For the last 40 years we have had neo-liberalism pushed into every part of our living human and natural world. This was designed to disintegrate the social democratic 20th century consensus and replace it with a 19th century market fundamentalism. This has successfully and obviously pushed selfish over selfless. Over the last 20 years this fundamentalism push social democratic norms out of the internet and web and replace these values with powerful tools for social control based on market logic of “want to be” powerful individuals and capital agender.
In web application development there are 3 groups you can empower and it’s important to understand which group you are empowering.
1) the users
2) the producers
3) the geeks who develop/admin
Most #geekproblem coding is about the 3ed grouping taking all the power to decide. We, tiny, “elite” know what is good for you “passive” masses. This is why most #openweb codebases are unusable, because obviously they simply do not know, good UX in social tech is hard.
Most #dotcons empower capital who pay the geeks to “serve” the producers to enslave the users. In this they are an interesting evil hybrid.
I can’t actually think of an example where the users are actually empowered off the top of my head – ideas please?
Good #openweb projects try to empower the producers/user they are not meany of these. Can anyone think of examples, we need a list.
Obviously we can’t keep repeating the first two shit outcomes as they are already piles of stinking manure everywhere from the last 20 years of this tech mess. You have/need a shovel #OMN
This is a truth that our #encryptionists need to be held to account on. The issue is not their code, though we should trust nothing that is not open source and p2p, which rules out almost all of their favourite projects for the last 10 years. And the stuff that in theory could be secure is not because it runs on insecure operating systems, insecure firmware and completely insecure networking equipment.
It’s a closed fantasy that has been a block on working open structures for way to long. Much more than 99.99% of our information infrastructure is “insecure” and let’s be generous .01% that just might be secure is impossible for any normal person to use.
We can’t keep repeating closed, we really need to rebalance with open.
Update: And if anyone thinks encrypted clientservers can be secure. Look at the police spy cases. They drove our vans and were at the heart of our activist meetings… you really do not think they were not running our activist internet infrastructure? The friendly shadowy internet geek who volunteers.. You never quite know who he is but the servers stay online and it’s all “encrypted” so must be safe, just trust “us” who ever “us” is.
Conclusion: Open is a large part of the fix for this and whispering in the forest. Never trust digital devices if you are doing anything illegal. Use them to built trust networks if you would like to do something effective. Then go off-line and whisper in the forest, its fun.
Update: To try and be a part of the .01% you have to use single use “burner” equipment from a not obvious public resource. Use a “burner” SIM card or public Wi-Fi. This is harder to do as almost all public spaces have CCTV. Then only Tor not logging into anything you normally log into. When the equipment is used dispose of right away. Preferably by destroying it with prejudice so no data can remain.
Every time you access a resource you have to go through this process a fresh. As each piece of technology has numerous digital “fingerprints” as you do personally, due to how you move mice/gestures on touch screens etc.
Does this sound anything like what your friendly #encryptionists actually dose you would be right 99% of their behaver is actually security theatre, the rest is lifestyle.
We can’t keep believing in the security fairy tail. Its socially unhealthy and obviously silly.
With the current #openweb reboot going on there’s a lot of default thinking that is bad, and we do need to learn to judge between the good and bad paths if it’s to live up to its potential. Let’s start to give examples:
* Promoting silos vs promoting networks – as our current thinking is based on closed/silo thinking then when we promote #openweb projects we continue to use this thinking and promote silo/closed thinking rather than harder to understand open/network thinking.
– Protocols rather than platforms, balance talk about fedivers/activertypub and mastodon or branded projects. Our brand thinking is a failure of networking and contains strong unseen #deathcult thinking.
– Always outreach a wide selection of instances rather than a single one, the strength is in the network and not in the silo. Networks scale downwards, more/balanced, with stability is better than one “solution”. Be weary of sites that push themselves as the “place”.
– Networks are based on trust, in this look for groups/families of projects to support. Lose is always good, do not support “we are THE solution” closed siloed thinking. Write articles about a spread of views is better outreach as this is actually the project.
– be weary of projects that promise digital security/privacy first – these projects are always lying and thus dangerous and unhealthy for trust based networks. This is a hard-to-understand open/closed issue, we all need to have real conversations about this.
So we live in a #deathcult that we all have worshipped at for the last 40 years of neoliberalism. This is #XR now a normal understanding that we all have to face. What do you think of this mess?
My initial thought on most academia is wank, most is poisoned by the last 40 years of the #deathcult It’s better to go back to radical basics and reboot something from outside the poisoned mainstream, we are doing this with #indymedia reboot.
Most “activism” from this source is little more than a funding drain 99.999% of progressive funding goes straight down the #fashionista drain in academia and #NGO land.
Thinking on the modern UX for the #indymedia reboot. Tabs are a line at the top of the page – metaphor is not buttons. You are switching sheets of paper. The page is the paper. The top banner is the desk under the paper. It’s an interesting challenge to think through metaphors.
Using buttons you are outside the desk/paper metaphor so it’s a whole different thing, to mix them is not KISS and confusing. You are into early computer metaphors with the buttons – think mainframes. We are a “newspaper” so the tabs and table and paper sheets make a feeling for the project. Always echo back if you can for a project that is based on a solid past.
For new stuff “invention” is good and there will be lots of space and growth for this when the #OMN is up and running…
One thing the fediverse taught us is that copying existing successfully projects is a root out of the #geekproblem that #fashernistas embrace. So this up to a point is the right thing to do for social change. We for the first time put a spin on it by rebooting a radical grassroots social tech project. But behind this is something much more radical. The #OMN lets see if we can plant and nurture a seed. Think the soil is a little dry pastime for some compost, get your spades out.
A complex counterintuitive subject. When Capitalism and “free-market” stop being the trust that glues society together. You are left with social data and who controls it. Open or closed becomes the choice we face.
Open it’s a shared commons.
Closed its something else.
The closed path of the #encryptionists for the last 10 years. The open path of the #fediverse for the last 5 years.
Interestingly the fediverse was built as a lie as a hybrid open/closed. It feeds this lie to grow. In fact its nieverly open which is why it grew so strong so fast. Goda’s respect a good social con. But learn the right lesson, that open rather than closed is the path.
Judge projects by the #4opens then by #PGA hallmarks. A good first step.
PS. and YES before you comment it’s a balance not one or the other.
I have been developing and using #opensource and #openweb projects for nearly 40 years. For the last 20 years at the coalface of development, this is my experience.
Most #openweb projects are more than 99.9% unusable this is normal. A few come up to 5% usability; these are the “successful” ones. It’s very rare for a project like mastodon to be 50% useable – but more than 90% of the people I push in that direction still bounce – though this is more likely because of digital drug habits of the #dotcons than the UX of the project which is good itself.
Let’s be generous our #indymedia reboot project is currently 90% unusable; this is normal for openweb projects. It’s hard to build something with limited resources and training.
Our plan is to make it as simple and #KISS looking as possible to roll out to small groups of testers to develop it into being 20% useable by their feedback. While doing this we can roll out the idea of the project to bring more energy and resources into this shift from 10% to 20% usability.
We only open outreach when we are beyond that 20% level, because it would obviously be self-defeating otherwise. Then inch up the usability while shifting the social expectations of good #UX to a social harmony.
