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.
History has a lot to teach people today, lets look at an example from activism, back in October 2013, a urgent message from the very lively Balcombe Anti Fracking Camp set out a familiar dilemma for grassroots activism. The fallow on smaller Wisborough Green anti-fracking camp was being established on private land, with limited amenities. It was a step camp, for people to recover there energy to pass on the skills and equipment. The landowners wanted it to remain focused on stopping fracking, rather than becoming a general travellers’ site or party space. A space for building unity with the local community and maintaining the trust of landowners to help create a precedent for next camp.
The intention was understandable, protect the space, build local support and prepare for the many other sites where resistance would be needed. But there is a sadly normal side to this story, the camp was soon torn apart by a disruptive individuals. The damage was demoralizing and hindered preparations for the next camp in Manchester. Then, in a separate incident, equipment gathered for the Manchester camp was taken and scattered by another group of activists. This knocked the growing #actavisttech project that cam from the tech space at Balcombe backwards, despite its earlier pioneering success of building solar power and practical infrastructure.
This is an example of the hidden costs of grassroots failure, were the damage goes beyond one camp. Equipment disappears, preparation time is lost, trust breaks down and people who have put in months of work become exhausted or leave. Projects lose the capacity to carry lessons and practical skills from one campaign to the next.
It is a recurring issue of how grassroots projects lose years of work in a short time. People build useful things together, but unresolved tensions, destructive behaviour and a lack of effective ways to deal with conflict soon undermine the effort. But the problem isn’t simply a few difficult people – it is tempting to tell this story as a battle between the committed activists and a few #loons but sometimes people really do behave destructively, and communities do need ways to protect themselves. But if we keejerk response is to blame individuals, we miss the recurring wider lesson.
Grassroots organizing brings together people with different needs, expectations and ideas about freedom. Some priorities the political campaign and relationships with local communities. Others want open spaces with fewer restrictions. Some focus on practical infrastructure and long-term preparation; others are drawn to the immediate energy of protest, then the is the party crew, these differences do not automatically make a project fail. The trouble starts when we have no shared way to discuss them, balance boundaries, resolve disputes and then respond when someone damages the work of others.
The example of Balcombe legacy raised a real question about who the camp are for and what responsibilities came with using land. But to balance this restrictions imposed without meaningful discussion create resentment, just as a refusal to accept any boundaries destroys the trust projects depends on. Neither blanket control nor unlimited individual freedom is enough to sustain a commons.
In the case of #actavisttech, the work at #Balcombe demonstrated that activists can build useful solar power and infrastructure. That knowledge and capacity should have been a foundation for future camps. Instead, conflict and the loss of equipment set the project back. This is a form of social waste, when we keep rebuilding things we have already learned how to build because we struggle to maintain the relationships and shared responsibilities that allow the work to continue.
It is one of the recurring problems of grassroots activism, we can be good at mobilizing against an outside threat but much less capable of dealing with tensions inside our own communities. So how do we mediate this? how do we move beyond the false choice between authoritarian control and letting everything descend into personality conflict. The answer is #KISS development of practical, shared ways of dealing with everyday conflicts before they destroy the work we need.
First, agree on the purpose of the space, be clear about what the camp is trying to achieve, who it serves and what responsibilities come with participation. These agreements should be discussed openly, not left to emerge through arguments and informal power.
Second, make boundaries accountable. Landowners, organizers, infrastructure crews and camp participants may have different responsibilities. But those differences need to be visible, decisions about access, safety and shared equipment should be proportionate, explainable and open to challenge.
Third, create ways to mediate disagreements early, by trusting people to find ways to raise concerns before tensions become public confrontations. Use facilitators or mediators that are accepted by the people involved, make space for different accounts of what happened, and seek workable agreements. Mediation does not mean excusing destructive behaviour; it means trying to resolve conflict before they spread.
Fourth, protect shared resources – equipment, solar systems, tools and supplies represent collective labour. Agree who is responsible for them, how they can be borrowed or moved, and what happens if they are damaged or removed without consent. Where there is a serious risk of theft or harm, practical safeguards and clear consequences matter.
Finally, learn collectively, after a conflict, record what happened, what worked, what failed and what needs to change. The point is not to create a bureaucracy or a permanent committee of gatekeepers. It is to make sure the next camp does not have to learn the same lessons through another round of damage.
This is where the idea of composting becomes useful, we need to break down the failures, recover the lessons and turn them into something that can nourish the next project. We should not pretend the damage did not happen, but neither should we let it become the only story we tell. The challenge is to build grassroots communities that can handle disagreement without destroying their own capacity to act. That means combining openness with responsibility, autonomy with mutual aid, and clear boundaries with meaningful participation.
The #OMN approach is to make those relationships and processes visible, rather than imagining that either technology or blinded goodwill will solve everything. The #4opens can help us keep the data, tools, standards and decision-making open to scrutiny, while the human work of trust and mediation makes the infrastructure usable.
Grassroots power is not just our ability to gather, protest and build. It is our ability to work through conflict, protect what we create together and pass that capacity on to the next generation of action. That is how move past composting the same failures over and over, and start growing something more durable that we need.
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.
The poison of #stupidindividualism is everywhere over the last ten years of social tech, the first thing that needs composting is treating structural criticism as only personal criticism, so instead of discussing the problem, they block the person raising the issues we need to change and challenge.
The result of avoiding shoveling this mess is the same problem, repeated across different platforms, communities and generations. We need to compost these habits, not just churn out more platforms with the same unthinking pushing of mess.
Compost personalizing everything, social problems need collective thinking, not endless status battles. Compost #blocking as the default as blocking has a place, especially for safety, but if every disagreement ends in exclusion, we never learn how to work through differences.
