The work of composting the #deathcult and growing something more human

The world is such a mess, partly this is because we use fear as a motivation to grasp for control were we should be reach for competence instead. The mess this makes needs shovels to work at composting, it is what tools like the #OMN are trying to provide, but to close this circle we have to first make them, then pick them up, then use them to shovel the #techshit into compost that is in part feeding this mess.

So what is blocking this work? In part it is we use language irresponsibly, and partly that this is a class issue. Groups feed back and reinforce bad language, forming tribes, these blinded groups then ingest the sickness and poison from each other. This is the world we have created over the last 50 years, shaped by the “law of the jungle”, where people behave less like humans and more like animals.

The irony is that the people with the most agency are often the most afraid of change. This is particularly visible in the #fashionista crew, Who constantly block necessary change, making process nasty and often violent until crisis overwhelms their fear. Only then do some maybe finally use their agency to try to save the situation, late and messily, when much of the damage is to late to be avoided

Lets look at this wider, there is a bigger argument than the current chattering class noise – how the last 50 years of #neoliberal culture reshaped social behaviour, language and, most importantly, our ability to act collectively. This connects to the #geekproblem, #fluffy/#spiky divide, #NGO #mainstreaming and why rebuilding the #openweb requires changing social norms, not only writing better #FOSS software.

Over the last 50 years, #neoliberalism shaped the social environment we live in, competition, individual advancement, insecurity and the worship of markets become normalized. We have been encouraged to see ourselves as competing individuals rather than participants in shared social paths. This is not simply a communication problem, it is a class problem, a cultural problem and ultimately a problem of collective growing any agency paths. Words that should help us understand the world have become tribal signals, instead of describing reality, they mostly describe which group we belong to, who we trust and who we are supposed to oppose.

The resulting mess where groups feed back their own language, assumptions and prejudices to each other is a feedback loop few try and escape from. They form tribes that develop internal vocabularies that reinforce their versions of reality. These closed feedback loops become increasingly disconnected from any idea of the wider world. People ingest the same social sickness and then pass it around, often believing they are defending something good, this is how bad ideas become new social norms.

Language should be a tool for exploring reality, negotiating differences and developing shared understanding, instead, much of our political and technological culture uses language as a form of social sorting. Words like safe, inclusive, progressive, radical, professional, disruptive, community and innovation lose their descriptive meaning and become membership badges.

The important thing for #mainstreaming is using the approved language rather than understanding the underlying reality, a strange situation were people become skilled at talking about social change while becoming increasingly unable to participate in it. We see this across our #openweb reboot were projects spend more time managing the language around participation than actually developing meaningful participation. The #fluffy approach then blindly turns kindness into avoidance – the #spiky approach can turn honesty into aggression. Both can become self-protecting tribes rather than useful approaches to collective work.

The class problem behind the tribes is that these behaviours don’t develop in a vacuum. Different social groups experience the world differently, have different resources and face different risks. They also develop different forms of agency, some people have professional security, institutional connections and the ability to move between funded projects. Others have practical skills, lived experience and grassroots relationships but little institutional recognition or financial security. These differences shape how people behave, for example:

The professional #NGO layer: Often has access to funding, institutional language and organizational influence. Its poison can be turning political struggle into manageable projects, consultation and career development. Its value is organizational experience, resources and the ability to maintain long-term work.
The #fashionista layer: Gains influence through cultural positioning, language and social legitimacy. Its poison can be conformity, status competition and policing who belongs. Its value is cultural energy, communication and the ability to bring new people into movements.
The technical #geekproblem layer: Gains agency through specialist knowledge, software and infrastructure. Its poison can be control, abstraction and the assumption that technical functionality solves social problems. Its value is practical skills, maintenance and the ability to build working tools.
The grassroots #spiky layer: Often has direct experience of organizing, conflict and practical resistance. Its poison can be hostility, burnout and destructive internal conflict. Its value is independence, political clarity and willingness to challenge established power.
The grassroots #fluffy layer: Often brings care, mediation, inclusion and relationship-building. Its poison can be conflict avoidance, endless consensus-seeking and enabling existing power. Its value is trust, participation and the social glue that keeps communities together.

These are all tendencies, not fixed identities. People move between them, and most projects contain several of these cultures at once, the thing is to understand that every group brings something useful and every group can also bring something destructive, we need to understand both. #Fluffy and #spiky: Two necessary sides of collective agency – the #fluffy/#spiky divide is a useful way of understanding a recurring problem in grassroots organizing.

#Fluffy

Trust and relationships
Care and inclusion
Mediation and consensus
Social stability

Failure mode: avoiding necessary conflict.

#Spiky

Challenge and resistance
Political clarity
Boundaries and accountability
Willingness to act

Failure mode: turning every disagreement into a battle.

Neither is enough on its own – without #fluffy, movements become hostile, exhausting and difficult to sustain. Without #spiky, movements become places where difficult questions are endlessly postponed and existing power is protected. To start to compost this mess we need to repair our grassroots groups so they can change the social norms to make these approaches work better together agen. Kindness must not mean avoiding accountability. Honesty must not mean abandoning care. A healthy movement needs both the ability to welcome people and the ability to challenge them.

The law of the jungle and the loss of human behaviour is another uncomfortable part of this argument. After 50 years of competitive individualism, much of our social behaviour is the law of the jungle. People become defensive, territorial, status-conscious and opportunistic. They protect their immediate position, compete for scarce resources and treat other people as threats or opportunities. This isn’t because people have somehow become less human by nature, it is because the systems we have built reward these behaviours. When insecurity becomes normal, trust becomes risky, when competition becomes normal, cooperation needs justification, when status becomes the measure of success, collective achievement becomes difficult to recognise.

We end up with groups that can talk endlessly about solidarity while behaving according to the opposite logic, this is one of the worst contradictions of the current #deathcult worship. We built social systems that undermine the very human qualities we need to change these systems.

The agency paradox: Those most able to act can become the biggest blockers is a particularly important contradiction. Some of the people with the greatest social agency are also the people most afraid of change. They have established positions, reputations, networks, professional identities and cultural influence, have learned how to operate within the existing system. They may have the resources to initiate change, but they also have the most to lose if the ground shifts beneath them, this is where the #fashernista problem becomes particularly visible.

