The rot of Couchsurfing is mainstreaming decay in #openweb paths

From hospitality exchange to venture capital, from grassroots community to corporate platform. The story of #Couchsurfing is a warning about what happens when we confuse building a network with building a community. The story of Couchsurfing is more interesting than a failed social network, it is a history of what happened to native #openweb paths when grassroots roots are overtaken by #NGO turns, startup culture and eventually the fantasies of the #dotcons.

There are lessons here for anyone trying to rebuild an open, grassroots internet today.. The roots were always social, not technological. Hospitality exchange didn’t begin with the internet, networks like Servas, founded in 1949, built on a simple human idea: people open their homes, share resources and create relationships across cultural and national boundaries. Later came Esperanto networks, Hospitality Club, Couchsurfing and more. The internet didn’t invent this, but it gave an existing movement new tools to organize, communicate and grow. This is a native lesson, the technology grows from existing human relationships and grassroots practice, not pretending we create community from nothing.

Hospitality Club, founded in 2000, was built through voluntary programming, translation, moderation, member support and organizing. Couchsurfing (#CS) grew from volunteers organizing local groups, hosting travellers, running potlucks, to built relationships and created a culture that no software company could have manufacture. The website was a small part of the infrastructure, the network was people.

The first failure on this path, was confusing community goodwill with ownership. Couchsurfing’s 2006 database crisis showed the strength of original model. Volunteers helped raise money and rebuilt the platform in ten days, think about that. A community mobilize people, money and technical skills to rescue shared infrastructure because people believed in what they were building.

But this created a fundamental question that the native #openweb has repeatedly failed to answer, who owns the value created by community? The volunteers had supplied labour, expertise, relationships and trust, yet they had no reliable guarantee that the resulting infrastructure would remain under community control. Disputes over volunteer code, NDAs and management transparency exposed this.

BeVolunteer and BeWelcome emerged from this wider conflict, attempting to build the same community based on more formal nonprofit organization and participation. This was an #NGO fork in the road, one path treated community participation as the foundation of a shared resource, the other treated it as an asset that could be managed, controlled and eventually sold.

The #CS NGO turn was replacing grassroots power with professional management, this is where the story connects to the wider #openweb, as grassroots networks grew, they increasingly encounter the world of professional nonprofits, foundations, institutional funding and eventually venture capital. The promise was sustainability, reality was a transfer of power.

Instead of building stronger grassroots governance, projects began importing management structures from the institutions they were supposed to offer alternatives to. Consultants, boards, executives, funding applications, professional communications and organizational hierarchies. The people who actually made the networks were pushed towards the edges. #CS move towards private commercial ownership in 2011 was a example of this mess.

A reported $7.6 million investment round, followed by further venture funding, transformed a community-oriented network into a privately controlled company. Members were not meaningfully consulted about the transfer, the wiki disappeared, community information became private, volunteer structures changed and growth became a corporate priority. The language of community remained, the community’s power did not.

This is the #NGO problem, hollowing out grassroots relationships that brings the value. Not every nonprofit follows this path, #BeWelcome and other alternatives demonstrate that different organizational choices are possible. The problem is not paying people or raising money, the problem is allowing the funding structure to displace the community’s purpose and control.

Couchsurfing eventually became a example of the #dotcons business fantasy of growth, not community. The assumption was that the vertical scaling of more members, more investment, more marketing and more professional management would produce a stronger network. And yes for a time, the network might grow while its social purpose disappeared.

This is the contradiction of the #dotcons, they measure growth in accounts, engagement, traffic and financial value, while the thing that has value, the human network comes from trust, participation, reciprocity and relationships. You can buy growth, you cannot buy the social fabric that makes a network work in meaningfully ways.

In 2020, Couchsurfing introduced mandatory contributions in many countries, making access conditional on payment. People who had spent years building the network were now being forced to pay to access the relationships and infrastructure they had create. The problem behind this was a normal mainstreaming one, it wasn’t only that the network needed money, the problem was who controlled it, who decided how it was funded and who benefited from the value it generated.

This fall is when the community starts to leave, the platform is already dead, the failure of Couchsurfing wasn’t a particular CEO, funding round or paywall, it was the gradual destruction of the reciprocal relationship between the platform and its community. This is an important distinction for the #openweb, a network can remain technically online long after its community has disappeared.

