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.

Breaking the openweb won’t stop the bad bots

It’s interesting that #mainstreaming tech makes it easy to use you, while alternative tech makes it hard to use freedom. One is built for control – and works very well at it. The other is built for freedom – but often works badly at delivering it. That’s the real #techshit problem we face, we need to make freedom easier to use than control.

The latest #fashionista panic about AI scraping is exposing a real problem with how we understand and defend the #openweb. Faced with aggressive commercial data extraction by the #dotcons and #AI industry, the response from parts of the traditional media establishment and mainstreaming policymakers is to restrict automated access, demand identification and introduce new controls over who can collect #4opens available information. This is the wrong direction.

We have a genuine problem of #dotcons extracting open flows, enormous amounts of public information, imposing costs on the people who create, host and maintain it. They take the value generated by the #openweb, feed it into proprietary systems and then build closed commercial products that bypass the original sources. This is another round of enclosure.

But shutting down the tools that make the #openweb work is not a solution, it leads to destroying the infrastructure we need to challenge this enclosure. The native #openweb depends on open flows, automated crawling, scraping, indexing, archiving and redistribution are not some new abuse of the internet. They are fundamental parts of how the native #openweb develops.

Search engines, independent journalism, public-interest research, accessibility projects, security monitoring and archives all depend on the ability to collect and process publicly available information. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved more than a trillion web pages. Investigative journalists have used automated collection to expose conflicts of interest in government. Researchers use it to examine discrimination, misinformation and corporate behaviour.

These activities need the #KISS ability to follow information across the web without asking permission from every website owner. Sometimes anonymity is needed, if a journalist, researcher or activist investigating powerful interests has to identify themselves and explain what they are looking for, the investigation itself is compromised. An #openweb cannot depend on asking permission from every gatekeeper before we see, collect, preserve and share public information.

The problem is extraction, not openness – we need to distinguish between two very different things. There is grassroots, public-interest use of automated tools to make information accessible, preserve knowledge and connect communities. Then there is the #dotcons industrial-scale commercial extraction, the gray area were they take the collective output of the openweb, concentrate it into private databases and use it to build proprietary #closedweb services. These are not the same activity.

The problem is not that information flows freely, it is that the value created by those flows is being enclosed and privately captured. Making every crawler identify itself doesn’t solve this. A commercial scraper can identify itself and still overwhelm a server with requests. Meanwhile, an independent archivist or journalist could be deterred from doing legitimate work simply because they cannot safely disclose their identity. We need to regulate harmful behaviour, not criminalize the basic mechanisms of openness.

The #geekproblem is about trying to control the mess instead of fixing it. When faced with complex social and technical problem, the instinct is to introduce another layer of technical control, identification and permission. But the native #openweb was built on a different understanding: distributed participation, open protocols, independent servers and the ability to connect information across organizational boundaries.

We should be strengthening the infrastructure that allows independent websites, archives and communities to survive. What the #OMN adds is rebuilding the commons. The answer is not to retreat into closed platforms, private APIs, permission-based networks or another generation of corporate-controlled infrastructure. We need to rebuild the shared flows, it is not about pretending that every use of public information is harmless. It is about building the social and technical capacity to distinguish useful participation from destructive extraction.

Don’t repeat the mistake – for too long, we have allowed the #dotcons to take the value of the native #openweb while selling us increasingly closed replacements. Now, faced with the consequences, some people want to restrict the openness that made the internet useful in the first place. We cannot allow the response to commercial enclosure to become another round of enclosure. The native #openweb was never perfect, it has technical debt, weak governance, funding problems and social conflicts. But it gave us something we have largely lost, the possibility of building collective power through open information flows. We need to recover that.

The answer to bad bots is not to break the web, the answer to commercial extraction is not to close public information, the answer to platform power is not another platform with more controls. The path is simple, we need to reboot the #openweb, not shut it down. That means rebuilding the grassroots communities, shared infrastructure and collective governance that allow openness to grow real social value.

https://www.techpolicy.press/breaking-the-open-web-wont-stop-the-bad-bots

Oxford, academia and the problem of #mainstreaming

One thing I keep noticing around Oxford is how much academic culture is about building consensus on how to name things, rather than actually talking about the things themselves. Events become status games: establishing who has authority, who gets referenced, who belongs in the #mainstreaming hierarchy around whatever subject is being discussed. There is plenty of time spent establishing credibility, positioning and agreeing on language, but remarkably little time spent getting to grips with the actual mess we increasing face.

Of course, referencing and academic rigour have their uses. We cannot all discover everything from scratch, and taking some things on good authority is necessary. But there is a balance, at some point we need to get beyond repeating what other people have said and ask, what is your contribution? What are you actually doing with this knowledge?

This isn’t an attack on academia or academics, it’s about recognizing the limits of a culture that can become more concerned with its own status and legitimacy than with the subject it claims to be studying. Well, perhaps spending less time establishing who is allowed to talk about the problem and more time actually talking about it would be a good start. Oxford has no shortage of clever people. What we seem to lack is a culture that turns all that knowledge into collective agency and practical change. We don’t need more consensus about how to describe the mess. We need to start doing something about it.

#OMN angle is that economics became another form of chattering-class authority: a closed conversation where mathematical models and professional status gained more weight than lived experience, social relationships and the actual workings of human communities.

