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 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 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.

Power stays with the people doing the work

One of the simplest lessons from revolutionary politics is that power should stay with the people doing the work, not with a permanent party, bureaucracy, or managerial class. This has strong relevance for the #OMN project’s first step.

A clear second step is needed, one that moves beyond reformism as an end point, not a rejection of reforms outright. Winning better wages, shorter working hours, stronger rights, and better conditions matters. These are how people develop confidence, solidarity, and an understanding of their collective power. The problem arises when reform becomes the destination, rather than a deeper process of social change.

When movements become satisfied with managing the existing system, the system itself becomes invisible. Language changes, structures become professionalised, leaders become representatives, activists become stakeholders, and participation becomes consultation. Eventually, the movement is managing the symptoms of the system it originally wanted to change and challenge.

Reform is a means of building collective power, not an excuse to abandon the possibility of fundamental change. We’re not interested in building better communications infrastructure to serve existing power structures. Our path is changing who has meaningful power over media, information, and governance.

This is an old story, moving from representation to participation – council communism. The alternative paths explored were the workers’ council, a project like the #OGB, where power wasn’t handed to a permanent party leadership.

In our 21st-century digital version, delegates are sorted, held accountable, and recallable. Governance bodies federate together without becoming subordinate to a permanent central authority. To grow spaces were the question is not – who represents us? The question isn’t who represents us, but how people participating in something retain meaningful control.
A very different starting point from the current mainstreaming.

The #OMN social tech project is built from this federation, not centralisation. People and groups participate locally while remaining connected to bigger networks through standards and shared protocols. A local group is autonomous while participating in a wider network. #OGB ideas like recallability, transparency, open process, and distributed decision-making become practical, not just theoretical.

For the #OMN, the daily struggle and larger transformation are connected, reform is a means of building collective power, not an excuse to abandon the possibility of fundamental change. On this path, we are not interested in building better communications infrastructure so that the existing power structures can communicate more efficiently. Our path is changing who has meaningful power over media, information and eventually governance.

But, yes, there is a temptation to romanticise grassroots movements, we should resist this, as the historically these paths declined for good reasons. They were to frequently divided by factional disputes, ideological arguments and organisational conflicts. We should not need to repeat how suspicion of bureaucracy sometimes became suspicion of organisation itself.

To heavy structure creates problems, but to light structure also creates problems, if you build no durable structures, somebody else eventually fills the vacuum. Romantic anti-authoritarian intentions do not automatically produce democratic outcomes, a group can reject formal hierarchy while developing powerful informal hierarchies. A movement can reject leaders while allowing a few confident voices to dominate discussions. An organisation can demand decentralisation while becoming impossible for ordinary people to participate in, and can become so fragmented that cooperation becomes harder than centralisation. This is one of the most important lessons, that shapes the #OMN.

Decentralisation needs usable governance, that is not to abandon structure, but make structures that remain accountable to the people using them. That means keeping governance simple enough to understand, open enough to inspect and flexible enough to change. It means separating coordination from ownership, by making sortition temporary and contestable.

This is where the #OGB idea becomes important, It allows people to disagree without turning every disagreement into a schism, and build processes that can survive this disagreement. The path is governance that can become something communities can actually do, rather than something handed over to specialists.

Then we need the as a defence against capture, it is not simply a technical preference, they are social safeguards. Together, they make it harder for power to hide/disappear into a black box. Openness creates places where hierarchy can be seen, challenged and, when necessary, bypassed. We need this to mediate the mess of everyday elitist vanguards that claims to speak for us, but the balance is, neither do we want a collection of isolated individuals pretending that society does not require organisation – the trap of #stupidindividualism. People need shared infrastructure, shared knowledge, shared processes and ways of making decisions together, to hold commons in place.

With the #OGB people participate directly, delegate where useful, contest decisions, fork when necessary and reconnect when possible. That makes low-energy structures more flexible than both the traditional party or the centralised platform. Democracy cannot simply be postponed until after the revolution as people learn collective power by exercising it. When they make mistakes they argue and experiment, change their minds to find what works through participation. Democracy is therefore not just a mechanism for selecting leaders, it is part of the process through which people become capable of governing themselves

We need useful historical lesson about keeping power close to participation. As when a party, committee, NGO, platform or the normal technical elitists begin making decisions on behalf of everyone else, the movement’s own capacity for self-government begins to atrophy. The #OGB simply keeps delegation recallable and infrastructure federated, processes visible and standards open. To keep governance simple enough for ordinary people to use.

And, critically, we need to grow enough structure that disagreement does not automatically destroy the organisation. This is the balance we are looking for, not bureaucracy – not chaos. Not permanent leadership – not isolated individualism. But, native grassroots federated, participatory, accountable organisation. Please – don’t forget anti-authoritarian intent is not enough, without workable governance, openness and trust, decentralised movements can still fragment, stagnate or recreate informal elitists.

The #OMN path is about building the infrastructure to hold those two truths together. Power to the participants, structure without hierarchy, federation without centralisation, governance without a ruling class. That is the path from old political arguments towards more practical working commons paths.

Life on a Lifeboat: Where Next?

We have already done a five-year voyage across 13 countries, travelling from the North Sea to the Black Sea, crossing the European continent through its extraordinary network of rivers, canals and inland waterways.

It was a slow way of travelling, that was the point. Rather than flying over Europe or rushing from one destination to another, we travelled through it, along the waterways that have connected communities, cities and cultures for centuries.

We lived on the boat, moving with the seasons and the water flows. Rivers became roads, canals became corridors, and the landscape changed gradually rather than flashing past a train or aeroplane window.

After finally arriving back in the UK, we decided that one adventure wasn’t enough. Last year we bought a bigger lifeboat, and are now fitting it out for the next stage of the journey. You can find out about this and support the media production on Patreon

The route we want to take is another extraordinary journey – we wanted to follow parts of the historic Volga trade route, travelling across some of the most geographically and culturally contrasting parts of Europe and Eurasia. The idea was to take the boat north through Finland, enter Russia via the Volga–Baltic Waterway, travel through the enormous network of Russian internal waterways and eventually follow the Volga south towards the Caspian Sea. From there, the plan was to cross to Iran.

On the map, it is an extraordinary journey: northern forests and lakes, huge rivers, vast inland seas, ancient trading routes and an entirely different cultural landscape. It is the kind of journey that makes living on a boat interesting. You aren’t simply visiting places, you are following the physical geography of a continent – moving through the infrastructure that people have used to connect themselves for centuries.

Unfortunately, geopolitics has a habit of getting in the way of geography, and right now, this particular route is not realistic. The Russian inland waterways, canals and the Volga are controlled environments. The wider Volga and Caspian region has become strategically important because of the war in Ukraine and the increasingly close logistical relationship between Russia and Iran.

