The #deathcult is selling the future as #techshit

We have done this before, we take a useful technology, wrap it in a huge financial story. We centralize it, try and monetize it to turn it into a platform. Then we pretend the social consequences were somehow an accident, it is what we are doing with LLMs. We took an interesting piece of software and started selling it as AI, then AI became AGI, became super-intelligence. This smoke and mirrors feeds the path of building gigantic data centres, burning enormous amounts of energy, raising billions, signing extraordinary infrastructure contracts and concentrating yet more power in a hands of the #nastyfew.

And now we are supposed to believe this is progress, nop, this is the normal #deathcult doing what the #deathcult does – take something useful and turn it into an extraction machine. the mess we need to compost is that “interesting software” doesn’t justify a trillion-dollar mythology – AI will transform everything – AI will replace everyone – AI will solve science – AI will destroy civilization – AI is the next industrial revolution – AI is the singularity – AI is almost AGI – AI is too dangerous to release – AI is progressing faster than anyone expected – AI will change humanity forever. Can you see the smoke and mirrors trick?

Both the utopian story and the apocalypse story sell the same thing, more #AI, more computing, more investment in data centres. More centralization of money for the companies already building the machines of control. Maybe the argument changes, the conclusion doesn’t. Pushing fear is also marketing, this is where the current AI “doom” industry pushes mess. Tell people your machine might destroy the world and you have simultaneously told them your machine is incredibly powerful. This is about grasping for the control of focus, creating scarcity, you have created fear you have created importance.

This mess is about #fashionista capture, its a old story, were you try to created a lever for governments, and the chattering classes, there servants to listen to you, for investors to keep funding you, to build even bigger machines. The apocalypse it self becomes a business model.

That doesn’t mean the risks aren’t real, #AI implementations can create real security, economic, social and political problems. But we need to separate those problems from the mythology. A badly isolated autonomous coding system is an engineering and security failure, it doesn’t mean the machine has “woken up”. An LLM producing confident bullshit isn’t evidence of an emerging artificial mind, it is an LLM producing confident bullshit. And a company repeatedly telling us that its next model might be AGI doesn’t make AGI a meaningful scientific milestone.

Sometimes #KISS is the radical answer, please look at what the machine actually does, not what the marketing department says it might eventually do. We have already seen this mess play through.

Web 1.0.

Web 2.0.

Crypto.

Blockchain.

NFTs.

Metaverse.

Web3.

DAOs.

Now AI.

Every few years Silicon Valley discovers the next thing that will “transform” nothing. The technology changes, were the investment logic barely does. Hype → investment → infrastructure → more hype → bigger investment → pressure to monetize, it is #techchurn.

Except now the machines require gigantic amounts of physical infrastructure and enormous financial commitments. This is the bit that gets hidden behind the shiny chatbot interface, LLM’s isn’t floating in the cloud, it is powered by somebody else’s warehouse, somebody else’s electricity bill and somebody else’s infrastructure. The supposedly weightless future has a very large material footprint.

The #deathcult loves this machine – but something deeper is happening here – the #deathcult has spent fifty years teaching us to worship – growth – efficiency – scale – competition – automation – consumption – financialization – individualism – technology. The AI industry is the last-ist gasp at pushing the mythology – more computing, more scale, more automation, more investment, growth, more efficiency. And because this machine is called “intelligent”, we are encouraged to bow down even further. The machine knows, the machine decides, the machine optimizes, the machine will solve all our knee ach problems. Meanwhile, the #nastyfew who own and direct the machine accumulate power.

Its a part of the #geekproblem were technical people make things work, this has real value, but technical expertise is one tool, not the toolbox. You cannot engineer your way out of social problems, or code trust. You cannot automate democracy. You cannot solve inequality with a better interface. You cannot fix the political economy of capitalism by making the algorithms slightly cleverer. And you certainly cannot hand over social decisions to machines because the humans have become inconvenient to a few nasty people.

This is the same blindness we have been suffering from for decades, if the problem is difficult, make it technical. But then “common sense” technical people become the gatekeepers, becomes the institution, becomes infrastructure. Then fingers in ears, nobody remembers that the original decision was political, as the power disappears into code – #AI becomes just more #dotcons.

To balance this mess, by composting, we need to open our eyes to the history of the #openweb. The original web was built messy on #4opens standards. hyperlinks, RSS to grow small websites were people published, people connected built by people making their own tools. Then Web 2.0 arrived, the UX got better, the platforms got bigger, the money arrived and the web became #dotcons.