The people who are most confident in progressive language tend to be the least willing to support actual structural change. They to often block emerging processes, challenge uncomfortable ideas, demand endless consultation and make practical experimentation socially difficult. They don’t necessarily do this consciously, as often they believe they are protecting the community, maintaining standards and preventing harm, but the outcome is the same: pre-emptive obstruction.

Then something interesting happens, as a crisis develops, the old structures begin to fail. Eventually the consequences become impossible to ignore. Suddenly, some of the same people who resisted change discover their agency. They start organizing, making decisions and taking responsibility, but by then the situation is much worse, the opportunity for gradual, thoughtful change has been lost. What could have been a manageable transition becomes a nasty and destructive crisis, the people who could have helped prevent the crisis discover their agency only when the crisis starts to threaten them directly. This is a currently a recurring failure of mainstreamed progressive culture: fear of manageable change produces the conditions for unmanageable change.

Functionality – People have different ideas about what works – this explains why arguments about functionality are often so difficult. People don’t approach a project with neutral ideas about what works, they bring their social position, experience, expectations and cultural assumptions. For one group, functionality means safety, predictability and professional standards, for another, it means speed, experimentation and getting something working. For another, it means participation, inclusion and making sure nobody is excluded, for another, it means political effectiveness and the ability to challenge established power.

These are not simply different opinions about people, software or project management, they are different ideas about how society should work. The problem comes when one group assumes its own definition of functionality is universal – this is particularly visible in the #geekproblem – the assumption that if something works technically, it must work socially, it doesn’t. A technically “perfect” platform can support terrible social relationships, a beautifully inclusive process can produce nothing useful, a politically radical project can destroy its own community through internal conflict.

We need to judge functionality across the whole system:

Does it work technically?
Does it work socially?
Does it support meaningful participation?
Does it distribute agency?
Can people challenge and change it?
Can it survive conflict, failure and changing circumstances?

This is why we need to bring in native #4opens development. As changing the social norms is needed, we cannot solve these problems simply by asking people to be nicer, more inclusive or more radical. Those often become just more tribal signals, we need different social practices. Some starting points:

Make disagreement normal. Conflict is not automatically a failure. The ability to disagree openly without destroying relationships is a foundation of collective work.
Separate criticism of ideas from attacks on people. We need to be able to say that a process is broken without turning every argument into a personality conflict.
Reward practical agency. Value the people who maintain, build, organise, experiment and take responsibility, not just those who are best at managing the language around projects.
Make power visible. Who decides? Who controls resources? Who can block progress? Who benefits from the existing arrangements?
Allow experimentation. Small failures are often cheaper than large, delayed failures. We need room to try different approaches without demanding institutional approval for everything.
Build accountability into care. Being welcoming does not mean accepting destructive behaviour. Being challenging does not mean abandoning collective responsibility.
Protect the commons. The people who contribute to a shared resource must have meaningful ways to influence and govern it.

The #OMN path is about this – building social technology for human agency, it is why the #OMN is not simply a software project – balanceing – growing social technology that supports different groups, different cultures and different forms of agency without allowing one group to capture the whole path or process. But as people likely reply, openness alone isn’t enough, we also do need the social practices that make openness useful.

The #OMN approach is to build networks of flows rather than centralized platforms. People and communities publish, subscribe, moderate, curate and maintain relationships with information. Trust develops through human participation rather than being imposed by a single algorithm or management structure. The #OGB work is about building the governance needed to make that shared infrastructure accountable. And #indymediaback is about recovering the grassroots publishing and organizing practices that made the native #openweb meaningful in the first place.

These projects need to work across the different social cultures, not become or be seen as another tribe defending its own assumptions. We need #fluffy people who can build trust, #spiky people who can challenge power, technical people who can maintain infrastructure and organizers who can turn shared intentions into practical action. None should dominate, all should be accountable.

The bigger change is that the last 50 years have normalized a particular kind of anti social behaviour: competitive, defensive, individualistic and increasingly disconnected from collective responsibility. To step away from this mess, we need to stop pretending that better interfaces, nicer language or another round of professional management will fix this. The problem is deeper, we need to rebuild the social norms that make collective agency possible. That means learning to recognize the different poisons circulating through our groups, understanding the useful capacities hidden inside those same groups, and finding ways to bring those capacities into productive relationships.

We need to stop rewarding people for defending their positions and start rewarding people for helping communities move forward, and most importantly, we need to stop waiting for crisis to give people permission to act. The point of grassroots organizing is to build the agency to change things before the crisis arrives, the work is of composting the #deathcult and growing something more human.

The rot of Couchsurfing is mainstreaming decay in #openweb paths

From hospitality exchange to venture capital, from grassroots community to corporate platform. The story of #Couchsurfing is a warning about what happens when we confuse building a network with building a community. The story of Couchsurfing is more interesting than a failed social network, it is a history of what happened to native #openweb paths when grassroots roots are overtaken by #NGO turns, startup culture and eventually the fantasies of the #dotcons.

There are lessons here for anyone trying to rebuild an open, grassroots internet today.. The roots were always social, not technological. Hospitality exchange didn’t begin with the internet, networks like Servas, founded in 1949, built on a simple human idea: people open their homes, share resources and create relationships across cultural and national boundaries. Later came Esperanto networks, Hospitality Club, Couchsurfing and more. The internet didn’t invent this, but it gave an existing movement new tools to organize, communicate and grow. This is a native lesson, the technology grows from existing human relationships and grassroots practice, not pretending we create community from nothing.

Hospitality Club, founded in 2000, was built through voluntary programming, translation, moderation, member support and organizing. Couchsurfing (#CS) grew from volunteers organizing local groups, hosting travellers, running potlucks, to built relationships and created a culture that no software company could have manufacture. The website was a small part of the infrastructure, the network was people.

The first failure on this path, was confusing community goodwill with ownership. Couchsurfing’s 2006 database crisis showed the strength of original model. Volunteers helped raise money and rebuilt the platform in ten days, think about that. A community mobilize people, money and technical skills to rescue shared infrastructure because people believed in what they were building.

But this created a fundamental question that the native #openweb has repeatedly failed to answer, who owns the value created by community? The volunteers had supplied labour, expertise, relationships and trust, yet they had no reliable guarantee that the resulting infrastructure would remain under community control. Disputes over volunteer code, NDAs and management transparency exposed this.