Long-range drone warfare has extended far beyond the immediate front lines, with attacks affecting infrastructure deep inside Russia. The Caspian has become an important transport and logistics corridor, while sanctions, military restrictions, security concerns and rapidly changing regional politics make the idea of taking a privately operated foreign vessel through the area complicated.

There is also the much simpler problem of bureaucracy. A route that looks possible on a map can become impossible once you start asking about permissions, borders, navigation restrictions, insurance, visas, maritime regulations and access for a foreign private vessel. So for now, that plan has to go back on the shelf.

That is frustrating, but the thing you learn from living on a boat is that you don’t control the journey. You work with the weather, the water levels, the locks, mechanical problems, bureaucracy and whatever else gets thrown at you. Geopolitics is simply another, rather larger, version of the same problem.

So what do we do now? The boat is almost ready for sea trials.

Boat refit photos

We have several possibilities, one is to head north.

Scandinavia offers the kind of wilderness that makes a boat-based life worthwhile: long stretches of water, Nordic silence, enormous pine forests, lakes and archipelagos. We could travel through Sweden using the Göta Canal, then work our way into the complex waterways and islands and inland lakes of Finland. That would be a very different voyage from our previous journey.

And there is another attraction to this route, if, in a few years, the political situation changes sufficiently for Russia to become accessible again, we would already be in the right part of Europe to reconsider the original plan.

The alternative is almost the opposite, head south. Follow the rivers and canals of France, eventually reaching the Mediterranean. That would be an easier life in many ways. Warmer weather, established waterways, lots of places to stop, repair facilities, food and wine, and an enormous network of canals and rivers connecting the interior to the coast.

But even that supposedly simple option isn’t really simple anymore. Brexit has changed the practical relationship between Britain and continental Europe. Climate change is affecting waterways, droughts and flooding. And the Mediterranean itself is one of the major frontiers of a rapidly changing Europe, with increasing migration driven by war, poverty, political instability and #climatechaos.

So there isn’t really an escape route, you can move north, south, east or west, but the wider world comes with you.

Life on a lifeboat is perhaps the more interesting story, but yes, a lifeboat is an odd home. It was designed for emergencies, for getting people away from a sinking ship and keeping them alive until they reach somewhere safer.

We have turned ours into something else, a small, floating home and a platform for exploring a changing continent. There is something increasingly appropriate about that. We live in a time when the old assumptions about stability are becoming less reliable. #Climatechaos, geopolitical conflict, economic instability, Brexit and the continuing concentration of political and economic power are all changing the landscape around us.

The value in this down scaling is that boat life teaches a different way of thinking, you carry what you need. You repair things rather than automatically replacing them, generate most of your own power to learn to live with constraints. You pay attention to weather, water, infrastructure and the people around you, to accept that plans are temporary.

The important thing is not necessarily to reach the destination you originally imagined, it is to remain capable of moving when the conditions change.

So perhaps the next voyage will be Scandinavia.

Perhaps it will be France and the Mediterranean.

Perhaps, several years from now, the Volga route will become possible again.

Or perhaps something completely unexpected will happen, and we will end up somewhere we haven’t even thought about yet. That is part of the attraction, the boat is almost ready, the sea trials are coming in the spring. The next adventure will begin from there.

Life on a lifeboat.

#boatingeurope #lifeboat#inlandwaterways #canals #rivers #Europe

Trust matters, community matters, participation matters

Hummm this needs more thought… DRAFT

The #deathcult is selling the void, turning meaning into a market, in this post we cover the normal themes of #stupidindividualism, commodification, atomisation, trust and community.

One of the deeper tricks of the #deathcult is that it doesn’t only sell us products. It sells us back the meaning, belonging and connection that the system itself has striped away. Nietzsche’s famous declaration “God is dead.” was not simply that religion was disappearing, but that an outdated system of shared meaning and moral authority had collapsed.

For many people, that leaves a void, a longing for meaning, connection, protection and purpose, for something larger than the isolated self. And where there is longing, capitalism sees a market – consumer capitalism, the market for meaning has always promised that dissatisfaction can be solved through consumption. Buy the car, the clothes, the holiday, the experience, buy the lifestyle. But what this hides is the more profound needs of belonging, meaning, safety, trust, community – don’t fit comfortably into commodity form – more stuff does not fill the hole – so the market moves further inward.

Instead of simply selling objects, it starts selling the self with self-improvement, self-mastery, self-optimization and personal growth. Manifestation and spiritual awakening, the lie becomes: the problem is not the society you live in, the surrounding relationships, or the structures shaping your life, the problem is you. And in the mainstreaming, conveniently, there is always another influencer peddling a course, book, retreat, coach or guru available to fix you.

This is the perfect market because the product must never work, if people actually became fulfilled, the market would disappear. So people need to remain almost healed, almost whole, almost happy, almost enough – the longing itself becomes the business model – this is #stupidindividualism dressed as enlightenment.

Then we have religion reborn – the commercialised form of Western spiritualism – not community ritual, religion or spiritual practice, but the Instagram-ready world of manifestation, “high vibration”, gurus, retreats and personal enlightenment. This supposedly alternative culture simply reproduces the core values of capitalism: individualism, control, competition, self-surveillance and the hero narrative.

Our current “thinking” instead of challenging these values, we spiritualise them, you are told that your thoughts create your reality, everything happens specifically for your personal development. That success proves you are aligned, suffering means you failed to think correctly. The fantasy is that you can become the god of your own reality.

This looks like liberation, but underneath it is the same old #stupidindividualism. The individual becomes the centre of everything, society disappears, material conditions disappear, history disappears and power disappears. The outcome is you treat other people as supporting characters in your personal journey, then exploit them by turning structural problems in to personal failure.

This is where politics becomes important, if every outcome is understood as a reflection of your mindset, then structural criticism becomes difficult. Poverty? It is a mindset problem. Loneliness? Means you need to work on yourself. Abuse? A lesson the universe sent you. Illness? Your energy is wrong. Failure? You did not manifest hard enough.

The effect of this “thinking” is deeply conservative, instead of asking why people are suffering, we tell them their suffering is evidence of their own failure. Instead of rebellion, we get self-improvement. Instead of solidarity, introspection. Instead of collective action, another #SEO journal.

This is an affective #mainstreaming way of neutralising dissent because it turns social pain into private inadequacy. The death of empathy is the ugliest part of this, if someone’s suffering is something they “manifested”, then nobody has to sit with them in it. Nobody has to listen, has to ask what happened, has to offer real help. A platitude replaces solidarity “Everything happens for a reason.” “You need to forgive.” “This is a lesson.” “You attracted this into your life.”