A project can have excellent open-source software while having no meaningful grassroots movement around it. The native #openweb was never just about publishing code, it was about building shared infrastructure through shared practice. When you remove that practice, you are left with an increasingly hollow technical shell.

What we can learn from this dead native #openweb project? This might be useful for current projects like the #fedivers, there are some of the lessons:

Build the community before scaling the technology. Start with existing relationships, local groups, shared practices and real needs. Software should strengthen these relationships, not replace them.
Make governance part of the infrastructure. Don’t leave governance until after the software is built. Open code without open processes still produce closed power structures. Participation, transparency, accountability and the ability to challenge decisions need to be designed into the project from the beginning.
Don’t confuse funding with sustainability. Money is necessary for developers, hosting, administration and maintenance. But funding should support the community rather than turn the community into a resource for funders.
Build networks, not platforms. A platform concentrates control, a network of interoperable, independently maintained communities distributes it. Shared data, open standards, portable identities and federated infrastructure make it harder for one organization to capture the network.
Value participation, not just numbers. A few hundred active people who trust each other, maintain the infrastructure and take collective responsibility can be worth more than millions of inactive accounts.

This is why we need the #OMN, history is relevant to what we are trying to build, the #OMN, #OGB and #indymediaback. The native #openweb had the right instincts: open standards, voluntary participation, shared resources, grassroots organization and trust between people. But it repeatedly failed to build durable structures to protect those values when projects grew, funding arrived and professional management took over.

We need to learn from that history rather than keep repeating it. The #OMN starts from a different place, not another social media platform competing for accounts and attention, it is a path to grow a shared network of media flows, where communities can publish, subscribe, moderate, curate and maintain their own connections to information. The technical foundation is important, but it is only one part of the work.

#4opens: Open data, open source, open standards and open process.

#OGB: Grassroots governance that makes collective ownership and accountability practical.

#indymediaback: Rebuilding community-based publishing and local media.

#MakingHistory: Building shared, federated archives where communities participate in preserving and interpreting their histories.

The working path is to make the social relationships, data and infrastructure reinforce each other rather than allowing one organization to capture the value of the whole network. This is also why we need to resist the #NGO turn and the #dotcons fantasy. Both encourage us to hand over grassroots power in exchange for promises of professional delivery, scale and sustainability. #Couchsurfing shows where that road can lead, we shouldn’t build big networks, rather we need to build the grassroots foundations that allow networks to grow without losing their purpose.

And that’s what we mean by the #OMN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#OMN: WHERE NEXT? WE HAVE SEED FUNDING, NOW COMES WORK

At the root of the mess we face is the worship of the #deathcult, the idea that competition, individualism, control and endless growth are simply human nature, they are not, they are systems we keep reproducing, even when it is making society unlivable.

We now have seed funding for the #OpenMediaNetwork projects. That gives us a chance to move beyond endlessly talking about the problems and start building practical tools for a different path. Were next? The #4opens gives us a basic test for the technology. The #OGB points towards grassroots governance. Together, these are part of a DIY toolkit for moving power away from the #dotcons, the #geekproblem and the #NGO mainstreaming that keep reproducing the same mess in supposedly alternative paths.

But funding is only a beginning, the real challenge is social – how do we compost the recurring cycles of paranoia, status games, dogmatic individualism of people pushing themselves towards the top? How do we build trust, shared responsibility and structures for people to work together without recreating the hierarchies we claim to be opposing?

To compost this mess, we need to look at the current arguments about the left and right paths. Yes, people understandably want to escape institutions they no longer trust, some retreat into private life, nature and their own projects, others double down on leadership and control. But walking away from society doesn’t make the wider problems disappear, replacing one set of bosses with another isn’t an alternative.

We need to think horizontally, by growing trust, keeping processes open, sharing power and making space for people to participate without demanding that they surrender their independence. So what can you do? Follow the hashtags, read the ideas, ask questions, find a part of the project you can contribute to – you don’t need to understand everything before taking this first step.