BeVolunteer and BeWelcome emerged from this wider conflict, attempting to build the same community based on more formal nonprofit organization and participation. This was an #NGO fork in the road, one path treated community participation as the foundation of a shared resource, the other treated it as an asset that could be managed, controlled and eventually sold.

The #CS NGO turn was replacing grassroots power with professional management, this is where the story connects to the wider #openweb, as grassroots networks grew, they increasingly encounter the world of professional nonprofits, foundations, institutional funding and eventually venture capital. The promise was sustainability, reality was a transfer of power.

Instead of building stronger grassroots governance, projects began importing management structures from the institutions they were supposed to offer alternatives to. Consultants, boards, executives, funding applications, professional communications and organizational hierarchies. The people who actually made the networks were pushed towards the edges. #CS move towards private commercial ownership in 2011 was a example of this mess.

A reported $7.6 million investment round, followed by further venture funding, transformed a community-oriented network into a privately controlled company. Members were not meaningfully consulted about the transfer, the wiki disappeared, community information became private, volunteer structures changed and growth became a corporate priority. The language of community remained, the community’s power did not.

This is the #NGO problem, hollowing out grassroots relationships that brings the value. Not every nonprofit follows this path, #BeWelcome and other alternatives demonstrate that different organizational choices are possible. The problem is not paying people or raising money, the problem is allowing the funding structure to displace the community’s purpose and control.

Couchsurfing eventually became a example of the #dotcons business fantasy of growth, not community. The assumption was that the vertical scaling of more members, more investment, more marketing and more professional management would produce a stronger network. And yes for a time, the network might grow while its social purpose disappeared.

This is the contradiction of the #dotcons, they measure growth in accounts, engagement, traffic and financial value, while the thing that has value, the human network comes from trust, participation, reciprocity and relationships. You can buy growth, you cannot buy the social fabric that makes a network work in meaningfully ways.

In 2020, Couchsurfing introduced mandatory contributions in many countries, making access conditional on payment. People who had spent years building the network were now being forced to pay to access the relationships and infrastructure they had create. The problem behind this was a normal mainstreaming one, it wasn’t only that the network needed money, the problem was who controlled it, who decided how it was funded and who benefited from the value it generated.

This fall is when the community starts to leave, the platform is already dead, the failure of Couchsurfing wasn’t a particular CEO, funding round or paywall, it was the gradual destruction of the reciprocal relationship between the platform and its community. This is an important distinction for the #openweb, a network can remain technically online long after its community has disappeared.

A project can have excellent open-source software while having no meaningful grassroots movement around it. The native #openweb was never just about publishing code, it was about building shared infrastructure through shared practice. When you remove that practice, you are left with an increasingly hollow technical shell.

What we can learn from this dead native #openweb project? This might be useful for current projects like the #fedivers, there are some of the lessons:

Build the community before scaling the technology. Start with existing relationships, local groups, shared practices and real needs. Software should strengthen these relationships, not replace them.
Make governance part of the infrastructure. Don’t leave governance until after the software is built. Open code without open processes still produce closed power structures. Participation, transparency, accountability and the ability to challenge decisions need to be designed into the project from the beginning.
Don’t confuse funding with sustainability. Money is necessary for developers, hosting, administration and maintenance. But funding should support the community rather than turn the community into a resource for funders.
Build networks, not platforms. A platform concentrates control, a network of interoperable, independently maintained communities distributes it. Shared data, open standards, portable identities and federated infrastructure make it harder for one organization to capture the network.
Value participation, not just numbers. A few hundred active people who trust each other, maintain the infrastructure and take collective responsibility can be worth more than millions of inactive accounts.

This is why we need the #OMN, history is relevant to what we are trying to build, the #OMN, #OGB and #indymediaback. The native #openweb had the right instincts: open standards, voluntary participation, shared resources, grassroots organization and trust between people. But it repeatedly failed to build durable structures to protect those values when projects grew, funding arrived and professional management took over.

We need to learn from that history rather than keep repeating it. The #OMN starts from a different place, not another social media platform competing for accounts and attention, it is a path to grow a shared network of media flows, where communities can publish, subscribe, moderate, curate and maintain their own connections to information. The technical foundation is important, but it is only one part of the work.

#4opens: Open data, open source, open standards and open process.

#OGB: Grassroots governance that makes collective ownership and accountability practical.

#indymediaback: Rebuilding community-based publishing and local media.

#MakingHistory: Building shared, federated archives where communities participate in preserving and interpreting their histories.

The working path is to make the social relationships, data and infrastructure reinforce each other rather than allowing one organization to capture the value of the whole network. This is also why we need to resist the #NGO turn and the #dotcons fantasy. Both encourage us to hand over grassroots power in exchange for promises of professional delivery, scale and sustainability. #Couchsurfing shows where that road can lead, we shouldn’t build big networks, rather we need to build the grassroots foundations that allow networks to grow without losing their purpose.

And that’s what we mean by the #OMN.

#OMN: WHERE NEXT? WE HAVE SEED FUNDING, NOW COMES WORK

At the root of the mess we face is the worship of the #deathcult, the idea that competition, individualism, control and endless growth are simply human nature, they are not, they are systems we keep reproducing, even when it is making society unlivable.

We now have seed funding for the #OpenMediaNetwork projects. That gives us a chance to move beyond endlessly talking about the problems and start building practical tools for a different path. Were next? The #4opens gives us a basic test for the technology. The #OGB points towards grassroots governance. Together, these are part of a DIY toolkit for moving power away from the #dotcons, the #geekproblem and the #NGO mainstreaming that keep reproducing the same mess in supposedly alternative paths.

But funding is only a beginning, the real challenge is social – how do we compost the recurring cycles of paranoia, status games, dogmatic individualism of people pushing themselves towards the top? How do we build trust, shared responsibility and structures for people to work together without recreating the hierarchies we claim to be opposing?

To compost this mess, we need to look at the current arguments about the left and right paths. Yes, people understandably want to escape institutions they no longer trust, some retreat into private life, nature and their own projects, others double down on leadership and control. But walking away from society doesn’t make the wider problems disappear, replacing one set of bosses with another isn’t an alternative.