The language sounds caring, but the practice becomes the opposite – cruelty is renamed healing, blame as wisdom, detachment is renamed enlightenment. This is simply more emotional capitalism, were the language of empathy remains everywhere, while the actual social practice of empathy disappears, but when empathy dies, connection dies with it.

Community is dangerous to power, people who gather can organise, people who form relationships can resist. People who trust each other become harder to govern through fear and isolation. The current mess does not need tanks in the streets to atomise people, it can do it culturally as when connection is labelled dependency, needing people becomes weakness and community becomes inconvenient. In our worship of the #deathcult the ideal person becomes the isolated, self-managing individual who treats every problem as something to solve alone.

At the #OMN we keep coming back to the #mainstreaming problem. Why? A system is most powerful when its values stop looking political, when they become common sense, when individualism becomes blinded freedom, competition becomes human nature, consumption becomes happiness. Self-surveillance becomes personal growth and isolation becomes independence. At this point, the system barely needs to tell people what to do, people reproduce the values themselves. They discipline themselves, blame themselves, sell the same worldview to each other. The #deathcult ideology becomes culture, becomes infrastructure.

But, the path away from this mess is simple, without followers, the hierarchy collapses, this is particularly obvious in digital culture. The supposed influencer is still dependent on likes, subscribers, sales, views and reputation. They claim independence while being embedded in the same attention economy they supposedly escaped. They are not outside the market, they are a particularly efficient product of it.

We need to remember that human beings have always created ritual, meaning, myth and shared practices. The #OMN path points in this direction, less self-obsession, more participation. Less individual optimisation, more shared action. Less influencer culture, more horizontal knowledge. Less performance, more trust. Less “fix yourself” more “build something together”.

The #openweb matters here because the structure of our technology also shapes our culture. The #dotcons push the isolated individual, your feed, brand, your followers, your engagement, your identity. The #deathcult repeatedly breaks social things into individual fragments and then sells them back to us. It breaks community and sells networking, meaning and sells lifestyle, confidence and sells self-help. It breaks connection and sells social media, belonging and sells branding.

The answer is not another product, its simply to rebuild the social fabric that commodification has been eating away. Yes, real connection is messy, solidarity is inconvenient, community involves disagreement, compromise, responsibility and mutual care. You cannot optimise it, you have to participate in it. And it is one of the reasons the #OMN keeps saying the same apparently simple thing – Trust matters. Community matters. Participation matters. The #deathcult wants you staring endlessly into yourself, the commons start when we look outward and find each other #KISS

I kind of though this was incomplete so did some reading and added this section.

Maybe focus on different paths to get a balance of good and bad…

The Chinese Cultural Revolution remains a difficult and important experiences for anyone seriously interested in emancipatory politics. It is tempting to reduce it to the normal #mainstreaming a story of authoritarianism, Mao, political violence and social chaos, but doing that misses something more useful. The Cultural Revolution was also a huge experiment in what happens when millions of people are encouraged to challenge established political power and create new forms of organisation.

Its failure raises a question that remains relevant today – how do people share real power without reproducing the behaviour of the structures we are trying to replace? – This is a central question for the #OMN path to walk from challenging power to creating alternatives.

The distinction between dismissal and pluralisation.

  • Dismissal is the politics of removing people, defeating factions and taking control. It is fundamentally about deciding who should have power and who should be excluded from it.
  • Pluralisation is different. It is about people organising themselves, experimenting with new relationships and creating institutions outside existing hierarchies.

The Cultural Revolution contained both tendencies, in its early years, independent organisations and new forms of mass political participation emerged. But these experiments became caught up in factional struggles. Groups began fighting over who would control political power rather than concentrating on what new forms of social organisation they could create.

The result was destructive, the politics of negation overwhelmed the politics of creation. This distinction matters as it is relatively easy to define what we are against. It is much harder to build something that people actually want to participate in. A movement can become good at identifying enemies while becoming progressively worse at creating alternatives.

That is one of the traps that the #OMN path is avoiding. A simple problem is that authoritarianism does not require a state, it is possible for people to reproduce authoritarian relationships among themselves. You can see this today in cancel culture, how ordinary people became involved in policing one another, enforcing political identities and attacking those considered insufficiently revolutionary.

This creates a difficult problem for anyone pursuing decentralised or anti-authoritarian politics, simply removing the state does not automatically create freedom. Simply decentralising power does not automatically make relationships democratic. A crowd can become authoritarian, a community can become authoritarian, a movement can become authoritarian or a social-media group can become authoritarian.

Even a supposedly horizontal organisation do develop informal hierarchies, gatekeepers and systems of exclusion. This is why “power to the people” is not enough as a political programme. We also need structures that help people exercise power without turning that power into domination over others. This is what the #OGB is for and about.

The danger of dismissal has a connection with what we now call cancel culture, although the underlying behaviour is much older than social media. The important issue is not simply criticism of individuals, criticism is necessary in any functioning democratic culture. The problem is the development of an internal policing culture where belonging depends upon ideological or moral purity. People are divided into the good and the bad. Disagreement becomes evidence of corruption. Mistakes become grounds for exclusion and political differences become moral crimes, eventually the movement starts consuming its own members. This is the logic of dismissal.

And it is particularly dangerous for grassroots movements because they lack the institutional safeguards that exist, at least theoretically, within formal democratic structures. Without some way of managing disagreement, accountability and conflict, decentralisation simply produce competing factions fighting for informal control.

Creation has to be the core path, this is the most important lesson, not simply “don’t be authoritarian.” It is more positive than that. Build, build! Institutions, relationships, build commons, build democratic practices, build alternative infrastructures. Build ways for people to participate without having to surrender control to a central authority, this #KISS step changes the political question.

Instead of asking – who should control the existing system? We ask – what can we create that makes the existing system less necessary? This is a much more interesting question, that moves politics away from permanent opposition and towards experimentation. The goal is not simply to seize somebody else’s institution and run it with different people, it is to create institutions with different relationships built into them.

Then we have the old stalwart of class analysis, this is useful for understanding economic power and exploitation, but when class becomes a moral label, it becomes another mechanism of dismissal. Someone is no longer disagreed with because of what they are proposing, they are dismissed because of what category they have been placed into.

This creates a strange reversal, the people who were supposedly building a more egalitarian society can become increasingly concerned with identifying and eliminating the “wrong” people. The category becomes more important than the political project, a historical paradox that people who had been oppressed under the old system could become defenders of the new hierarchy, while people from previously privileged backgrounds could become radical opponents of bureaucratic privilege. People are more complicated than political categories that matters for any attempt to build a genuinely participatory politics.