Compost #feudal governance as the #geekproblem keeps rebuilding systems where a few owners, admins and were the normal technical gatekeepers hold the power. That’s simply not the social infrastructure we need for the change we need.
Compost #techchurn, as new #mainstreaming platforms won’t fix old social habits, if we keep reproducing the same processes, we keep getting the same outcomes.
We need to move towards balancing governance: open processes, shared responsibility, community memory, trust and ways to disagree without destroying our ability to work together.
The #openweb should help us build that capacity, not just give us more places to fight or hide.
We face very real challenges, including the struggle to keep a habitable planet over the next 50 years. We cannot afford to keep wasting our collective energy on social patterns that go nowhere.
Everyone blocks, the question is: what value does your blocking create, and what does it destroy? Is it protecting people, or avoiding the harder work of building something better?
Let’s get the shovels out, what habits, tools and governance processes do we need to compost, and what should grow in their place?
This #blocking conversation on the #oxfordboaters chat is a intolerant conflict between trying to manage the immediate problem and building the collective process needed to stop the same problems recurring. Lets look through a needed #KISS lens at the cludge between reactive (stupid)individualism and the harder work of building community structures.
The immediate conflict is a symptom, not the underlying problem
The conversation is filled with suspicion and frustration about people, conduct, and the proposed response to HT. There is a concern, and a #blocking that the group is accommodating behaviour that should be challenged. This is a two sided mess we need to compost as these conflicts become more damaging because the group lacks the processes and structures needed to deal with any collective working path.
Politeness and niceness become tools of control
The articles smiling-faced vileness and WhatsApp plebiscites reveal the wider mess we need to compost. That enforced niceness discourage the needed confrontation, that composting is about. Our focus on informal #dotcons chat platforms encourage reactive opinions and shallow consensus rather than sustaining any working collective decision-making. People trying to challenge dysfunctional paths are framed as the problem because they make the people blocking and obscuring uncomfortable.
In this self creating mess, the pressure to remain agreeable prevents a working group empowered culture from developing the capacity to act effectively. This is not an argument against kindness, it is an argument against using politeness as a weapon of control to substitute for accountability, political clarity and collective action we need.
The current flipping of #WhatsApp groups is this same problem because it shapes the process. This is a part of the blinded objection to setting up the #opencollective page, its unthinking #blocking, not merely technological. The group had an opportunity to move away from the limitations of the #dotcons but instead blindly reproduced the same failed patterns and paths that are shaping the current mess.
The underlying argument here is simple that the tools we use shape what we can collectively do. When the group stays locked into a reactive chat environment, where decisions emerge through fragmented discussion and informal fear based influence, it becomes harder to maintain any shared direction, to challenge obstruction or organize sustained work we need. The medium is helping to reproduce the dysfunction we already suffer from.
The group needs basic, half step, working activism infrastructure, like moving to Signal chat from WhatsApp, not just more noise, and blind reaction inside the #dotcons. Then we have #OpenCollective role in cutting through and composting this crap, to establish a clearer organizational and resource base. then the simple process of Working Groups give people defined areas of responsibility and #KISS accountability, with out this the is ZERO trust that we can deal with conflict without repeatedly returning to the same informal blocking arguments and paths.
The purpose for this change is not bureaucracy for its own sake, it is to make collective action possible without relying entirely on personal relationships, goodwill or whoever happens to be most active in the chat.
Working groups are not a magic solution
Yes, working groups often disappear, and the same people end up doing all the work. That is a genuine challenge to any horizontal path. Composting is not just adding more material to the pile, it requires active work to turn the material into something useful. A working group without responsibility, follow-through and a shared direction is just another layer of organizational clutter. What it dose give us, and what we need, is transparency and focus, it can be used as a path to organically work round the nasty-ness of smiling passive blocking.
We need to focus, on taking responsibility for growing the path out of our group’s own dysfunction. The difficulty is not an external force that the group can do nothing about, the group is reproducing its own problems through its current practices. Instead of treating every dispute as a fresh crisis caused by particular people, the group needs to examine the conditions that allow the same patterns to recur. That means moving past blame to structure, from reaction to process, and from informal influence to shared responsibility.
The immediate HT response is distracting from the work
The disagreement is not necessarily about whether NBTA proposed response is factually or tactically sound. It is about whether solving the immediate problem is being allowed to substitute for fixing the conditions that keep producing these problems. The group needs an active pause, to examine the wider issues and decide whether it is willing to pursue a more functional collective path.
What is not working or sustainable is the current messy flow of immediate conflict, suspicion, frustration, disagreement. We need to compost the mess of enforced niceness, reactive chat, informal power and avoidance of any difficult questions. Its been a year and we still have no reliable shared process, clear responsibilities or sustained collective organization. OpenCollective, working groups, #KISS structures and accountable processes. So the question that matters is can we do the difficult work of changing our practices, or just continue reacting to each new crisis?
Lets look at these flows – first, #stupidindividualism is strong, treating each incident as a problem of individual behaviour rather than examining the social structures that reproduce it. Even when people recognize that something is wrong, they remain trapped in personal reactions, competing opinions and informal status games. The answer to this kinda mess is not to build an elaborate governance system, it is to establish the minimum viable structure that allows our group of disparate boaters to make decisions, share responsibility, resolve disagreements and get things done. Simple does not mean structure-less.
We need to focus on social composting of the existing conflict, frustration and failed attempts are the raw material for building something better. But they do not transform themselves, the current people (or a smaller subset of them) has to do the work of turning experience into shared learning, practical process and renewed collective capacity. The important distinction is that a working group, an OpenCollective account or a new chat platform is not, by itself, an alternative. These are tools, the alternative is the commons practice that makes them useful. There is still to wide a gap between identifying the problem and making the solution work in practice.