We need to think horizontally, by growing trust, keeping processes open, sharing power and making space for people to participate without demanding that they surrender their independence. So what can you do? Follow the hashtags, read the ideas, ask questions, find a part of the project you can contribute to – you don’t need to understand everything before taking this first step.

And yes, bring a shovel, social composting is messy work, we have plenty of accumulated shit to turn into something useful. A simple first test for #stupidindividualism, can you find your way into a shared project without demanding that it revolve around you? Can you help build something that benefits people beyond yourself?

If not, that’s not a reason to give up, it’s a place to start digging. The #openweb won’t rebuild itself, we need people, practical tools and grassroots structures that make cooperation possible. A little seed funding gives us a chance, the next step is building the crew to do the work to grow the commons.

At #OMN, we’re working to compost the #techdebt problem using federation and the #4opens. The idea is simple, build apps around shared data flows, not locked-in codebases. Keep the data useful across projects, while the code becomes a golden ladle in a #witchescauldron, a tool for shaping and serving the commons, not a container that owns it.

New codebase? Let the data flows move across. Less tech debt, less churn, more reuse. Build on what we have, rather than endlessly starting again.

Why does this matter? The #mainstreaming path, represented by projects like https://blog.joinmastodon.org/, is becoming narrow through #NGO capture and institutional funding priorities.

The problem is that five years of funding have helped create a poor diversity of codebases and approaches. We need to mediate this blinded #geekproblem and grow more working grassroots paths that people can spread out across, rather than keep funneling everyone into the same few #openweb codebases.

Yes, there’s a lot of #techshit to compost. And yes, we need people with shovels to do the work of clearing the ground, reusing what’s useful, and planting seedlings along more native #openweb paths.

Less tech churn, more shared flows. Less lock-in, more commons.

#OMN #4opens #OGB #OpenWeb #KISS #MakingHistory #indymediaback

Please get off your knees and pick up a shovel

Our choice for the last 20 years has been between the #deathcult and #fascism, how the hell did we get into this mess? And how do we find a way out? To build a path we need shovels, not saviours. We need to dig through the shit, compost failures and regrow paths to grassroots collective power. To work on this we need to stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start rebuilding the ground beneath our feet.

Politics is the human condition, you’d have to be mad as a hatter, or a liberal, to imagine we can somehow escape it. We live in messy times, and they’re getting dirtier. Politics isn’t going away, the question is whether we organize collectively to shape it, or leave the field to the #nastyfew people already digging our collective graves.

To be clear, what I’m putting forward doesn’t solve any single problem. What it does is take a practical step towards solving many problems, by changing how we work together. What we don’t need is market-based “green” solutions, elitist control or any more left-wing hero worship – as all feed into the same trap – the #deathcult of #neoliberalism. That common sense keeps us looking upwards for leadership, waiting for markets to save us or hoping the next hero will finally get things right, meanwhile, our uncommon sense collective ability to act decays.

To use a shovel we need is to move beyond fear and control towards trust, open processes and grassroots power. And yes, this isn’t the normal #blinded path about finding another perfect ideology to worship, it’s messy, its about growing practical tools and relationships to allow us to act together, to learn from failure and make change possible.

I should not HAVE to keep saying this, but this is what the #4opens process is about – moving beyond #stupidindividualism, beyond copying the #dotcons, and towards a path we can actually walk together. Open data, open source, open standards and open processes are practical starting points for shared responsibility. They test us, to build in public, hold power to account and create commons that belong to participation rather than private ownership.

The last 50 years of common sense monetization of everything is the #deathcult, as is the endless me, me, me that fragments our ability to act collectively. We won’t compost this mess by repeating the same individualistic habits with a few new slogans, we have to change the practices that keep reproducing it.

At #OMN, we’re turning to decades of grassroots experience of practical tools for collective action. #OGB, #indymediaback, #MakingHistory people have been working on for years. But, they’ve been stuck at the development stage for far too long. The challenge now is to get them moving, connect the people and skills involved, and turn activist traditions into working infrastructure for grassroots media, shared knowledge and collective organization.

This isn’t a magic solution, it’s a way to start growing many solutions from the ground up, rather than waiting for the market, the state or another self-appointed hero to deliver them. Please get off your knees, pick up a shovel, the ground is covered in mess, but that’s exactly why we need to start composting. We have plenty of shit to work with, and plenty of seeds worth saving.

And if you need a shovel, ask in the comments.

#OpenWeb #FOSS #4opens #OMN

Why does the #Fediverse exist?

The #Fediverse exists because the corporate #dotcons are not enough, we don’t wont more of our social lives as products, our relationships into #closeddata, and our communities into audiences to be managed. We wont a different way to communicate, organize and build power together.

But the #Fediverse is not simply a kinder version of corporate social media, its has a promise based on the history of the #openweb: people and communities building their own spaces, connecting through open standards, and sharing power without handing control to a central platform.

The problem we need to compost is that there are few working, humane alternatives to the current #deathcult. So for meany people simply stepping away isn’t an option – We need practical alternatives that work in the real world, rooted in grassroots experience and capable of growing beyond isolated projects for these people to step to.

We already have a first step, that is the point of federation, with #ActivityPub, independent communities can connect and share without having to surrender their autonomy. We can scale horizontally, linking working social projects together rather than building another “common sense” centralized empire.

The #OMN takes this to the next step by bringing in grassroots practices we know work to this open technology, human trust and shared responsibility. #MakingHistory, #IndymediaBack, the #OGB and the #4opens are stepping stones towards a more sustainable world, not products to consume, but tools for #KISS collective action.

This is why the current push for #mainstreaming is more problem than solution. If we bring the habits of the #dotcons into the #Fediverse, we are pushing the turning of build something different into another version of the same old “common sense” mess – we become users demanding personal comfort, rather than participants building communities.

And this is where #BLOCKING becomes political. Blocking has a place, especially when people need protection from harassment and abuse. But if it becomes our default answer to every disagreement, it turns despair into the appearance of action. We retreat into smaller and smaller spaces while the structures of power who are ripping the world apart remain untouched.

We cannot build solidarity by pretending differences don’t exist, we build it by developing and growing ways to work through those differences, set boundaries, share responsibility and act together. That is how grassroots movements for the last 100 years have always built real capacity.