A needed balance is that institutions matter, we should not only romanticise spontaneity. People organising themselves is important, grassroots experimentation is important, but spontaneous organisation does not automatically remain democratic. There need to be ways to deal with disputes, abuse, exclusion, manipulation and concentrations of informal power.

This does not mean rebuilding a centralised bureaucracy, more about developing lightweight (like the ) democratic institutions that protect pluralism and participation. The challenge is to create enough structure to prevent domination without creating so much structure that the institution becomes another hierarchy. Yes, a difficult balance, but avoiding the problem does not make it disappear.

The #OMN project is not about building another political machine, it is to experiment with infrastructure that allows people to organise, communicate, publish, archive and make decisions while retaining meaningful control over their own participation. That means moving away from the logic of the centralised platform, instead of one organisation → one authority → one set of rules, we can explore, many participants → shared protocols → transparent processes → distributed participation.

But distributed does not mean unaccountable, the infrastructure needs mechanisms for trust, moderation, transparency, rollback, correction and disagreement. The aim is not to eliminate conflict, it is to make conflict productive rather than destructive. But openness alone is not enough, an open system can still develop closed social relationships. A technically decentralised network can still become dominated by a few people. A community project can still develop gatekeepers. So the technical architecture and the social architecture have to develop together.

This is why the #OMN path is not simply about technology, it is about learning how to build social systems that are capable of remaining open, while not repeating the politics of negation. The path is therefore be surprisingly simple, a movement cannot define itself forever by what it opposes. If all our energy goes into removing enemies, exposing bad actors, denouncing ideological impurity and winning internal arguments, we eventually become trapped in the same power logic we claim to oppose.

We need to spend more energy on creating, create spaces where people can participate, commons where people can contribute without surrendering ownership to a corporation, archives that preserve collective memory. We need media systems that don’t depend upon algorithmic gatekeepers, governance where disagreement does not become exclusion. Not only that, but we need to create institutions that can learn, this path is the difference between negation and creation.

We need a path, not a blueprint. Questions to address, problems any emancipatory movement has to confront. How do we prevent bureaucracy from becoming permanent? How do we stop decentralisation becoming factionalism? How do we deal with disagreement without turning it into moral warfare? How do we give people real power without enabling new forms of domination? How do we create democratic institutions that remain open to change?

The #OMN therefore starts from a path of creation rather than dismissal, we should not try to build a perfect system. We build systems that people can participate in, question, modify and improve. That means accepting disagreement, allowing experimentation to create mechanisms that prevent any one group from permanently capturing the commons. This path to self-government has to be learned, practised and institutionally supported.

Freedom is not created simply by removing authority, it is created by building the social relationships and institutions that allow people to exercise power together without turning that power into domination. That is a much harder project, but also the more interesting one.

The #OMN path is not about taking power – it is about building the capacity for people to share power #KISS

The #openweb and projects such as the #OMN are more than technical alternatives

Techno #feudalism is a description of the power that large #dotcons technology platforms now have over the economy and society. The comparison is with medieval feudalism. Under feudalism, land was the critical means of production and ordinary people worked land they did not own. Lords controlled access to it and extracted rents or surplus from those who depended on it.

This is relevant today were the critical bottleneck is increasingly digital capital: platforms, servers, algorithms, data, cloud infrastructure, app stores and enormous networked captured user bases. A few corporations, run by an increasingly visible #nastyfew control this infrastructure. Communities, businesses, workers and creators are dependent on platforms they do not control.

The current shift is from ownership to access, instead of owning software, music, games or other digital tools, people rent access through subscriptions and platforms. This means wealth and control accumulate with the owners of the infrastructure rather than with the people using it.

The #closedweb platform economy creates rent extraction. App stores, marketplaces, hosting platforms and gig-economy companies take a percentage from the economic activity that passes through them. Network effects make dominant platforms increasingly difficult to challenge, as we are seeing, allowing those rents to rise.

#AI is we get past the narrow use case of #LLMs could intensify this dynamic by replacing human labour with capital-intensive systems. If a few companies own the #AI infrastructure, the bargaining power of labour will fall while the power of capital owners, the #nastyfew takes over the levers of power over the #mainstreaming.

The political dimension – #dotcons don’t merely control economic infrastructure; their algorithms influence what billions of people see, discuss, believe and buy. This gives the #nastyfew platform owners an extraordinary ability to shape public discourse.

But yes, you would be right to point out this is just the normal monopoly capitalism for now, these companies still invest enormous amounts in research, infrastructure and innovation. They operate within markets and people are not legally bound to them in the way medieval serfs were bound to their lords. The system can also be understood as an intensification of monopoly capitalism and rent extraction.

For the #OMN, the strongest point is that the problem isn’t technology itself, it is concentrated ownership and control of the technological infrastructure. A simple stepping to network changes the relationship, instead of everyone being tenants on somebody else’s platform, we build infrastructure around open standards, federation, interoperability, shared ownership, participation and commons-based production.

That makes the #openweb and projects such as the #OMN more than technical alternatives. They become part of the struggle over whether the digital world develops into a feudalistic landscape of platform landlords and digital tenants, or remains a genuinely distributed native #openweb commons.

In that sense, is an economic and political argument as much as a technical one: keep the infrastructure open enough that nobody can permanently own the flows through which everyone else has to live and communicate.

It’s a #KISS project.

Institution create the behaviour they claim merely to measure – Economics → institutions → behaviour → the #deathcult

One of the meany problems with modern capitalism is not simply that some corporations are greedy. It is that we have built institutions around the assumption that people are greedy, and then wondered why they behave that way.

Since the 1970s, #neoclassical economics became dominant in business schools and corporate thinking. An older social democratic idea of the manager as a professional with responsibilities to workers, customers, communities and society was displaced by a #geekproblem model of management built around financial incentives, shareholder value and measurable returns.

This became part of what is commonly called #neoliberalism. At the #OMN we polemically and, we argue, factually call the resulting social system the #deathcult: a system that places financial accumulation, competition and individual economic interest above the social relationships and ecological systems that actually make society, and life possible.

The darkness at the centre of this system is the idea of #Homoeconomicus – the simplified economic human who is assumed to rationally pursue personal advantage and maximise material rewards. Applied to the corporation, the logic becomes straightforward, managers cannot be trusted to act in the interests of shareholders because they have interests of their own, so we need incentives.

Give managers shares and stock options. Tie their bonuses to share prices. Measure everything. Monitor everything. Make individual financial reward correspond with corporate financial performance. This became part of the intellectual foundation for shareholder value.

The corporation increasingly stopped being understood as a social institution with multiple responsibilities and became something closer to a machine for maximising financial returns. Workers become costs, communities externalities, nature becomes a resource, customers markets. Managers become agents, shareholders become the priority. And success becomes a number.