Blindly, repeating this same mistake with the dotcons LLM’s in the era of #climatechaos is stupidity. Its a big mistake to be building another generation of giant closed systems of control. At best we should be asking – what would an open AI infrastructure look like? What data? What standards? What ownership? What governance? What accountability? What local control? What human oversight? What right to challenge? What right to rollback? What happens when the system is wrong? Who gets to decide? These are political questions.

That is backwards, technology is a tool for people, and yet here we are. agen we are generating the problem to feed the machine built to solve the problem, peak #techshit. So what do we do? We don’t have time for another #fashionista moral panic please. Not “ban everything”, not “AI will save us”, not “AI will kill us”. Not another fucking blinded conference where everybody agrees that governance is important and then goes home and builds the same centralized paths.

What we do need is to compost is this mess, take the useful technology, the useful research, the open models to build automation that actually gives people more time and power. Knowledge is always useful, but please throw the mythology onto the compost heap, the fake AGI worship, the #nastyfew billionaire saviour stories, the singularity smoke. We cant survive the endless-growth assumptions, of the #closedweb platforms, the surveillance economy, we need to compost this social #techshit.

Composting this is why the #openweb is a tool that still matters, not because openness is fashionable, or that another technical architecture will magically save us. It matters because power has to be distributed somewhere. Open data – Open source – Open standards – Open process – The #4opens. To make this tool work we need to grow the path of human moderation, community trust, distributed infrastructure and shared public knowledge.

The #OMN has practical projects for this path – archives with #makeinghistory – news with #indymediaback and eventually governance with #OGB. A practical #KISS path that understands that we need useful technology, to help communities organize, remember, communicate and act. We need infrastructure that belongs to the people using it, And the community to use this “shovel” to stop worshipping the mythology of the #deathcult machines and start rebuilding the commons.

Yes, this is a first small step in the path we need, not a dogmatic answer to everything. We clearly do not need more blinded technological salvation story’s. What we do need is a practical path to build news, archiving and eventually governance around open flows, trust and participation rather than surveillance, extraction and platform ownership.

The #deathcult has had fifty years, look at the mess, now lift your eyes and let’s start composting.

As the worshipping the #deathcult for the last 50 years becomes harder to hide, the lies are more naked. The lie of endless growth, trickle-down wealth, technological salvation and individual freedom are running into the material reality they created. The mess can no no longer be hidden in the abstract.

#Climatechaos, inequality, war, social fragmentation, political decay. #techshit. The question now is impossible to keep ignoring, not whether the system has problems, it is whether we can see the problems clearly to stop worshipping the mess that created them.

This is where we need social composting. Turn the pile. Expose the assumptions. Keep what is useful. Let the dead ideas rot down. Then grow something alive.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #deathcult #lifecult #techshit #techchurn #dotcons #geekproblem #AI #LLM #commons #compost #KISS

Bunker as a metaphor

There is something revealing about the way powerful people talk about our future, when they imagine crisis, they imagine their escape. A luxury bunker, fortress border, a private city, a rocket or an #AI cloud. A place for the self chosen few to survive while everyone else is left outside to die.

This is the “logic” of the #deathcult we all worship, if the world is breaking, protect yourself rather than repair the world. It should be obverse to us that this is is not really any actual plan for the future, its just more head down worship, an admission that this class have stopped believing in any thing at all.

But, yes they hid this, they still tend to tell a story, the shiny version of this story is always the same, out of catastrophe comes a golden city, the old world burns, the rubble is cleared, and the self selecting few build something beautiful on top of it.

We have heard this story for thousands of years, apocalypse, judgement, Armageddon, collapse, then purification for paradise for the few survivors. The modern retelling simply replaces heaven with a billionaire bunker, an exclusive smart city, an AI utopia or a colony on Mars, different technology, same path.

On this #mainstreaming path some people, who we call the #nastyfew in the #OMN hashtag story, deserve to survive the mess they created. But what is not told in this simply story is that the bunker is hard right politics – #climatechaos, pandemics, resource conflicts, economic insecurity and technological disruption are real problems. But there are two very different ways to respond to systemic crisis.

One response is – How do we protect everyone and make the system more resilient?

The other is – How do I make sure I am on the inside when it collapses?

The second path is not surprisingly increasingly visible in #nastyfew billionaire culture, authoritarian politics and in the #dotcons industry we all spend way to much time inside.

in this modern story, the bunker is not just a building underground, it is a political metaphor, fortress borders are bunkers, private security is a bunker, gated communities are bunkers, #closedweb platforms are bunkers. What matters for us in #FOSS is monopolized infrastructure is a bunker. Even the fantasy of escaping humanity through #AI or space is another bunker, an attempt to leave the shared social and ecological world rather than compost our dysfunctional relationship with it.

