I am not religious, but that does not mean religion is something that can only be dismissed as irrational, stupid or obsolete. There is a useful distinction between believing in a religion and understanding the social, cultural and philosophical work that religion has historically done.
This matters for the #OMN because we are interested in how human beings make meaning, build communities and organise themselves when they don’t have complete knowledge of the world. We don’t know everything – one of the interesting things is that science and theology both eventually run into the same thing – mystery.
Science starts with observation, evidence and experiment, to builds theories from what we can discover and then changes those theories when better evidence appears. Religion starts where empirical knowledge runs out and tries to construct stories, symbols and ethical frameworks around the things we cannot yet explain.
That doesn’t mean the paths science and religion are on identical, they aren’t. A scientific theory is not the same thing as a religious myth, evidence, testing and falsifiability matter. But there is a shared human problem underneath both – we are trying to understand a world that is bigger than our ability to understand it. The problem begins when either side claims to have finally solved the mystery.
In my view It’s useful to look at religion as a social technology – for thousands of years, religion has been a kind of social technology that helped people organise communities, explain death, create rituals, transmit stories, establish ethical expectations and give people ways of dealing with uncertainty. Before modern science, medicine and large bureaucratic institutions, people had very few tools for dealing with an unpredictable world.
Storms happened.
Crops failed.
Children died.
People became sick.
Wars arrived.
People didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow, religion provide a framework for living with that uncertainty. Prayer, ritual, myth and community provide a sense of meaning when there was very little else available. Yes, that doesn’t mean the explanations were factually correct, it means they performed social functions.
And this is where the conversation becomes interesting for the #OMN – the danger is false certainty – there is a big difference between living with mystery and selling people certainty. The religious con begins when somebody says “I know exactly what God wants.”,”I know what happens after death.”, “I know the future.” or “Give me money and I can protect you from it.”
This isn’t limited to religion, modern society is full of people selling certainty – politicians, corporations, economists all sell certainty. As do most of our #dotcons technology companies which are pushing the cult of influencers trying to sell certainty. And on the other side increasingly the #geekproblem sells us the idea that every social problem can be solved with the correct application, platform or algorithm.
That #techshit is another kind of theology, the technology of certainty, a lot of contemporary technology culture is built around the assumption that uncertainty is a technical problem waiting to be eliminated. We want perfect systems, perfect moderation, perfect security, perfect prediction etc.
But human society doesn’t work like that – people are messy, cultures are messy, communities disagree, knowledge changes. Context matters, things break, and sometimes we simply don’t know. The attempt to remove all of this uncertainty produces something worse than the original problem – systems of control.
This is one reason the #openweb matters – #OPEN is about living with uncertainty – on this native path the #OMN isn’t an attempt to build a perfect system, quite the opposite. The aim is to build social and technical infrastructure that allows people to work together without requiring perfection.
The #4opens approach is useful precisely because it doesn’t require everyone to agree. It creates conditions where disagreement can remain visible and productive, this is very different from trying to create one system that finally gets everything right.
We need better stories, not final answers – human beings need stories – we need ways of explaining where we came from, where we are going and what we should care about. Religion has historically provided some of those stories, art, politics, philosophy and community life provide others. Now science is trying to provide new ones to replace the dieing religions. The mistake is thinking that one of these “correct paths” has to completely replace all the others.
The #OMN is interested in the space between – how do we build the communication systems through which communities can create, challenge, preserve and share their stories? That is what #MakingHistory is about too – history isn’t just a collection of “facts”. It is a living social process of deciding what happened, who experienced it, what mattered and what we should remember.
If we leave that process to corporations, governments, algorithms and closed platforms, we increasingly lose control of our collective memory. In this mess, there is an uncomfortable parallel between religious fundamentalism and technological fundamentalism, both can become systems of faith. Both create sacred texts, produce priesthoods, punish heresy and both can promise salvation.
The work to compost this mess, is to keep thinking, keep questioning and keep the systems open enough for other people to challenge us. That is a very #KISS principle – we don’t know everything – so build systems that allow us to learn. We need a culture of epistemic humility, an acceptance that our understanding is partial, provisional and socially constructed.
We need tools that help communities see what they know what they don’t know – what they disagree about and how their understanding changes over time. That means moving away from closed systems that manufacture certainty and toward open systems that make the process visible. That is the #openweb, and the social purpose of the #OMN.
And perhaps the most important lesson from religion, science and everything between them is remarkably simple “We don’t know.” so let’s build systems that help us find out, together.
One of the interesting things about the history of the #Fediverse is how many of its ideas come from places that, at first glance, seem completely unrelated to social media or network technology. #ActivityPub is a good example – the word activity carries a much older intellectual history, including the work of Soviet psychologist Alexei Leontiev, who developed what became known as activity theory. His work grew out of the cultural-historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, and eventually became a major school of psychological thought.
For #OMN, this history is interesting because it points toward a different way of thinking about technology. The important question is not simply – what does a person do with a piece of technology?It is – what activity is the technology part of, what social relationships make that activity possible, and what happens when those relationships change? That is a much more useful starting point for grassroots technology, from the individual to activity
Leontiev’s work developed around the idea that human life can be understood through activity: the processes through which people actually live in and engage with the objective and social world around them. He described activity as encompassing human life in its social richness and variety. His model breaks activity down into connected levels:
Activity → motive
Action → goal
Operation → practical means
This is useful because it stops us treating technology as an isolated object. A button, interface, server or protocol does not have much meaning by itself, its meaning comes from the activity surrounding it. A publishing system exists because people are trying to communicate, moderation exists because communities need to negotiate trust and boundaries. An archive exists because people want to remember, a federation protocol exists because independent communities want to exchange information without becoming one organisation.
The technology is the means, the social activity is the larger thing, this matters for the #openweb – A lot of blinded technology culture starts from the opposite direction, it starts with the tool, a protocol, an application, a database. Here is a new platform, then we ask people to reorganise their lives around the technology, one of the roots of what I call the #geekproblem. The problem isn’t that programmers are bad people or that technical knowledge is somehow illegitimate. The problem is that technical systems become disconnected from the social activity they support. The result is often tech-first thinking, we build something technically impressive and then ask – what can people do with it?
