To compost the #dotcons, the #openweb needs more people with shovels

Yes, the #web02 revolution was a con, it always was. The problem is now most people have spent years pretending that the dominant technology companies were somehow neutral actors – clever companies making useful tools, occasionally getting a little too powerful, occasionally needing a bit of regulation. But now this comforting chattering class story is harder to maintain, as the long “invisible” problem has finally reached the #mainstream, the act of stepping over the smoke and mirrors can now be seen in books such as Gil Durán – that the Silicon Valley billionaire class has developed an explicitly anti-democratic political worldview, and it has accumulated enough money, technology and institutional influence to start acting on it.

The book Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy describes a political culture that did not suddenly appear with Trump. It has roots going back decades: hostility to government, hostility to taxation, extreme individualism, the fantasy of “exit”, private jurisdictions, network states, crypto-utopianism and the idea that technological elitists should be able to operate outside democratic constraints. This view of #geekpoblem history matters because if we treat what is happening now as simply another Trump-era political crisis, we shovel the wrong shit onto the compost heap.

This mess we need to compost is the blinded politics of our technology classes. The con was always bigger than the platform, #dotcons were never simply websites, there “value” comes from when they became infrastructure for social life. #Failbook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, X and the rest were built to control people, they “business modal” inserted themselves between people and their ability to communicate, organise, publish, buy, work and increasingly understand the world.

The con, the clever trick was that they appeared to be giving us something, free publishing, free communication, free social networks, search, storage and entertainment. But the real business model was the capture of the flows, our relationships became data, our attention a commodity, communities became markets, conversations became #LLM training material. Now that our social lives are increasingly controlled as behavioural prediction systems, and the more dependent we became, the more control and thus power accumulated on the other side of the interface.

This is why calling the #dotcons simply “social media companies” is too small a description. They became private governance systems, to make rules, decide visibility and control infrastructure. They moderate speech, shape markets, influence elections. They lobby governments to corrupt political control. And now some of the #nastfew openly talk about replacing democratic institutions with technological and corporate control. The con was never about advertising, it was about power.

Seeing the path underneath the technology is of the useful things, connecting today’s behaviour with 20th century ideas. The Silicon Valley ideology did not begin with artificial intelligence, it developed through decades of worshipping the #deathcult of libertarian and anti-government thinking. Books such as The Sovereign Individual became influential within the elitist chatting classes. Figures such as Peter Thiel pushed ideas, and funding at technology, sovereignty, crypto, private jurisdictions and “exit”.

The basic #nastyfew fantasy is consistent – when the government gets in the way, leave, if democracy is inefficient, replace it. When taxation is inconvenient, move somewhere else. If regulation applies to everyone, build somewhere it doesn’t. If nation states are obsolete, create new digital or corporate forms of sovereignty. It sounds futuristic, but underneath the science-fiction language is something ancient. A #nastyfew group of extremely wealthy people deciding that ordinary democratic accountability should no longer apply to them. This is simply oligarchy updated with #postmodern branding, and then came the #AI boom, that accelerates and intensified the #techshit class mess.

We should not need to talk about how the technology itself is not the enemy, the current #openweb reboot clearly shows it is not. So what is, a very normal story, the worship of the #deathcult, our political and economic structure around the #dotcons, and the #geekproblem that breeds this is the problem.

With #climatechaos visible all around us, we are still being told that all this #techshit is necessary because someone in Silicon Valley has decided that the future requires it. This now easy to see mess is why resistance to data centres, surveillance systems, crypto schemes and companies such as Palantir can become broader than narrow traditional left politics. People are now starting to experience #nastyfew billionaire power physically in the growing social mess. The abstract becomes concrete, the cloud a building, the algorithm becomes distracting fluff, the #dotcons platforms are revealed as workplaces when the billionaire becomes the person deciding what happens in your town.

The #OMN more profound question is increasingly about who gets to control infrastructure and who gets to participate in deciding how it is used. That is a democratic question, and it should also be a #openweb question. This is where the current reboot comes in to balance the mess. The #NGO, civil society answer cannot simply be to keep regulating the #dotcons harder while continuing to depend on them for everything. Yes, regulation matters, taxation matters, breaking up monopolies matters and basic democratic accountability matters.

But we also need alternatives; otherwise we remain trapped inside #nastfew controlled infrastructure. This balancing is why we can’t keep fucking up our #openweb reboot. We need to #KISS take the useful lessons from the early web – openness, decentralisation, interoperability, user control and federation – and combine them with the better UX lessons we learned from Web 2.0.

We need to build this alt path on the current #Fediverse, based on exiting reboot #4opens paths like #ActivityPub and #RSS. What we don’t need is more of what current takes the vast majority of #openweb funding and coding focus. Not another collection of #VC startups, any more “ethical” billionaire-funded platforms – not another centralised service waiting to become the next #dotcons.

We need something structurally different, we need practical shovels to composting the #dotcons. This is where I use the word compost deliberately, we cannot simply pretend the last 30 years didn’t happen, there is an enormous pile of #techshit. Some of it is bad technology, much is bad governance. Some is exploitative economics, surveillance, addiction. In our heads we need to compost venture-capital paths, empty innovation language and the stink of #NGO and institutional capture.