The problem is that people aren’t actually like this – the fascinating thing is that the economic model is a very dangerous description of how humans actually behave. Research from behavioural economics and even game theory has repeatedly demonstrated that people are motivated by much more than financial self-interest.

People care about: honesty, fairness, trust, reciprocity, reputation, pride in their work, belonging and professional responsibility. People will often sacrifice financial rewards in order to behave in ways they consider right, cooperate when they trust each other, reward cooperation and punish behaviour they believe is unfair – sometimes even when doing so costs them something.

This matters enormously for how we organise institutions – if people are capable of cooperation, trust and reciprocity, then building institutions on the assumption that everybody is fundamentally selfish can actually make society more selfish, a institutional feedback loop

This is the real problem, a narrow and blinded theory about human behaviour becomes institutional reality. We start by saying: People are selfish, so we design institutions around that assumption. We create bonuses, stock options, surveillance, competition.

Then people learn that these are the behaviours that matter, cooperation becomes secondary, professional pride becomes secondary, community responsibility becomes secondary. Trust becomes something that needs to be managed rather than something that can be built.

People adapt to the system, and then we look at the resulting behaviour and say: “See? People really are selfish.” it is the trap we have all walked into. Assume people are selfish → build institutions around selfishness → reward selfish behaviour → weaken trust and professional norms → observe selfish behaviour → conclude that the original assumption was correct.

The institution has created the behaviour it claims merely to measure, is the #mainstreaming problem. Once a particular model becomes normal, it stops looking like ideology, it becomes common sense. Eventually, people forget that things could have been organised differently.

This is one of the most powerful things institutions do: they turn particular assumptions about human beings into apparently neutral systems. The system then reinforces those assumptions is how ideology becomes infrastructure.

This argument is more subtle, and more important. A narrow economic model has had enormous influence over how corporations understand management, incentives and organisational success. It helped legitimise corporate culture with its head bowed down worshipping a #deathcult.

And once that becomes the default, even people who personally reject the model have to bow there heads or be banished. To let the light into this mess, the path itself has to change, from extraction to participation. This connects directly to the #OMN projects.

We need to stop designing social systems around the assumption that people are isolated individuals competing for maximum personal advantage. Humans are social, we build relationships, we cooperate, create communities, develop shared norms. We care about reputation, we care about doing a good job, care about whether other people treat us fairly.

This is also why the #OMN puts so much emphasis on trust, participation, commons and the . As the alternative to the #deathcult isn’t simply a nicer version of the same system, it is a different understanding of what people are. Instead of designing systems to control selfish individuals, we need to #KISS design systems that enable cooperation between social beings.

  • Instead of endless surveillance, build trust, of individual competition, build participation.
  • Instead of extracting value from communities, build commons, recognise them as contributors.
  • Instead of measuring everything through financial value, recognise social and ecological value.

The path isn’t simply “How do we make selfish people behave better?” the bigger question is “Why are we building institutions that require people to behave selfishly in the first place?” That is the question we need to ask of corporations, business schools, governments, NGOs and our own activist institutions. Because when a system repeatedly produces the behaviour it claims is simply human nature, perhaps the problem isn’t human nature, perhaps the problem is the system.

Our institutions are not neutral observers; they actively shape human nature. The path away from this mess is simple and native to the #openweb, compost the #deathcult, build the commons.

The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from this mess

#OMN #openweb #commons #neoliberalism #neoclassicaleconomics #HomoEconomicus #mainstreaming #capitalism #community #trust #participation

There is a wide gap between the people who talk about changing society and the people who actually have to live in the current mess

The #fashionista left problem isn’t simply “bad messaging”, but the loss of relationships, class politics and ordinary participation. This left path is #blocking, leading to a serious problem, that there is a growing gap between the people who talk about changing society and the people who actually have to live with the consequences of the society we have.

A lot of contemporary so-called left politics has become a culture of credentials, language, status and moral performance. Political activity becomes a test of whether you know the correct vocabulary, have read the correct theory and can demonstrate the correct politics. Meanwhile, people are dealing with rent, wages, insecure work, debt, housing, transport, healthcare and the basic struggle to get through the week.

This isn’t an argument that cultural or identity issues don’t matter, they do. But when cultural politics displaces material politics, something fundamental has gone wrong. And the answer isn’t to assume that working-class people are stupid, ignorant or simply “brainwashed” by the right. That attitude is itself a form of class contempt.

People have reasons for being angry, they have experiences, relationships, communities. They have knowledge that doesn’t come with a university certificate. The right has become good at recognising that anger and offering people belonging, even while offering economic policies that ultimately benefit only the #nastyfew billionaires and capital.

The mess in the left too often does the opposite, it offers people a lecture about why their existing culture, language or opinions are wrong before it offers them any meaningful collective power. That is backwards, politics begins with people working together around things that materially improve their lives. Better wages, housing, shorter working weeks, strong unions, public services to grow more time and power for ordinary people.

The left is supposed to be about, build solidarity through doing things together. You don’t need everyone to agree about everything before they can work together. In fact, demanding ideological agreement before allowing participation is one of the fastest ways to destroy a mass movement.

This is where I think the #OMN approach matters as a practical way to step away from this current blocking of left paths. #KISS we need less political performance and more participation, less gatekeeping and more open infrastructure, less obsession with who has the correct politics and more ability for different people to contribute, argue, cooperate and build something together.

The goal isn’t to make everyone think the same, it is to build enough trust and shared power that ordinary people can actually change the conditions they live in. That’s the old left and in today’s mess, a much more difficult politics, but it is also a much more democratic one.

#OMN #openweb #commons #workingclass #solidarity #democracy #politics #class

The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from this mess

We need to stop talking about “climate change” as though we are discussing a slightly inconvenient change in the weather. Climate change is too soft, too neutral. Climate change makes it sound as though something simply happened to us. It didn’t, we pushed this mess, we built an economic system that treats the living world as raw material, turns everything into property, pushes everything through markets and then calls the resulting destruction “growth”. The next twenty years will be the “bill” we pay for this short-sighted greed. And the really dangerous part is that we are still trying to solve the problem using the same thinking that created it.

Welcome to #climatechaos, not one dramatic event that starts on a particular day, it is chronic, it accumulates, compounds. It moves through food systems, water systems, ecosystems, economies and communities. This makes it politically difficult because there is no single moment when everyone can point at the disaster and say, there it is. Instead, the extremes get worse, harvest fails, rivers floods, insurance disappears. The food price rises, drought lasts longer and finally the ecosystem quietly collapses. But one thing that is becoming common sense is we cannot carry on pretending this is normal.