This path is the opposite of the #openweb,it is were the #deathcult turns fear into control. The right-wing answer to social crisis is always built around fear – Fear of outsiders, fear of immigrants, fear of social change, fear of losing status, fear of disorder, fear of the future. But, then comes the golden lie, the promise, we will protect you, but this protection soon becomes control. The anger that should be directed toward concentrated wealth and political power gets redirected sideways and downwards toward other ordinary people.

The poor become the problem, migrants become the problem, minorities become the problem, the left becomes the problem. The messy complexity of society is reduced to enemies, it is an old political trick that the #blinded technological #closedweb makes much more powerful. Today’s authoritarian politics doesn’t arrive wearing an old-fashioned uniform. the phone in our pocket, influencers, algorithms, targeted advertising, surveillance systems, AI-generated propaganda and permanently monetised outrage. The infrastructure of the #dotcons is a bunker.

But what we focus on the #OMN path is there is alternative, this alternative isn’t pretending that everything is fine, not another shiny utopia, and it certainly isn’t waiting for some perfect political party, perfect technology or perfect leader to save us. The alternative is much more boring – Build things that work, trust, commons, local resilience. Create media systems where communities can see and understand what is happening. Focus more on building technologies that people can actually control by #KISS keeping the infrastructure understandable so participation is possible. Create spaces where people can disagree without immediately becoming enemies. That sounds much less exciting than an AI god or a $50 million survival bunker, good, what we need to do as the #DIY grassroots is move from bunkers to bridges

The important question is not, who gets into the bunker? The question is, what are we building outside it? Because humans have already built an enormous number of bunkers, political bunkers, economic bunkers, cultural bunkers, technological bunkers, information bunkers. We don’t need more, we need bridges, and bridges are fundamentally different from bunkers.

A bunker protects something by excluding people, a bridge creates value by connecting people. That is the deeper #openweb possibility – not a technological escape from society, but technology that helps society organize itself. Not centralized control, but distributed participation, not ownership of everything, but stewardship of shared resources, not fear as the organizing principle, but trust. Not “how do I survive when everything collapses?” but “How do we make collapse less likely, and life better, together?”

Its about composting the apocalypse – the world really is messy, but fear doesn’t have to become a bunker, it can become a reason to organize. This is where social composting matters, take the accumulated waste of the last decades — #neoliberalism, authoritarianism, #techshit, platform capitalism, political tribalism, broken institutions and the endless fear machine. Don’t pretend it isn’t there, don’t worship it or spend your entire life fighting it head-on. Compost it, break it down, learn from it, keep what is useful, let the dead parts become soil to then grow something different.

The #deathcult says the future belongs to the #nastyfew who can buy their way out, the #lifecult says the future belongs to those who can build relationships strong enough to stay. The choice isn’t really between apocalypse and utopia, it is between bunkering down or building commons. The planet doesn’t need another billionaire bunker, it needs people willing to pick up shovels.

A #mainstreaming view of this

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #lifecult #deathcult #dotcons #socialcomposting #KISS

The #openweb is #4opens, where dues this place the current #AI path?

To understand and walk this, lets look at an example of the mess we need to compost – by lifting the lid on the current #AI noise. The problem, isn’t simply whether #AI is intelligent; it is who controls the infrastructure, what incentives drive it, and whether technology serves people or turns people into components of the machine. When can see this we might be able to see, thus act on the #OMN trajectory: technology → power → participation → open infrastructure → commons, let try and get past the #fashionista mess of whether #AI is or isn’t “really intelligent.” as this is a lot of #mainstreaming noise.

AI is going to take all our jobs.
AI is going to transform everything.
AI is going to become conscious.
AI is going to kill us.
AI is going to save us.

Some of these claims might be true, some are noise and others certainly nonsense. The more useful questions are simpler – Who controls the technology, what are they trying to achieve, and who gets to decide how it is used? This is where the #OMN view of technology starts, don’t believe the hype – but don’t ignore the technology.

One of the problems we need to mediate, is, we should be careful about criticizing AI by repeating the claims made by the #dotcons (AI companies). If a company tells us its system is basically becoming a digital human, and we respond by saying “yes, but this digital human is dangerous”, we have already accepted their framing, we are helping improve there profits and power by repeating there story.

The same thing happens with the last generation of #dotcons, #Facebook told us its algorithm understands us, #Google tells us its systems are intelligent, #AI companies tell us their models are reasoning. Most of this is smoke and mirrors that we should be ignoring if we actually wont to see anything real.