Some of the simple #geekproblem is just plain bad social thinking dressed up as technical expertise. But there is likely useful material in the pile too, the #web02 #dotcons did teach us things – They showed us that people want easy-to-use communication tools – the importance of good #UX, we need to take what is useful and use this to expose what is toxic. To understand how it happened, learn from the failures. Then we need to translate this understanding into action to break the concentrations of power, to open space to grow something different.

The #geekproblem is part of this, another uncomfortable layer. The alternative technology world has not always been good at avoiding the same mistakes, the #geekproblem is real. Too often we build technology according to what technically clever people think is interesting rather than what communities actually need. We confuse technical complexity with progress, confuse innovation with usefulness, technical decentralisation with democracy. And often we recreate the same power structures inside #FOSS that we were supposedly trying to escape.

The resulting technically elegant social mess, is a strange imitation of the #dotcons: technically open underneath, but socially closed around the people who understand the machinery. This mess is then feed into the funding problem, where the #fashernistas enter the pile.

With the current #openweb reboot, alternative technology is increasingly surrounded by funding ecosystems that reward fashionable language, impressive demos, grant-friendly projects and institutional credibility. The grassroots people actually doing the work can become secondary, the people who understand the community get pushed aside by people who understand the funding application. The messy project gets replaced by the polished project, the difficult social question becomes a technical deliverable, and the result is another layer of #techshit.

This is not inevitable, but we need an open process capable of exposing it, that is the reason the #4opens matters – Open data – Open source – Open standards – Open process. The fourth one is particularly important, if the process is visible, we can see who is making decisions, how money is moving, whose ideas are being prioritised and where the projects are about grafting. We can challenge it before the pile gets too big, we need to compost the #techshit at source.

To grow anything in the current mess, we need infrastructure that ordinary communities can understand, use, modify, share and govern. We need technology that supports participation rather than extracting it, systems where disagreement, correction, rollback and learning are normal. We need tools that help communities build memory rather than constantly throwing yesterday into the algorithmic landfill.

So we know what we need, we know what we need to compost. The chattering classes are finally waking up, we have the interesting thing, that some of the people who have spent years talking about “innovation” and “the future” are finally starting to notice what has been happening. The warning signs are no longer hidden, #nastyfew political power is visible as is the social and ecological damage.

The question is no longer whether there is a problem, it is becoming what we do about it. And this is where I worry about the next stage because every time the mainstream finally notices a grassroots problem, the #fashernistas arrive. They package it, brand it, secure the funding to create the conference to build their careers. This simply “common sense” behaver stinks and is going to kill and displace billions of people.

And somehow, after all that activity, the people who were actually doing the work are still standing outside the room, we have seen this cycle for decades, we cannot afford to repeat it here. So shovel harder, the #openweb reboot has a job to do, we don’t have the time to create another fashionable technological sector. We don’t need another class of sellout experts to compete to become another set of gatekeepers. And definitely not to reproduce the #dotcons with a nicer logo and some open-source code.

We need to shovel hard, turn over the #dotcons, expose the blinded ideology, compost the bad economics, the #geekproblem and the corrupt grant culture. We need to compost our own #fashernista performance. To balance this we have to keep the useful technology, the useful knowledge, the communities and most importantly keep the history. Then use all of that compost to grow something genuinely different.

The old web was open enough to give us a glimpse of what was possible, #web02 captured that openness and turned it into private infrastructure. Now we have a chance to take the useful parts back, not by going backwards, but by putting people and communities back into the centre of the flow.

The #deathcult worshippers have spent decades building an escape route from simple democratic accountability. Our path is not to follow them on this fantasy, it is rather to build a better path in the other direction. The #dotcons are a huge pile of compost, the question is whether we are willing to pick up the shovels.

Just put a # in front of words

Let’s look at stepping away from the #dotcons as an example of hashtag affinity group organising. A hashtag can help name a problem, but it cannot by itself create a movement. It only becomes a tool for social change when shared language connects people to shared relationships, practical projects and action. The “spade and compost” metaphor is useful for this, the hashtag helps identify the mess, but the point is to pick up the spade and compost with them. A useful progression is: Name → Connect → Organise → Act → Build → Repeat:

Name the problem: #dotcons, #stupidindividualism, #deathcult, #techshit give people a shorthand for something they already experience but may not have language for.
Connect the people: hashtags allow people who recognise the same problem to find each other. But this needs to become an affinity group of action, not just a pile of accounts using the same word.
Make the metaphor understandable: explain what the hashtag means and give groups lived examples. Otherwise, it becomes just another insider language.
Turn criticism into a question: What can we do about this? Or What did you do today to help your community step away from the #dotcons?
People need a next step: join a project, move a community conversation to the #openweb, install something, help document a project, host a server, organise an event, teach somebody else.
Create visible alternatives: this is where #OMN matters. If you tell people to leave something, you need somewhere meaningful to go.
Build collective habits: the hashtag becomes useful when a community consistently uses it to recognise problems, share experience and coordinate action.
Compost the criticism: don’t only keep producing negativity about the #dotcons. Turn the accumulated criticism into knowledge, relationships, tools and projects.