And yes, bring a shovel, social composting is messy work, we have plenty of accumulated shit to turn into something useful. A simple first test for #stupidindividualism, can you find your way into a shared project without demanding that it revolve around you? Can you help build something that benefits people beyond yourself?

If not, that’s not a reason to give up, it’s a place to start digging. The #openweb won’t rebuild itself, we need people, practical tools and grassroots structures that make cooperation possible. A little seed funding gives us a chance, the next step is building the crew to do the work to grow the commons.

At #OMN, we’re working to compost the #techdebt problem using federation and the #4opens. The idea is simple, build apps around shared data flows, not locked-in codebases. Keep the data useful across projects, while the code becomes a golden ladle in a #witchescauldron, a tool for shaping and serving the commons, not a container that owns it.

New codebase? Let the data flows move across. Less tech debt, less churn, more reuse. Build on what we have, rather than endlessly starting again.

Why does this matter? The #mainstreaming path, represented by projects like https://blog.joinmastodon.org/, is becoming narrow through #NGO capture and institutional funding priorities.

The problem is that five years of funding have helped create a poor diversity of codebases and approaches. We need to mediate this blinded #geekproblem and grow more working grassroots paths that people can spread out across, rather than keep funneling everyone into the same few #openweb codebases.

Yes, there’s a lot of #techshit to compost. And yes, we need people with shovels to do the work of clearing the ground, reusing what’s useful, and planting seedlings along more native #openweb paths.

Less tech churn, more shared flows. Less lock-in, more commons.

#OMN #4opens #OGB #OpenWeb #KISS #MakingHistory #indymediaback

Please get off your knees and pick up a shovel

Our choice for the last 20 years has been between the #deathcult and #fascism, how the hell did we get into this mess? And how do we find a way out? To build a path we need shovels, not saviours. We need to dig through the shit, compost failures and regrow paths to grassroots collective power. To work on this we need to stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start rebuilding the ground beneath our feet.

Politics is the human condition, you’d have to be mad as a hatter, or a liberal, to imagine we can somehow escape it. We live in messy times, and they’re getting dirtier. Politics isn’t going away, the question is whether we organize collectively to shape it, or leave the field to the #nastyfew people already digging our collective graves.

To be clear, what I’m putting forward doesn’t solve any single problem. What it does is take a practical step towards solving many problems, by changing how we work together. What we don’t need is market-based “green” solutions, elitist control or any more left-wing hero worship – as all feed into the same trap – the #deathcult of #neoliberalism. That common sense keeps us looking upwards for leadership, waiting for markets to save us or hoping the next hero will finally get things right, meanwhile, our uncommon sense collective ability to act decays.

To use a shovel we need is to move beyond fear and control towards trust, open processes and grassroots power. And yes, this isn’t the normal #blinded path about finding another perfect ideology to worship, it’s messy, its about growing practical tools and relationships to allow us to act together, to learn from failure and make change possible.

I should not HAVE to keep saying this, but this is what the #4opens process is about – moving beyond #stupidindividualism, beyond copying the #dotcons, and towards a path we can actually walk together. Open data, open source, open standards and open processes are practical starting points for shared responsibility. They test us, to build in public, hold power to account and create commons that belong to participation rather than private ownership.

The last 50 years of common sense monetization of everything is the #deathcult, as is the endless me, me, me that fragments our ability to act collectively. We won’t compost this mess by repeating the same individualistic habits with a few new slogans, we have to change the practices that keep reproducing it.

At #OMN, we’re turning to decades of grassroots experience of practical tools for collective action. #OGB, #indymediaback, #MakingHistory people have been working on for years. But, they’ve been stuck at the development stage for far too long. The challenge now is to get them moving, connect the people and skills involved, and turn activist traditions into working infrastructure for grassroots media, shared knowledge and collective organization.

This isn’t a magic solution, it’s a way to start growing many solutions from the ground up, rather than waiting for the market, the state or another self-appointed hero to deliver them. Please get off your knees, pick up a shovel, the ground is covered in mess, but that’s exactly why we need to start composting. We have plenty of shit to work with, and plenty of seeds worth saving.

And if you need a shovel, ask in the comments.