This next #dotcons #AI boom involves enormous amounts of investment in computing infrastructure, data centres, chips and energy. The companies involved are under pressure to keep growing because the financial system only rewards growth. This produces a dangerous feedback loop, a company needs to keep growing as investors expect growth, the company therefore needs a new story about future growth, the technology becomes that story. The investment creates infrastructure, the infrastructure creates pressure to find uses for it, the uses become evidence that the technology is inevitable. Then more investment follows, it isn’t only a conspiracy, it is a #KISS system of incentives.

The better approach for us is to look underneath the noise. Q. What does the system actually do? What infrastructure does it require? Who pays for it? Who owns it? Who benefits? What happens when it fails? What happens to the workers? What happens to the users? What happens to the communities around it? All are more interesting than arguing about whether a snake oil chatbot is “really thinking”.

And this is an important #OMN lesson – technology does not exist outside society – the code is one layer, underneath the code are ownership, money, labour, institutions, energy, law, culture and power, when we get distracted and ignore those lower layers we don’t understand the technology at all. When this happens the mess we constantly have to compost is that this pushing of #techchurn isn’t innovation. We’ve seen this before, #web02 was going to transform everything, then crypto, NFTs. Then the metaverse, and then whatever the next shiny thing was.

Each wave arrived with claims about revolutionary transformation, yes some of the technologies were useful, but the investment system doesn’t reward usefulness, it rewards growth stories. This produces #techchurn, endless technological change driven partly by the need to find the next thing to invest in, rather than by any clearly identified social need. This is not new, we have been pushing this kinda mess since the industrial revolution.

So, how can we compost this mainstreaming mess, one path we tried and it kinda worked in the 20 century was socialism, or in the western guise social democracy. This is a different politics from simply saying “technology bad”. That older question takes us directly into #4opens territory were there is another mythology we need to challenge – Markets don’t produce good technology, the idea that if a technology is useful, the market will automatically discover the best version of it. History doesn’t support this well, this is why the #openweb matters. A genuinely open network gives people alternative paths. Open standards reduce #dotcons lock-in. Open source makes systems modifiable. Open data makes information reusable. Open process makes power visible.

The fourth one of these is especially important, so that the social consequences of technology aren’t hidden inside the code. We can find them hidden inside the process, who funded the project? Who decided the priorities? Who was consulted? Who wasn’t? Who owns the infrastructure? Who gets to change it? Who carries the social and ecological risk? Who gets the benefit? If those questions aren’t visible, the technology is normally reproducing the same old power structures, we need to compost.

This mess is not only to be found in technological we can use the #4opens to look and judge social paths. The same thing happens with markets, with bureaucracies, algorithms. The system follows its incentives, consequences emerge from the interaction between the system and the world. This is the reason #KISS matters, don’t invent unnecessary mythology when a simpler explanation works.

Open source is a social technology, one of the strengths of #FOSS is that people can inspect the system. That doesn’t magically make it secure, but it creates a culture in which claims can be challenged, problems exposed and were people can build alternatives. The current #mainstreaming path is not this, its repeating trust us:

Trust the company.

Trust the algorithm.

Trust the secret model.

Trust the security team.

Trust the executives.

Trust the experts.

Trust the investor story.

That is the kind of technological hierarchy that the native #openweb paths needs to challenging with a shovel. Native paths, need native technologies, with community participation, not #dotcons or #geekproblem technologies of obedience. Our path is about composting the layer of abstraction between people and reality – technology can make people more capable or it can make people more manageable, this simply understanding is what makes #OMN a shovel.

The #OMN isn’t trying to build another AI-powered social media platform or creating a better algorithm, it isn’t trying to replace one technological priesthood with another, the #OMN is much more basic.

News.
Archiving.
And eventually, down the road, governance.

The idea is to build infrastructure where people participate in the flows of information rather than being only consumers. Events come into the network – People and communities add context – Stories connect and organize those events – Objects move between nodes – Metadata gets added and corrected – Different communities can see different things – Useful information can spread – Useless information is allowed to decay.

And, nobody has to maintain one giant master database containing the “correct” version of reality. This is a what we call a #datasoup, messy, living, federated information environment. And that mess isn’t weakness, it becomes the very resilience we need. Distributed systems need distributed understanding.

The #OMN path is deliberately different from the dominant AI model, were the dominant model says: collect everything → centralize it → train the model → produce the answer. The #OMN is closer to: collect from many places → connect → tag → contextualize → challenge → correct → archive → feed back into the network.