These are the messy problems we need to compost. The path of “making positive posts about specific openweb projects” is part of the answer, but positive promotion alone isn’t enough. People also need a shared explanation of why the existing system is a problem and a language for understanding it.

So the hashtag isn’t the movement, it is the flag, vocabulary and filing system. The movement is the people who organise around it and actually do something. And that’s the bit missing from “just put a # in front of the words.” 🙂

Religion, mystery and the #openweb

I am not religious, but that does not mean religion is something that can only be dismissed as irrational, stupid or obsolete. There is a useful distinction between believing in a religion and understanding the social, cultural and philosophical work that religion has historically done.

This matters for the #OMN because we are interested in how human beings make meaning, build communities and organise themselves when they don’t have complete knowledge of the world. We don’t know everything – one of the interesting things is that science and theology both eventually run into the same thing – mystery.

Science starts with observation, evidence and experiment, to builds theories from what we can discover and then changes those theories when better evidence appears. Religion starts where empirical knowledge runs out and tries to construct stories, symbols and ethical frameworks around the things we cannot yet explain.

That doesn’t mean the paths science and religion are on identical, they aren’t. A scientific theory is not the same thing as a religious myth, evidence, testing and falsifiability matter. But there is a shared human problem underneath both – we are trying to understand a world that is bigger than our ability to understand it. The problem begins when either side claims to have finally solved the mystery.

In my view It’s useful to look at religion as a social technology – for thousands of years, religion has been a kind of social technology that helped people organise communities, explain death, create rituals, transmit stories, establish ethical expectations and give people ways of dealing with uncertainty. Before modern science, medicine and large bureaucratic institutions, people had very few tools for dealing with an unpredictable world.

Storms happened.

Crops failed.

Children died.

People became sick.

Wars arrived.

People didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow, religion provide a framework for living with that uncertainty. Prayer, ritual, myth and community provide a sense of meaning when there was very little else available. Yes, that doesn’t mean the explanations were factually correct, it means they performed social functions.

And this is where the conversation becomes interesting for the #OMN – the danger is false certainty – there is a big difference between living with mystery and selling people certainty. The religious con begins when somebody says “I know exactly what God wants.”,”I know what happens after death.”, “I know the future.” or “Give me money and I can protect you from it.”

This isn’t limited to religion, modern society is full of people selling certainty – politicians, corporations, economists all sell certainty. As do most of our #dotcons technology companies which are pushing the cult of influencers trying to sell certainty. And on the other side increasingly the #geekproblem sells us the idea that every social problem can be solved with the correct application, platform or algorithm.

That #techshit is another kind of theology, the technology of certainty, a lot of contemporary technology culture is built around the assumption that uncertainty is a technical problem waiting to be eliminated. We want perfect systems, perfect moderation, perfect security, perfect prediction etc.

But human society doesn’t work like that – people are messy, cultures are messy, communities disagree, knowledge changes. Context matters, things break, and sometimes we simply don’t know. The attempt to remove all of this uncertainty produces something worse than the original problem – systems of control.

This is one reason the #openweb matters – #OPEN is about living with uncertainty – on this native path the #OMN isn’t an attempt to build a perfect system, quite the opposite. The aim is to build social and technical infrastructure that allows people to work together without requiring perfection.

The #4opens approach is useful precisely because it doesn’t require everyone to agree. It creates conditions where disagreement can remain visible and productive, this is very different from trying to create one system that finally gets everything right.

We need better stories, not final answers – human beings need stories – we need ways of explaining where we came from, where we are going and what we should care about. Religion has historically provided some of those stories, art, politics, philosophy and community life provide others. Now science is trying to provide new ones to replace the dieing religions. The mistake is thinking that one of these “correct paths” has to completely replace all the others.

The #OMN is interested in the space between – how do we build the communication systems through which communities can create, challenge, preserve and share their stories? That is what #MakingHistory is about too – history isn’t just a collection of “facts”. It is a living social process of deciding what happened, who experienced it, what mattered and what we should remember.

If we leave that process to corporations, governments, algorithms and closed platforms, we increasingly lose control of our collective memory. In this mess, there is an uncomfortable parallel between religious fundamentalism and technological fundamentalism, both can become systems of faith. Both create sacred texts, produce priesthoods, punish heresy and both can promise salvation.

The work to compost this mess, is to keep thinking, keep questioning and keep the systems open enough for other people to challenge us. That is a very #KISS principle – we don’t know everything – so build systems that allow us to learn. We need a culture of epistemic humility, an acceptance that our understanding is partial, provisional and socially constructed.

We need tools that help communities see what they know what they don’t know – what they disagree about and how their understanding changes over time. That means moving away from closed systems that manufacture certainty and toward open systems that make the process visible. That is the #openweb, and the social purpose of the #OMN.

And perhaps the most important lesson from religion, science, art and everything between them is remarkably simple “We don’t know.” so let’s build systems that help us find out, together.