Modern economics has a strange problem. It has spent more than a century building an elaborate mathematical model of human behaviour, then started treating that model as if it were human nature itself. The people inside this model are called Homo economicus: perfectly rational, endlessly informed individuals who act only in their own self-interest. They have the memory of a supercomputer, the reasoning power of Einstein and the self-control of Gandhi. The problem? These people don’t exist.

Real human beings are social, emotional, cooperative, competitive, contradictory and shaped by the communities around them. We live through relationships, shared expectations, social norms and collective action. Evolution has spent millions of years shaping these behaviours. But the mainstreaming economic establishment pushed this messy reality aside because it was harder to fit into mathematics.

This is where the #chatteringclasses come in, an educated professional class builds its authority through specialist language, prestigious institutions, awards and internal agreement. The models become more important than the world they are supposed to describe. Dissent is tolerated at the edges, but the central assumptions remain protected.

Even Nobel-winning economists demonstrate that real people behave differently, the great theoretical machine carries on. What should be evidence that the model is wrong gets labelled a paradox that needs explaining away. The irony is that early economists like Adam Smith had a much richer understanding of human nature. Smith recognized that people care about reputation, fairness, social expectations and other people, not just their own monetary advantage. His invisible hand was about how social systems emerge from local interactions, not a magical proof that selfishness makes everything work.

This matters beyond economics, as it is a familiar pattern across our institutions: a professional class creates a simplified model, builds careers and authority around it, then treats the model as reality. When the real world refuses to behave, the response is to defend the model rather than learn from experience. We see the same #geekproblem in technology, the same #NGO problem in activism and the same #mainstreaming problem across pushing back grassroots movements. Process becomes paperwork, participation becomes consultation, and mathematical or professional legitimacy replaces any collective understanding.

For the #OMN, this is a central lesson. Human systems cannot be built from abstract models of isolated individuals. They grow through relationships, trust, shared practice, conflict, cooperation and the messy work of communities. We need to stop confusing the map with the territory, and stop giving the chattering classes a monopoly on describing the world. Less worship of abstract models, more attention to how people actually live, organize and work together.

That’s part of rebuilding the #openweb, not just better technology, but better ways of understanding and organizing our shared social reality. #4opens

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.

The #openweb is a network of links, not islands

Ten years ago, I wrote about a problem that was already undermining the #openweb, that nobody was linking to anybody, and that the incentives were all moving in the wrong direction. #Mainstreaming platforms had little reason to send people towards alternative sources, while grassroots projects were left struggling to build connections with each other. Even when people wanted to cooperate, there were plenty of reasons to avoid linking, sharing audiences or giving another project visibility.

The result was an increasingly fragmented web. Lots of websites, lots of content, lots of people doing useful work, but fewer if any meaningful connections between them. Ten years later, the technology has changed, the underlying problem has not gone away. In some ways, it has become worse, as the attention economy has eaten the #openweb. The commercial internet is built around capturing attention, the more time people spend inside a platform, the more valuable that audience becomes to its owners. External links interrupt this process, they send people somewhere else, towards another publisher, another community or another source of information.

From the perspective of the #dotcons, this is a problem to manage, as their business model rewards keeping people inside their own environments, controlling discovery and turning the activity of users into something that can be measured, monetized and sold. Likewise search engines increasingly provide answers directly, social platforms prioritize their own feeds and recommendation systems and publishers compete for visibility inside systems they do not control.

The #openweb still has hyperlinks, but the “common sense” culture surrounding them has changed. The problem is not that links have disappeared, it is that the common sense dominating online life have weak incentives to support an open, reciprocal network of independent publishers. This matters because the web was never supposed to be a collection of isolated destinations. Its strength came from the connections between them: people following sources, discovering unexpected ideas, checking evidence, finding communities and building on each other’s work. Take those connections away, and the web becomes a collection of competing islands.

We have been building better technology, but federation is not enough, over this last ten years, the #Fediverse has grown, ActivityPub has become more visible, and more websites connect with decentralized social networks. This is real progress, we now have more technical possibilities for building an alternative to the centralized paths. But there is #blocking, we to often grow federated social networks that still reproduce the habits of closed #dotcons social media.

Federation connects systems, it does not create solidarity these systems need to work. The same applies to #FOSS, open-source software. Open code is important, but it does not guarantee that projects will cooperate, share audiences or build lasting relationships. Technical openness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. This is where the #4opens become useful: open code, open data, open standards and open processes. They can be used to give us a practical foundation for cooperation, but we still have to build the culture that makes that cooperation meaningful.

The mainstreaming trap… ten years ago, I described the difficulty of getting #mainstreaming alternatives to link to each other. This underlying tension remains, grassroots projects need reach, resources and recognition, mainstream organizations have their own priorities, reputation concerns and institutional incentives. They will link externally when it serves their purposes, the problem is that those links are selective and instrumental rather than part of a wider commitment to an open information commons.

Grassroots projects end up supplying stories, ideas, research and community knowledge to organizations that gain the attention while the original producers receive little in return. This is one of the quieter forms of #mainstreaming. The grassroots become useful contributors to somebody else ‘s system without building the independent relationships needed to sustain their own. The answer to this smell is not to refuse every mainstream connection, that would be another kind of isolation. It is a balancing act, work with wider institutions when useful, but maintain independent infrastructure, reciprocal relationships and the ability to carry on without their permission. We need bridges, not gateways that leave us dependent on whoever controls the other end.