“Another world is possible” cannot just be a slogan, we have to make it possible, through practical projects, open infrastructure and communities that learn how to govern themselves. The #Fediverse exists to give us a path to do that. Whether we use it to build a different world, or simply recreate the one we already have, is up to us.

Keep it #KISS, less platform worship, less knee-jerk rejection, more collective work. We won’t block our way into another world, we have to build and grow it.

“Another world is possible” – but our friendly enemies keep pushing #mainstreaming dressed up in radical language. The result? We’re accepting “common sense” of the system instead of challenging it. Solidarity gets fragmented into identity and partisan battles, while class power escapes scrutiny. We end up pointing fingers at each other while the #deathcult carries on.

We need to defend the right to care, but turn that care into collective power. Real solidarity means looking beyond the latest distraction, naming structural power and building alternatives together. Don’t just make the existing world look kinder.

#makinghistory #OMN #4opens #openweb #ActivityPub #IndymediaBack #OGB

The #deathcult is selling the future as #techshit

We have done this before, we take a useful technology, wrap it in a huge financial story. We centralize it, try and monetize it to turn it into a platform. Then we pretend the social consequences were somehow an accident, it is what we are doing with LLMs. We took an interesting piece of software and started selling it as AI, then AI became AGI, became super-intelligence. This smoke and mirrors feeds the path of building gigantic data centres, burning enormous amounts of energy, raising billions, signing extraordinary infrastructure contracts and concentrating yet more power in a hands of the #nastyfew.

And now we are supposed to believe this is progress, nop, this is the normal #deathcult doing what the #deathcult does – take something useful and turn it into an extraction machine. the mess we need to compost is that “interesting software” doesn’t justify a trillion-dollar mythology – AI will transform everything – AI will replace everyone – AI will solve science – AI will destroy civilization – AI is the next industrial revolution – AI is the singularity – AI is almost AGI – AI is too dangerous to release – AI is progressing faster than anyone expected – AI will change humanity forever. Can you see the smoke and mirrors trick?

Both the utopian story and the apocalypse story sell the same thing, more #AI, more computing, more investment in data centres. More centralization of money for the companies already building the machines of control. Maybe the argument changes, the conclusion doesn’t. Pushing fear is also marketing, this is where the current AI “doom” industry pushes mess. Tell people your machine might destroy the world and you have simultaneously told them your machine is incredibly powerful. This is about grasping for the control of focus, creating scarcity, you have created fear you have created importance.

This mess is about #fashionista capture, its a old story, were you try to created a lever for governments, and the chattering classes, there servants to listen to you, for investors to keep funding you, to build even bigger machines. The apocalypse it self becomes a business model.

That doesn’t mean the risks aren’t real, #AI implementations can create real security, economic, social and political problems. But we need to separate those problems from the mythology. A badly isolated autonomous coding system is an engineering and security failure, it doesn’t mean the machine has “woken up”. An LLM producing confident bullshit isn’t evidence of an emerging artificial mind, it is an LLM producing confident bullshit. And a company repeatedly telling us that its next model might be AGI doesn’t make AGI a meaningful scientific milestone.

Sometimes #KISS is the radical answer, please look at what the machine actually does, not what the marketing department says it might eventually do. We have already seen this mess play through.

Web 1.0.

Web 2.0.

Crypto.

Blockchain.

NFTs.

Metaverse.

Web3.

DAOs.

Now AI.

Every few years Silicon Valley discovers the next thing that will “transform” nothing. The technology changes, were the investment logic barely does. Hype → investment → infrastructure → more hype → bigger investment → pressure to monetize, it is #techchurn.

Except now the machines require gigantic amounts of physical infrastructure and enormous financial commitments. This is the bit that gets hidden behind the shiny chatbot interface, LLM’s isn’t floating in the cloud, it is powered by somebody else’s warehouse, somebody else’s electricity bill and somebody else’s infrastructure. The supposedly weightless future has a very large material footprint.

The #deathcult loves this machine – but something deeper is happening here – the #deathcult has spent fifty years teaching us to worship – growth – efficiency – scale – competition – automation – consumption – financialization – individualism – technology. The AI industry is the last-ist gasp at pushing the mythology – more computing, more scale, more automation, more investment, growth, more efficiency. And because this machine is called “intelligent”, we are encouraged to bow down even further. The machine knows, the machine decides, the machine optimizes, the machine will solve all our knee ach problems. Meanwhile, the #nastyfew who own and direct the machine accumulate power.

Its a part of the #geekproblem were technical people make things work, this has real value, but technical expertise is one tool, not the toolbox. You cannot engineer your way out of social problems, or code trust. You cannot automate democracy. You cannot solve inequality with a better interface. You cannot fix the political economy of capitalism by making the algorithms slightly cleverer. And you certainly cannot hand over social decisions to machines because the humans have become inconvenient to a few nasty people.

This is the same blindness we have been suffering from for decades, if the problem is difficult, make it technical. But then “common sense” technical people become the gatekeepers, becomes the institution, becomes infrastructure. Then fingers in ears, nobody remembers that the original decision was political, as the power disappears into code – #AI becomes just more #dotcons.

To balance this mess, by composting, we need to open our eyes to the history of the #openweb. The original web was built messy on #4opens standards. hyperlinks, RSS to grow small websites were people published, people connected built by people making their own tools. Then Web 2.0 arrived, the UX got better, the platforms got bigger, the money arrived and the web became #dotcons.

Blindly, repeating this same mistake with the dotcons LLM’s in the era of #climatechaos is stupidity. Its a big mistake to be building another generation of giant closed systems of control. At best we should be asking – what would an open AI infrastructure look like? What data? What standards? What ownership? What governance? What accountability? What local control? What human oversight? What right to challenge? What right to rollback? What happens when the system is wrong? Who gets to decide? These are political questions.

That is backwards, technology is a tool for people, and yet here we are. agen we are generating the problem to feed the machine built to solve the problem, peak #techshit. So what do we do? We don’t have time for another #fashionista moral panic please. Not “ban everything”, not “AI will save us”, not “AI will kill us”. Not another fucking blinded conference where everybody agrees that governance is important and then goes home and builds the same centralized paths.

What we do need is to compost is this mess, take the useful technology, the useful research, the open models to build automation that actually gives people more time and power. Knowledge is always useful, but please throw the mythology onto the compost heap, the fake AGI worship, the #nastyfew billionaire saviour stories, the singularity smoke. We cant survive the endless-growth assumptions, of the #closedweb platforms, the surveillance economy, we need to compost this social #techshit.