Leontiev’s work also sits inside a wider tradition of thinking about human beings as fundamentally social. People don’t arrive in the world as fully formed independent economic or political units. We are born into relationships, language, culture, institutions and communities. We need to balance this, a useful grassroots approach is to start with – what are people already trying to do together, what technology would help them do it better? That is a different question, seeing activity is social.
Our ability to act independently is something that develops through those relationships. This is important for understanding the #openweb because the #openweb is not really about individual freedom in isolation, it is much more about collective capacity. The value of federation isn’t that everyone gets their own little island, it is that many different islands can communicate. The value of open standards isn’t that everybody has to behave in the same way, it is that different communities can remain different while still sharing enough infrastructure to cooperate. That is the social possibility sitting underneath the technical architecture.
ActivityPub is therefore more interesting than a protocol
ActivityPub carries the word activity for a reason.
The protocol doesn’t just describe pieces of content, it describes things happening between actors. Someone creates something – someone follows someone – someone likes something – someone shares something – someone blocks someone – someone undoes an action. These are social actions represented through technical infrastructure. That distinction matters, a closed platform can treat communication as a product. An open network, instead treats communication as a social activity that needs infrastructure. That is much closer to what we are trying to build with #OMN.
The #OMN approach is not inventing the perfect social media platform, that would be the wrong starting point. We are interested in building practical infrastructure for grassroots media activity: Publish. Subscribe. Moderate. Edit metadata. Rollback. These are not simply software features, they describe parts of a wider social activity. People create media, communities decide what they trust, information moves between communities, where people correct mistakes and stories develop over time. Archives preserve collective memory.
The technology should make these activities easier rather than forcing communities into somebody else’s business model, a simple needed step from activity to commons. This is also where the #4opens becomes important, #FOSS is useful, but it isn’t enough. A project can publish its code and still reproduce closed governance, concentrated power and dependency. For a genuinely useful grassroots infrastructure we need openness across the whole activity: Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process. That creates larger commons around the technology, the code becomes something people can inspect and improve, data becomes something communities can work with, standards allow different systems to communicate, the process makes decisions visible and contestable.
This is not about creating a perfect system, it is about creating systems that can remain changeable by the people who depend on them, technology as a part of culture. We can build the most technically decentralised system imaginable and still reproduce centralised social behaviour, we build open-source software that puts us under authoritarian governance, federation can create little kingdoms. We can build democratic tools and allow a small group of developers or funders to control everything.
If communities have no control over their communication infrastructure, their social organisation remains vulnerable to whoever owns that infrastructure, the #geekproblem again. The technical architecture matters, but it cannot solve the cultural problem by itself. The opposite is also true, a healthier culture needs appropriate technology to support it.
This is why maybe Leontiev’s idea of activity is useful today, it gives us a way out of the endless argument about whether technology is inherently good or bad. Technology is neither the beginning nor the end of the story, it sits inside activity. The question becomes – What activity does this technology encourage? Who controls the means of that activity? Who benefits? Who gets excluded? Can the community change the system? Can people leave without losing everything? Can different communities connect without surrendering their independence?
Those are much better questions than simply asking whether a technology is “innovative”. This is also why native projects such as #OMN, #IndymediaBack, #MakingHistory and #OGB matter, as paths for growing infrastructure around social activities rather than trying to manufacture another attention platform.
#MakingHistory is about collective memory and living archives.
#IndymediaBack is about grassroots media infrastructure.
#OGB is about experimenting with governance structures.
#OMN is about federated publishing and the movement of trusted media between communities to rebuild collective capacity in a time when much of our communication infrastructure has been enclosed by the #dotcons. Human beings do not exist outside their activities and relationships – Technology is one of the means through which those relationships are organised – So the challenge for the #openweb isn’t simply to build better software – It is to build better relationships between people, communities and the tools they use to act together.
That is the part of the #Fediverse story that interests me, and it is where the #OMN project starts.
One of the most useful ways to understand the mess we are in today is to ask a deceptively simple question – what comes first – the individual or the network? #Mainstreaming economics startes with the individual, were sociology, anthropology and related traditions start somewhere else – with relationships, institutions, communities and the social structures into which individuals are born.
This difference matters enormously, when we start thinking about technology, politics, economics and the #openweb. It is one of the reasons I keep coming back to the problem of #stupidindividualism – the point isn’t that individuals don’t exist, of course they do, the problem is treating the individual as if they exist independently of the social world that produces, supports and constrains them.
Why? we are not born as isolated economic actors, we are born helpless. Other people feed us, protect us, teach us language, teach us how to behave, introduce us to culture and eventually help us become capable of acting independently. Before there is an autonomous economic actor, there is already a network of care. That simple observation has consequences, that the network come first. that nobody invents themselves, every person was born into an existing social world, where there are families, communities, languages, institutions, infrastructures, histories and expectations already.
Even our ability to imagine ourselves as an individual depends upon other people. Language is social, knowledge is social, culture is social, markets are social and technology is social. The idea of private property depends on a society capable of recognising and enforcing it. Yet a great deal of mainstream economic thinking narrows it self to begin with the individual as though they are already standing outside society, deciding what they want and entering into relationships with other individuals through voluntary exchange. That is a very particular, narrow, way of not seeing the world, and it is not neutral, this blindness is historically produced.
One of sociology’s important contributions is to make the background visible. The individual is not simply a natural fact. The particular kind of individual we imagine ourselves to be is shaped by the social structures around us. But yes, modern societies are unusually good at producing the experience of being an isolated individual. We can move cities, change jobs, rent instead of own, interact with strangers. We can buy almost everything we need through markets, communicate with people thousands of kilometres away. We can participate in institutions without ever knowing the people who operate them.
This creates an extraordinary experience – we can feel independent while being massively interdependent. That is one of the great illusions of modernity, that the person sitting alone in a flat, ordering food through an app and working remotely from a laptop can feel completely autonomous. But underneath that apparent autonomy is an enormous network of other people and systems: farmers, delivery workers, programmers, electricity grids, telecommunications networks, roads, warehouses, financial institutions, governments, data centres and countless forms of unpaid and paid care.
So to put this simply, the individual is not independent, the individual is networked and the current narrow economic model hides the network. Composting this mess is where the distinction between mainstream economics and sociology becomes politically important. A simplified economic model can begin with individuals who have preferences, resources and choices. They meet in markets, supply meets demand, prices coordinate activity. The model can be useful for analysing particular situations.