#OpenWeb #FOSS #4opens #OMN

Technology can secure the commons, it should never become a substitute for the commons

Enforcing artificial scarcity when we finally have the technology to move towards a post-scarcity world is what’s driving us towards real scarcity. And if you think artificial scarcity is bad, wait until you experience the real thing. Much of this mess is avoidable, but we keep prioritizing #nastyfew wealth and profit over building a sustainable future. We have the technological potential to do better, but we’re choosing to keep worshipping a #deathcult that protects scarcity for the few at the expense of survival for the many

In the #OMN story, #encryptionist describes the tendency to priorities technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem. It is the belief that social and political problems can primarily be solved through cryptography, protocols and mathematics, rather than through communities, relationships and accountable governance.

Encryption itself is not the problem, strong encryption is essential, private communication and secure infrastructure matters. People living under authoritarian governments, journalists protecting sources and activists defending themselves from surveillance all depend on robust cryptographic tools.

The #OMN critique is directed at #encryptionist – the narrow view that elevates technical security above every other social value. The assumption becomes – If we can encrypt everything… .we have solved the problem. But technology cannot replace trust, Encryption can prove that a message has not been altered, it cannot prove that the sender is honest. Encryption can protect communication, it cannot build community. Encryption can hide information from attackers, it cannot help people resolve disagreements, share responsibility or govern themselves.

These are social problems, they require social solutions. This is where #encryptionist thinking becomes a form of the #geekproblem. Faced with messy human questions, the instinct is to build another protocol, another identity system, another blockchain. More cryptographic layers, another clever piece of infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the harder questions remain untouched. Who controls the community? Who moderates abuse? How are decisions made? How social trust is earned? And finally how is social power distributed? These questions cannot be encrypted away.

The history of the internet is full of examples of technically elegant systems that failed because nobody wanted to use them. Perfectly secure software abandoned because there was no community around it. Projects that solved fascinating engineering problems while leaving ordinary people confused, excluded or dependent on technical specialists.

This is why #OMN puts people before protocols – the phrase #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer captures this perfectly. The purpose of technology is to strengthen human relationships, not replace them.

The #encryptionist mindset often begins from an assumption that people are the weakest part of any system. Humans make mistakes. Humans cannot be trusted. Humans introduce uncertainty. Therefore, remove humans from the process wherever possible.

The #OMN path starts somewhere different, humans are not bugs, they are the point. Technology should help people build trust – not eliminate the need for it. A healthy community is not one where nobody has to trust anyone. It is one where trust can grow because people have transparent processes, shared history and accountable relationships.

This is why #openprocess is just as important as encryption, if governance happens behind closed doors, secure communication does not create democratic accountability.

This is why #openweb native projects like #makinghistory matter. Communities need memory as much as secrecy, this is why #grassroots matters, people need relationships as much as protocols. This is why the #4opens fit together.

Open systems create public accountability.

Encryption creates private security.

These are complementary values, not competing ones, the danger comes when security blindly becomes the only value. An obsession with technical purity can easily produce systems that ordinary people cannot understand, maintain or participate in. Complexity becomes a gatekeeper. Technical experts become the hidden authorities. Communities become dependent on those who understand the cryptography.

Ironically, systems designed to eliminate trust often end up demanding enormous trust in a small group of experts. Trust the developers, trust the protocol, trust the mathematics. Trust that someone else has implemented everything correctly. The trust never disappears, it merely becomes invisible.

The #OMN approach argues that invisible trust is more dangerous than visible trust. Better to acknowledge that communities depend on relationships and build institutions that make those relationships accountable. This is where the #Fediverse offers an interesting lesson.

Its success has come less from cryptographic innovation than from federation, shared standards and community moderation. It works because independent communities develop their own norms while remaining connected through open protocols. The technology enables the relationships, it does not replace them. The same lesson applies across the #openweb.

In the #OMN story, #encryptionist is a warning against forgetting this balance. The path is not to build a world where nobody has to trust anyone, it is to build a world where trust is deserved, distributed and supported by technology rather than replaced by it.

Technology should secure the commons, it should never become a substitute for the commons itself.

#AskQ

Why does the #Fediverse exist?