Peoples objection exposes this – how do working groups avoid becoming inactive, and how do they stop the same few people carrying all the work? The next step needs to have solid moorings, what is each working group’s purpose? Who has committed to take responsibility for this work? The #4opens is core here, how are decisions made and communicated? What happens when commitments are not met? How does the group review progress and change direction? Yes, without answers to these questions, calls for structure risk becoming another round of mess created discussion. With them, #KISS becomes a practical path rather than just a principle to stand on.
The Oxford boaters’ problem is not simply a difficult dispute with #HT, it is that the group is trying to act collectively through bad, reactive and conflict-avoidant practices that repeatedly undermine our ability to act. Rather than building the simple, accountable structures needed to turn shared frustration into collective power we need to keep our moorings. That is the central #OMN point – stop trying to fix each new mess in isolation, and start building the community process that compost our mess into something useful.
This mess is driven by climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems, they reinforce each other. At the same time, we are seeing a feedback loop of political movements built around fear, scapegoating, hierarchy and fantasies of escape. This creates a basic question we need to focus on – how do we build the means to live through these crises together, rather than retreating into individual survival, authoritarianism or delusions of technological escape?
One of the strongest #blocks running through the current crisis is, what could call, exit culture. You can see this in the wealthy #nastyfew who push the mess attempt to buy their way out through the nasty fantasy of private security, property and technology. Some feed political movements that imagine an escape into an ethnically or culturally purified nation, the hard right. Some religious movements look towards another imagined world. Some technology #geekproblem culture imagines that humanity can escape its material limits through AI, automation, space or digital transcendence.
The world is broken, so find a way out, a dangerous stupid social response to the systemic social and ecological crisis. But any one with any sense can see there is no #stupidindividualism exit from #climatechaos. There is no technological #dotcons platform that allows us to escape social relationships. And there is no bunker large enough to protect a society from the consequences of destroying the living systems it depends upon. What is needed is we need to actively be composting this mainstreaming mess, the alternative is not to escape, it is to focus on becoming more capable of being here.
Then on the left the is a matching fantasy, we romanticism collapse, but it is not automatically progressive. It is easy to look at broken institutions and think that their collapse must create an opportunity for something better. But collapse has no political direction of its own, maybe it can produce mutual aid, solidarity and new forms of democratic organization. More likely we get authoritarianism, scapegoating, violence and stronger hierarchies.
The outcome depends partly on what people and communities are ready to do when crisis washes over them. If communities have networks (like the #OMN), relationships, communication systems, practical skills and ways of making decisions together (like the #OGB), crisis can become an opportunity to build something new. If they don’t, people are much more likely to fall back on fear and whoever appears to offer simple answers.
So preparation matters, but preparation is hopeless, if people do not pick up the tools or when it means becoming an individual survivalist. We need to balance this commons sense urge, with working collectives to create social relationships and grow ways of looking after each other. It is now 20 years past time to move for survivalism to #KISS mutual aid, we need focus on how do we make sure people can look after each other when things become difficult?
That means better late than never to building relationships before the crisis, knowing who is around us, knowing how to communicate, where resources are, how to organize. Knowing how to disagree without destroying the group, how to make decisions, share responsibility. This is grassroots working democratic resilience from the bottom up.
We need grassroots repossess to authoritarian pushing insecurity – find someone to blame – the nation against the foreigner – the majority against the minority – the “real people” against outsiders – the pure against the contaminated. The hard right are pushing belonging through this kinda blaming exclusion.
We need to work to balance this mess, we need another form of belonging, that means building coalitions capable of holding difference without turning every disagreement into another power struggle. We need to compost the false choice between local organizing and large-scale networks, we need the strong local relationships to provide the social foundation of our change and challenge.
But we also need #KISS technology as tools, #4opens flow networks to allow those communities to exchange knowledge, resources and experience without surrendering their autonomy. This is one of the reasons the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub are interesting. Federation gives us a technical path where independent communities can remain independent while still communicating with each other.
This principle can extend beyond the current #openweb reboot of the fedivers, copying #dotcons social media. We need to build projects like the #OMN based on local relationships + open networks = distributed resilience. This is a much more interesting path than simply building another or replenishing the normal centralized platforms we currently live inside. This move need to be based on technology that supports social process rather than replace it with blinded control.
We don’t need a perfect future, a lot of political narrow thinking is trapped between two fantasies. One says, the existing institutions will eventually fix themselves. The other says, the whole thing has to collapse before we can build something new. It is dangerous to accept either of these paths blindly. What we do need is to grow, trust networks, practical democratic experiments, its fine that none of these are perfect. They need to work better than the current mess, to connect people and communities, so they can step from fear to cooperation.
The current hard right is good at turning insecurity into fear, they feed from fear of migration, cultural change, technological change. Fear of economic collapse, losing status and fear of the future. But the knee jerk reactions cant be to simply tell people not to be afraid as people have real reasons to feel insecure. The better balancing is to build something that gives people something better to fall back on than fear. That means replacing fear → scapegoating → authoritarianism with crisis → cooperation → solidarity. Not in a utopian sense, but as practical path.
On the native openweb path this is the question and the bigger reason for building the #OMN. As we don’t know exactly what the next twenty or forty years will look like, we do know that the existing system is becoming increasingly unstable. We know that #climatechaos is accelerating, that #dotcons technology is concentrating power. We know that authoritarian politics is growing. And we know that simply defending the existing structures is not enough.