As I keep saying, this is not an attempt to create a perfect database, it is an attempt to create flows of trust. The network flows become the process of understanding. That is why federation matters, open process matters, why human moderation matters. It is why disagreement matters, and why we don’t need another central algorithm deciding what everybody should see.

In our current economics: People are inputs, workers are costs. Communities become markets. Attention becomes a resource. Knowledge becomes training data. Care becomes an inefficiency. That should reveal to you the common sense #deathcult mess we need to compost. That is the #OMN path, technology is a tool, the question that matters is who holds it, who maintains it, who benefits from it, and what kind of society it helps us to build.

Care is missing in the current mess, in a better world, a worker cares about the person using the product, a journalist cares whether the information is true, a nurse cares whether the patient gets better, a programmer cares whether the software actually works, a community cares whether its infrastructure remains useful after the funding runs out. This is difficult to understand for only automated paths because care isn’t an optimization problem, it is a social relationship.

The future doesn’t need more technological priests, it needs people able to pick up the tools, understand how they work, challenge the assumptions behind them and use them together.

That is the #openweb path, that is #4opens.

A more progressive liberal view of this same #AI mess

#OMN #openweb #4opens #FOSS #AI #automation #techchurn #techshit #dotcons #geekproblem #commons #KISS

People moved right becouse the #deathcult pushing of insecurity and distrust has been uncomposted for 50 years

Currently we are to stuck in the liberal response to the current hard rightward shift, as they treat it like a fixed demographic fact. “Those people won’t move.” “Those voters are lost.” “Reform has captured them.” then comes more polling, messaging, focus groups, electoral strategy and process. This is the #geekproblem applied to blinded #fashernist liberal politics: treating a living social system like a technical problem that can be managed from above. But people don’t live inside polling data, they live in communities, institutions, workplaces, families, streets, media systems and increasingly broken #dotcons digital spaces.

And when this #mainstreaming stops giving people security, meaning or trust, something will fill the gap. If government doesn’t deliver, people look elsewhere, institutions aren’t trusted, people look for identity, communities are fragmented, people look for tribes. If #mainstreaming politics can’t offer a believable future, people reach for something that feels solid now. That is why sectarian identity becomes attractive in an age of inchoate policy, captured institutions and bad-faith politics.

At least identity feels tangible, I know who I am, who they are, and I know who is to blame. It is a crude form of social infrastructure, but it is still infrastructure. And this is where the liberal framing goes wrong, the “rightward shift” isn’t some mysterious virus that has infected society, it is a feeding on the very probels our 40 years of worshiping a neo-liberal #deathcult has produced, on broken social trust, insecurity, precarity, housing insecurity, broken public services and loss of community that leads directly to political powerlessness.

And the constant experience of being told that everything is improving while your lived experience says otherwise. You don’t compost that with better messaging, you don’t shoval it with another consultation, you don’t defeat it by telling people they are stupid, racist, backward or “misinformed”. You certainly don’t challange it by becoming better at managing the same broken system.

You change the conditions that produce the politics, this is where the #OMN way of thinking matters. Start with the social infrastructure, build trust, participation to grow commons with space for paths where people see the evidence, challenge it, add context and correct mistakes. Build spaces where people do things together rather than simply consuming politics through algorithmic feeds.

That is how trust grows, from paths where the #4opens is more than a technical checklist. Because open process lets people see how power actually works, it turns politics from something done to people into something people can participate in. Communities become visible without first getting permission from the #mainstreaming machine. Where trust is something built through participation rather than handed down by an authority. Where disagreement isn’t automatically treated as failure. Where mistakes can be corrected rather than silently buried. Where history isn’t constantly erased by the next algorithmic cycle.

You don’t solve the rightward shift by endlessly talking about the rightward shift, you rebalence the social conditions underneath it. The right-wing understands something that much of the liberal centre has forgotten – people need belonging. The nasty mess we currently need to compost is allowing belonging to grow from fear, exclusion and enemies. Make people safer, communities stronger, open up space were people can build together.

Because trust is built through doing things together – that is the native #openweb path. We need to compost what the right feeds on: division, so the alternative has to grow from trust. That’s not electoral strategy, its #KISS growing social infrastructure.

The problem isn’t that humans are stupid, maybe its more that we’re just good at organising stupidity. The planet isn’t dying because it hates us, the planet will be fine. It’s the humans who are having the difficult bit, the economic system says: BUY MORE SHIT. Religion says: TRUST THE INVISIBLE AUTHORITY. Politics says: PICK A TEAM. The #dotcons say: KEEP SCROLLING. And the #geekproblem says: DON’T WORRY, WE CAN ENGINEER OUR WAY OUT OF IT.