A small step is that the language matters “Global warming” sounds almost pleasant, “Climate change” sounds neutral. Climate breakdown tells us something more important, there is a direction of travel, continuing accelerating the conditions that make human and ecological life less stable. That is what the next twenty years are, yes science based global averages are useful, but the things communities actually experience are extremes – heat, flooding, drought, food insecurity and other disruptions.

Living through the consequences, will show that today’s common sense, the #neoliberal answer to #climatechaos is wonderfully convenient for the #nastyfew – you are the problem, you have the wrong car, eat the wrong food, you use too much energy and bough the wrong thing. You didn’t recycle enough, and feel guilty.

This is the #deathcult at work, the individual is made responsible for a systemic crisis while the systems generating the crisis remain untouched. The absurdity is the dumping of climate responsibility onto individuals while corporations continue selling products that cause global warming. This mess isn’t accidental – #stupidindividualism is politically useful as isolated individuals have very little power. Where communities, workers, cooperatives, movements and collective action do have power.

By now it should become a little obvious that we don’t need greener consumption, what we do need a different relationship with the living world, the current uncomfortable path. Let’s make this plan – #Climatechaos isn’t an energy problem, it isn’t just a transport problem, it isn’t just a technology problem, it is a problem with how we understand ourselves. We have built a culture around the idea that everything exists to be owned, land, water, animals, forests, minerals, knowledge, attention. Even our relationships, on the #dotcons, become a commodity.

Everything becomes something that can be extracted, then we are surprised when the living systems collapse. To start to compost this mess the next twenty years need to be more about moving from ownership to participation, from extraction to stewardship. About better balancing competition and cooperation to move from isolated individuals to resilient communities. In an economic sense from commodities to commons. And yes, it is a much bigger political project than buying an electric car.

Food is going to expose the current blinded stupidity, food is where the abstraction ends. You can argue about climate models forever, but when food becomes unreliable and expensive, everyone understands. The climate discussion points to the vulnerability of agricultural systems, including dependence on a few major crops due to growing pressure on farming from heat, drought and extreme weather.

The response cannot simply be another technological monoculture. We need real diversity, more resilient crops, local knowledge, healthy soils to grow this biodiversity. We need shorter and more resilient supply chains, community food systems. And probably a much more serious conversation about what we choose to eat and how much land and sea we devote to producing it because agriculture isn’t happening outside nature.

The next twenty years will remind us that nature is not decoration, currently we treat biodiversity as something nice to have after the economy has been sorted out. But ecosystems are part of the economy, wetlands manage water, salt marshes protect coasts, healthy soils support food, forests regulate water and store carbon. Biodiversity provides resilience, this is not romantic environmentalism, it is infrastructure.

And then comes the techno-fix – whenever capitalism encounters a problem caused by technology, extraction and industrial growth, it offers us more technology. So next we get geoengineering, perhaps we can reflect sunlight, perhaps we can manipulate the atmosphere, perhaps we can capture carbon, perhaps artificial intelligence will optimise everything. Or perhaps some billionaire will save the planet. This is the reheated #mainstreaming #geekproblem version of climate politics, the problem is that the blinded underlying assumption, the system is fine, we just need a better machine.

But, unspoken is more mess we then need to compost – Who gets to control the thermostat? Who decides? Who is accountable? Who gets protected? Who gets sacrificed? These are not engineering questions, they are political questions, the next twenty years will be a democratic test of where the climate crisis becomes bigger than climate policy. We are going to have to make real choices about where should people live, what happens to communities that cannot be protected? Who pays? Who decides? What technologies are acceptable? And from a deep green prospective what land is for humans? What land is for the rest of life?

There are no purely technical answers, science can tell us what is happening, it tells us what happens if emissions continue. But science cannot decide what kind of society we want, that is politics, at best it is democracy. And at worst it is where the #mainstreaming agenda becomes dangerous as #climatechaos doesn’t care about our current political comfort zones. To find a path through this mess, we have created, we need resilience, not reassurance

Doom on its own is useless, but pretending everything will be fine is worse, people need real information about what is happening? What are the risks? What can we do? What can our community do to prepare, to organise? This is why #KISS communication needs to become local and participatory.

The example of community-based #OMN like projects matter – people come together, learn what is happening and then discuss what they can do locally. The process itself builds resilience, this should be obvious. A community is more resilient when it knows how to communicate, when it can share information. More resilient when it trusts people, when it has local knowledge and more resilient when it has shared infrastructure to remember what happened last time.

That is why media matters – the rebooted #openweb becomes climate infrastructure – where the #climatecrisis connects directly to the #OMN. We need an information infrastructure that belongs to communities rather than corporations, so communities can continue to document what happens to them. Because when the next flood comes, the official report six months later isn’t enough. The native #openweb can be part of the infrastructure of climate resilience that is if we stop treating it as another marketplace for attention.

The #OMN is native to this kind of future, it’s not a climate project in the narrow sense. But the underlying problem is the same – how do we build systems that support collective intelligence rather than extracting it? How do we allow people to publish, share, moderate, correct and preserve information without handing control to a handful of #closedweb platforms?

How do we create the trust we need without building more centralised authority? How do we make community knowledge persistent? How do we build infrastructure that can survive the failures of individualist #dotcons platforms? These questions become much more important as #climatechaos increases. Because resilience requires distributed systems, but not just technically distributed systems, we also need socially distributed systems.

The mainstream will always tell us – now is not the time, too radical, too expensive, too difficult, too political for people to accept, or the market isn’t ready, the technology isn’t ready. We have had 20 years of stalling change and challenge: we need more evidence, consultation or another #fashionista report. The #KISS answer is simple, NO, we have had decades, the next twenty years we either build resilience or discover how truly fragile we really are.

On a thin but needed positive note, the #climatecrisis is already producing the conditions for change, the question is whether that change is democratic or authoritarian. And in a narrow sense of our #openweb culture, whether it breaks the monopoly of the #geekproblem or gives it more power. It’s a simple choice of do we compost the old system or let it push us aside.

To not simply be pushed aside we need political movements capable of defending life in its widest sense, yes, the next twenty years will not be comfortable. There will be disruption, loss, conflict and there will be failures. But the future is not simply something that happens to us, it is something we organise. So please stop asking “How do I, personally, save the planet?” and ask “What can we build together that makes a different future possible?” in short get off your knees from worshipping the #deathcult, and stop waiting for the #mainstreaming agenda to save us.

  • In internet culture, stop handing every problem to the #geekproblem.
  • Light green environmentalism stop turning climate action into consumer guilt.
  • In economics stop treating nature as an externality.
  • In fashion, stop treating people as consumers.

To compost current mainstreaming mess, we need to start treating people as participants to rebuild the commons and infrastructure of trust. In short, we need people to #makinghistory, by getting the bloody shovels out. The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from it.