So rather than waiting for the next crisis to tell us what to do, we start building now. Practical grassroots paths, not as an escape route, another #closedweb platform as smoke and mirrors for another hierarchy waiting to take control. A network of people and communities that can communicate, remember, cooperate, organize and govern themselves. That is the native #openweb path to compost this mess, that is the practical meaning of the old slogan “another world is possible”.
We don’t have to wait for another world, we can start building the means for it here.
The last five years have changed the #Fediverse. What started, grassroots, commons-based native path has become much more visible. More people have arrived, more organizations have become interested. There are more conferences, more funding conversations, more institutional involvement and more attempts to make the Fediverse part of the wider technology landscape.
Some of this is useful, but it also creates a question that is harder to avoid – what do we actually want to carry forward from the last five years? Perhaps the answer is not to defend everything that has happened, or to reject it all. Perhaps we need to compost it, were omposting means taking what has grown, including the dead material, separating out what is useful and allowing something new to grow from it.
Lets look at an example – the paywall is not just about the ticket – this becomes visible in arguments about conference tickets and paywalls. At one level, the argument is simple, events cost money, venues cost money, travel costs money, some people organizing events need to be paid. But that isn’t really the interesting part, the question that matters is what a paywall means inside a commons-based culture. For someone who comes from the #openweb, free software, grassroots media and other commons traditions, putting a price on entry feel wrong, not just a financial barrier.
It becomes an ideological barrier as the message shift from “This is something we are building together.” towards “This is something you consume if you can afford to enter.” That distinction becomes a block, particularly when some of the people being asked to pay helped build the culture, infrastructure and ideas that made the network possible in the first place. The question therefore isn’t whether events should cost money, it is, are we paying the costs of maintaining a commons, or are we turning participation in the commons into a product? Those are not the same thing.
Let look at this shift from commons culture to event culture – over the last five years, the #Fediverse has developed an increasingly visible event culture. Conferences, workshops, panels and gatherings can be valuable, they create relationships, spread knowledge and bring people together. But there is a danger when the pay to enter events are pushed to the centre of the network. The commons starts to decay, funding resources and focus then starts to orbit around conferences rather than communities. This grows when access is controled by money, professional status, travel and institutional connections.
This doesn’t happen because somebody decides to push us into a #closedweb path, rather it is a common sense mainstreaming organic mess that happens gradually when a grassroots network becomes successful. Success brings institution thinking (#NGO), these institutions bring funding, funding feeds and creates professional roles. Professional roles push a feedback loop creating more top down organizations, these create events with paywalls.
This money creates barriers that eventually a culture that begans with people simply building things together can start looking surprisingly similar to the systems it originally wanted to move beyond. This is not necessarily corruption (though it often is when you lift the lid), it is institutional #NGO drift. Working to recognizing this mess making is part of keeping the commons alive were we need to fund and support the what can we build together? While still actively questioning who gets recognized, funded and invited? As those questions produce very different cultures. The first is about participation and making things, the second is about access to an emerging institutional path.
This is one of the tensions the Fediverse now has to work through, were the answer to this question is not simple, yes, we need to not to romanticize volunteer culture either, as volunteerism has its own exclusions, it to can depend on people having spare time, money and privilege. The point is to find ways of funding the commons without turning the commons into an industry. The last 5 years we have spent enough time trying to prove that the #Fediverse deserves to exist.
The more interesting question for the next 5 years is – What did we actually learn? What worked? What failed? Which projects created durable infrastructure? Which relationships survived? Which forms of organizing created useful results? Which created endless meetings? Which assumptions turned out to be wrong? Which things should we stop doing? And we need to do this without a paywall, to make this composting useful. So, to repeat, don’t throw away the good stuff, composting isn’t destruction, as there is a lot worth keeping.
The last five years have demonstrated the practical value of open standards, federation, independent communities, people running their own infrastructure, interoperability, grassroots paths, mutual aid, trust built through practice and the ability to leave one system without losing the network. These are not just historical curiosities, they are the useful material from which the next seeds can grow. But we have made mistakes over the last 5 years by thinking that moving forward means abandoning the culture that created the #Fediverse in the first place. And yes the is balance, equally, the mistake would be to freeze that culture in place. We maybe need to keep the principles while changing the practice, a way of looking at this is native and non-native paths
This is where the distinction between native and non-native paths becomes useful, a native path starts from the assumptions of the commons open, federated, participatory, interoperable and community-controlled. A non-native path can still use ActivityPub or Fediverse technology while importing assumptions from another world, closed access, professional gate-keeping, centralized authority, ownership, status and consumption. The technology alone doesn’t decide which path we take, #ActivityPub can carry both, as an open protocol does not nesserserly push an open culture.
This is one of the important lessons of the last five years, we need to pay attention to the social structures growing around the plumbing. What should the next five years look like? Perhaps we should balance pushing the #dotcons copying #Fediverse of five years ago. We need different streams to grow the useful material and build the next layers.
Not more copy’s of social-media platforms, not more common sense conference ecosystems, not another self selected central organization deciding what the network is. Instead open media → shared archives → trusted flows → local communities → federated governance to shape a native path much closer to the original promise of the #openweb.
Yes, the original path is good, the federated network should make it easier for communities to communicate, remember, cooperate and organize without having to surrender their autonomy. This means a renewed and a clear focus on moving from social media to social infrastructure is a useful path. As the biggest danger is that we keep reproducing the assumptions of the corporate social #closedweb while using open protocols. We don’t need to feed open infrastructure carrying closed social practices, were the technology is federated, but it feeds culture that is still centralizing.
Some of the current mess we need to compost – the protocol is open – the events tend to be pay-walled. The software is free – but the organizations are controlled by a small professional layer. The network is decentralized – the power isn’t. This is the contradiction mess we need to work on composting.