Why don’t the grassroots simply link to each other? This is where the problem becomes more uncomfortable, as it is easy to blame the #dotcons as their incentives are obvious. It is harder to look at the habits and assumptions within our own communities. Grassroots projects compete for the same funding, audiences, volunteers and recognition. People worry about sending attention elsewhere. Organizations protect their own identities, developers build separate platforms, campaigns create separate communication channels.

Sometimes this mess happens for understandable reasons. Projects have limited time and resources, trust has to be earned, not every source is reliable, and not every relationship is useful. But too often, we reproduce the same competitive logic we claim to oppose. We talk about solidarity while treating our own websites as little territories. We talk about commons while keeping our work disconnected. We talk about decentralization while building social and technical systems that make cooperation harder than it needs to be.

This is the #geekproblem in a wider social form, the assumption that if we build the right technology, the human relationships will somehow follow. They won’t – a network is made through practice, people have to link, share, maintain, argue, repair and work together. The technology should support those activities rather than pretend to replace them. The OMN is about mediating this mess by making linking part of the infrastructure – the OMN is not another social-media platform competing to own an audience. It is a network of flows, a way to connect independent publishers, community archives, grassroots news projects and other sources through shared data and open protocols.

The basic technical model is straightforward.

SUB – flow in. Nodes subscribe to RSS, ActivityPub and other feeds, collecting public information from independent sources.

Shared data objects – connect the information. Nodes maintain local copies of text and metadata, preserving links to the original sources and recording provenance.

PUB – flow out. Nodes publish selected information through feeds that other projects can reuse, with attribution and links back to the original material.

FAT-PING – synchronize the metadata. Participating nodes share tags, classifications and relationships, allowing communities to connect information without requiring one central authority to control the whole network.

This #KISS technical path creates the possibility of something more useful than a collection of disconnected websites.

A local news project could publish reporting that appears in a community feed. An archive could connect that reporting to historical material. Another community could add relevant location or subject tags. Different frontends could present the same information for different purposes.

The original publisher remains visible. The information becomes more useful through connection. The wider network gains value as more people participate, the objective is not to scrape everybody’s content and republish it without permission. It is to build a practical commons around open feeds, clear attribution, appropriate licensing and community control.

The technology should make it easier to send attention outwards, not capture it inwards, we need to move from reciprocal links to reciprocal infrastructure. The original proposal is simple: if linking is going to become central to the #openweb again, the grassroots have to make it happen.

We need to take that idea further – reciprocal linking should be part of a broader practice of reciprocal infrastructure. That means:

Linking to relevant work from other independent projects.

Citing original sources rather than stripping information of its provenance.

Sharing feeds and making independent publishers easier to discover.

Connecting community news with historical archives and local knowledge.

Maintaining directories and cross-project indexes.

Supporting open standards so that information can move between different systems.

Building shared infrastructure without requiring every project to surrender its independence.

This is not about #SEO of creating artificial link exchanges or rewarding websites for linking to one another. Nor is it about pretending that every source deserves equal trust. It is about recognizing that the value of an open network comes from useful connections, not isolated ownership. Trust still matters, moderation still matters, communities need to decide what they publish and which sources they rely on. But these decisions should help build better flows rather than turn every community into another closed silo.

The political choice is simple (#KISS) – we have spent years watching the commercial internet turn relationships into engagement metrics, communities into audiences and information into a resource to be enclosed. The #openweb offers another possibility, but only if we are willing to practise it. This is not about abandoning individual projects, it is about making them part of a living commons. A river does not become powerful by keeping every drop in a separate container. It becomes powerful through the connections between its springs, streams and tributaries. The same is true of the #openweb.

Ten years ago, the problem was that nobody was linking to anybody. Today, we have more technical ways to connect, but we still need the social practice that makes those connections matter. The #OMN is one path to build that practice into the infrastructure itself, not another platform, not another silo. A network of flows, built by the people who need to begin to rebuild the #openweb.

I should LINK from this post, please post URLs in the comments.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #Fediverse #ActivityPub #RSS #indymedia #commons

Composting and the Commons: Oxford’s Riverbank and the Fediverse

Two stories, one struggle – on the Oxford riverbank, live-aboard boaters are caught in a struggle over mooring, access, responsibility and who gets to decide how shared space is used. In the #Fediverse grassroots communities face a related struggle over digital space, moderation, ownership and who gets to shape the networks we depend on.

At first glance, these look like different problems. One is about boats, land and the river; the other is about servers, software and online communities. But both expose the same underlying question – How do we organize shared life when private ownership, institutional control and grassroots needs collide?

The hard-right argument is straightforward: the riverbank is private property, and the owner has the right to decide who can moor there. Unlicensed mooring is the problem, not the solution. Years of tolerance, this argument goes, have allowed neglected boats, environmental damage and conflict over public access to accumulate. Rules must be enforced, and order restored.

Translated into digital politics, this becomes the argument that a commons without clear ownership and enforceable rules inevitably descends into disorder. The answer is stronger control, stricter boundaries and someone with the authority to make people comply.

There is a real issue buried in this position. Shared spaces need maintenance, responsibility and boundaries. Ignoring environmental damage or the consequences of unmanaged use does not make a community more radical. It makes the problems harder to solve. But this “common sense” argument leaves out the other half of the story. The progressive argument is enclosure is not the same as care.