Composting this is why the #openweb is a tool that still matters, not because openness is fashionable, or that another technical architecture will magically save us. It matters because power has to be distributed somewhere. Open data – Open source – Open standards – Open process – The #4opens. To make this tool work we need to grow the path of human moderation, community trust, distributed infrastructure and shared public knowledge.

The #OMN has practical projects for this path – archives with #makeinghistory – news with #indymediaback and eventually governance with #OGB. A practical #KISS path that understands that we need useful technology, to help communities organize, remember, communicate and act. We need infrastructure that belongs to the people using it, And the community to use this “shovel” to stop worshipping the mythology of the #deathcult machines and start rebuilding the commons.

Yes, this is a first small step in the path we need, not a dogmatic answer to everything. We clearly do not need more blinded technological salvation story’s. What we do need is a practical path to build news, archiving and eventually governance around open flows, trust and participation rather than surveillance, extraction and platform ownership.

The #deathcult has had fifty years, look at the mess, now lift your eyes and let’s start composting.

As the worshipping the #deathcult for the last 50 years becomes harder to hide, the lies are more naked. The lie of endless growth, trickle-down wealth, technological salvation and individual freedom are running into the material reality they created. The mess can no no longer be hidden in the abstract.

#Climatechaos, inequality, war, social fragmentation, political decay. #techshit. The question now is impossible to keep ignoring, not whether the system has problems, it is whether we can see the problems clearly to stop worshipping the mess that created them.

This is where we need social composting. Turn the pile. Expose the assumptions. Keep what is useful. Let the dead ideas rot down. Then grow something alive.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #deathcult #lifecult #techshit #techchurn #dotcons #geekproblem #AI #LLM #commons #compost #KISS

This is the Web 1.5

This is the web 1.5 idea, with the #OMN people ask whether this is just rebuilding Web 2.0, the answer should be no. We are trying to undo some of the damage Web 2.0 did to Web 1.0 while keeping the useful things we learned from it.

Web 1.0 openness.
Web 2.0 UX.
Fediverse federation.
#4opens process.
Community trust.
News and archives first.
Governance further down the road.

That is the rough shape of Web 1.5, it isn’t about making another giant platform, it is building infrastructure where media objects can flow between communities, where history can be preserved without everything being privately owned, and where social intelligence isn’t replaced by a central algorithm. The mess we’ve inherited is real, but perhaps we don’t need to clean it all up before we can build something new, we can compost it.

So, let’s dive a bit deeper into this, how is #OMN different from Web 2.0? The short answer is, it isn’t trying to rebuild Web 2.0. It is trying to recover what Web 1.0 got right, while keeping the useful UX lessons of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 took much of the openness of Web 1.0, wrapped it in better UX, and then turned it into the #dotcons – centralised, privatised platforms that captured and monetised the value of the #openweb.

#OMN takes a different path – the basic idea flows rather than ownership. Instead of everything being centred on individual accounts, owned databases and personal content silos, media objects can flow between trusted nodes. Media comes in, are curated and grouped into Stories, and those Stories then flow back into the network as new media objects. That makes #OMN feel like Web 1.5, it keeps the Web 1.0 openness, decentralisation and interoperability, but adds some of the better usability lessons from Web 2.0. The difference is that we’re not bringing back the centralised ownership model.

In #OMN, an instance isn’t primarily a collection of individual social-media accounts. It is more like a node in a shared media flow, providing curation through media objects and collective Stories. Users can still exist in the underlying software, it’s a balance, but they don’t need to be pushed to the surface as the centre of the #OMN network. This also changes how we think about participation. You don’t necessarily have to “own” the media to participate in it. You can contribute, curate, tag, connect, remix, archive and pass things on. As we put it – less ownership, more participation, more flow, more commons.

The aim is also to get away from the popularity contests of social media. Objects move through the federation towards the nodes and communities where they have value. Things that aren’t useful don’t necessarily need to be centrally deleted, the network can be deliberately lossy, allowing some things to fade while other things are carried forward. Though instances can choose to save everything if they can scale this, even apparently useless material might become useful as compost for future work.

And importantly, #OMN is not social media, it is about news and archiving, with governance further down the road. It works alongside social media rather than trying to become another social-media platform.

The bigger idea is that we shouldn’t have to choose between the open but sometimes awkward Web 1.0 and the polished but enclosed Web 2.0. Like the #Fediverse we balance the best of both, Web 1.0 openness + Web 2.0 UX + today’s federated infrastructure = Web 1.5. Not a return to the past, not another #dotcon. A reboot of the #openweb, using what we have learned since.

#MakingHistory #OMN #openweb #4opens #Fediverse #FOSS #Web1 #Indymediaback #commons #OGB

UPDATE01: OK for #web1.5 am going to use #web15 as the point breaks the hashtag #KISS

UPDATE02: why is this important? It’s simple, participation rather than passive consumption is a cultural problem. The #dotcons trained people to become consumers – Scroll. Like. Share. Repeat – The #openweb needs a different relationship.

To move past this current mess, let’s look how the #OMN changes this, you might start by simply reading, then you learn how the system works. Eventually, you contribute something to become part of the production process rather than remaining a consumer at the end of it.

The aim is to lower the barriers between producer and consumer. This doesn’t mean everybody has to become a journalist or programmer. It means creating systems where participation is possible and meaningful.

The Politics of Ignorance

One of the important ideas in the sociology of science is also one of the easiest to misunderstand: knowledge is socially produced. This does not mean that scientists simply make things up, it means something much more practical. Science is a human activity, it requires people, institutions, money, equipment, archives, universities, laboratories, communities and time. What we choose to investigate – and what we choose not to investigate – is therefore shaped by society.

That means there is another side to the politics of knowledge, we construct knowledge, but we can also construct ignorance. This is the idea of agnotology: the study of how ignorance is produced, maintained and as we see todays messy world, deliberately manufactured. Yes, this should be common sense, that the consequence of science is unavoidable selectivity: we look here rather than there, and every decision to investigate one thing means that something else receives less attention.