The #Fediverse exists because the corporate #dotcons are not enough, we don’t wont more of our social lives as products, our relationships into #closeddata, and our communities into audiences to be managed. We wont a different way to communicate, organize and build power together.

But the #Fediverse is not simply a kinder version of corporate social media, its has a promise based on the history of the #openweb: people and communities building their own spaces, connecting through open standards, and sharing power without handing control to a central platform.

The problem we need to compost is that there are few working, humane alternatives to the current #deathcult. So for meany people simply stepping away isn’t an option – We need practical alternatives that work in the real world, rooted in grassroots experience and capable of growing beyond isolated projects for these people to step to.

We already have a first step, that is the point of federation, with #ActivityPub, independent communities can connect and share without having to surrender their autonomy. We can scale horizontally, linking working social projects together rather than building another “common sense” centralized empire.

The #OMN takes this to the next step by bringing in grassroots practices we know work to this open technology, human trust and shared responsibility. #MakingHistory, #IndymediaBack, the #OGB and the #4opens are stepping stones towards a more sustainable world, not products to consume, but tools for #KISS collective action.

This is why the current push for #mainstreaming is more problem than solution. If we bring the habits of the #dotcons into the #Fediverse, we are pushing the turning of build something different into another version of the same old “common sense” mess – we become users demanding personal comfort, rather than participants building communities.

And this is where #BLOCKING becomes political. Blocking has a place, especially when people need protection from harassment and abuse. But if it becomes our default answer to every disagreement, it turns despair into the appearance of action. We retreat into smaller and smaller spaces while the structures of power who are ripping the world apart remain untouched.

We cannot build solidarity by pretending differences don’t exist, we build it by developing and growing ways to work through those differences, set boundaries, share responsibility and act together. That is how grassroots movements for the last 100 years have always built real capacity.

“Another world is possible” cannot just be a slogan, we have to make it possible, through practical projects, open infrastructure and communities that learn how to govern themselves. The #Fediverse exists to give us a path to do that. Whether we use it to build a different world, or simply recreate the one we already have, is up to us.

Keep it #KISS, less platform worship, less knee-jerk rejection, more collective work. We won’t block our way into another world, we have to build and grow it.

“Another world is possible” – but our friendly enemies keep pushing #mainstreaming dressed up in radical language. The result? We’re accepting “common sense” of the system instead of challenging it. Solidarity gets fragmented into identity and partisan battles, while class power escapes scrutiny. We end up pointing fingers at each other while the #deathcult carries on.

We need to defend the right to care, but turn that care into collective power. Real solidarity means looking beyond the latest distraction, naming structural power and building alternatives together. Don’t just make the existing world look kinder.

#makinghistory #OMN #4opens #openweb #ActivityPub #IndymediaBack #OGB

A story about our normal path

I have to be clear about where I’m coming from, as I’m standing in what might generously be called an undefined position. Not because I have no position, but because I’ve spent a very long time in the messy path of history that nobody has ever managed to define: grassroots DIY direct action. It’s a long history, a lot of people have been building things, breaking things, occupying things, squatting things, filming things, publishing things, arguing about things and occasionally setting fire to things.

The problem is that when you later try to write the history down, everyone suddenly wants to know what the movement was. What was the ideology? Who were the leaders? Where were the foundations? What was the organisation? And that’s where things get messy, because nobody agrees where the foundations are.

Lets look at an example: so you get this normal argument about protest camp bridge-building, one person says the bridge needs a proper political foundation, another says it needs a technical foundation, someone else wants a historical foundation, someone else wants consensus, someone wants a committee to decide what the foundations should look like. And while everyone is arguing about foundations, the river is getting wider.

So eventually somebody says: “Fuck it. Let’s just build the bridge.” And that is more or less what happens. You find some old timber, someone has some big rope, someone has some strong string. There’s a pile of planks that was probably once part of a pallet, nobody is sure where they came from. Someone has painted ACTIVITYPUB on the side of it, although they have misspelled it.

And somehow, against all sensible engineering, the first section reaches the other bank, it wobbles, it creaks, one of the ropes looks deeply theoretical, there is no planning permission, there is certainly no five-year infrastructure strategy. But people are crossing.