The progressive-left view starts somewhere different, by asking who has the power to make decisions, who bears the costs, and whose needs are being ignored. When public agencies, private landowners and local authorities pass responsibility between themselves, communities ends up paying the price for decisions they never controlled. For live-aboard boaters, a mooring is not simply a piece of land or a place to park a vessel. It is a home, a social network and a practical system of mutual aid.

The same applies to the Fediverse – the #dotcons, platform capitalism concentrated ownership and control over much of our digital life. The #Fediverse offers another possibility were people run their own instances, communicate across organisational boundaries and build shared infrastructure without handing everything to a single corporate owner.

Yet federation alone does not guarantee a commons. A network can be technically decentralised while its culture, funding and decision-making become increasingly centralised. Professionalised activism, institutional priorities and informal hierarchies recreate the same exclusions that grassroots projects originally set out to challenge.

The progressive answer is collective stewardship, the people who depend on a shared space should have meaningful power in shaping it, maintaining it and deciding how it develops. That requires more than defending access. It requires building the social relationships and practical paths that make shared responsibility possible. The trap of choosing one side as both arguments identify something real. The hard-right position recognises that unmanaged problems have consequences. The progressive position recognises that rules and ownership become instruments of exclusion. The mistake is to imagine that we must choose between control from above and freedom from responsibility.

A functioning commons needs boundaries, but those boundaries must be accountable to the community. It needs maintenance, but maintenance cannot become an excuse for dispossessing the people who sustain it. It needs moderation, but moderation must not become a mechanism for concentrating power in the hands of a few.

Balance does not mean splitting the difference, it means understanding which parts of each argument reveal a real problem, and which parts reproduce the system that created it. This is where the #OMN approach becomes useful, rather than treating the argument as a contest between competing blindness, we ask what practical arrangements would help people live together, share resources and resolve conflict. We need to move from abstract claims about property, freedom and authority towards the everyday work of building a commons.

The positive and negative are both information – Look at what persists despite the difficulties. #Oxfordboaters continue to help one another with broken engines, share equipment and look out for neighbouring boats during floods. These practices matter because they demonstrate that collective life is not merely an idea. It is something people already do. In the #Fediverse, millions of posts continue to move across independently operated servers. Communities maintain software, moderate discussions and keep infrastructure running without requiring one central owner to control the entire network.

These are not perfect paths as they contain conflict, unequal labour, poor decisions and failures of responsibility. But their persistence is evidence that the underlying need for cooperation is real. The negative side matters too. Blockers, internal conflicts, careerism, purity tests and institutional capture all tell us something about where a project is vulnerable. They reveal weaknesses in its decision-making, its distribution of work and its ability to balance disagreement.

The mistake is to treat every negative experience as contamination to be removed, if we eliminate everyone who creates friction, we can end up with a compliant monoculture: pleasant until the first serious challenge arrives. Equally, we cannot romanticise conflict or excuse destructive behaviour in the name of diversity as some patterns genuinely undermine collective work. The task is to understand what is happening, address it openly and change the conditions that allow it to continue.

This is social composting – turning the material of failure into the ground for better practice. In meetings, keep the whole picture visible, grassroots meetings easily become dominated by whatever is going wrong. Equally, some groups protect a positive image by refusing to discuss failure. Both approaches distort reality.

A useful practice is to grow space for what is working and what is broken. Celebrate the person who has kept the shared infrastructure running, but also discuss why the workload falls on them. Recognise the value of community cooperation, but do not ignore the unresolved conflicts that threaten it. The path is not artificial fifty-fifty balance, it is that neither success nor failure disappears from view.

In participation – value practical contribution – grassroots projects need ideas, but they also need people who maintain servers, repair equipment, organise meetings, document decisions and do the repetitive work that keeps projects alive. In our fashernista world, too often, the culture rewards visibility over contribution. The person who produces the polished explanation of a problem receives more recognition than the person who quietly fixes it.

People are complicated, they make mistakes, change their minds and sometimes contribute something valuable even when they are difficult to work with. That does not mean every behaviour should be accepted, a recurring pattern of using collective labour to build personal status, avoiding shared responsibilities or quietly capturing decision-making needs to be named and challenged. We need warmth towards messy human beings and a clear-eyed approach to extractive patterns. Without the first, we reproduce exclusion, without the second, we allow the commons to be hollowed out from within.

From riverbanks to digital commons, yes the Oxford riverbank and the #Fediverse are not identical. Physical moorings involve land rights, housing needs, environmental obligations and the practical limits of river space. Digital networks involve infrastructure, software, moderation and the distribution of information. We should not pretend that one simple solution can resolve both. But they share a question that the #OMN is trying to medate, how do we move from individual ownership and institutional control towards shared participation and accountable collective stewardship?

In digital media, this means building around shared data flows rather than locking communities into individual codebases. It means making content portable, moderation accountable and decisions open to scrutiny. It means allowing different communities to organise themselves while remaining connected through common standards and shared infrastructure. The #4opens provide a practical starting point: open data, open source, open standards and open processes. They are not a guarantee of good politics, but they help make the workings of a project visible and give communities a better foundation for collective action.