We’ve pushed a #nastyfew class to avoid any responsibility, and then people on there knes eyes closed wonder why nothing changes. Maybe the useful position is to step back from the social and ecoloical mess long enough to actually we are creating it. Not abandon people, not give up on society, but stop pretending the existing path is working.

The #OMN starts from that uncomfortable place. News. Memory. Trust. Participation. Eventually governance. Not another shiny platform, another central authority. A bit of infrastructure for people to see what is happening, connect it, challenge it, remember it and build something better together.

The planet doesn’t need saving from humans, humans need saving from the #deathcults we so easely worship. And maybe the first step is getting off our knes opening our eyes and looking around at the mess we need to compost.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #FOSS #dotcons #geekproblem #deathcult #KISS

Outreaching, what is the #OMN?

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is “anything in, anything out” network operating through a mediated trust, designed to handle a diverse range of content, data and interactions while leaving communities with the power to decide what they do with that data.

People can also choose their own level of engagement. You can be an active participant – publishing, tagging, moderating, connecting and contributing – or a more passive consumer, following trusted flows of information. The network does not need everyone to participate in the same way.

At its simplest, the #OMN is a “data soup” of tagged data objects flowing through channels, mediated by trust, rather than assuming that everything entering the network is equally valuable, useful or trustworthy, the network allows trust relationships to shape how data moves and how it is consumed.

This creates a different model of media consumption, with no central algorithm deciding what everyone sees, people and communities navigate the data soup through their own relationships, tags, channels and trust networks.

The #OMN is part of what we describe as Web 1.5 were #web01 had many of the things we now need back: openness, decentralisation, interoperability, linking, publishing and the ability for people to build their own spaces. #Web02 took much of that openness and wrapped it in dramatically better user interfaces. That was useful – people quite reasonably liked the easier ways of sharing, communicating and publishing. The problem was what happened next. The platforms became the infrastructure, this infrastructure was privately owned, communities became users, data became a commodity, social relationships became network effects. The #openweb was transformed turned into the #dotcons.

This is the mess we need to compost #Web15 is not about going backwards to Web 1.0. It is about taking the openness and decentralisation of Web 1.0, keeping the useful UX lessons of Web 2.0, and rebuilding the underlying infrastructure as an open, federated commons. That is the path we have taken the first steps on in the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub.

It’s the space the #OMN is working in – a data soup – the metaphor matters, not creating one perfect, clean, central database containing the definitive version of everything. Instead, tagged data objects to flows through networks. Objects can be copied, edited, tagged, linked, filtered, challenged, archived and passed between different communities. Different nodes carry different parts of the soup, some information will be useful in one context and apparently useless in another, that is OK.

The network is deliberately lossy and redundant, information does not have to be complete or perfectly synchronised everywhere, multiple copies and versions can exist, context is added as data flows. Something that appears irrelevant today may become important tomorrow – this is closer to how knowledge actually works than the fantasy of one perfect database.

The #geekproblem tends to see this redundancy, uncertainty and lossy data as technical failures that need to be eliminated. The #OMN sees them as characteristics of a living information network that need to be managed through trust and participation. Flows of trust – not simply the data, it is the flows of trust around the data. Trust becomes part of the network architecture, when people and communities decide which sources, objects, tag, channels and relationships they trust.

That trust can change over time, you don’t have to trust everything, you don’t even have to participate fully. You can follow particular people, communities or channels because you trust them, while ignoring other parts of the network. Someone else can make entirely different choices. This means there is no single central algorithm to decide what is important for everyone, instead, many smaller trust relationships create many overlapping flows through the #datasoup.

Those flows form communities and because they are federated, communities remain distinct while still sharing information and infrastructure. Trust instead of the algorithm is the differences between the #OMN and the #dotcons. The #dotcons operate by extracting social relationships into centralised systems, then using opaque algorithms to decide what people see. The #OMN starts from almost the opposite assumption: people and communities should have more control over the flows they participate in, the context and community relationships do more of the work.

This does not make the network magically free of disagreement, misinformation or bad behaviour. Quite the opposite, it makes those things visible and gives communities tools to respond to them. That is where mediation, moderation, tagging, rollback and open process become important. The network should make it possible for communities to see how things work, participate in decisions, challenge mistakes and build their own projects.

The aim is to take existing tools, protocols and technologies and embed practical federated media/news networks with a good user interface into these existing native #openweb flows. That is where the interesting part begins, real value is not the database, the protocol or the interface, it is the flows that emerge between people, communities, media objects and networks.