The problem comes when the model becomes a description of human reality itself. A market is not simply a mathematical relationship between isolated individuals, it is a social institution, requireing rules, trust, a state thatrequires infrastructure, property rights, requires enforcement, communication of shared expectations. It requires people who know how to behave within this narrow system.
In other words – the market sits inside society and society does not simply emerge from a collection of markets. This distinction becomes particularly important when discussing capitalism, it is not some natural state that appears whenever humans are allowed to trade. It is a historically, involving particular institutions, property arrangements, states, legal systems, technologies and cultural assumptions.
Once we recognise this, the supposedly inevitable starts to look contingent, and that is where sociology becomes politically interesting. The state doesn’t disappear, just because the market exists. The current story presents the market and the state as opposites:
state = control
market = freedom
But historically, the development of modern markets has depended heavily upon states, to establish property law, currencies, enforce contracts. States build infrastructure, define corporations and regulate labour. States establish borders, create legal identities, enforce debts. The market and the state are not simply opposites standing outside one another, they are entangled.
This matters because when we look at modern capitalism as though it emerged from naturally individuals making voluntary exchanges, we erase much of the infrastructure that made those exchanges possible – again, the network disappears. The problem with universalising capitalism is one of the most damaging intellectual habits, taking the economic system we happen to live inside and treating it as though it describes human economic behaviour everywhere and throughout history.
Capitalist monetary exchange becomes “the economy.”
Market behaviour becomes “human nature.”
Competition becomes inevitable.
Private ownership becomes normal.
Debt becomes morally obvious.
Money becomes something humans must always have invented because they wanted a more efficient version of barter. But history repeatedly show much greater diversity, human societies have organised production, distribution, care and exchange in many different ways. There have been gift economies, commons, reciprocity networks, redistributive systems. There is no single timeless human economy – there are economic cultures. It is our assumptions about what is “normal” are themselves historically specific.
That lesson is directly relevant to technology of the #OMN project, as technology has its own version of this problem. We often start with the assumption that the individual user is the basic unit. The user creates an account. The user chooses a platform. The user posts content. The user chooses whether to participate. The user accepts the terms. The user leaves if they don’t like it. Doses this sounds reasonable?
But yes, as we have said, its not, as it ignores the network, if all your friends are on Facebook, “just leave Facebook” isn’t an individual decision in any meaningful sense. If your local council publishes important information only through Facebook, leaving becomes a civic problem. If your community organises through WhatsApp, leaving becomes a social problem. If your employer requires a particular platform, leaving becomes an economic problem. If your political movement organises somewhere, leaving becomes a political problem.
The individual appears to have a choice, but the network determines the cost of exercising it. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current #dotcons as they don’t simply sell software to individuals, they capture networks. Network effects become political power – once enough people are locked inside a platform, the platform becomes difficult to leave. This is often described as a “network effect”, as though it were simply a technical feature, it isn’t, it is a abusive social relationship.
The value of the platform increases because other people are there, that means the individual cannot solve the problem individually. You cannot build a better social network merely by downloading better software. You need people, communities, trust, shared practices. You need governance – you need ways for information to move and institutions that can maintain the infrastructure.
This is why simply telling people to “move to Mastodon” is insufficient. The problem isn’t that Mastodon exists or doesn’t exist. The problem is social infrastructure, the #openweb is a social project, this is why we don’t see the #openweb simply as a collection of technologies. #RSS, #ActivityPub, #PeerTube, #blogs, #wikis, distributed hosting and open-source software are tools. They become socially transformative only when communities use them to create different relationships.
The technical layer matters enormously, but technology alone cannot produce a commons. A commons requires people who maintain it, and these people need to be heald tagather by norms, trust, governance. This is where the #OMN comes in – from individual users to communities, we start from a different assumption – media is a social relationship, not simply a commodity produced for individual consumers. Instead of imagining millions of isolated users consuming content through a central platform, we build networks of communities that publish, share, moderate, maintain and archive media together.
This changes the question, instead of “What does the individual user want?” we can also ask “What does this community need?” And “What relationships allow this information system to remain healthy?” And”Who maintains it?” And “Who has power?” Thus “How can that power be accountable?” That is sociology applied to technology and importently why governance becomes unavoidable. Why governance is such a big part of #OMN and #OGB. If we pretend that technology is simply a neutral tool used by independent individuals, governance becomes something we only discover later when things go wrong.
But if we recognise that technology creates social relationships, governance is there from the beginning. Every platform has governance, the question is who governs – A dictator-for-life project is governance – a developer-controlled project has governance – an NGO-funded project has governance – a corporate platform has governance so yes then a community-run project has governance. Even “no governance” is a form of governance because it usually means that whoever has the most time, technical knowledge or social power ends up making the decisions. The #OGB challenge is therefore not to eliminate governance, it is to make governance visible, participatory and appropriate to the culture of the #openweb.
This brings us back to #stupidindividualism, remmber the hashtag isn’t saying that individuals are stupid, it is pointing at what happens when individualism becomes the only permitted way of understanding social problems. If someone says “Our community has a problem.” and the response is “Are you saying I’m the problem?” the conversation has already been derailed. The same happens with technology, if we say “The structure of social media encourages dependency.” and someone responds “But I personally choose to use Facebook.” we have moved from a structural question to an individual one.
Why all this matters now – we are walking a path where many of the systems that previously appeared stable are becoming unstable. Climate disruption, political polarisation, economic insecurity, platform collapse and #enshittification. leading to the current mess of #AI generated information overload. Declining institutional trust, fragmented communities and increasing centralisation of infrastructure. The probelms cannot be solved by millions of isolated individuals making slightly better consumer choices. They require collective action, and collective capacity requires understanding how people actually relate to each other. That means #KISS moving beyond the fantasy of the autonomous individual.
On this path the #OMN isn’t trying to invent some perfect alternative society, the starting point is much simpler – build infrastructure that assumes people are social – build media flows around communities – build governance around participation and trust – build software that supports cooperation rather than only extraction – build open standards so different communities can interoperate – build archives so collective memory survives – build metadata so information can be found and connected. And finaly build moderation systems that recognise human relationships rather than reducing everything to algorithmic scoring and blocking.