The important question is therefore not – what do we know? It is also, what don’t we know, why don’t we know it, and who benefits from that ignorance? Science does not happen outside society, there is a persistent #fashernista fantasy that science exists somewhere above politics and society. In this common sense fantasy, scientists simply follow the evidence, eventually discovering the truth. Any gaps in knowledge are assumed to be temporary, eventually somebody will get around to researching the missing pieces and the picture will become complete.

But our current capitalist science doesn’t work like that, as research needs resources, someone has to decide what gets funded, has to establish institutions and employ researchers. Someone has to maintain archives and databases. Someone has to decide which questions are legitimate enough to investigate. This means that the social organisation of knowledge is itself part of the knowledge system. Science is not an abstract ideal, as meany people treat it, but a human practice made up of institutions, resources and people. Political forces influence the scientific ecosystem without needing to dictate the results of individual experiments.

This matters – you don’t need to falsify scientific evidence to manipulate science, you can simply make sure that the research never happens. The politics of the missing, lets look at an example, imagine two possible worlds.

In one, researchers spend twenty years investigating a particular health problem. Thousands of people contribute data. Universities train specialists. Public institutions maintain long-term datasets. Researchers develop treatments, identify risks and improve policy.

In another, funding disappears. The research programme closes. The datasets are deleted. Researchers move into other fields. Young academics decide there is no career in the subject. Communities become reluctant to participate because they no longer trust the institutions.

Nobody has announced “we have banned this knowledge”, but the knowledge disappears anyway. This is one of the most powerful things about agnotology. Ignorance does not have to be created by a giant conspiracy, it can emerge through apparently ordinary administrative decisions: funding priorities, institutional closures, data deletion, censorship, intimidation, restructuring and changes in what counts as a legitimate research question. Over time, the result becomes material.

Scientific knowledge is cumulative, new work depends upon old work, archives and datasets. Remove the foundations and you don’t simply lose yesterday’s knowledge – you make tomorrow’s knowledge harder to produce. The archive is political infrastructure – this is where the #OMN path becomes important. We often think of archives as passive things, as librarys siting somewhere, a database sits on a server, a government website publishes information, a research paper exists in a journal. But these things are infrastructure, if the infrastructure disappears, access to knowledge disappears with it.

This is why #makinghistory matters – society needs the ability to remember itself, not just the official history or whatever survives inside corporate platforms or that happens to remain profitable. We need distributed, community-controlled records of what happened, what people experienced, what institutions did, what communities built and what was subsequently removed. That is media infrastructure, but it is also social memory infrastructure – closed systems make forgetting easy, sometimes this is deliberate, often it isn’t.

The social record becomes fragile, is one of the problems with concentrating so much of our communication inside a small number of commercial platforms. We have allowed a huge amount of collective memory to become dependent on organisations whose primary responsibility is not to society but to their own narrow institutional interests. That is not the resilient information system we need today in the era of #climatechaos.

The #openweb is a memory machine – the alternative isn’t that everything needs to be permanently preserved forever, that would be another form of technological fundamentalism. The point is to create distributed capacity, multiple archives, multiple publishers, multiple communities, institutions. Multiple ways of finding and verifying information, multiple copies, open formats, standards, source and proces. This is what the #4opens approach is trying to get at, not simply technical principles, they are social protections.

Open Data means information can remain accessible.

Open Source means the tools themselves can be inspected and maintained.

Open Standards mean that information doesn’t have to remain trapped inside one company’s technical ecosystem.

Open Process means that decisions can be challenged rather than disappearing behind institutional walls.

Together these create a technical architecture of social resilience.

Then we have the danger of the “no data, no problem” argument, is a particularly nasty political trick that follows from manufactured ignorance. First, prevent the research, then point to the lack of research as evidence that the problem isn’t real No evidence.”, “No consensus.”, “More research is needed.”, “We simply don’t know.” Sometimes those statements are reasonable, but they can also become circular.

If you systematically prevent people from collecting the evidence, you cannot then use the absence of evidence as proof that nothing is happening. The rhetorical pattern is that the assumption that if something were true, science would already have conclusively demonstrated it. But a lack of evidence can also result from social forces preventing researchers from doing the work in the first place. This matters far beyond any single political issue, it applies to climate research, poverty, housing, public health, marginalised communities, the effects of technology. It applies to almost anything where powerful interests might prefer that certain questions remain unanswered.

Information needs communities, is another lesson – knowledge doesn’t survive simply because somebody writes it down. It survives because communities care enough to maintain it, institutions train people, maintain archives, provide context. Researchers build upon previous work, journalists document events, activists preserve evidence, technologists maintain infrastructure, historians connect fragments together. This is a social ecosystem and when you break enough parts of it, knowledge starts disappearing.

That is why the #OMN isn’t simply about making another publishing platform, the larger idea is to build infrastructure for collective knowledge production and memory. Publishing is one part, metadata another, moderation, trust, archives, federation are all parts. The ability to edit, correct, contextualise and preserve information needs to work together.

The #openweb gives us a possibility that centralised media never really delivered: a network where different communities maintain their own spaces while still communicating with one another. That creates disagreement without requiring isolation, creates diversity without requiring fragmentation and it gives us a chance to build something much more resilient than the current model of a handful of corporate databases surrounded by billions of users. From information to social truth, is a political question.

This is the reason I keep coming back to #makinghistory – if somebody deletes a webpage, we should have copy, if a community documents an event, that record should not depend upon one #dotcons corporation continuing to host it. If an organisation changes its story, there should be an accessible historical record. If a government removes information, communities should be able to preserve what was orgionaly published.

If today’s activists disappear, tomorrow’s activists should still be able to understand what they did. If a research project closes, the work should not simply evaporate. This doesn’t mean believing every archive is automatically true – archives need context, metadata, discussion, provenance and criticism. In fact, that is exactly the point – the answer to bad information is not less information, it is better social infrastructure for comparing, contextualising and challenging information.

There is a tendency to think of technology as neutral plumbing, but the plumbing determines what can flow through it. A centralised system encourages centralised memory – a closed system encourages institutional dependency – a disposable platform encourages disposable history. Were open systems create the possibility of continuity beyond any single organisation. What we do with those #4opens possibilities is a social question, it is why #OMN, #MakingHistory, #Indymediaback, #OGB and the wider #4opens approach belong together. They are different pieces of the same argument.