#climatechaos #climatebreakdown #deathcult #mainstreaming #geekproblem #commons #openweb #OMN #MakingHistory #resilience

Update: I just read this you should too https://hamishcampbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/National_security_assessment_-_global_biodiversity_loss__ecosystem_collapse_and_national_security.pdf

This is the Web 1.5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rethinking commons

We currently have deeply embedded idea that objects have to be owned by an individual, as we are taught to think in terms of possession, this is mine, that is yours. We measure security through what we own, status through what we accumulate, and value through what we can control. This feels like common sense because it is invisibly embedded in modern Western culture. But it isn’t the only way to understand value, in the #openweb paths what if we thought less about ownership and more about flows?

The Clod and the Pebble

By William Blake

“Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sung a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle’s feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another’s loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

Let’s think about a river – a river doesn’t belong to the individual drops of water moving through it. A drop of rain becomes a stream, the stream becomes a river, and the river eventually becomes part of the sea. Water moves through different places and forms, continually changing while remaining part of the larger flow.

So who owns the river? Who owns the sea? The question starts to look strange, perhaps our social systems could work differently? From possessions to participation – ownership tends to turn things into possessions: something I control, something I can exclude you from, something whose value is measured by what I have. Commons work differently:

  • The value comes from being part of the flow – contributing, using, sharing, remixing, maintaining and passing things on.
  • The important thing isn’t possessing the resource. It is having a meaningful relationship with it and with the people around it.
  • People get their value not from owning the thing, but from their place in the relationships and flows around it.

This changes the question, instead of what do I own? We begin asking what am I part of? And then what do I contribute to it? That a very different way of thinking about social value, the individual as a drop in the flow

This doesn’t mean that individuals disappear, quite the opposite. The individual still matters, but their importance isn’t defined primarily through isolated ownership. A person might be a spring, feeding something larger, a stream, connecting different communities. They might be a drop of rain, arriving briefly but contributing something necessary to the wider system. They might be part of several flows at once, their value comes from these relationships.

This challenges the idea that independence means standing completely outside everyone else. We need to challenge the #stupidindividualism “common sense” by pushing into view the obvious idea that we are already dependent on enormous networks of other people, infrastructure, knowledge and nature. To make it more obvious that the fantasy of the completely independent individual is impossible to sustain. We are social beings living inside flows of resources, information, culture, care and knowledge.

The question is whether our infrastructure can recognise this reality, that there is a problem with ownership as the default, yes, ownership has useful functions. It can provide security, responsibility and autonomy. But when ownership becomes the dominant way we understand everything it creates problems – Knowledge becomes intellectual property – Culture becomes content to be monetised – Relationships become networks to be harvested – Personal expression becomes data – Communities become audiences – Attention becomes a commodity. And infrastructure becomes something controlled by whoever owns the platform.

The result is the mess we live in today, a society organised around accumulation and exclusion, the more you own, the more power you have to control access for everyone else. This is particularly obvious online as the #dotcons have built enormous “value” networks around ownership and control. They accumulate our data, relationships, attention and cultural production inside privately controlled infrastructures for private ends.

The #openweb is very different, a flow, this is why the idea of the commons matters so much – people publish, others discover, people remix, others contribute, communities archive, others build upon the archives. Ideas move between projects, software is forked, knowledge is shared, tools are adapted. The value comes from the movement. This is different from the current #mainstreaming model, where the aim is to capture the flow and turn it into an enclosed private power tool. The platform wants to become the river owner, the commons ask, why does anybody need to own the river?

There is another useful shift here, from ownership to stewardship. If something is part of commons, somebody still needs to look after it. In the #openweb servers need maintaining, archives need preserving, software needs updating, communities need moderation, standards need developing. The answer isn’t that nobody is responsible, it is that responsibility doesn’t have to mean absolute ownership, a person or group can care for something without possessing it absolutely.

That creates a different relationship with resources, you become a participant and steward rather than simply an owner. The question shifts to what can I contribute to keeping this flow healthy? Rather than, how much of this can I capture for myself? Trust becomes important, #commons cannot function through ownership and contracts, they depend on relationships. People need to trust that others will contribute, trust that resources will not simply be captured, trust the governance process so that disagreements can be resolved. They need to trust that people will maintain the basic infrastructure.

This doesn’t mean blind trust, it means building distributed, accountable trust through participation, reputation, open processes and shared responsibility. The flow is maintained because people have reasons to maintain it. Less ownership does not mean less value, there is a fear that if we reduce ownership, we somehow reduce motivation. But this assumes that people are motivated primarily by possession. They aren’t – people are motivated by belonging, recognition, creativity, curiosity, relationships, contribution, usefulness and the satisfaction of making something work.

A relevant example is that open-source developers contribute to projects they don’t individually own, people contribute to Wikipedia without owning the articles, communities maintain shared spaces without individually owning every part of them. Artists build on other people’s work, researchers build on generations of shared knowledge. Parents and communities care for things whose benefits extend far beyond themselves.

These are all forms of value created through participation in a flow. But what should be common sense is still alien too Western common sense “thinking” – so, yes, the common’s path can feel strange because much of Western economic and political thinking is organised around individual property. We are taught to ask – Who owns it? Who paid for it? Who controls it? Who gets the profit? The commons ask different questions – Who participates? Who contributes? Who benefits? Who maintains it? How does it circulate? How do we keep the flow healthy? That is not simply a change in terminology, it is a different social logic.

And thus the challenge of the #openweb, to build the next generation of digital infrastructure that carries this flow. Or we can continue building platforms where people accumulate followers, data, status and ownership. Or native infrastructures where value comes from participation, trust, contribution and circulation.

The are useful here because Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process all help keep the flow open. They make it harder for one actor to capture the entire system. They allow people to contribute, allow others to build upon that contribution, allow communities to maintain their own parts of the infrastructure.

This is also part of the reason projects such as #OMN matter, the point isn’t to build another platform. It is to build infrastructure that allows media, knowledge, trust and community activity to flow between people and communities without being captured by one owner. From “mine” to “ours” Perhaps the deepest change is cultural, to move from: Mine → yours towards: Ours → flowing through us

That doesn’t mean abolishing personal possessions, more it’s about focusing on recognising that many of the things that create the value in our lives don’t work like possessions in the first place. Knowledge grows when shared, culture grows when remixed, relationships grow through participation, communities grow through contribution, the web grows through links and flows.

A river remains a river because the water moves – the challenge is to build social systems that understand this. We don’t need everybody to own a piece of everything, we need people to become meaningful within the flows that sustain them. A spring doesn’t need to own the river, a stream doesn’t need to own the valley, a drop of rain doesn’t need to own the sea. In social terms they contribute to the flow, and the social flow gives us meaning and value in return.