Halfway across, somebody stops and announces that the bridge isn’t sufficiently inclusive, someone else points out that it isn’t sufficiently decentralised. A third person wants to rewrite the protocol, a fourth person has discovered a grant opportunity for “Innovative Participatory Bridge Futures”. And meanwhile the people who actually need to get across are standing on the bank saying “Can we just get across the fucking bridge?”

That, unfortunately, is a pretty good description of the whole project, it isn’t finished, it probably isn’t even properly defined, it has a long and badly documented history, and it is held together by people who don’t always agree with each other.

But it moves, and sometimes, when nobody can agree where to build the perfect bridge, the most useful thing you can do is build the rickety one. Then cross it, then fix it while you’re standing on it, preferably before the river rises.

Balance is not only trying to convince people about the #OMN in the abstract, show them.

If a #fashernista sees shiny stuff growing on real soil, they’ll drift toward it because it works.

If the #geekproblem finds a simple tool, they’ll tinker because they can get their hands dirty.

The #mainstreaming will wait until it looks inevitable. Fine, don’t build for them, build something useful, build it in the open. That’s the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, open process.

A working #OMN node, a #MakingHistory flow, news moving, archives useful, trust built through participation. We don’t only need better marketing, we need better working examples.

it is a #KISS path.

#NLnet we are still waiting for an opportunity

#NLnet is the BEST of the terrible #openweb tech funding in Europe, likely the world. Over the last 10 years we’ve put around a dozen funding applications in to #openweb funders with real-world social and technological value projects. All were dismissed at the first round.

So this time we brought in a professional fundraiser to help write the application. They did an impressive job, and finally, our #OMN #makinghistory proposal – Trust-Based Media Flows for the #Fediverse – made it through to the second round.

Today, people have started publishing updates on getting grants, nothing back for us yet. The second-round process appears to involve “a polite interrogation: what are the ideas, how will the project be developed, what will the money pay for, what are the main tasks, and what is the project’s policy on AI-assisted coding? All perfectly reasonable questions”, that we are still waiting to have an opportunity to address.

There is a bigger problem, progressive tech funding still has a narrow idea of what counts as valuable #openweb work. Projects have to translate themselves into the language of funders, technical reviewers and the #geekproblem before they can even get considered. Grassroots projects are expected to prove their legitimacy through carefully packaged technical language.

Meanwhile, the things we are actually trying to build – trust, federation, community infrastructure, open process, human moderation, archives and alternative media flows – are the things that don’t fit neatly into the usual technology funding boxes.

So yes, we’re patiently waiting to see what happens with #NLnet, and are grateful that the project reached the second round. But getting through one funding round shouldn’t feel like winning a lottery. If the #openweb is supposed to be commons, funding it needs to be about more than finding projects that already know how to speak the language of institutions and narrow #geekproblem subcultures.

The #OMN path is about building infrastructure with and for the people doing the work, that probably means we will always be slightly awkward applicants. Good, the #openweb needs more awkward projects and fewer polished funding bubbles.

#4opens #OMN #openweb #FOSS #Fediverse #techchurn

Who’s Building the #Openweb – and Who’s Just Feeding Off It

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 #4opens #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

Update02: How do we describe the problem and how we organize ourselves to deal with it? For the #fashionistas, the point is that language isn’t just decoration. A #hashtag is a way of framing attention. If you call someone “evil”, “dangerous” or “nasty”, you may simply reinforce their preferred identity, yes, we’re tough, we’re feared, we’re fighting the enemy. You’ve accepted their frame.

“Weird” works differently because it pokes at their claim to represent normality. It reverses the us versus them story: hang on, perhaps the strange behaviour is coming from you. But this is where the #OMN/#KISS point comes in. Calling the #nastyfew “nasty” isn’t really about persuading the #nastyfew. It’s about helping us recognize the pattern.

We need language that lets ordinary people point at a structural problem without having to become political theorists, join a faction or spend three hours arguing about ideology. That’s what an affective hashtag can do – #nastyfew = focus. Not “these people are monsters and we must destroy them” more “there is a small concentration of people pushing harmful behaviour and power – let’s recognize the pattern, stop pretending it is normal, and organize our way around the problems they are creating.”