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

This summer #climatechaos

This summer, heat, fires, the soon to come winter floods and insurance withdrawals will make #climatechaos harder to treat as something happening somewhere else. For years, climate breakdown was framed as an activist issue, something discussed by environmental groups while mainstream politics carried on with business as usual. That is changing, people are experiencing the consequences: extreme heat, flooding, damaged homes, rising insurance costs, failing infrastructure and growing uncertainty about what the next few years will look like. The #climatecrisis is moving into everyday life, so how do we live through what is already locked in?

Once the consequences of a warmer world are being experienced everywhere, adaptation becomes an unavoidable path. That means practical changes will finally start to happen such as resilient building standards, flood planning, water management, food systems, energy resilience, heat protection and changes to where and how we build.

But there is a danger in treating adaptation as purely a technical problem, we might redesign buildings, strengthen flood defences, change planning regulations. We can develop better warning systems – but who controls these systems? Who decides what gets protected? Who gets information when something goes wrong? Who maintains the infrastructure? Who remembers what happened last time? And who gets left behind? These are social and political questions.

The missing infrastructure is where the #OMN native path becomes important. Surviving #climatechaos isn’t only about physical infrastructure, it is also about information infrastructure and community infrastructure. During crisis, people need reliable information to know what is happening locally, they need to know who needs help, to know which transport links are closed, where resources are available, what services are operating and what communities are doing. They need ways to communicate when normal paths fail.

And afterwards, they need a record of what happened, this is why the #openweb matters, a resilient society cannot depend entirely on #closedweb privately owned platforms whose responsibility is to the current #nastyfew shareholders and advertisers. It is basic that the #dotcons are not resilience infrastructure – Facebook, Google, X, TikTok and the other #dotcons distribute information, and misinformation very quickly, but speed isn’t the same thing as resilience.

These current #closedweb digital systems are designed around control, engagement, advertising, data extraction and platform addiction. They are dangerous to use when important information will disappear into algorithmic feeds. It should be becoming obverse that communities cannot keep being dependent on proprietary services, as accounts can be suspended, interfaces can change, companies can change their business models, services will disappear.

And the information itself is often difficult to preserve, connect or reuse outside these #closedweb platforms. That is a terrible foundation for a society increasingly dealing with environmental disruption. This is why the #OMN focuses on the #deathcult story, in part to highlight it isn’t simply a collection of bad corporations. The current mess is about the way of organising society around short-term extraction, profit before resilience, growth before sustainability, competition before cooperation. Private ownership comes before the commons, and immediate financial returns are prioritised over the ability of communities to survive any long-term disruption.

In this mess, climate adaptation within this risks becoming another market, those who can afford resilience buy it, those who can’t are left exposed. Insurance withdraws from risky areas, property values become tied to climate risk. Private companies decide which infrastructure is commercially viable, the result is adaptation as another form of inequality.

To compost this mess we need #KISS social adaptation too – The alternative isn’t to reject technology – It is to change what technology is for. The #4opens provide a useful starting point: Open Data – Open Source – Open Standards – Open Process. These principles make it easier for communities to share information, build on each other’s work and maintain infrastructure without being locked into one corporation. The #openweb gives us the technical culture for this, #Federation allows different communities to remain independent while still communicating. Open standards allow systems to interoperate. Open data allows information to remain useful beyond one platform. And open process allows communities to understand and participate in decisions affecting them.

There is another important piece: memory, when a flood happens, people document it. When a heatwave hits, people record what happened, when infrastructure fails, somebody usually knows why. But much of this grassroots knowledge disappears into #dotcons social-media feeds. A few years later, we start again from scratch. This is why #openweb projects such as #MakingHistory matter. We need living community archives that connect events, places, people, media and responses over time. The archive becomes part of resilience, knowing what happened last time helps communities prepare for the next time.

Moving beyond the current #NGO pointlessness – we need to grow projects like the OMN as shovels, to clear the #techshit mess to grow grassroots infrastructure for publishing, sharing, moderating and preserving information. But yes, the technology is only part of it, the deeper goal is to help communities build trusted information networks that are not dependent on the current #dotcons. A resilient media system should allow people to – publish locally – discover relevant information –
share between communities – moderate collectively – preserve important records – correct mistakes – maintain metadata – and keep historical context. This becomes especially important when normal systems are under pressure as the #mainstreaming is only seeing half the problem. But yes, the mainstream conversation is beginning to understand climate adaptation matters, but adaptation cannot be reduced to flood barriers, new building codes or air-conditioning.

We also need to ask whether the social systems surrounding those technologies are resilient. Can communities cooperate? Can people trust the information they receive? Can knowledge move between organisations? Can local experience become shared knowledge? Can communities govern their own infrastructure? Can we preserve memory? These questions are still largely outside the mainstream climate conversation. They shouldn’t be, the next wave of #climatechaos will test not only our physical infrastructure but our social infrastructure. The challenge is therefore twofold – build the physical systems that help us survive the changing climate – build the open, collective information systems that help communities understand and organise that survival.