Less ownership. More participation.
Less accumulation. More circulation.
Less control. More stewardship.
Less isolation. More belonging.
Less platform capture. More commons.

That is the direction the #openweb needs to be moving in.

The expertise problem

Technical expertise matters, the problem begins when technical expertise is treated as the only legitimate way of understanding a social problem. This is the trap of technocracy: taking a useful tool for understanding parts of the world and turning it into a complete worldview. The expertise problem “We need more technical expertise in government.” But that is half the answer. The mistake is to jump from “politicians need technical expertise” to “technical experts should make decisions.” That replaces one form of stupidity with another.

A functioning society needs engineers, scientists, programmers and researchers. But it also needs historians, sociologists, artists, carers, journalists, workers, communities and ordinary users Technical knowledge is one tool in a toolbox, it is not the toolbox.

We have seen the consequences repeatedly. Politicians who barely understand how the internet works are expected to regulate it. At the same time, technology companies and technical communities assume that because they understand the machinery, they therefore understand the society surrounding it. Neither position is good enough – we need technical people involved in politics and governance, but we also need those technical people to understand that engineering is not governance.

The #geekproblem hashtag is particularly important part of the story for the #openweb. A lot of contemporary technology culture has inherited a blinded belief that social problems can be converted into technical problems: if something is messy, build a perfect system, when people disagree, write a protocol, when something is unsafe, add security. If information is difficult to manage, build an algorithm, when people behave badly, moderate them automatically. If a community is struggling, optimise the workflow. Sometimes these things are useful, but often the “technical solution” simply hides the social problem.

The problem isn’t that geeks are bad people. It is that technical culture can become too comfortable with abstraction. People become numbers, communities datasets, politics optimisation. Relationships become networks, trust becomes authentication and participation becomes a user interface. And suddenly, we have designed a technically elegant system that nobody actually wants to live inside.

This is the deeper danger of #technocracy, it is not simply about having too many computers, engineers or technical experts. It is about turning technical expertise into political authority. The idea has been around for a long time. During the crisis of the 1930s, technocratic movements argued that society could be managed by scientific and technical experts rather than through the messy processes of democratic politics. The appeal was understandable: when society is in crisis, efficiency, certainty and expertise can look much more attractive than disagreement, compromise and uncertainty.

But that is the problem – democracy is messy because society is messy. There is no technical system that can contain all the values, histories, relationships, conflicts and experiences of the people affected by a decision. The belief that a small group of people with enough information can simply calculate the correct answer is not an escape from politics, it is politics disguised as engineering.

We can see the same problem emerging in our own technology culture. Silicon Valley has presented itself as being above politics: just build the system, scale it and let the technology solve the problem. But these companies have accumulated enormous economic and political power precisely because their systems shape how people communicate, work, organise, consume information and understand the world. Technology is therefore not neutral infrastructure, who owns it matters – who controls it matters – who funds it matters – who writes the rules matters – who has the power to change those rules matters. And what happens when the system is wrong matters.

The danger becomes serious when technological power and political power start merging. A technology billionaire does not become democratically accountable simply because their company operates critical infrastructure. A powerful algorithm does not become legitimate because it is technically sophisticated. A government does not become more democratic because it uses AI. Technology can be used to amplifie power without making that power accountable.

Technologies of humility

This is where the idea of technologies of humility becomes useful: technical and policy systems need to take uncertainty, ambiguity, vulnerability and the limits of knowledge seriously. Four principles might be useful.

  1. Framing

How are we defining the problem? Are we actually addressing the problem, or simply addressing the part that is easiest to measure? This is hugely important in #OMN development, if we define the problem as “How do we distribute content efficiently?” we will build one kind of system. If we define it as “How do communities maintain trustworthy shared media and social memory?” we build something very different. The technical architecture follows the social framing.

  1. Vulnerability

Who gets hurt by the solution? A system can be efficient and still be destructive. Algorithms can optimise engagement while making people miserable. A moderation system can reduce abuse while silencing marginalised voices. A security system can protect one group while excluding another. We need to ask: who is missing from the path?

  1. Distribution

Who gets the benefits? Who gets the power, the money and who carries the risks? This is one of the most important questions in technology because “innovation” is rarely distributed equally. The #dotcons have become good at extracting value from social relationships while presenting the resulting technology as neutral infrastructure, it isn’t neutral. The ownership model matters, governance matters. The matters because it tries to move these questions into the open.

  1. Learning

What happens when we are wrong? This may be the most important principle of all, there is rarely one perfect answer to a complex social problem. We need systems that can learn, not simply systems that can scale. This is one of the reasons #OMN is interested in things like moderation, rollback, metadata, federation and open governance. A social system needs mechanisms for correction, needs to be possible to say “That didn’t work. Let’s change it.” without treating the previous decision as sacred.

We need to understand that open systems need more than code, you can have beautifully engineered open-source software running a terrible social system, a decentralised network full of authoritarian communities, transparent code supporting opaque power, and you can build technically open systems that are socially closed.

So the challenge isn’t simply – how do we make the technology open? It is, how do we make technology part of an open social process? That is a much harder question, and much more interesting and why #OMN is deliberately messy.

The #OMN approach isn’t to pretend that we can design the perfect social system in advance. It is to build enough open infrastructure for communities to experiment, disagree, adapt and learn. That means accepting that different communities will do things differently, while providing common building blocks that allow different paths to develop – different interfaces, different workflows, different communities and different forms of participation. It means designing for disagreement rather than pretending disagreement can be engineered away, a path from technical systems to social infrastructure.

Composting the current mess is where the critique of tech authoritarianism connects directly to the #geekproblem, it is the problem of expertise becoming authority without accountability. And the answer is not to remove technical people from decision-making. Quite the opposite. We need their knowledge. But we need it alongside other forms of knowledge and inside democratic, open and accountable processes.

Engineers can tell us what a system can do, but they cannot, by themselves, tell us what society should want. Programmers can design protocols, but they cannot decide what relationships a community should have. Data scientists can identify patterns, they cannot determine what those patterns mean to the people living through them. And AI can process enormous quantities of information, it still cannot replace human judgement, lived experience, disagreement and democratic legitimacy.

This is why + #OGB + #OMN + #MakingHistory belong together, attempts to build technical infrastructure that leaves room for social intelligence rather than replacing it. To repeat endlessly the path is not one perfect platform, one perfect algorithm or one perfect governance model, #KISS we need more tools, not one answer.

On this native path, mess is not necessarily a failure, it can be the space where learning, disagreement, adaptation and democracy actually happen. That is a much humbler – and potentially much more powerful – ambition.

#OMN #openweb #OGB #MakingHistory #FOSS #geekproblem #technocracy #technology #governance #commons #socialmedia #decentralisation