The same principle applies beyond technology. A commons cannot survive on good intentions alone. It needs working practices, clear responsibilities, accessible information and ways to resolve conflict without handing all power to an owner or a self-appointed elitists. That is the difference between merely defending a commons and actively building one.

Compost the old ground, grow something better – The compost heap that works is one where the rot and the new roots are visible at the same time. If we see only rot, we walk away and abandon the possibility of change, if we see only roots, we ignore the problems until they undermine the balance. We need to keep looking at both, preserving what works, confronting what fails and changing the conditions that allow useful practices to grow.

The hard right offers control as the answer to disorder. Parts of the progressive left offer collective care as the answer to enclosure. The practical challenge is to build forms of collective care that can deal with disorder, and forms of accountability that do not become new systems of enclosure. This is not a call to find a comfortable middle ground, it is a call to do the harder work of building alternatives that function in the real world.

For the #OMN, that means turning grassroots experience into usable tools, connecting communities through open media flows and making collective participation easier than it is today. For Oxford’s boaters, it means taking mutual aid, environmental responsibility and the realities of living on the river seriously in any attempt to mediate shared spaces.

In both cases, the work begins when we stop waiting for a perfect path, a benevolent authority or a heroic individual to solve everything. We need shovels, not saviours. We need to compost the failures, protect the roots and keep building the commons together.

#OMN #4opens #OpenWeb #Commons #OxfordBoaters #Indymedia #MakingHistory #KISS

The uncomfortable question

Art is individualism, a disturbing, disintegrating force. That’s where its value lies. It breaks the shared mould, unsettles common sense, and opens cracks in the world we take for granted. The trick is to compost individualism into collective creativity, not let it rot into #stupidindividualism.

Oscar Wilde, with an #OMN twist

Why do people nowadays defend systems that make their own lives worse? Why do movements that begin by challenging authority end up creating new authority’s? Why do communities built around freedom develop gatekeepers, purity tests and informal leaders who become impossible to question? Why do people who oppose #dotcons corporate control still spend their time copying corporate platforms, business models and organizational habits? These are not isolated contradictions, they point towards an invisible issue of how power works.

We tend to imagine oppression as something imposed from above, a ruling class, a government, a corporation or an institution that wants to control us. The solution then seems obvious: expose the injustice, remove the people responsible, and replace the system with something better. But what happens when people actively participate in reproducing the same relationships they claim to oppose?

Power does not operate through force alone, it also shapes what we want, what we admire, what we fear and what we consider normal. We become attached to the #mainstreaming because those systems also provide identity, status, security and a sense of belonging. The problem is not simply power controls us, it is that we learn to desire the very world power has built for us. This is one of the hardest lessons for grassroots paths to absorb – that the #deathcult is not something outside us. We live inside it, in the dominant logic organized around endless economic growth, competition, commodification and control, even when these undermine the ecological and social conditions on which life it self depends.

It is easy to point at the visible mess: corporate monopolies, extractive business, environmental destruction and political movements built around fear. But the #deathcult survives more because it is an economic system, pushed over us the last 50 years as a culture, a set of habits and a way of understanding ourselves. our worship is where we learned to measure success through individual achievement, compete for attention and recognition. it is were we treat relationships as opportunities for advancement and look for personal solutions to collective problems. We imagine that security comes from controlling our own little corner of the world, even when that control depends on the same blinded paths that make everyone else less secure.

We might oppose capitalism while still measuring our worth through its ideas of productivity and success, oppose authoritarianism while insisting that our own opinions should never be challenged. We talk about community while treating collective projects as platforms for personal status. The system reproduces itself through these everyday behaver, this is mess even among people who sincerely want something different. That is why changing the #nastyfew people at the top is never enough, if the common sense relationships remain unchanged, the new leadership inherits the old system and reproduce it with maybe a different vocabulary.

This is why oppression feels comfortable – people do not attach themselves to oppressive systems simply because they are foolish or malicious, the reality is more complicated. #Mainstreaming established systems offer familiar routines, clear identities and ready-made explanations for a confusing world. They tell us who belongs, who is responsible, what success looks like and where to direct our anger. A competitive society promises that individual effort will bring individual rewards, hierarchical organization promises that someone competent is in charge, rigid thinking promises certainty. A charismatic leader promises to take responsibility for decisions that would otherwise require difficult collective work, promises can be attractive, especially when people feel insecure and overwhelmed.

The catch is that the comfort comes at a very real price, individual success depends on collective failure. Certainty require silencing disagreement, strong leadership become unaccountable power and belonging can to often depend on excluding outsiders. Fear and control become self-reinforcing, as the more insecure people feel, the more attractive rigid authority becomes. The more authority concentrates, the less opportunity people have to develop the confidence and relationships needed to govern their own lives in any working grassroots paths.

This is one way authoritarianism becomes embedded in everyday life without requiring most people to openly support fascism. People oppose a particular dictator, corporation or political party while reproducing the same “common sense” habits of obedience, exclusion and domination in their own communities. The lesson from this mess is not that everyone is secretly fascist, it is that authoritarian patterns survive inside movements and institutions that sincerely oppose them.

The left is not immune, grassroots and progressive movements begin with a desire to create open and humane societys, but good intentions do not often produce good processes. A movement opposed to hierarchy can still developing invisible hierarchies that nobody is allowed to discuss. They might demand democratic participation while allowing a small group of insiders to control the agenda. Celebrate diversity while pushing blinded conformity or criticize celebrity culture while building its own #fashionista cults of personality.