This is the job of the #4opens – open data, open source, open standards and open process – that are useful here because they make the infrastructure contestable. No single group gets to say “Trust us. We know what’s best.” keeping the infrastructure inside the commons wherever possible.
The most important lesson from sociology and anthropology isn’t that economists are always wrong. There are economists doing good work, and economics contains some internal diversity. The point is that no single discipline should get to define the whole of human reality. Economics is powerful at asking narrow questions. Sociology asks different questions, Anthropology asks different questions. History asks different questions, ecology asks different questions, technology asks different questions. The problem begins when one particular model becomes so powerful that its assumptions disappear from view.
That is the real danger of hegemony, you stop seeing the assumptions because everyone around you is using them. to work to compost this current mess, the #openweb is valuable because it gives us an shoval to build differently. But we won’t get anywere simply by swapping one piece of software for another, we need to challenge the deeper assumptions underneath the software. The assumption that the user is alone, that networks are collections of individuals, markets are natural, technology is neutral, that governance can be bolted on afterwards. And perhaps most importantly, the assumption that we are independent when we are actually interdependent.
Yes, the individual matters, but the individual is not the starting point, the relationship is. That is why sociology matters to the #OMN. And that is why building a genuinely social #openweb is about much more than writing better code. It is about rebuilding the networks of trust, cooperation, memory and collective power that allow people to live together in the first place.
So keep the path #KISS, technology is the tool, the social network is the foundation, the commons is the direction. Get to growing this please #OMN
The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is useful? That difference isn’t necessarily a weakness, when we nurture this it can be our strength.
To do this we need to support, fund and actually use a wide range of #openweb technologies, as there is no single “right path” waiting to be discovered. The #openweb should be a messy ecosystem, some projects will be radical, others pragmatic by compromising with existing institutions. Some will refuse every compromise, some will be technically elegant, were others will be slightly ugly but actually useful. Some people will be idealists, some will be organisers, geeks, activists – some will be experimenters, others will be complete weirdos.
We need all of these people. Even the “sellouts” can push open technology into places that fundamentalists cannot reach. The fundamentalists can protect principles that pragmatists might otherwise throw away. The pragmatists can make things usable, while the experimenters can discover things nobody expected and the weirdos can see possibilities that the sensible people completely miss.
The problem starts when any one of these groups decides that they are the whole movement. Then diversity becomes tribalism, difference becomes factionalism and criticism attack. And eventually everyone starts spending more energy defeating people who are broadly on the same side as building the commons we actually need. We’ve seen this mess before, the history of alternative technology is full of splits between people who wanted to build practical infrastructure and people who wanted purity, between technical communities and social movements, between centralised coordination and decentralised autonomy.
The lesson shouldn’t be “pick the correct side” – it needs to be – learn how to work with difference. This is particularly important now because the #dotcons have already demonstrated what happens when a technical ecosystem becomes dominated by a few powerful platforms. Monoculture creates dependency, creates control that leads to vulnerability. The answer to this simply cannot be to build another monoculture with different branding, we need plural infrastructure, based on #KISS#openweb native standards that communicate with each other.
That is where #FOSS based on open standards and the #4opens become important, they give a common floor without demanding a common culture. We don’t need everyone to agree, but we need enough openness that different projects can coexist, exchange knowledge and build on each other’s work. This is also why projects such as #OMN, #OGB, #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory shouldn’t be understood as competing for the one correct future. They are paths, pieces of a wider ecosystem.
Buts yes the important thing is to keep the commons alive while we experiment. The value isn’t in choosing one tribe and defeating the others, value is in creating conditions where difference can coexist, challenge assumptions, learn from failure and grow something wider than any individual project. We need disagreement without fragmentation, criticism without destruction and experimentation without constant reinvention. To make this work we also need pragmatism without selling everything out.
To help compost the #geekproblem we need technology that serves the social projects rather than becoming the social project. That means supporting the native diversity, contradictions and productive tensions that make an ecosystem resilient. And yes, you are right there are to meany people being prats currently on this subject.
This summer, heat, fires, the soon to come winter floods and insurance withdrawals will make #climatechaos harder to treat as something happening somewhere else. For years, climate breakdown was framed as an activist issue, something discussed by environmental groups while mainstream politics carried on with business as usual. That is changing, people are experiencing the consequences: extreme heat, flooding, damaged homes, rising insurance costs, failing infrastructure and growing uncertainty about what the next few years will look like. The #climatecrisis is moving into everyday life, so how do we live through what is already locked in?
Once the consequences of a warmer world are being experienced everywhere, adaptation becomes an unavoidable path. That means practical changes will finally start to happen such as resilient building standards, flood planning, water management, food systems, energy resilience, heat protection and changes to where and how we build.
But there is a danger in treating adaptation as purely a technical problem, we might redesign buildings, strengthen flood defences, change planning regulations. We can develop better warning systems – but who controls these systems? Who decides what gets protected? Who gets information when something goes wrong? Who maintains the infrastructure? Who remembers what happened last time? And who gets left behind? These are social and political questions.
The missing infrastructure is where the #OMN native path becomes important. Surviving #climatechaos isn’t only about physical infrastructure, it is also about information infrastructure and community infrastructure. During crisis, people need reliable information to know what is happening locally, they need to know who needs help, to know which transport links are closed, where resources are available, what services are operating and what communities are doing. They need ways to communicate when normal paths fail.
And afterwards, they need a record of what happened, this is why the #openweb matters, a resilient society cannot depend entirely on #closedweb privately owned platforms whose responsibility is to the current #nastyfew shareholders and advertisers. It is basic that the #dotcons are not resilience infrastructure – Facebook, Google, X, TikTok and the other #dotcons distribute information, and misinformation very quickly, but speed isn’t the same thing as resilience.
These current #closedweb digital systems are designed around control, engagement, advertising, data extraction and platform addiction. They are dangerous to use when important information will disappear into algorithmic feeds. It should be becoming obverse that communities cannot keep being dependent on proprietary services, as accounts can be suspended, interfaces can change, companies can change their business models, services will disappear.