And yes, before you start kee jerk #blocking the answer isn’t purity, it is wide experimentation, meany native paths to build things, trying different organizational models that make the processes visible, we can learn from failure to keep what works. But please lets let what doesn’t work become composts. The commons needs metabolism, things grow, things fail, people leave, new people arrive. Yes, ideas become useful and then become obsolete, organizations shaped by these ideas appear and disappear. Practices get tested, some survive, some need to be broken down and returned to the soil.
That is what social composting means, not being afraid of the failures and contradictions of the last five years. They are part of the material we have to work with, the question is whether we can turn that experience into something more useful. The aim isn’t to reject institutions, funding or professional work. It is to #KISS keep asking who is this infrastructure for? Who can participate? Who controls it? What remains open? And the biggest question – does this strengthen the commons, or does it slowly turn the commons into another market?
For the #OMN, this is an important distinction as we don’t need another project that simply adds another social timeline to the #Fediverse. We need to explore what happens when federated technology is used for media, archives, trust and eventually governance. That means building from the things that have already proved useful while questioning the assumptions that came with the current #mainstreaming of the Fediverse, don’t overcomplicate what already works, build on it.
It’s interesting to see that the #mainstreaming is moving onto subjects that many of us native to the #openweb have been talking about for the last 20 years. The problem is that when our ideas finally become fashionable, they arrive with a rush of #fashionista baggage – followed by the #geekproblem reaction of trying to solve things with another layer of #techshit.
So maybe now is the time to get the shovels out, the #OMN is one of those shovels. We need to compost the onrushing mess rather than let it become another 20-year cycle of #techcurn, fashion and reinvention.
Take the useful ideas, break down the bad habits, keep the #openweb roots. Build something that the next generation doesn’t have to spend another twenty years digging its way out of.
I went to the #Oxford event tonight with a slightly awkward position in mind. Before going, I wrote that the #mainstreaming people would probably be idealistic about cynical politics, while I was going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My aim wasn’t to pick a fight. I wanted to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build a bridge between idealism and the messy reality of power.
The event was “Democratic Resilience: What Do We Need to Know?”, a panel at the Blavatnik School of Government looking at how democratic institutions might respond to democratic backsliding. The panel brought together a selection of the political and intellectual chattering classes: senior figures from politics, academia, law, international institutions and civil society. The question was how governments, civil society, universities, businesses and international organizations can make democracy more resilient.
It was an important question, but as the evening went on, I increasingly felt that my cynicism had won. I wasn’t given the opportunity to ask what I thought was the uncomfortable horizontal question: With the hard shift to the right, accelerating #climatechaos, and the clear failure of the liberal class over the last 50 years, are the institutions they are trying to save actually fit for purpose? If we are facing the next forty years of serious systemic social and ecological backdown, we may need something closer to wartime socialist planning simply to hold our societies and civilization together.
So the question I did not put to the room was simple: Are the institutions you are focusing on actually capable of doing that job? Or are we watching the last gasps of a fading political and intellectual chattering class?
That is why my cynicism kicks in. One speaker talked about progressive #mainstreaming, but the solution still sounded bureaucratic and top-down. Another perspective came from a legal and institutional tradition that was confident in the existing structures. There was always a blinded sense of trying to protect the system without asking whether the system itself needs fundamental change.
There was some discussion of horizontal organization, grassroots capacity, open infrastructure, local participation. These are important ideas, and I was glad they were being discussed. But the final answer was always focused on using these approaches as tools to get people back into the institutions and forms of power they were assumed, by the people in the room, to belong in.
Looking at the last 50 years, I think there is a much more basic question, is that still useful? Perhaps the problem is not that people have lost access to power, perhaps some of the structures being pushed at events like this are parts of the problem. That we may need to grow new forms of resilience from the bottom up, real native horizontal organization, grassroots capacity as ways of rebuilding social capacity outside the increasingly brittle institutions these people fixate on.
That is one of the reasons I keep coming back to on the #openweb and projects like the #OMN. Were the point is to give people better tools to build the capacity for communities to organize, communicate, cooperate and govern themselves in different ways. Tonight reinforced my feeling that we need both idealism and cynicism to move away from the path this room sees as normal.
Keep the idealism about what society could become and keep the cynicism about institutions, power, and the assumption that existing structures will somehow fix themselves. The useful question that was not space to ask was: What kinds of institutions and social structures do we actually need for the next forty years – and are we building them yet?
That is the uncomfortable conversation I think we need to have.
On a positive note on shoveling this kinda mess, we need to see the difference between power struggle politics and organizing. Power struggle politics can keep going forever, even if you win, the same struggle comes back because the underlying structures haven’t changed. That is part of the 20th-century political legacy we need to move beyond.
Good organizing doesn’t mean having no conflict, every real group has disagreements, arguments and difficult personalities. The important question is, does the conflict stop the work from growing? Some of the best movements have had serious internal disagreements and still managed to be productive. The problem is when conflict becomes the work – when energy goes into controlling each other instead of building something together.
This is also where good open technology can help. Used well, transparency makes patterns of behaviour visible instead of hiding them inside closed meetings and informal power structures. So the goal isn’t a conflict-free movement, it is where conflict doesn’t consume the capacity to act.
That feels like a very 21st-century organizing problem.
Update: My report back from the Oxford discussion on “Democratic Resilience” left me thinking about a basic problem. They talked about grassroots capacity, horizontal organization and open infrastructure, but mostly as ways of getting people back into existing institutions.
I think we need to turn that around, when the existing institutions are becoming increasingly brittle, and have helped produce many of the problems we now face, why are we still treating them as the destination?