That is the danger of manufactured ignorance, and why preserving the #openweb is not a technical hobby, it is part of preserving our collective ability to think.

#OMN #MakingHistory #Indymediaback #OGB #4opens #openweb #FOSS #media #archives #knowledge #agnotology #commons

We have a serous problem at the moment in progressive technology

The language around #climatechaos is changing

For years, climate breakdown was treated as distant, a problem for activists, scientists, future generations or places somewhere else. That blinded view is now harder to sustain. Heat, fires, floods, crop failures, infrastructure disruption, rising insurance costs and the growing difficulty of simply keeping homes and communities safe are making climate disruption part of our everyday life.

As we are talking about tech on this site – the important question for the #OMN is therefore not only how do we stop climate change? It is also – how do we build the social infrastructure needed to live through the disruption that is already here? This is where the climate conversation needs to become broader, and treat adaptation not surrendering, due to the fear that talking about adaptation means giving up on mitigation, it doesn’t.

We still need fundamental social change to reduce emissions, change energy systems and challenge the economic structures pushing us to ecological destruction. But we also need to mediate the very real mess and disruption is already here, we need to be honest about that. A community facing repeated flooding needs flood planning, when homes become dangerously hot, people need cooling, insulation and better housing. When extreme weather repeatedly disrupts transport, energy or communications, communities need resilient alternatives, insurance companies withdraw from areas they consider too risky, it is basic that communities also need better ways of thinking about collective risk and resilience.

These are not future problems, they are now simply ordinary infrastructure questions. And this infrastructure is never only physical, we also need social infrastructure too. This is needed to grow climate resilience, information resilience, on this path we need native #openweb systems where communities can publish what is happening, preserve local knowledge, compare experiences, challenge bad information, coordinate responses and maintain collective memory. That is very different from the current model of social media, where information is filtered and controlled through commercial algorithms, engagement incentives and platform ownership.

The #climatecrisis is already difficult enough – we don’t need our communication systems making it harder. Thus, the climate crisis is also a media crisis: When a flood happens, what matters? People need to know where the water is. They need to know which roads are closed, where vulnerable people are, which services are operating. They need to know what happened last time to know who they can trust.

And afterwards, someone needs to record what actually happened, this last part is particularly important. Without good local records, every disaster becomes an isolated event. Communities repeatedly rediscover the same problems because institutional memory disappears. This is one reason the #OMN #makinghistory matters, the idea is simple: communities should create living, collaborative records of what is happening around them. Not just journalism in the traditional sense, but a shared memory infrastructure. Stories, events, places, people, evidence, changes and responses connected over time to give communities something valuable during #climatechaos – memory.

You would be right we already have more information than ever, the problem is that information is fragmented into disconnected #closedweb platforms. One person posts on Facebook, someone else posts on X, another publishes a video on YouTube. A council puts an announcement somewhere else, a local activist keeps information on a personal website were a journalist publishes an article that disappears behind a paywall.

Then the flooding comes, and suddenly nobody has a reliable picture of what happened. This is the #datasoup problem. The answer isn’t simply more information, we need better ways of connecting information while keeping its provenance, context and history. This is why open standards matter – #RSS, #ActivityPub, open metadata, decentralised publishing, archives and interoperable tools are not just technical preferences, they are pieces of a social resilience infrastructure. The #4opens is a useful starting point: Open Data. Open Source. Open Standards. Open Process. These matter because climate resilience cannot depend entirely on proprietary systems controlled by a few companies.

We shouldn’t respond to the crisis by creating another centralised technological solution and declaring it the answer. This is not about building one perfect system, there is another lesson here – climate chaos is too complicated for that. Different communities have different needs, the important thing is that these systems connect and remain open. We already have a path for this – the #openweb is already a diverse ecosystem rather than another platform monopoly. This is why the #OMN approach is deliberately practical and pluralistic, we don’t need technological purity, we need useful tools that work together and remain in the commons.

Yes, finally the wider #mainstreaming is noticing the physical problem. Heatwaves are no longer exceptional, flooding is no longer unimaginable, insurance withdrawal will become a political issue. Food and energy security need to become part of everyday political discussion. The mainstream is beginning to understand the hard infrastructure problem, but the social infrastructure problem remains much less visible.

We need to build paths through this before we need them – The worst time to discover that your community has no communication infrastructure is during a disaster. The worst time to discover that nobody knows what happened during the previous flood is during the next flood. The worst time to discover that all your community information lives on somebody else’s platform is when that platform changes its access rules or goes away.

Resilience therefore means building before the emergency, but not another giant centralised project, more lots of small interconnected pieces. Open tools, local archives, community websites, federated publishing sharing metadata based on open standards. Then the social side is people who know how to maintain servers, know how to tell stories, how to moderate and systems that allow all those pieces to connect, as climate resilience is also social resilience.

The deeper point is that climate chaos exposes the weakness of the current #dotcons social model. A society organised around individual consumption, competition, private ownership and short-term profit is poorly equipped for long-term collective disruption. The response has to move in the opposite direction: balancing individualism towards community; from enclosure towards commons; from proprietary platforms towards open infrastructure; from disposable information towards collective memory and from centralised control towards distributed resilience.

Technology cannot solve #climatechaos, but the wrong technology can make it much worse, while the right kind of technology can help communities organise, remember, communicate and cooperate. That is the space we are interested in with the #OMN to build the open social infrastructure underneath society – infrastructure that can survive the platforms, the political fashions and hopefully some of the climate disruption coming our way.

The climate crisis is not only asking whether we can build stronger walls, better drains and cooler buildings, it is asking whether we can become better at being a society. That is where the #openweb has a role – you need a shovel #OMN

#OMN #MakingHistory #climatechaos #openweb #4opens #IndymediaBack #OGB #resilience #commons #federation #community #climateadaptation

The Politics of Ignorance

Religion, mystery and the #openweb

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, art and everything between them is remarkably simple “We don’t know.” so let’s build systems that help us find out, together.

#OMN #OpenWeb #4opens #MakingHistory #IndymediaBack #OGB #KISS #geekproblem #stupidindividualism #commons

OMN: Activity, culture and why Soviet experiments matter

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.

https://o.ee/blog/activitypub-won-by-being-boring

The individual, is not, the starting point for the #OMN

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