And the information itself is often difficult to preserve, connect or reuse outside these #closedweb platforms. That is a terrible foundation for a society increasingly dealing with environmental disruption. This is why the #OMN focuses on the #deathcult story, in part to highlight it isn’t simply a collection of bad corporations. The current mess is about the way of organising society around short-term extraction, profit before resilience, growth before sustainability, competition before cooperation. Private ownership comes before the commons, and immediate financial returns are prioritised over the ability of communities to survive any long-term disruption.
In this mess, climate adaptation within this risks becoming another market, those who can afford resilience buy it, those who can’t are left exposed. Insurance withdraws from risky areas, property values become tied to climate risk. Private companies decide which infrastructure is commercially viable, the result is adaptation as another form of inequality.
To compost this mess we need #KISS social adaptation too – The alternative isn’t to reject technology – It is to change what technology is for. The #4opens provide a useful starting point: Open Data – Open Source – Open Standards – Open Process. These principles make it easier for communities to share information, build on each other’s work and maintain infrastructure without being locked into one corporation. The #openweb gives us the technical culture for this, #Federation allows different communities to remain independent while still communicating. Open standards allow systems to interoperate. Open data allows information to remain useful beyond one platform. And open process allows communities to understand and participate in decisions affecting them.
There is another important piece: memory, when a flood happens, people document it. When a heatwave hits, people record what happened, when infrastructure fails, somebody usually knows why. But much of this grassroots knowledge disappears into #dotcons social-media feeds. A few years later, we start again from scratch. This is why #openweb projects such as #MakingHistory matter. We need living community archives that connect events, places, people, media and responses over time. The archive becomes part of resilience, knowing what happened last time helps communities prepare for the next time.
Moving beyond the current #NGO pointlessness – we need to grow projects like the OMN as shovels, to clear the #techshit mess to grow grassroots infrastructure for publishing, sharing, moderating and preserving information. But yes, the technology is only part of it, the deeper goal is to help communities build trusted information networks that are not dependent on the current #dotcons. A resilient media system should allow people to – publish locally – discover relevant information – share between communities – moderate collectively – preserve important records – correct mistakes – maintain metadata – and keep historical context. This becomes especially important when normal systems are under pressure as the #mainstreaming is only seeing half the problem. But yes, the mainstream conversation is beginning to understand climate adaptation matters, but adaptation cannot be reduced to flood barriers, new building codes or air-conditioning.
We also need to ask whether the social systems surrounding those technologies are resilient. Can communities cooperate? Can people trust the information they receive? Can knowledge move between organisations? Can local experience become shared knowledge? Can communities govern their own infrastructure? Can we preserve memory? These questions are still largely outside the mainstream climate conversation. They shouldn’t be, the next wave of #climatechaos will test not only our physical infrastructure but our social infrastructure. The challenge is therefore twofold – build the physical systems that help us survive the changing climate – build the open, collective information systems that help communities understand and organise that survival.
The first is increasingly #mainstreaming, the second is where the #openweb, #4opens, #OMN, #OGB and #MakingHistory have something important to contribute. We do need #KISS more resilient communities, and resilient communities need infrastructure they can actually trust and control.
For 50 years we have worshipped the #deathcult – endless growth, extraction, competition and individualism – and now we are living with the damage that this has done to our society and the living world.
The current hard shift to the right won’t fix any of this, it simply empowers the #nastyfew to surf the apocalypse while more and more of us are left fighting over the scraps.
Blind hatred and political ignorance are not solutions. Neither is pretending that the past 50 years of “common sense” somehow didn’t happen.
So what do we do? We compost the mess, we take the broken assumptions, failed systems, #techshit, tribalism and accumulated political baggage and turn them into something useful.
Apathy is boring, get on with doing something useful please. That’s part of what #OMN is, not a shiny platform, nor another ideological club. It’s made as a shovel for digging through the mess and help build the grassroots #openweb infrastructure we need for a different future.
“After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries… to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned.”
The starting point is simple, Marx was right about many things. From a commons perspective, Marx understood something fundamental. Capitalism is not just a collection of individual choices and isolated market transactions. It is a system built around extraction, enclosure and the concentration of power. He understood that capitalism emerged through the destruction of older commons systems – taking land, resources and social relationships that had been collectively managed and turning them into private property, commodities and sources of profit.
And, the enclosure of the commons was not simply an economic change, it was a social transformation. People were separated from direct access to the means of survival and production. They became dependent on selling their labour within a system they did not control. With this in mid, the question for the #OMN, is not only “What is wrong with capitalism?” that question is important, but it is not enough. The deeper question is “What kind of structures can replace it without recreating the same problems in a different form?” This is where history, and our projects, becomes complicated.
Capitalism’s contradictions – Marx identified contradictions inside capitalism that remain visible today. The drive for endless accumulation, competition, overproduction and the pressure on profit all create instability. The interesting thing is not that capitalism avoided these contradictions, it did not, instead, capitalism adapted. The state became part of the survival mechanism, financial intervention, corporate subsidies, public spending, monetary policy and crisis management became ways of moving contradictions around rather than resolving them.
The destruction of the commons was not simply progress, it was a loss of social capacity. Communities lost direct relationships with land, production and decision-making, people lost the ability to say no because the alternatives had been enclosed.
The current system survives not because it solved its problems, but because it continually transforms them. The #deathcult adapts, capitalism is good at absorbing criticism, turning challenges into new markets and changing shape while maintaining the underlying logic: growth, extraction and accumulation.
The problem of capturing power – Marx understood that states are often captured by powerful interests, his answer was that the working class should take control of the state and use it as a tool of transformation. The problem is that power does not become harmless simply because different people hold it, a system designed around centralised power tends to attract people who understand and seek centralised power.
The history of the 20th century showed the dangers of this as temporary emergency powers have a tendency to become permanent structures. The promise that authority will eventually disappear is harder to achieve than the promise suggests. This is where the commons’ tradition offers a different starting point, the question then becomes – How do we build systems where power is distributed from the beginning? Not after a revolution, not after someone promises to give power back, now.
Means shape ends, a decentralised, participatory society cannot be built through centralised and authoritarian methods. If the process is based on hierarchy, control and obedience, then the destination carries those same patterns. This is why the commons connects with the libertarian traditions within Marxism, anarchism and movements such as the Paris Commune. The most interesting Marx is often the later Marx, the Marx who became more interested in communal ownership, local organisation and different forms of social production outside the Western industrial model. That Marx is much closer to commons thinking.