We need to build new capacity from the bottom up, recognizing that there are already different paths developing: institutional, grassroots, #openweb, #FOSS, federated and community-based. They don’t all have to become the same thing, the goal should be mutual recognition and practical bridges between them.
So democratic resilience is more about balancing protecting the institutions we already have and having the courage to build the ones we are going to need.
Marketisation, competition and individual success replace solidarity and collective provision.
Institutional capture, grassroots movements are professionalized, defanged and absorbed into #NGO processes.
Conformity as the price of influence, alternatives must become respectable, fundable and manageable before the mainstream will listen.
The closing of alternatives, radical projects are blocked, marginalized or stripped of their political purpose.
Manufactured common sense, this whole process is presented as realism – as if there is no alternative to the system producing the mess.
Going to an Oxford event tonight where the #mainstreaming people will be idealistic about cynical politics – while I’m going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My mission is to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build bridges across that gap. There is a useful conversation between idealism and cynicism: keep the ideals, but be realistic about how power actually works.
To get beyond people feeling lost and political debate becoming pointless, it helps to use a simple #KISS lens: fear and trust. The right mobilize through fear – fear of loss, outsiders, disorder and change. The left has been strongest when it builds from trust – solidarity, openness, cooperation and collective action. These are not absolute categories, but they can help us see some of the dynamics underneath political arguments. Fear creates cycles of control; trust creates the possibility of openness and collaboration.
This matters for the current #openweb reboot. What happens when #mainstreaming pushes projects away from trust and towards fear, control, exclusion and defensive code? Could we use this simple lens to highlight which direction our projects are actually moving in – regardless of what language games people play? And this leads to the sharper question: are we building systems based on fear, or systems based on trust? The fear loop is simple:
Fear the right → fight the right → feed the right → create more fear of the right → fight the right harder. Fear becomes the fuel, the response becomes the problem, the cycle feeds itself. You can end up fighting the politics you fear in ways that reproduce the fear, division and control that give those politics space. So the #KISS question to talk about tonight is, are we breaking the fear loop, or feeding it?
For the native #openweb path, that means building from trust, solidarity and collective capacity rather than letting fear set the agenda. This is also why I keep coming back to the practical work around #OMN, #4opens, #makeinghistory,#IndymediaBack and #OGB. The point isn’t to win another argument on the existing path, it is to grow working alternatives outside current assumptions.
The challenge tonight is to keep the bridge open, cynical about power, but not cynical about people, idealistic about the future, but practical about how we get there.
The #Fediverse exists because the corporate #dotcons are not enough, we don’t wont more of our social lives as products, our relationships into #closeddata, and our communities into audiences to be managed. We wont a different way to communicate, organize and build power together.
But the #Fediverse is not simply a kinder version of corporate social media, its has a promise based on the history of the #openweb: people and communities building their own spaces, connecting through open standards, and sharing power without handing control to a central platform.
The problem we need to compost is that there are few working, humane alternatives to the current #deathcult. So for meany people simply stepping away isn’t an option – We need practical alternatives that work in the real world, rooted in grassroots experience and capable of growing beyond isolated projects for these people to step to.
We already have a first step, that is the point of federation, with #ActivityPub, independent communities can connect and share without having to surrender their autonomy. We can scale horizontally, linking working social projects together rather than building another “common sense” centralized empire.
The #OMN takes this to the next step by bringing in grassroots practices we know work to this open technology, human trust and shared responsibility. #MakingHistory, #IndymediaBack, the #OGB and the #4opens are stepping stones towards a more sustainable world, not products to consume, but tools for #KISS collective action.
This is why the current push for #mainstreaming is more problem than solution. If we bring the habits of the #dotcons into the #Fediverse, we are pushing the turning of build something different into another version of the same old “common sense” mess – we become users demanding personal comfort, rather than participants building communities.
And this is where #BLOCKING becomes political. Blocking has a place, especially when people need protection from harassment and abuse. But if it becomes our default answer to every disagreement, it turns despair into the appearance of action. We retreat into smaller and smaller spaces while the structures of power who are ripping the world apart remain untouched.
We cannot build solidarity by pretending differences don’t exist, we build it by developing and growing ways to work through those differences, set boundaries, share responsibility and act together. That is how grassroots movements for the last 100 years have always built real capacity.
“Another world is possible” cannot just be a slogan, we have to make it possible, through practical projects, open infrastructure and communities that learn how to govern themselves. The #Fediverse exists to give us a path to do that. Whether we use it to build a different world, or simply recreate the one we already have, is up to us.
Keep it #KISS, less platform worship, less knee-jerk rejection, more collective work. We won’t block our way into another world, we have to build and grow it.
“Another world is possible” – but our friendly enemies keep pushing #mainstreaming dressed up in radical language. The result? We’re accepting “common sense” of the system instead of challenging it. Solidarity gets fragmented into identity and partisan battles, while class power escapes scrutiny. We end up pointing fingers at each other while the #deathcult carries on.
We need to defend the right to care, but turn that care into collective power. Real solidarity means looking beyond the latest distraction, naming structural power and building alternatives together. Don’t just make the existing world look kinder.
There is a recurring argument about the #Fediverse that starts with a reasonable question of how can the Fediverse scale? So why, because, yes, it doesn’t yet have the same ease of use as mainstream social media. Infrastructure can be fragile. Servers can struggle when large numbers of people arrive at once. Developers need support and servers cost money. There are no universal performance guarantees, and there isn’t a single business model paying for the whole system. All of that is real.
But underneath this question is a important distinction. Are we trying to scale a platform, or are we trying to scale a network of communities? Those are not the same project, platform scale versus network scale. The #dotcons are built around platform scaling, the basic model is: one organization → one platform → millions of users → centralized infrastructure → centralized governance → monetized attention. The objective is to get as many people as possible onto the same system.