The first is increasingly #mainstreaming, the second is where the #openweb, #4opens, #OMN, #OGB and #MakingHistory have something important to contribute. We do need #KISS more resilient communities, and resilient communities need infrastructure they can actually trust and control.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #MakingHistory #OGB #IndymediaBack #climatechaos #deathcult #dotcons #resilience

Grassroots #openweb infrastructure is need for a different future

For 50 years we have worshipped the #deathcult – endless growth, extraction, competition and individualism – and now we are living with the damage that this has done to our society and the living world.

The current hard shift to the right won’t fix any of this, it simply empowers the #nastyfew to surf the apocalypse while more and more of us are left fighting over the scraps.

Blind hatred and political ignorance are not solutions. Neither is pretending that the past 50 years of “common sense” somehow didn’t happen.

So what do we do? We compost the mess, we take the broken assumptions, failed systems, #techshit, tribalism and accumulated political baggage and turn them into something useful.

Apathy is boring, get on with doing something useful please. That’s part of what #OMN is, not a shiny platform, nor another ideological club. It’s made as a shovel for digging through the mess and help build the grassroots #openweb infrastructure we need for a different future.

#4opens #IndymediaBack #OGB #MakingHistory #openweb #deathcult #compost

Living through twenty years of #dotcons addiction

For those of us who’ve spent the last twenty years working around alternative technology, grassroots media and activism, the hardest thing to watch has been how deeply the #dotcons have become embedded in the culture. We know the problems, we’ve been talking about surveillance, extraction, algorithmic manipulation, platform lock-in and the destruction of community for years. And yet we keep going back, not because people are stupid, but because addiction is powerful – especially when the thing you’re addicted to is also where everyone else is.

This is where #mainstreaming becomes such a problem. People have been, and still are, vile in their interactions with the alternatives. Instead of helping build something different, too much energy gets spent defending the existing system, attacking people trying alternatives, or having endless prat fights about which alternative is ideologically pure enough. The result? We waste years fighting each other while the #dotcons keep growing.

Our #mainstreaming crew/friends are always pushing pointless fights over alternatives, while defending the obvious worship of the #deathcult – forty years of #neoliberal “common sense” normalised extraction, competition, growth and individual consumption as if these were laws of nature, they aren’t, they are political choices. And “common sense” built around those choices is going to take time – and a lot of messy work – to change.

That’s what we mean by composting, not throwing people away, not creating another subculture purity club. Taking the accumulated #techshit, failed projects, bad assumptions, ego battles, corporate habits and activist baggage and turning it into something useful. Because dumping Big Tech isn’t just a matter of personal politics, it isn’t even primarily about “tech sovereignty” – that is another con when sovereignty means building our own little versions of the same extractive systems. It’s about survival – Big Tech is the latest flag-bearer for our recurring worship of #deathcults.

After living through this mess, we don’t need another shiny platform, we need to recover the ability to build things together. Small-scale, federated, open, human, trust-based, with memory and governance. With communities that can survive the failure of the latest #dotcons or #fashionista platform. That’s the point of the #openweb, #FOSS, #Indymedia and projects like #OMN. Not another tech fashion, more a way out of the addiction. So, grab a shoal and compost this mess, please.

Make the #4opens fashionable

The crisis of the #openweb isn’t just coming from the #dotcons. It’s also coming from us. Our #mainstreaming #fashionistas are dangerously consumptive, forever chasing the next platform, the next funding round, the next shiny self abstraction. Meanwhile, our alternative #fashionistas mirror exactly the same behaviour, endlessly reinventing tools that never escape their own echo chambers.

Both paths produce the same result: more #TechShit, more #TechChurn, less social value. We don’t need another clever framework, another protocol that nobody uses, or another startup pretending to be commons. What we do need is to change and challenge the social norms that reward novelty over usefulness to make the #4opens fashionable.

Reward open data instead of data hoarding.
Reward open process instead of closed decision-making.
Reward open standards instead of lock-in.
Reward open source instead of proprietary dependency.

And yes, this isn’t about technology, it’s about culture. As Oscar Wilde observed in The Critic as Artist:

“We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”

In the current churning mess, that feels even more true today. We are producing more code, more platforms, more content and more noise than ever before, while creating less shared understanding and fewer if any useful durable institutions, structures or networks.

The answer isn’t to work harder. It’s to work differently. The #OMN is a path to do that by stopping repeating the same mistakes by compost the failures of the last forty years, and rebuild the #openweb on social foundations that people can actually live with. If we can’t make this shift, we’ll simply keep rebuilding the same broken systems with newer code.

#OMN #4opens #openweb #TechShit #TechChurn #KISS #NothingNew

Our failure to mediate the mess

The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content.

Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs.

The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the #deathcult, where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking (and acting on) questions the tech industry never asks.

This is where the #OMN approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems.

This mess is a part of our long-standing #geekproblem, that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless #techchurn: one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power.

We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these #techshit outcomes. The #4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the #nastyfew.

That’s the work of the #openweb, and the path of #OMN.

