:

        • Write: Creating the content.
        • Tag: Categorizing it, so others can find it.
        • Publish: Making it available on the web.
        • Federate: Sharing it across different trusted networks.
        • Archive: Ensuring it remains accessible over time.

        The “#4opens” Framework is built on four principles designed to keep power in the hands of communities and users rather than central authorities:

        • Open Data: Information belongs to the community.
        • Open Source: The code is free to see and change.
        • Open Process: Decisions are made transparently.
        • Open Standards: Systems can “talk” to each other without gatekeepers.

        Key Concepts for Simplification

        • Keep It Simple (KISS): The system should be so simple that anyone can mentally model how it works. If it’s too complex to understand, it’s too complex to govern.
        • Social over Technical: Prioritise how people use the tools over how “elegant” the code is, to mediate the #geekproblem (tech that’s too hard for normal people to use).
        • Composting the Past: Instead of starting from scratch or repeating old mistakes, the #OMN is about taking the “wreckage” of previous projects and turning them into “fertile soil” for new, federated networks.
        • Trust-Based Networking: It moves away from global algorithms and toward small, connected “nodes” of people who trust each other (or not).

        You can build any application from this foundation – that’s the point of keeping the core this simple. On top of the basic #OMN #5F, we’re developing a set of seed projects:

        • #makinghistory – tools to keep grassroots and mainstream history alive, linked, and evolving across the #openweb
        • #indymediaback – a reboot of grassroots news, open publishing with modern federated infrastructure
        • #OGB (Open Governance Body) – lightweight, federated governance for coordinating people, decisions, and trust
        • #digitaldetox – a horizontal tool to step away from addictive, manipulative platform dynamics

        Interoperability is default, not an afterthought, nothing is locked in, instead of building another isolated platform, we plug into the existing ecosystem, extend it to compost what doesn’t work. This is how we grow the #openweb by building better flows inside what already exists, not by replacing everything.

        These aren’t separate silos, they’re expressions of the same underlying flows. The system is native to the Fediverse, built on ActivityPub. That means content flows in from existing platforms and codebases and flows out to existing networks and apps.

        Compost metaphor – is memorable, not just technical. The focus on process over platform is clear and important. The move to simple steps works as onboarding and the insistence on #KISS + #nothingnew is the right first step.

        #OMN is not an app, it’s a process + tools to move from isolation to commons.