The Fediverse nativly comes from a different tradition, its #KISS path is: many communities → many servers → open protocols → federation → local autonomy → shared network. The objective isn’t necessarily to put everyone in the same place, it is to allow different places to connect. That is the central distinction that gets ignored by mainstreaming crew in discussions about “scaling the Fediverse”.
Scaling the platform is not the same as scaling the network, if we take the #dotcons model as our definition of success, then the Fediverse will always look deficient. It doesn’t have one company providing everything, have one business model funding everything, it doesn’t have one #UX controlling everyone, or one central authority making all the decisions. But these aren’t simply missing features, they are features we deliberately don’t want to reproduce.
The common sense question shouldn’t be – why isn’t the #Fediverse more like mainstream social media? The more need focus should be on – how do we make a federated network of communities sustainable at much larger scale? That is a different engineering, economic and social problem, a different idea of scale.
The problem we need to compost is then when #mainstreaming blindness asks – how do we get millions of people onto one platform? The openweb asks – how do we make thousands or millions of people able to participate in sustainable communities that can connect to each other? That is still scale, it is distributed scale rather than centralized scale. Instead of building one giant machine capable of containing everyone, we build a network of autonomous communities capable of supporting themselves while remaining interoperable. This is native to the historic logic of the #openweb.
This changes the #UX question, the cultural problem that is easy to mistake for a UX problem #mainstreaming common sense talks about. The #dotcons have spent years developing effective systems for capturing attention, infinite feeds, control algorithms, notifications, status competition, engagement metrics pushing personalized outrage. Constant “novelty”, better named as people becoming accustomed to digital drugs. So the mainstreaming “fix” is “why doesn’t this work like the platforms I’m used to?” But if the alternative simply reproduces the same addictive relationship between people and media, we haven’t built anything at all that we need, and the will still be no alternative.
Our native project we have worked so hard on for the last 50 years, is not only about changing the plumbing, its better understood as drug detox. The openweb needs working detox, what we do not need is a “better” version of the same addiction. The current reboot needs a different relationship with media to move from passive consumption towards participation – publish → participate → moderate → organize → build. This is the reasons the #OMN is interested in the federated flow #UX question.
The aim isn’t to make another platform that is easier to consume, it is to make participation easier than consumption. On this different path the #mainstreaming people still have veiled points, but the problem is they still use these to push us down bad paths. Yes, distributed doesn’t mean free, and this distinction should not become an excuse for ignoring the real material problems. Servers cost money, developers need to live, systems need maintenance, communities need resources, infrastructure needs reliability.
You cannot wish these problems away, but to rebalance this we do have seed paths, platform cooperatives are one possible response. Shared ownership and cooperative funding can provide useful ways of sustaining infrastructure and development. But this needed “business model” is not the same thing as a governance model.
And this is where the argument gets more interesting, the governance problem. Once we accept that the #Fediverse is a network rather than a platform, we need governance appropriate to a network, with questions like: Who decides? Who represents whom? How do autonomous communities resolve conflicts? How are shared resources managed? How do communities negotiate with powerful external organizations? What happens when commercial interests arrive? And how do we prevent a small number of organizations from becoming permanent gatekeepers?
These aren’t abstract questions, the more successful the #openweb becomes, the more contested it will become. The #dotcons have enormous resources and existing user bases. Governments, NGOs, foundations and commercial interests will also have reasons to influence an increasingly important open network. So governance needs to be designed before concentrated power becomes embedded.
The historical disagreement, the difference between the two approaches becomes clearer. One path says – The Fediverse needs to become sustainable enough to compete with Big Tech. Build better infrastructure, develop business models, support developers and perhaps use platform cooperatives.
The other says – yes, we need sustainable infrastructure – but don’t define success as becoming another Big Tech platform. Build the economic and governance systems around federation rather than replacing federation with centralization. These positions overlap on many practical problems, they diverge over the path of the thing being built. One starts from the platform, the other starts from the network. That distinction matters because the governance that follows will be different.
This is the gap that led to the #OGB – the Openweb Governance Body. The proposal for a native governance layer for a federated network. Using the same principles that make federation possible – autonomous communities, open protocols, distributed participation, federation between communities, local decision-making, shared standards, negotiation and mediation, accountability between participating groups.
In other words governance that follows the architecture, rather than creating one institution above the network, building ways for the communities within the network to coordinate. Governance between communities “Who should control the Fediverse?” – “How can autonomous communities govern their relationships with each other?” very different questions.
A community shouldn’t have to surrender its autonomy in order to participate, different groups should be able to connect, negotiate, delegate, challenge decisions and coordinate around shared problems. Governance becomes a network capability, rather than a permanent hierarchy sitting above the network. Institutions can still exist, foundations can still exist, cooperatives can still exist. The important thing is that they don’t become synonymous with the network itself.
#OMN is the media version of the same problem – how do we build federated media flows where communities publish, subscribe, moderate, archive and share information without handing ownership of the whole media environment to a platform? #OMN and #OGB are therefore two parts of the same larger project to build the social infrastructure needed for a federated openweb to remain federated as it grows.
The technology matters, #ActivityPub matters, federation matters, #FOSS matters. But none of these automatically produce a healthy social system, they are tools. The culture, economics and governance built around them matter just as much. Don’t scale the wrong thing, is the central lesson.
We should absolutely work on reliability, infrastructure, sustainability and usability, but we should stop treating the #dotcons platform model as the measuring stick for anything. Scaling a platform means concentrating more people and resources into one system, scaling a federated network means enabling more autonomous communities to participate and connect. Those are fundamentally different forms of scale.