Those flows allow communities to form around shared interests, shared histories and shared trust without requiring everyone to belong to the same organisation or use the same interface. A network, not a platform, is better understood as commons infrastructure, rather than another social-media platform.

We build basic infrastructure and lets communities decide what they want to do with it, that is Web 1.5, not a nostalgic return to the old web, not another version of Web 2.0 – an #openweb reboot – using the best of what came before, leaving the centralised ownership model behind, and building the next layer around federation, trust, participation and the commons.

#OMN #Web15 #openweb #4opens #FOSS #commons #fediverse #KISS #geekproblem #dotcons

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 #4opens. 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 #4opens #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 #4opens #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 #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.

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 #4opens 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.

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

Trust and the trustless mess

One of the useful arguments in the debate around decentralisation, blockchain and the #openweb is also one of the simplest – We do not actually live in a trustless world, we live in a world built on different kinds of trust. This is why the Fediverse worked because it was #4opens with a good #UI.

The problem it had to overcome and still does is that much of #geekproblem pushing technology is obsessed with trying to eliminate trust rather than understanding how trust works. The idea of the “trustless” technology sounds attractive. If we cannot trust governments, corporations, banks, platforms, administrators or even other people, why not build digital systems where nobody needs to trust anybody?

This is a simple mindset, instead of trusting a person, trust the mathematics, instead of trusting an institution, trust the protocol. Instead of trusting a moderator, trust the code. Instead of trusting a community, trust the ledger. It sounds wonderfully clean, but there is a problem – you cannot eliminate trust, the social truth is you can only move it somewhere else.

A #blockchain can make it difficult to alter records after they have been entered, but it cannot magically make the information entered into the system true. Someone still has to enter the information, someone has to write the software, someone has to maintain the infrastructure, someone has to interpret the results and someone has to decide what happens when reality doesn’t fit the rules. That distinction, people, is important for thinking about the future of the #openweb as the path to trustless is usually just displaced trust.

Imagine buying a digital object through a “trustless” smart contract. The theory says that you don’t need to trust the seller. The contract automatically enforces the transaction. But do you trust the person who wrote the smart contract? That the code does what you think it does? Do you understand the code well enough to audit it? Do you trust the software running on your computer? Do you trust that the thing described by the contract is actually the thing you want? Suddenly, the system isn’t trustless in any way.

On this blinded pushed #geekproblem path, you are exchanging trust in people and community for trust in software, tech infrastructure and your own technical ability. A tiny number of people are grasping for power, in this it is a “grassroots” mirroring of the current #dotcons mess. Supposedly trustless transactions always fall back on reputation, previous experience, known counterparties or the assumption that somebody will behave fairly.

And this isn’t necessarily a failure, it is a recognition of how society actually works, trust is basic infrastructure. We think of trust as something soft and personal, a handshake, reputation, knowing somebody. Being part of a community, a history with an organisation. But trust is actually a form of core social infrastructure.

When you buy something from a local shop, you don’t individually audit every component of the business. You trust the shopkeeper, the reputation of the shop, the legal framework. You trust food standards, trust that if something goes badly wrong, there are mechanisms for dealing with it. None of this means that the shop is perfectly trustworthy, it means that layers of “soft” trust, accountability and social mechanisms make cooperation possible.

The same thing happens online, we trust websites, moderators, administrators, developers. We trust maintainers, communities. They all have reputations, the interesting question here isn’t – how do we eliminate trust? It is, how do we build better systems of trust? The #geekproblem problem of pretending that trust doesn’t exist, is a fantasy of the trustless system that makes things less democratic. If trust is made invisible inside code, people lose sight of where power shapes process and actually sits. So replacing a human decision with a technical decision doesn’t remove politics, it hardens and hides it by simply hiding politics inside infrastructure.

The #geekproblem isn’t about technical people being bad or that technical knowledge isn’t relevant. Quite the opposite, complex systems need technical knowledge. The current problem comes when technical expertise becomes a substitute for social and political accountability. The system says, “The code says so.” But somebody decided what the code should say, decided what the code should not say – that is governance.

This is where the #4opens become useful.

Open Data.
Open Source.
Open Standards.
Open Process.

The point of this simple clarification of #FOSS is to make the system trustworthy enough to participate in and transparent enough that people can understand how that trust is produced. Open source allows people to inspect and modify the software. Open standards allow different systems to communicate. Open data allows information to be examined and reused. Open process makes decision-making visible. They together make trust more accountable, a much healthier goal.