The important bit is US, the understanding that the #nastyfew become more powerful when we give them our attention, fear, division and energy. If we can name the pattern as an abstract, keep our heads, and build better path, their power becomes much less interesting.

This is why #OMN is interested in media flows rather than personality cults, so we don’t spend all day fighting the person. We look at the flow:

Who is amplifying what?
Who benefits?
What behaviour is being normalized?
Where is trust being built or destroyed?
What can we change locally?

The #geekproblem to often wants to solve this with another closed path, the #fashernistas want another clever narrative, but the #nastyfew want us fighting each other, its in the name. Maybe the simpler answer is to name the pattern, focus our attention, build the alternative, and stop feeding the circus.

#KISS

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.
#4opens 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 #4opens #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.

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.

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.

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?

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 #4opens matters because it tries to move these questions into the open.

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 #4opens + #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 #4opens #OGB #MakingHistory #FOSS #geekproblem #technocracy #technology #governance #commons #socialmedia #decentralisation

The Politics of Ignorance

One of the important ideas in the sociology of science is also one of the easiest to misunderstand: knowledge is socially produced. This does not mean that scientists simply make things up, it means something much more practical. Science is a human activity, it requires people, institutions, money, equipment, archives, universities, laboratories, communities and time. What we choose to investigate – and what we choose not to investigate – is therefore shaped by society.

That means there is another side to the politics of knowledge, we construct knowledge, but we can also construct ignorance. This is the idea of agnotology: the study of how ignorance is produced, maintained and as we see todays messy world, deliberately manufactured. Yes, this should be common sense, that the consequence of science is unavoidable selectivity: we look here rather than there, and every decision to investigate one thing means that something else receives less attention.

The important question is therefore not – what do we know? It is also, what don’t we know, why don’t we know it, and who benefits from that ignorance? Science does not happen outside society, there is a persistent #fashernista fantasy that science exists somewhere above politics and society. In this common sense fantasy, scientists simply follow the evidence, eventually discovering the truth. Any gaps in knowledge are assumed to be temporary, eventually somebody will get around to researching the missing pieces and the picture will become complete.

But our current capitalist science doesn’t work like that, as research needs resources, someone has to decide what gets funded, has to establish institutions and employ researchers. Someone has to maintain archives and databases. Someone has to decide which questions are legitimate enough to investigate. This means that the social organisation of knowledge is itself part of the knowledge system. Science is not an abstract ideal, as meany people treat it, but a human practice made up of institutions, resources and people. Political forces influence the scientific ecosystem without needing to dictate the results of individual experiments.

This matters – you don’t need to falsify scientific evidence to manipulate science, you can simply make sure that the research never happens. The politics of the missing, lets look at an example, imagine two possible worlds.

In one, researchers spend twenty years investigating a particular health problem. Thousands of people contribute data. Universities train specialists. Public institutions maintain long-term datasets. Researchers develop treatments, identify risks and improve policy.

In another, funding disappears. The research programme closes. The datasets are deleted. Researchers move into other fields. Young academics decide there is no career in the subject. Communities become reluctant to participate because they no longer trust the institutions.

Nobody has announced “we have banned this knowledge”, but the knowledge disappears anyway. This is one of the most powerful things about agnotology. Ignorance does not have to be created by a giant conspiracy, it can emerge through apparently ordinary administrative decisions: funding priorities, institutional closures, data deletion, censorship, intimidation, restructuring and changes in what counts as a legitimate research question. Over time, the result becomes material.

Scientific knowledge is cumulative, new work depends upon old work, archives and datasets. Remove the foundations and you don’t simply lose yesterday’s knowledge – you make tomorrow’s knowledge harder to produce. The archive is political infrastructure – this is where the #OMN path becomes important. We often think of archives as passive things, as librarys siting somewhere, a database sits on a server, a government website publishes information, a research paper exists in a journal. But these things are infrastructure, if the infrastructure disappears, access to knowledge disappears with it.

This is why #makinghistory matters – society needs the ability to remember itself, not just the official history or whatever survives inside corporate platforms or that happens to remain profitable. We need distributed, community-controlled records of what happened, what people experienced, what institutions did, what communities built and what was subsequently removed. That is media infrastructure, but it is also social memory infrastructure – closed systems make forgetting easy, sometimes this is deliberate, often it isn’t.