Ownership is not enough, a common mistake is to think the problem is only who owns production. Private ownership creates problems, but replacing private ownership with state ownership does not automatically create liberation. A factory owned by the state can still destroy ecosystems, a planned economy can still pursue endless growth.
The deeper question is – What is production for? Capitalism has a built-in requirement, money must become more money, production must expand, markets must grow, but the biosphere has limits. The #climatechaos era makes this impossible to ignore. A system that requires endless expansion inside a finite ecosystem contains a fundamental contradiction. The challenge is not simply changing ownership, it is changing the relationship between humans, technology, production and the living world.
The violence of extraction – capitalism treats value through exchange. Things matter because they can be turned into commodities. This creates a dangerous relationship with the natural world as forests become timber, rivers become sewers, animals become production units, land becomes an investment and life becomes something measured by economic usefulness.
When ecosystems cannot be made profitable, they are treated as obstacles rather than living systems with their own value. This logic spreads into human relationships, over the last 50 years people are increasingly judged through productivity, economic contribution and market value.
The problem is not individual greed alone, the problem is a system that rewards extraction. The question is not whether some people are good or bad, it is what kinds of behaviour the system encourages.
The commons ask a different question, not “Who controls the machine?” But “How do we build systems where nobody can easily capture the machine?” This is where the #4opens matters. The #4opens are not just a technical checklist, they are social infrastructure.
Open process.
Open data.
Open source.
Open standards.
They create transparency, participation and the ability for communities to understand and shape the systems they depend on. The goal is not simply to seize existing structures, it is to build different structures. Revolution as compost to grow alternatives in the cracks. The current crisis is also a crisis of social organisation as change is no longer only organised through traditional institutions. It moves through networks, data, attention and shared platforms.
Building commons, networks and shared memory, creating systems that survive beyond personalities, leaders and moments of attention. From individuals back to collectives, the commons is not one path where everyone must agree, it is a space where many paths can grow together. Diversity is not a problem to solve, it is the resilience.
The commons and climate responsibility – People often say “Humans are to blame for climate change.” But which humans? The responsibility is not evenly distributed, some actors have created far more extraction, pollution and destruction than others. The problem is not humanity, the problem is a particular way of organising human activity.
Keep in mid when building what comes next – capitalism extracts – authoritarian socialism centralises – the commons try to do something different by building power that belongs to everyone and cannot easily be taken away. This task is not to find a perfect blueprint, it is to grow living systems that are adaptable, transparent and rooted in participation. The #OMN, #openweb, #fediverse, #OGB, #indymediaback and #4opens ideas all come from this path.
Not replacing one hierarchy with another, not creating another machine for someone else to control we need to be building commons, trust, collective capacity. The future will not come from waiting for a better version of the existing system, it comes from growing alternatives that make the existing system less necessary.
It is your ability to discern facts that make you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a tyrant.
The #openweb needs this balance: people with the freedom to question, investigate and challenge – and communities with the shared trust to build together.
Without critical individuals we get conformity. Without common knowledge we get fragmentation. Democracy needs both: curiosity and commons.
Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.
The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.
The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.
So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.
But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.
The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.
The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.
The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.
The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.
The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”
The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.
The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.
The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.
From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.
But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.
The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.
Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.
The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.
The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.
If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.
The current mess and tragedy is that the tools we need most are often the first things that stressed, messy, #elitist systems defund, discredit, and dismantle. Why? Because these tools threaten the psychological certainty that people cling to when the world feels unstable. The ability to sit with uncertainty, to question assumptions, to admit complexity. These are not weaknesses, they are survival tools.
Yes, this is a mess we need to compost, the #nothingnew path to work on this is about recovering tools we already know work: science’s methods, hypothesis testing, falsifiability, uncertainty management, peer review, and collective correction. These are cultural technologies for thinking beyond the current #blocking immediate tribal reactions. They are systems designed around humility – the understanding that reality is bigger than any one person’s story.
In #OMN terms projects like #indymediaback, #OGB and #makeinghistory are the toolkits that can help us escape psychological traps, not by removing fear, fear is part of being human, but by building social paths strong enough to keep working even when the humans walking them are scared.
Psychological safety only works in ecological surplus, long-term joined-up thinking requires this psychological safety, when we have a surplus, a system has enough resources, so that it can experiment, adapt, and invest in the future. When a system is stressed, like we are today everything collapses towards survival thinking and behaver. This is why stressed societies underinvest in care, research, education, community, and long-term thinking. They marginalise the people doing this work and punish institutions trying to protect it. One of the resigns why the prophet is often stoned.
The hard right’s politics of scarcity – real or manufactured – creates cognitive narrowing. As people feel under constant threat, attention focuses on immediate danger, planning horizons shrink, outsiders become threats, complexity becomes suspicious. Cultures shaped by generations of insecurity carry this short-term thinking into institutions, mythology, and identity. It becomes the “common sense” in that everyone unthinkingly believes in. After 50 years of worshipping the #deathcult of endless extraction, competition, growth and profit above everything else, our societys and ecologys are fragile. And this is exactly when collapse pressure increases, the things that looked inefficient during growth become survival-critical – Diversity – Redundancy – Resilience – Commons.
The #OMN approach has always been that messy diversity is not waste, rather a core to living survival. So why do people still block this to cling to the broken paths? Humans know they will die, it creates a deep existential pressure that cultures have always tried to manage. Worldviews, communities, identities and belief systems become anxiety buffers. When those are threatened, people do not always become more rational. Often they become more defensive, double down, they become more attached to the group that gives them meaning.
This is why authoritarian paths grow during periods of fear – stronger hierarchy, tighter in-groups, scapegoating, magical thinking, blinded rigidity. The response to uncertainty becomes control, but control is not the same as resilience. Were the #openweb alternative is to often pushed away, it becomes a challenge, to build cultures that can handle uncertainty without collapsing into fear. And why It’s so hard to grow the needed open processes, shared knowledge, trust networks, collective problem-solving, and spaces where disagreement can happen without destroying the commons.