Sometimes the problem appears as endless internal conflict, sometimes as a demand for unity that suppresses diversity of disagreement. Sometimes it appears as a professionalised activist culture in which visibility, funding and institutional access are more important than the original purpose of the work. These are different expressions of the same danger – the collective project becomes a means of reproducing the status and security of those who push the easy common sense mess.

This is where mixed metaphor of #mainstreaming becomes important. Grassroots projects do sometimes seek funding, recognition and wider influence because they need resources to survive and space to grow. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, the danger comes when adapting to the blinded common sense of established institutions that use there control to change what the project is able to do. A movement that began by building alternatives ends up competing for a place inside the system it wanted to change.

Then we have the #geekproblem building freedom with tools of control – this contradiction is particularly visible in social technology. The #openweb offers the possibility of shared infrastructure people use, adapt and maintain together. Open standards, open data and open-source software help communities escape dependence on the #dotcons. But still #blocking this path is the #geekproblem, the assumption that technical system can solve social problems without changing the relationships through which people use and govern these systems. We build software that makes certain behaviours easy and others difficult, we create interfaces that reward some forms of participation and obscure others, we choose what is measured, what can be moderated and who has permission to make changes. These choices shape the #FOSS culture that grows around the technology.

The path we need is #KISS, resistance means changing what we reward – oppressive systems survive partly because people become attached to their habits and rewards – resistance must involve more than criticism. We need to create practical alternatives that make different ways of living and working possible: rewarding cooperation rather than competition, recognizing maintenance alongside innovation, care alongside visibility, and collective achievement alongside individual contribution.

It means creating organizations where people can question decisions without being treated as enemies. It means making power visible, distributing responsibility and developing ways to correct mistakes without destroying the people who make them. It also means accepting that there is no perfect community and no final control that will eliminate conflict. People will disagree, projects will fail, some participants will behave badly, others will make mistakes while trying to do something worthwhile.

What history tells us is the working path is not in creating pure community’s free from contradiction, its is more in balancing the processes that can recognize and work through contradiction without turning every difficulty into a struggle for domination. This is the practical meaning of moving beyond #stupidindividualism, we do not abandon individual agency, we develop the collective conditions that allow the path to become something more than competition between isolated individuals.

So, what dose this means for projects like the #OMN, attempts to put this path into practice through grassroots media, shared data and federated communication. Were the starting point is that people should be able to publish, share, organize and moderate media through open processes rather than depending on a central platform to determine what is visible and who has power. Technical openness is necessary for the kind of commons we want to grow, but, yes, it is not sufficient.

The #OMN path is #KISS, shared flows of information rather than locked-in applications – content moves between communities and instances. Stories gain visibility through trust and linking. Local moderation can respond to local needs without requiring a central authority to control the network. It is an path to support a different social relationship with information, less ownership, more participation, less central control, more distributed responsibility.

As we highlight, the work is about confronting our own contradictions, were we avoid turning open standards into rigid dogma, grassroots leadership into personal empires, or collective projects into another competition for recognition. We need to build these paths that help people work together, while remaining open to criticism and change. From the #deathcult to the #lifecult, by changing the everyday practices the current system reproduces, recognizing that our desire for certainty, status and individual security sometimes pull us back towards the very systems we want to escape.

The #deathcult tells us that competition is human nature, that everything must be owned, that markets should decide what matters and that collective problems require stronger systems of control. The #lifecult begins with a different possibility, people can build trust, share resources, care for one another and create institutions that support life rather than undermine it.

Neither possibility becomes real through words alone, the difference emerges through practice. Most importantly, it means building alternatives that work well enough for people to experience the difference. That is the work of grassroots paths, it is why projects like the #OMN and communities like #Oxfordboaters could matter. And that is why we need to keep digging, composting the failures and growing something different together.

#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

A reminder, what is the #OMN

In the Open Media Network (#OMN), the commons represents both the foundation and the destination of the native #openweb. Rather than relying on #closedweb corporate #dotcons or top-down state power, re-framing the commons as a practical, lived alternative – what you might call a “quiet” form of collective ownership and mutual aid grown into daily social infrastructure.

The OMN makes a distinction between native and non-native technology paths. A native path starts from the commons: open, federated, participatory, interoperable, and community-controlled. Conversely, non-native paths import corporate assumptions – turning participation in a network into a commercial product, creating paywalled event cultures, or establishing centralized platform hierarchies. The OMN always asks whether technical infrastructure is being built to maintain a commons or to turn participation into an industry.

The OMN sees technology as a way to secure the commons, but it should never become a substitute for the commons itself. The OMN cautions against the #geekproblem and #encryptionist mindsets trying to replace human trust and accountability with hard code or cryptography. True commons require human relationships, transparent governance, shared memory, and mutual aid – technology is merely the piping that supports these social processes.

Rather than engaging in endless ideological debate or waiting for top-down system shifts, the OMN views growing the commons as a quiet, everyday practice. This happens through minimal viable structures – such as working groups, shared resource bases (like the #NGO #OpenCollective), federated media flows, and shared archives. By applying the #4opens (Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process), communities keep their resources public and accountable without relying on private profit or blinded #stupidindividualist survivalism.