Techno feudalism what changes

What part can you play? The #openweb is one place to start, keep it simple (#KISS), build commons, compost the mess. The political centre created this mess. Four decades of neoliberal “common sense” deepened inequality, weakened democracy, privatised public goods, and pushed us beyond ecological limits. Yet much of the centre still offers only more of the same: better management of the #deathcult rather than a path beyond it.

That leaves a dangerous vacuum. If progressive movements cannot offer practical alternatives, the far right will continue to grow by presenting itself as the only force willing to confront the crisis. Their answers are built on fear, exclusion and authoritarianism – but they resonate because they acknowledge that the old system is failing, while the centre too often pretends it can be repaired.

Simply defending the status quo is not enough. Nor is retreating into abstract radicalism disconnected from everyday life. We need practical, grassroots alternatives that people can participate in and build themselves.

This same pattern appears in technology. Our #geekproblem isn’t primarily bad code – it’s a culture of arrogance and ignorance. Technical communities often reproduce the assumptions of the wider society without questioning them. They celebrate disruption while recreating centralisation. They mistake individual freedom for collective liberation, reproducing #stupidindividualism while unconsciously serving the logic of the #deathcult.

This isn’t usually malicious. It’s a feedback loop. The culture produces the technology, and the technology reinforces the culture. The answer isn’t to reject technology. It’s to mediate it socially.

The #4opens offer a simple path:

Open Data keeps knowledge in the commons.
Open Source keeps tools accountable.
Open Standards prevent enclosure.
Open Process ensures communities – not just developers or investors – shape the progress.

We need to use this to composting 40 Years of “Common Sense”, For the last 40 years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what passes for “common sense” in #mainstreaming society. Their influence runs so deep that many assumptions now feel natural rather than ideological. When these assumptions are challenged, people react defensively, not because they’re bad people, but because their worldview feels under attack.

This isn’t just a mainstream problem. Activist spaces reproduce the same patterns. The result is endless circular arguments, performative politics, and fragmentation rather than solidarity. Our task isn’t simply to oppose this culture, it’s to mediate it, to compost the mess rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Composting means taking the waste of the last forty years – failed assumptions, captured institutions, #techchurn, #fashionista politics, and individualism – and turning it into fertile ground for something better.

The worrying trend is that the grassroots signal is being submerged beneath an echo chamber of #mainstreaming voices. On many #fashionista threads, noise overwhelms practical action. We spend time performing politics rather than building the infrastructure movements need. That requires empathy, patience, and practical organising. It means creating spaces where people can step outside inherited “common sense” without feeling they have to defend it. It means building working alternatives instead of only criticising broken systems.

The answer isn’t to shout louder, it’s to build better spaces, better tools, and better processes. The signal-to-noise ratio can change again, but only if we do the patient work of mediation, trust-building and commons creation – The work of #OMN.

Technology is never just a tool

Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.

The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.

The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.

So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.

But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.

The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.

The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.

The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.

The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.

The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”

The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.

The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.

The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.

From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.

But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.

The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.

Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.

The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.

The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.

If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.

#OMN #OGB #4opens #openweb #FOSS #indymediaback

When Technologists Forget the Warning

The thing about #techbro culture is that some of the most #elitists people grew up loving stories that warned us about the #techshit they are building. They read the dystopias, watched the films, they understood the dangers of unchecked capital, concentrated power, surveillance, artificial intelligence, inequality, and corporate control.

Then many of them decided “Great idea. Let’s build it.” as the #geekproblem made them think they knew better. This is what our #fashionista class call the #tormentnexus problem – the moment when a warning about a future goes wrong becomes interpreted as a blueprint for that future. The issue is not that people like technology, science fiction, fantasy, or engineering. The #openweb itself grew from people who loved exploring what technology could make possible. The problem is when technical possibility becomes separated from social consequence.

A story like Dune is not simply about a powerful individual changing history. It is a warning about charismatic power, messianic thinking, and the danger of believing one person can control complex systems. A story like Snow Crash is not just a cool vision of virtual worlds. It is a satire of corporate fragmentation, private control, and a society where everything becomes a service. A story like Blade Runner is not simply a stylish future aesthetic. It asks what happens when technology creates beings and systems that challenge our ideas of humanity, rights, and exploitation.

But our blinded #mainstreaming started removing the politics from the stories. They kept the shiny machines, they kept the aesthetics, the power fantasies. They discarded the warnings, the #geekproblem is about capability without consequence. A recurring problem in technology culture is that engineering thinking often asks:“Can we build this?” That is an important question, but society has to ask “Should we build this?” And “Who benefits?” And “What happens to the people who have no power in this system?”.

The #geekproblem is not that engineers are bad people. It is the cultural mistake of believing technical problems can be separated from social reality. A better algorithm will not automatically solve inequality, more data will not automatically create wisdom, more automation will not automatically create freedom.

The blinded #geekproblem myth of the chosen builder, is another pattern that appears again and again. The people building these systems imagine themselves as the exception, the story says “Yes, this technology could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but I am different, I will use it responsibly.” This is the same #elitists fantasy that many cautionary stories warn against.