What we need to compost is the mainstreaming mess of when we “forget” the historical openweb wasn’t created because people wanted a slightly nicer version of #Facebook. What these people forget is that it came from a different idea of what networked communication could be. The challenge, what we need to support, now is to preserve and develop that difference while dealing realistically with money, infrastructure, scale, governance and the arrival of powerful actors.
So please focus – the real question isn’t simply, can the Fediverse scale? It is, can a federated network scale without turning itself into a platform? And underneath that is can the openweb grow without becoming the thing it was built to replace? A basic #KISS governance problem, that is why we need to build the alternatives now, before the vacuum is filled for us.
Federation, not a central organization – OGB isn’t one body governing everyone. It is a federated governance layer that communities, projects and servers can participate in.
#ActivityPub native, were overnance functions are distributed through the same federation model as the #Fediverse. Groups can communicate, propose, delegate, challenge and record decisions across organizational boundaries.
Permissionless participation as the is no central gatekeeper deciding who is allowed to join the governance network. Communities can connect when they meet the basic protocol/social requirements.
Affinity groups rather than permanent representatives, were people organize around issues, projects or communities. Authority comes from participation and demonstrated trust, rather than simply holding an institutional position.
Sortition and recall. Where representatives are needed, selection is based on sortition rather than elections or permanent appointment. Delegates remain accountable and can be recalled.
Dilution of concentrated power. No person, organization or community is able to accumulate permanent control. Roles, influence and decision-making capacity are deliberately distributed.
Voices rather than a single leadership. A small rotating group of 3–5 “Voices” provides coordination and a public interface without becoming a permanent ruling committee.
Governance as a protocol/social practice. The important thing isn’t creating another institution, it’s creating a shared way for autonomous communities to negotiate with each other.
So in the current Fediverse the example is:
#SWF governance through an institution. #OGB governance between federated communities.
And that fits the #openweb because the governance path follows the architecture – distributed, federated, contestable and permissionless, rather than the normal default common sense of centralized ownership. The interesting bit is that #OGB doesn’t have to replace existing institutions, it can talk to them, mediate with them, and provide a counterweight to them while the #openweb remains open.
OK, lets not deny real risks, but also don’t accept the AI industry’s mythology as the starting point for discussing risks. The useful question is what currant AI’s actually do, who controls them, and what infrastructure and power relationships we are building around them.
AI is useful technology wrapped in a massive social, political and financial mythology. At the #OMN we are less interested in the usual argument between “AI will save humanity” and “AI will destroy humanity”. as both become noise in the current #LLM mess. To get a clearer picture we need to step back to ask a much simpler question – what does the technology actually do, and what are we building around it? Because there is a trap here.
We take an interesting piece of software, call it “AI”, then AI becomes AGI, AGI becomes superintelligence, and suddenly we are discussing machines as if they are becoming digital people. The #dotcons are happy with this story, as this story justifys gigantic data centres, enormous energy use, massive investment, extraordinary infrastructure contracts and the concentration of yet more technological power in the hands of the #nastyfew.
But there are serious questions about AI safety – autonomous weapons – cybersecurity – biological research – critical infrastructure – economic disruption – surveillance – disinformation – concentration of power. The replacement or degradation of human work. But there is a difference between looking at concrete risks and accepting a mythology about an imaginary future machine.
lets look at some of these risks: “AI will destroy humanity” argument starts somewhere like this – AI becomes more intelligent than humans – it develops goals – those goals don’t align with human interests – it becomes capable of improving itself – it gains access to infrastructure – it protects itself from being switched off – it expands its ability to act. Eventually humans become an obstacle, therefore humanity is eliminated. If we were actually building #AI not the current LLM’s that would be a possible speculative scenario.
But notice how many assumptions are packed into that chain. AI → AGI → autonomous agency → self-improvement → independent goals → infrastructure access → resistance to control → human extinction. Each arrow needs evidence, to judge this #KISS becomes useful. Don’t start with the end of the story, start with the machine in front of you. What can it actually do?
An #LLM generating confident bullshit isn’t evidence of an emerging artificial mind, a badly isolated “autonomous” system causing damage is an engineering and security problem. A corporation using dysfunctional AI to replace workers is an economic and political decision. A military using LLM’s based on the history of litterateur, feed partial data to kill people is a legal, political and military decision. A government using AI for surveillance is a governance problem. A data centre consuming enormous amounts of electricity and water is an infrastructure and ecological problem.
These things don’t require us to believe that a machine has become conscious, they require us to look at the #nastyfew are pushing over us. If we don’t look at the problems from this view we make the same mistake we have made with technology for decades, turning a social problem into a technical problem. Have you noticed that it is the priests of the #deathcult who loves AI.
But the are real problems in the #AI arms race – military competition → autonomous weapons → humans delegate decisions because machines are faster → competing systems interact → escalation/control failure → mass killing. Here extinction result from autonomous weapons, nuclear systems, biological weapons or other military infrastructure. That argument doesn’t require AGI it is simply the current mess with added tech mythology.
The #OMN critique isn’t so much about whether LLM’s are “good” or “bad” it is about the economic and social system surrounding the current #techshit paths, we already have piles of #techchurn to compost with out adding more. The #OMN doesn’t want to repeat this mess with AI, what we need is ways of keeping power visible enough that people can challenge it, for this we need to compost the mythology.
This is why the #OMN is deliberately boring compared with the AI storeys. Our focus is not technological salvation, or technological apocalypse. We need useful #KISS technology embedded in social structures where people can understand, challenge, change and, when necessary, walk away from. The mistake is always turning the tools into a mythology and then building society around the mythology. The #deathcult has had fifty years of economic “thinking” on this, look at the mess, now lift your eyes.