The social record becomes fragile, is one of the problems with concentrating so much of our communication inside a small number of commercial platforms. We have allowed a huge amount of collective memory to become dependent on organisations whose primary responsibility is not to society but to their own narrow institutional interests. That is not the resilient information system we need today in the era of #climatechaos.

The #openweb is a memory machine – the alternative isn’t that everything needs to be permanently preserved forever, that would be another form of technological fundamentalism. The point is to create distributed capacity, multiple archives, multiple publishers, multiple communities, institutions. Multiple ways of finding and verifying information, multiple copies, open formats, standards, source and proces. This is what the #4opens approach is trying to get at, not simply technical principles, they are social protections.

Open Data means information can remain accessible.

Open Source means the tools themselves can be inspected and maintained.

Open Standards mean that information doesn’t have to remain trapped inside one company’s technical ecosystem.

Open Process means that decisions can be challenged rather than disappearing behind institutional walls.

Together these create a technical architecture of social resilience.

Then we have the danger of the “no data, no problem” argument, is a particularly nasty political trick that follows from manufactured ignorance. First, prevent the research, then point to the lack of research as evidence that the problem isn’t real No evidence.”, “No consensus.”, “More research is needed.”, “We simply don’t know.” Sometimes those statements are reasonable, but they can also become circular.

If you systematically prevent people from collecting the evidence, you cannot then use the absence of evidence as proof that nothing is happening. The rhetorical pattern is that the assumption that if something were true, science would already have conclusively demonstrated it. But a lack of evidence can also result from social forces preventing researchers from doing the work in the first place. This matters far beyond any single political issue, it applies to climate research, poverty, housing, public health, marginalised communities, the effects of technology. It applies to almost anything where powerful interests might prefer that certain questions remain unanswered.

Information needs communities, is another lesson – knowledge doesn’t survive simply because somebody writes it down. It survives because communities care enough to maintain it, institutions train people, maintain archives, provide context. Researchers build upon previous work, journalists document events, activists preserve evidence, technologists maintain infrastructure, historians connect fragments together. This is a social ecosystem and when you break enough parts of it, knowledge starts disappearing.

That is why the #OMN isn’t simply about making another publishing platform, the larger idea is to build infrastructure for collective knowledge production and memory. Publishing is one part, metadata another, moderation, trust, archives, federation are all parts. The ability to edit, correct, contextualise and preserve information needs to work together.

The #openweb gives us a possibility that centralised media never really delivered: a network where different communities maintain their own spaces while still communicating with one another. That creates disagreement without requiring isolation, creates diversity without requiring fragmentation and it gives us a chance to build something much more resilient than the current model of a handful of corporate databases surrounded by billions of users. From information to social truth, is a political question.

This is the reason I keep coming back to #makinghistory – if somebody deletes a webpage, we should have copy, if a community documents an event, that record should not depend upon one #dotcons corporation continuing to host it. If an organisation changes its story, there should be an accessible historical record. If a government removes information, communities should be able to preserve what was orgionaly published.

If today’s activists disappear, tomorrow’s activists should still be able to understand what they did. If a research project closes, the work should not simply evaporate. This doesn’t mean believing every archive is automatically true – archives need context, metadata, discussion, provenance and criticism. In fact, that is exactly the point – the answer to bad information is not less information, it is better social infrastructure for comparing, contextualising and challenging information.

There is a tendency to think of technology as neutral plumbing, but the plumbing determines what can flow through it. A centralised system encourages centralised memory – a closed system encourages institutional dependency – a disposable platform encourages disposable history. Were open systems create the possibility of continuity beyond any single organisation. What we do with those #4opens possibilities is a social question, it is why #OMN, #MakingHistory, #Indymediaback, #OGB and the wider #4opens approach belong together. They are different pieces of the same argument.

That is the danger of manufactured ignorance, and why preserving the #openweb is not a technical hobby, it is part of preserving our collective ability to think.

#OMN #MakingHistory #Indymediaback #OGB #4opens #openweb #FOSS #media #archives #knowledge #agnotology #commons

We have a serous problem at the moment in progressive technology