To grow a healthy digital commons, the OMN works on social composting: breaking down the “dead material” and toxic habits of both #FOSS and corporate tech. By taking the lessons and failures of past projects and turning them into organic material, communities build the collective capacity and trust needed to sustain shared networks long-term.

Let’s try and simplify the #OMN

We need people learning how to work together

We need to incurage people to better balance personal coping with collective power to challenge the #DeathCult as we are living through a time when the world is becoming harder to live in, yet the dominant message is that we must learn to cope better as individuals. #Climatechaos accelerates, inequality deepens, and the #nastyfew accumulate wealth and power while communities struggle to meet basic needs. Democracy is hollowed out, public services are weakened, and the institutions that should protect us increasingly serve the interests of those who already hold power.

The answer our #fashionistas sell us is to often more self-help, become more resilient, set better boundaries, meditate, journal, practise mindfulness and learn to manage our anxiety. Some of these things can help, and people need space to rest and recover. But something is deeply wrong when the response to a collective crisis is an endless demand for individual self-improvement. If we are all busy fixing ourselves, we have less time and energy to challenge the systems making our lives harder.

This is #stupidindividualism, the assumption that social problems can be solved through private choices, personal discipline and consumer spending, rather than collective action and shared responsibility. It is one of the ways we worship the #deathcult – learning to experience structural failure as personal inadequacy. When work becomes unbearable, we are told to improve our resilience. When communities fall apart, we must develop better coping strategies. When insecurity becomes normal, we must manage our anxiety. The system remains unquestioned, while the individual becomes the problem to be solved.

Even care becomes another market, we are sold products, subscriptions and services to help us endure conditions we have little power to change alone. We are encouraged to become healthier and more resilient while the social and ecological foundations of our lives continue to deteriorate. Self-care matters. But there is a difference between caring for ourselves so we can live, and being encouraged to care for ourselves so we can tolerate the intolerable indefinitely. Self-care without community becomes sedation.

The same problem runs through the economy – this individualizing logic is not confined to self-help. It runs through the mainstream story about how the economy works. We are told that markets are natural, competition is inevitable, profitability is the ultimate measure of success, and alternatives must prove themselves within the very system they seek to change. Even the economic left remains trapped in arguments about how to improve capitalism’s imperfections, rather than questioning the assumptions that organize it.

The liberal fantasy of perfect competition hides the struggle taking place inside the economy. Real firms fight for markets, push down costs and seek advantages over workers, suppliers and rivals. This is not an unfortunate deviation from a harmonious market, it is central to how capitalism operates. Profit, and exploitation, is not simply a side effect, it is an organizing principle.

Businesses invest where they expect returns. Capital moves towards greater profitability, shaping employment, production, trade and investment. Communities lose industries and economic security because production has moved elsewhere. Environmental destruction can remain profitable when its costs are pushed onto workers, communities and future generations. What is profitable and what is socially useful are not the same thing.

An economy can grow while people lose security, solidarity and control over their futures. Environmental protection is supported when it makes money, and decent wages are defended when they improve productivity. But what happens when doing the right thing becomes less profitable? When justice depends on profitability, justice remains conditional.

This is the wider #deathcult, a path that treats accumulation as success even when the social and ecological consequences are destructive. Our head down worship of this mess teaches us to accept the economy as an impersonal machine, beyond our collective control, rather than as a set of human relationships and institutions that people have built, and can change.

The myth of the isolated individual. The economic story and the self-help story share a deeper assumption, that people are fundamentally isolated individuals, responsible for maximizing their own interests. But people are not calculating machines operating outside society. Our behaviour is shaped by relationships, emotions, culture, class, gender, nationality, history and the influence of others. What we want, what we believe is possible and how we act are all shaped by the communities and institutions in which we live.

When we build institutions around the assumption that everyone is an isolated competitor, we reward competition and weaken cooperation. We then point to the resulting behaviour as proof that competition is simply human nature. The system produces the behaviour it expects, then uses that behaviour to justify itself.

The same pattern appears in our personal lives. We are encouraged to compete for work, status and security, then blamed when we become exhausted, anxious or isolated. We are told to become better individuals rather than asking why our lives have been organized in ways that make collective well-being so difficult. This is not an argument against personal responsibility, it is a rejection of the idea that personal responsibility can substitute for shared responsibility. We cannot solve collective problems by treating every person as a separate problem to be fixed.

From private survival to collective care – the alternative is not to shame people who are tired, overwhelmed or unable to do more. Demanding that everyone become a full-time activist would reproduce the same pressure to perform and succeed that helped create the problem. People need rest, they need friendships, personal space and the freedom to step away from constant crisis. But personal peace is not the same as collective freedom.

We need to rebuild the social structures that make care possible: mutual aid, local groups, shared spaces, grassroots media, community resources and relationships where people participate without turning everything into a transaction. This means making participation possible at a human scale. Share skills and resources. Build trust, create spaces where people can disagree, work through conflict and take practical action together. Let people contribute what they can, rather than expecting everyone to do everything.

Care is not simply something we consume, it is part of how we organize our lives together. Real freedom means more than managing our own private existence, it also means having a collective say in the conditions we live in. The path we need now is from collective care to the commons, this is where the #OMN – Open Media Network – fits into a wider political project.