And we have people to do this – the reserve army “problem” – Capitalism creates its own insecurity, it structurally requires a group of people who are not fully included in production. The unhoused, precariously employed, unemployed, migrants and marginalised communities. They are treated as failures of the system, but from a structural perspective, precarity is useful to the mainstreaming. A population living with insecurity disciplines everyone else, it tells workers to accept worse conditions, less power and less control. Because someone else can replace you.
The #4opens can be a part of composting this, not because openness magically fixes everything, but because transparency, participation, and accountability are tools for keeping power visible. The #OMN path is about growing these social technologies alongside existing technical ones. In this the work is not to pretend fear does not exist. The answer is to build paths where fear does not become the organising principle. So we have real social groups to compost authoritarian thinking, scarcity politics, scapegoating, magical solutions, and the idea that domination is the only realistic path.
The future needs different seeds, the precarity, #openweb, #OMN, #4opens and other commons-based paths are parts of that wider work. The question is not whether the old system can continue forever, it is what are we growing while it cannot?
The first thing many people notice about a Rainbow Gathering is what is “missing”. There are no ticket booths, no commercial stages, no vendors selling branded experiences, no cash registers. Thousands of people gather in a forest to create temporary villages and cities to share food, build kitchens, make music, care for each other and then disappear again.
The absence of money can seem like a strange fantasy, but the deeper story is that it is not a just a rule, the refusal of commerce was the original idea, Rainbow was built around a simple but radical question – What happens if people try to organise life around sharing instead of buying? Not as theory, not as a manifesto, but as a lived practice.
The idea was the path – The Rainbow Family emerged from the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period where many people were questioning war, consumerism, hierarchy and the social structures around them. There were many competing ideas and paths about how change should happen, some believed confrontation and disruption were necessary, others believed a different approach was needed – Instead of only fighting the existing system, create something outside it, create a living example as a base from growth, temporary spaces, flows, where people could experience that another way of organising was possible.
The point was not simply to protest capitalism, the point was to demonstrate that cooperation was possible. The free festival model became the foundation – Food shared freely, skills offered freely, music created freely. People contributing because they wanted to, not because they were being paid. Noncommercial was not separate from the message, it was the message – it was real working emporary commons.
The Rainbow Gathering became a working flowing commons for the last 50 years in meany different country’s. A place where the normal, “common sense” rules of the market were excluded. The basic needs of the community were organised through collective effort – Kitchens, water, medical care, childcare, information sharing, conflict resolution. The important part was not that everything was perfect, it was that people attempted to create the working infrastructure of a different culture.
This is the part often misunderstood, a commons is not the absence of organisation, a commons is a different kind of organisation. It requires participation, responsibility, people to care. Freedom without responsibility does not create a commons, it creates a tragedy.
So why did getting rid of money matter? The rejection of money was both symbolic and practical, money does more than exchange goods, it creates relationships between buyers and sellers, it introduces ownership, competition and hierarchy what the Rainbow crew called, in there folksy, spiritual way Babylon.
Why? Because if someone can buy influence, buy comfort or buy power, the social relationships begin to change. The Rainbow idea was, remove the market inside the space and see what grows instead. The “Magic Hat” became one solution, the gathering still existed in a world where food, supplies and transport required money, the difference was that money was moved into the background as a part of the wider gift economy.
With the magic hat people contributed anonymously, resources become collective, the camp itself remained based on sharing. It was not pretending the outside world did not exist, it created a different relationship, the value was about belonging. This path treated humans as creators – a culture where nobody was just a consumer, nobody was only a customer, nobody was reduced to economic value, everyone had something to contribute to belong.
This is why Rainbow connects with wider commons movements, the same question appears in many places – Can people build systems based on cooperation instead of extraction? Can communities create value without everything becoming a product? Online this is also the question at the heart of the #openweb that meany people fail to talk about.
The problems – every commons faces the same challenges, that people are messy. The same openness that pushes participation also pushes nasty problems. Rainbow developed its own language for this “Drainbow.” The word describes people taking more than they give, people who consume the resources of the gathering without contributing. At one level, this is a problem, as a community based on mutual aid depends on people participating, a commons dose need boundaries. But if those boundaries become a way of creating insiders and outsiders, the original path is weakened.
This is the ongoing Rainbow tension – How do you stay open without being overwhelmed? How do you protect the commons without creating hierarchy? It is a living contradiction, that still exists, but still demonstrates that people can cooperate on a huge scale for 50 years, but how difficult cooperation can be to sustain. Consensus can be beautiful, but it can also be exhausting. Leaderlessness prevents domination, but it also creates confusion. Openness creates freedom, but this creates vulnerability.
These are the challenges of any attempt to build a different culture. There is also a modern lesson here – When we describe movements like Rainbow, there is a tendency to turn them into either mythology or failure. Either “Look at this perfect alternative society.” Or “Look at this chaotic disaster.” Both extremist common sense views miss the point, were the important question is what did people learn by living this life?
Culture is not built by perfect systems, it is built through practice, through mistakes, through correction. Through people returning and trying again. Rainbow shows that the infrastructure matters – The kitchens mattered – The councils mattered – The shared practices mattered. The technology of the commons is social, the same is true for media were a new publishing system will not create a commons by itself.
The Rainbow story is not that humans can’t escape all conflict, humans bring conflict with them. The story is that conflict can happen inside a different framework, a framework based on trying, sharing, learning and repairing. That another way of organising is possible, that people are capable of creating temporary worlds outside the dominant logic.
Yes, commons are fragile, but they matter, the path is not a finished destination. And like every commons, they survive only when people keep tending them.
One of the things missing from conversations about rebuilding radical networks is that we defult to looking first at the technology. The #OMN question is different – What are the social systems that allow alternatives to survive?
A useful example comes from the history of the Rainbow Gatherings. To an outsider, the strangest thing about a Rainbow Gathering is likely the hippies, the second is the absence of money. Thousands of people gather in forests, share food, organise care, create culture and then disappear again – without tickets, vendors or commercial stages. This can look like a quirky tradition, but there are lessons – the absence of commerce was never just a rule, it was the point. The idea was simple – If you want to show that another society is possible, you cannot only argue against the existing system, you have to create a working alternative.
The non-commercial path was the message, a living example of a working alternative logic. The early Rainbow organisers came out of the Vietnam War veterans and the antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were asking a question that still matters – How do you challenge a system built around war, competition, consumption and hierarchy? One answer was confrontation, another answer was demonstration. the rainbow path was instead of only fighting the existing culture, was to create a space where different values operate with shared resources, mutual aid, no buying and selling, no central authority. People contributing what they can and receiving what they need.