On this current broken path, some people assume that decentralisation means removing trusted intermediaries. But decentralisation does not mean removing relationships, it means distributing relationships and accountability. Instead of one corporation controlling everything, you have many independent communities. Instead of one giant moderation department, you have distributed moderation, one platform deciding the rules, instead communities establish their own rules while communicating through shared standards. Instead of one central archive, many organisations hold copies and contribute metadata flows.

That is not in any way trustless, it is distributed trust, and distributed trust is much closer to how healthy communities actually operate. Reputation matters, people have always used reputation to decide whom to trust. You recommend a builder because someone you know had good experience with them, choose a restaurant because friends recommend it. You work with someone because they have a history of doing good work, participate in a community because you know the people involved.

An example of this #geekproblem in tech the last 20 years of #blockchain projects, is that they have to recreate reputation systems, off chain, to grow trusted parties because people need them to function. This shouldn’t surprise us, reputation is accumulated social knowledge, a record of relationships, it is one of the ways communities remember.

And that common sense is something that technology should help communities develop rather than trying to replace with abstract technical mechanism. This is the danger of “code is law” a seductive idea, if the rules are encoded into software, nobody can arbitrarily change them. But real life doesn’t work like software, people make mistakes, circumstances change. Sometimes the rules themselves are wrong.

A genuinely sustainable social system needs the ability to interpret, moderate, appeal, correct and change, this requires people, relationships and basic governance. It requires trust, were a completely rigid system may be technically predictable while being socially disastrous. Trust needs accountability, this is particularly important for grassroots technology. When we build alternatives to the #dotcons, we shouldn’t simply recreate their power structures with different software. We need to ask:

Who can make decisions?

Who can see what is happening?

Who can challenge a decision?

Who can correct mistakes?

Who can leave?

Who can fork the system?

Who can moderate?

Who controls the infrastructure?

Who owns the data?

These are trust questions, a trustworthy system isn’t one where nobody has power, it is one where power is visible, distributed and accountable. Trust isn’t blind faith, yes, there is a danger in romanticising trust, trust doesn’t mean blindly believing people. Good trust is built through evidence.

You trust somebody because you have a relationship with them.

You trust an organisation because it has demonstrated competence.

You trust a process because you can see how it works.

You trust a community because people hold each other accountable.

You trust software because it is open, tested and maintained.

You trust a system because there are ways to challenge it when it fails.

So the opposite of “trustless” isn’t “blind trust”, it is earned, observable, and accountable. This gives us a useful direction for the current #openweb reboot. It points to the mess we need to compost, we don’t need to recreate the fantasy of an entirely trustless internet. The commercial internet already tried extreme centralised trust – for 20 years the #dotcons became trusted intermediaries for almost everything, owning the infrastructure, controlling the algorithms, identity, data, moderation. They controlled visibility, they still control the economic relationship with users. That isn’t trustless, it is concentrated trust and concentrated power.

Trust is the missing layer, there is a tendency in narrow #geekproblem paths to think in terms of infrastructure first. Servers, protocols, APIs, encryption, algorithms. But underneath all of these sits a social question – why should anyone trust this system? And the answer cannot simply be “Because the code works.” as a system can work perfectly and still be socially terrible. The important question is whether the technology helps people create relationships that are transparent, accountable, resilient and capable of self-correction. That is a much bigger challenge than creating a trustless protocol, but it is also much more useful.

To build on a different path, we need networks where communities can trust their own infrastructure. We are already doing this on the #Fediverse, building on #ActivityPub standard that allow communities to communicate. Moderation systems where decisions are kind of visible and accountable. What is lacking is building governance that people can participate in, this is where projects such as #OMN and #OGB become interesting. There goal isn’t to make human relationships unnecessary, it is to build technical infrastructure that supports better human relationships.

From trustless to trustworthy, means accepting that trust is unavoidable and then making trust visible and accountable. It means combining open standards with open governance, decentralisation with community and recognising that humans aren’t bugs in the system – humans are the system.

Technology should therefore not be designed around the fantasy that people are unreliable components that need to be eliminated. It should be designed around the reality that people cooperate through relationships, reputation, shared history, norms, institutions and accountability. The #KISS task of the #openweb is not to eliminate these things, it is to build better versions of them, real alternative to the #dotcons – not more dead-end trustless technology.

The #OMN path is distributed trust, supported by open technology and democratic governance. And perhaps a more radical idea – rather than trying to remove trust from society, we should get much better at building it, sharing it and making it accountable #KISS.

#Trust #Trustless #OpenWeb #OMN #OGB #4opens #FOSS #Commons #Fediverse #Decentralisation #Governance #Democracy #Technology #Community