A system can be technically brilliant and socially destructive, the history of technology is full of examples where innovation created new problems alongside the solutions. The factory increased production but created new forms of exploitation, the car increased mobility but reshaped cities around machines. #dotcons social media connected people but also created control, surveillance, manipulation, and attention extraction. The question is never only what technology can do, the question is what kind of society technology grows.

The problem is not bad individuals, though they exist. The problem is social and economic paths that concentrate power and reduce accountability. The danger is not only the evil ruler, more it’s creating structures where rulers become inevitable. This is why the #openweb matters, real power is not finding a better king, it is building #KISS systems where power is distributed, visible, and accountable.

Our current worship of capital rewards the wrong interpretation, is another uncomfortable part of this. The market rewards the most dangerous reading of a story. The cautionary version says “Maybe we should not build this because it creates harm.” The investment version says “Can we build it faster than everyone else?” The version that creates companies, funding rounds, patents, and control is usually the one that wins. The result is that technology is shaped by incentives that favour scale, speed, and ownership. Not care, community, resilience or long-term social health. This is the mess we need to compost to not end up with a world where the same systems criticised in dystopian fiction become business opportunities.

The missing piece is growing the commons, not with anti-technology (the wrong lesson) – The answer is technology embedded in social systems that understand responsibility. This is where the original #openweb ideas matter – growing from open processes, transparent development, shared ownership, community governance and public interest infrastructure. The lesson of #FOSS was never simply “Anyone can copy the code.” The deeper lesson was “People can collectively build and maintain things outside pure market logic.”

It should be obverse that the technical commons will need social commons, without that, open code can still become captured by closed paths. The solution is the challenge for projects like #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, and #indymediaback – not to reject technology – to keep asking a different question not “How do we build the next big thing?” but “How do we build things that help people build together?”

The future does not need more isolated #eletist builders trying to control complexity, it needs communities capable of navigating complexity. The opposite of the #tormentnexus is not rejecting technology, its is more about creating technology where the social relationships come first.

The #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is technical – a commons is social. The work now is making sure we do not build the dystopias our own stories spent decades warning us about. The warning signs are there, the question is whether we listen.

Rethinking Grassroots Tech Funding

Building beyond the #deathcult – Our current model of #tech funding and developer agendas is not neutral. The way we fund technology shapes the kind of technology we build. For the last 20 years, the dominant tech culture has followed the same path:

venture capital growth

platform monopolies

extraction of attention and data

endless scaling

short-term metrics

private ownership of public infrastructure

This has produced #techshit – technology built because it can make money, not because it improves society. And now we are facing an era of #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, and social instability. The question we have to ask is uncomfortable – Has our current model of technology funding become part of the problem?

The answer cannot simply be “more innovation”, we have had decades of innovation. The problem is that innovation has been pointed in the wrong direction. The #openweb and #FOSS communities contain many of the seeds of a different path, but we still fall into the same trap of building tools to optimise code, solve technical problems, but we struggle with the social question of how do we build and sustain commons?

This is the #geekproblem, not that technical people are bad, not that code does not matter. But that we treat social systems as if they are just technical systems waiting to be fixed. They are not: A community is not a server, a movement is not a repository, a network is not just infrastructure. The missing piece is grassroots funding models that support the social work around technology.

What could grassroots tech funding look like? Instead of asking “How can we create the next unicorn?” Ask “How do we support useful things that communities actually need?” This means funding – Maintenance, not just invention as a huge amount of valuable #FOSS work is boring. Keeping things running, helping users, writing documentation and supporting communities to do governance. This is invisible labour, but it is what keeps the commons alive.

We need networks, not just products, the #dotcons model asks “What is the product?” The #openweb question should be “What relationships are we strengthening?” On this native path, funding needs to support ecosystems, not just individual projects. Long-term contribution, not short-term growth.

A grassroots project does not need to become a company, it might need small sustainable funding, shared infrastructure, community support, public accountability with open processes. Growth is not always success, sometimes resilience is success. Funding the gaps between technology and society – The hardest work is often translation by helping activists use tools, developers understand communities, so communities can shape technology.

This is where #OMN sits, not just making software, but more importantly building the social infrastructure around software. The hardest problem is cultural, the block is not only money. The block is “common sense”, living inside a #neoliberal idea where something is only useful if it produces financial return. Anything outside that looks interesting but “unrealistic”.

The #deathcult assumption is if it cannot become a profitable business, it has no value. But the internet itself was not built this way, the #openweb grew from public investment, shared knowledge, volunteer contribution, and communities building things because they mattered. We need to recover that thinking, but to breaking out of the cycle is difficult because it requires changing what we measure.

Not, how much money did this make? But how much capacity did this create? How many people can now participate? How much commons did we grow and how much power moved away from concentrated systems?

The challenge for #OMN, #OGB, #4opens and #indymediaback is not only technical. It is creating a different economic imagination, a way of funding technology that helps communities grow instead of helping platforms extract.

The future will not be built only by companies, it will be built by people creating alternatives together.