The Free Store experiments and early free festivals showed this approach in practice. The gathering itself became temporary commons – a place where the normal rules of the market were suspended. The important part was not the camping, not the festival. It is the social infrastructure underneath – Food does not appear magically, care does not happen automatically, conflict does not disappear.
A commons requires trust, participation, shared responsibility, informal governance and a culture of contribution. This is the part missing from technology discussions, people imagine the #openweb as about tools – Protocols – Platforms – Software. But the deeper layer is social, the software only works because communities create meaning around it.
The #OMN connection is that this is the same lesson for radical media networks. #Indymedia was never only a publishing platform, It was a social path, the technology enabled publishing, but the power came from the culture of open participation, collective editing and local autonomy to build shared responsibility.
The failure of this network was not simply technical, like many commons, the challenge was maintaining the social practices that made the technology meaningful. A reboot cannot just recreate the tools, it has to regrow the conditions that allowed the tools to matter in a world beyond the market logic.
The #dotcons path blindly pushes – create a product, grow users, extract value, centralise control.
The commons model works differently – create relationships, grow trust, share value to distribute power.
This does not mean money disappears from the world. The Rainbow example itself shows this complexity. People still need resources. Food still has to be bought somewhere. The outside economy still exists. The difference is where the organising principle sits. Does money organise the community? Or does the community organise resources?
That is the question that matters, it’s the danger of rebuilding the same common sense system – that many alternative paths fail because they challenge the surface while reproducing the structure underneath. A shiny platform can still become a gatekeeper, a new network can still become centralised. A new media system can still become extractive. The question is not only “Is the technology open?” The question is also “Is the culture open?”
The Rainbow Gatherings survived because they were not trying to build a better marketplace. They were trying to practice another way of organising, that is the deeper #openweb lesson. We do not just need alternative tools, we need alternative relationships with tools. It is about creating spaces where people can trust, participate, maintain and build together.
The #OMN vision is not a replacement platform, it is a garden, the technology is the soil, the people are the gardeners, the commons are what grows.
The thing about #techbro culture is that some of the most #elitists people grew up loving stories that warned us about the #techshit they are building. They read the dystopias, watched the films, they understood the dangers of unchecked capital, concentrated power, surveillance, artificial intelligence, inequality, and corporate control.
Then many of them decided “Great idea. Let’s build it.” as the #geekproblem made them think they knew better. This is what our #fashionista class call the #tormentnexus problem – the moment when a warning about a future goes wrong becomes interpreted as a blueprint for that future. The issue is not that people like technology, science fiction, fantasy, or engineering. The #openweb itself grew from people who loved exploring what technology could make possible. The problem is when technical possibility becomes separated from social consequence.
A story like Dune is not simply about a powerful individual changing history. It is a warning about charismatic power, messianic thinking, and the danger of believing one person can control complex systems. A story like Snow Crash is not just a cool vision of virtual worlds. It is a satire of corporate fragmentation, private control, and a society where everything becomes a service. A story like Blade Runner is not simply a stylish future aesthetic. It asks what happens when technology creates beings and systems that challenge our ideas of humanity, rights, and exploitation.
But our blinded #mainstreaming started removing the politics from the stories. They kept the shiny machines, they kept the aesthetics, the power fantasies. They discarded the warnings, the #geekproblem is about capability without consequence. A recurring problem in technology culture is that engineering thinking often asks:“Can we build this?” That is an important question, but society has to ask “Should we build this?” And “Who benefits?” And “What happens to the people who have no power in this system?”.
The #geekproblem is not that engineers are bad people. It is the cultural mistake of believing technical problems can be separated from social reality. A better algorithm will not automatically solve inequality, more data will not automatically create wisdom, more automation will not automatically create freedom.
The blinded #geekproblem myth of the chosen builder, is another pattern that appears again and again. The people building these systems imagine themselves as the exception, the story says “Yes, this technology could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but I am different, I will use it responsibly.” This is the same #elitists fantasy that many cautionary stories warn against.
A system can be technically brilliant and socially destructive, the history of technology is full of examples where innovation created new problems alongside the solutions. The factory increased production but created new forms of exploitation, the car increased mobility but reshaped cities around machines. #dotcons social media connected people but also created control, surveillance, manipulation, and attention extraction. The question is never only what technology can do, the question is what kind of society technology grows.
The problem is not bad individuals, though they exist. The problem is social and economic paths that concentrate power and reduce accountability. The danger is not only the evil ruler, more it’s creating structures where rulers become inevitable. This is why the #openweb matters, real power is not finding a better king, it is building #KISS systems where power is distributed, visible, and accountable.
Our current worship of capital rewards the wrong interpretation, is another uncomfortable part of this. The market rewards the most dangerous reading of a story. The cautionary version says “Maybe we should not build this because it creates harm.” The investment version says “Can we build it faster than everyone else?” The version that creates companies, funding rounds, patents, and control is usually the one that wins. The result is that technology is shaped by incentives that favour scale, speed, and ownership. Not care, community, resilience or long-term social health. This is the mess we need to compost to not end up with a world where the same systems criticised in dystopian fiction become business opportunities.
The missing piece is growing the commons, not with anti-technology (the wrong lesson) – The answer is technology embedded in social systems that understand responsibility. This is where the original #openweb ideas matter – growing from open processes, transparent development, shared ownership, community governance and public interest infrastructure. The lesson of #FOSS was never simply “Anyone can copy the code.” The deeper lesson was “People can collectively build and maintain things outside pure market logic.”
It should be obverse that the technical commons will need social commons, without that, open code can still become captured by closed paths. The solution is the challenge for projects like #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, and #indymediaback – not to reject technology – to keep asking a different question not “How do we build the next big thing?” but “How do we build things that help people build together?”
The future does not need more isolated #eletist builders trying to control complexity, it needs communities capable of navigating complexity. The opposite of the #tormentnexus is not rejecting technology, its is more about creating technology where the social relationships come first.
The #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is technical – a commons is social. The work now is making sure we do not build the dystopias our own stories spent decades warning us about. The warning signs are there, the question is whether we listen.