If the existing system organizes life around profitability and private accumulation, we need to build spaces where social usefulness, collective participation and shared responsibility can become organizing principles in their own right. We need grassroots media and archives that serve communities rather than advertisers. We need cooperatives and worker-owned organizations where people have a meaningful stake in decisions. We need shared infrastructure that communities govern, rather than relying on corporate #dotcons platforms and institutional #NGO gatekeepers.

We need to move past the people currently #blocking. The #OMN is not another platform promising to solve society through technology, it is a practical attempt to help communities share news, preserve collective memory, connect local struggles and build trusted flows of information. It is about moving power towards the people who create and use media, rather than leaving it concentrated in the hands of corporate platforms or a small groups of technical elitists.

The challenge is to better connect the technical, economic and social dimensions of the commons. To grow a different common sense. Were we have ways of understanding society that connect theory to lived experience, expose the power relationships hidden behind supposedly neutral systems, and help us test alternatives in practice. We need to stop treating the market as a neutral measure of human value, just as we need to stop treating individual resilience as the answer to collective breakdown.

The personal and the political meet in our everyday lives, in whether we have time to rest, whether we can afford to live, whether our communities have places to gather, whether our work is meaningful, whether we can trust one another, and whether we have any real power over the decisions shaping our futures. These are not separate problems, they are connected expressions of how society is organized.

So to sum up, the task is to move from private coping towards collective agency. Less pressure to optimism ourselves, more power to change the conditions we live in. Less isolation, more mutual aid. Less consumption disguised as healing, more care organized through community. Less dependence on profitability as the measure of value, more collective power to decide what matters.

We are not simply broken individuals who need to become better at surviving a broken society, we are people who need the collective space, trust and tools to build a better one. That is the work of the #OMN, the #openweb and the grassroots commons paths, connecting personal well-being with community well-being, critical understanding with practical participation, and #4opens technology with pushing collective power.

#KISS #OMN #4opens #openweb #commons #stupidindividualism #deathcult #oxfordboaters

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is both shovel and social path to dig the #Fediverse out of the #mainstreaming crap

Over the last five years, the #Fediverse has been pushed down the path of copying corporate #dotcons: chasing raw user growth, building paywalled conference cultures, reproducing professional #NGO gatekeeping, and concentrating power around branded projects and scale. To balance this mess the Open Media Network (#OMN) path offers both the conceptual shovel and the practical social infrastructure to help dig the Fediverse out of this #mainstreaming trap.

The answer is not to discard the last five years or retreat into nostalgia, it is to compost our failures, break down what has gone wrong, recover the useful nutrients, and use them to grow more durable grassroots commons infrastructure. That means shifting focus away from scaling platforms and towards connecting much wider divers networks.

From platform scale to network scale – what we need to work on composting is that #mainstreaming assumes success means a recognizable brand, a convenient platform and millions of users. But grassroots power does not have to follow this corporate path – the #OMN path is to strengthen the horizontal connections between the thousands of autonomous, community-run servers that already exist across the #Fediverse.

By developing and sharing new #AP codebases, we help these communities work together more effectively, sharing news, preserving our own histories and building collective resources without surrendering local control or self-reliance. If you need a slogan, start here – Moving from Social Media to Social Infrastructure. This describes a practical progression for grassroots power:

Open media flows → shared archives → trusted flows → community organization → federated governance. We begin by working with people to publish and share their own media, to build the archives that preserve collective memory, the trusted flows that connect communities, and the organizational capacity to turn shared knowledge into active lived collective action.

The push for #mainstreaming encouraged authority to concentrate into small professional layers, institutional foundations and technical gatekeepers. Where we need more native grassroots forms of governance, that operates between autonomous communities rather than above them. The Open Web Governance Body (#OGB) is a path for this. Through mechanisms such as permissionless participation, sortition, recallable delegates and distributed decision-making, we begin building governance that connects communities without turning into another centralized institution.

The challenge is to make cooperation possible without making communities dependent, and to make collective decisions without handing control to a new professional class. In technical terms re-centring people-to-people – on this path at the heart of the #OMN is a direct challenge to the #geekproblem: the habit of trying to solve human and political problems with another technical protocol, encryption layer or app.

Technology matters, but it cannot replace human trust, shared responsibility or mutual aid. The #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process – provide a practical framework for keeping these social foundations visible and accountable. This means building technology around people and their relationships, rather than expecting people to adapt themselves to technical systems. It means recognizing that decentralization is not just about where servers sit, but about how people share power, make decisions and maintain their common resources.

The #Fediverse does not need to race to become the next corporate platform, what it needs is to recover its grassroots purpose and focus to balance growth to building on what already exists, to restart this by compost the failures of #mainstreaming, strengthen the connections between autonomous communities, build shared media and archival infrastructure, and develop federated governance that keeps power distributed.

Less branded platform growth, more network building, less blinded technical noise and more human trust. Less centralized control, more native grassroots power, that is the #OMN path towards a more durable #openweb Commons.

The tension between alternative cultures and the #mainstream is now rooted in 40 years of #neoliberalism – market logic replacing solidarity, grassroots movements being absorbed into #NGO process, and radical alternatives being forced to conform before they’re taken seriously.

This is how the system reproduces itself – block the bridges, co-opt what survives, and call the result “common sense”. Where we need bridges that connect without forcing conformity, collaboration without co-option, and grassroots alternatives that keep their radical purpose while sharing what works – less absorption, gatekeeping and more bridges.

#OMN #openweb #4opens