To make this path work we need a hand reaching back across the gap – Stepping away from the #dotcons is not a simple a moral judgment to jump from one world to another. A native path is one foot in, one foot out. To stay connected enough to understand where people are, what they need, and how they think – while building alternatives that move beyond the worship of the #deathcult.

The hand reaches back across the gap, not to pull people into the past, but to help people cross into something different, change does not happen by shouting from the other side. It happens by building bridges while growing the new.

So the question is: why are so many people not acting? In the era of #climatechaos, people #blocking social change in society and technology are not just slowing things down, they are helping maintain systems that are driving social and ecological breakdown.

The question is not only what is wrong, more what are we building instead? Different paths already exist with the #4opens, #penweb, #OGB, #indymediaback and wider #OMN projects. These are paths to move away from the failures of #mainstreaming and towards more open, collective ways of organising.

There is no profit in this for us, we are not building this to cash out. So maybe the more useful question is not “What’s the agenda?” Maybe ask – Who benefits when alternatives never get built People often look for who gains from creating something. But power also exists in maintaining the status quo.

The #openweb has always been about creating spaces outside the usual incentives – spaces based on sharing, participation, and collective ownership. That threatens systems built on keeping things closed, controlled, and dependent.

The challenge is mediation, how do we separate signal from noise? How do we build alternatives while people are still trapped inside the old systems? How do we create spaces where change can actually happen?

One foot in – One foot out – A hand across the gap.

Don’t become part of the blockage, help build the bridge.

Compost “digital sovereignty”, build working commons

The #KISS secret about the noise in “digital sovereignty” is very simple – Ignore most of this branding and build commons tech instead. That’s the path, not another layer of management, another funding bureaucracy for a glossy strategy document. Not another NGO conference circuit explaining why nothing can happen without another round of funding. Just build working commons.

This matters because much of the #EU “digital sovereignty” conversation is simply more churn inside the same #neoliberal #mainstreaming logic that created the problem in the first place. Europe spent decades outsourcing infrastructure, privatising public space, undermining local autonomy, and feeding the #dotcons.

Now the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore, dependence on US platform monopolies, fragile infrastructure, imperialist surveillance capitalism, cloud centralisation, shrinking democratic accountability, and growing geopolitical vulnerability.

So suddenly everybody is talking about “sovereignty”, but what do our chattering class of institutional actors mean by sovereignty? Too often they mean procurement contracts, compliance frameworks, consultancy ecosystems, defence posturing, startup hype and fashionable funding narratives. The same old structures wearing a new outfit.

This is where the #fashionistas rush in to cash out of the latest cycle of #techshit, every crisis produces a new branding wave #Web3, #AI, #blockchain, smart cities, trusted identity and now digital sovereignty. The words change, the consultants were the same clothes, to push funding applications with different buzz words. But underneath, the social relations to often stay exactly the same. This is why so much “innovation” produces so little durable social value, the energy and focus gets consumed by branding, positioning, institutional competition, and funding capture.

The #OMN approach is to compost this mess rather than feed it. Composting means recognising that some parts of the existing system still contain nutrients technical knowledge, infrastructure, institutions, legal frameworks, public funding, developer skills. But these need breaking down and re-rooting into commons processes instead of simply reproducing the same dead structures.

The #KISS approach is important because complexity is often used as a control system, the more complicated the governance path becomes the harder it is for normal people to participate, the easier it is for insiders to dominate, and the more power flows to the parasite class managing the process. People then confuse institutional complexity with competence, but most healthy social systems are not built this way, healthy systems tend to be transparent, iterative, federated, participatory, and grounded in practical trust.

That’s why the native #openweb worked when it worked, people built things together directly like mailing lists, forums, blogs (bit more messy), federated publishing, open protocols, community hosting, shared standards. Messy? Yes. Human? Yes, but functional. The current “digital sovereignty” debate ignores this history because acknowledging it would undermine the need for the giant managerial layer now feeding on the crisis.

A lot of the current policy noise is about preserving institutional power during systemic decline, that’s why signal-to-noise matters, most of the noise performs concern, manages perception, protects careers, and absorbs dissent into harmless process. Signal is rarer, it’s about building actual commons’ infrastructure, creating durable trust networks, supporting federation, sharing governance openly, and keeping paths simple enough that communities can understand and maintain them.

This is one reason the #4opens remain central, without these, “digital sovereignty” simply becomes another enclosure strategy under a different flag. European-owned silos are still silos, state-managed platform capitalism is still platform capitalism. Replacing Silicon Valley landlords with Brussels landlords is not liberation.

The real challenge is rebuilding public digital commons, that means the hard part is cultural, not only technical. People are deeply trained by #mainstreaming to look upward for solutions to governments, corporations, experts, influencers, NGO etc. But commons culture grows sideways instead, through participation, trust and through practical collaboration, yes this is slower at first, but far more resilient over time.

That’s the real #KISS secret, ignore much of the spectacle and quietly build the alternative underneath it. Less noise, more compost – Less branding, more commons – Less #techshit.
More grounded infrastructure. That’s how you compost the #mainstreaming mess instead of endlessly feeding it.