For the social change we need

For the social change we need to survive as a society and flourish as a species we need to take some time to go back to basics

All economic systems are based a unspoken idea of what it is to be human. To be clear, if you do not have an understanding of this you have little understanding of anything that matters in the era of #XR

Let’s look back to early Christianity to highlight this idea.

* The Old Testament is based on a negative view of humanity, greed, selfishness and gluttony are the motivations that god is controlling by forcing us to bow down to his authority.

* The New Testament is based on love and common humane society.

* Capitalism is based on greed and the worst parts of human nature

* Socialism is based on altruism and the best parts of human nature

As you can see, the divide between these different ideology’s goes back a long way and likely to the dawn of human history.

These simple groupings live within supposedly sister ideology’s, think for example of how the horizontal’ists and the vertical’ists in progressive movements represent the different views.

When we start to understand this, you can use this clear difference to make judgments on what has value and what is destructive in our current society.

#deathcult

#geekproblem

#encryptionists 

#stupidindividualism

#openweb

#OMN

The only question that matters is the balance between trust and fear is a useful way of looking at this.

If you are interested in technology and society

Open/closed, a look at the issues in tech

The idea of total control manifested in the master/slave relationship of computers and programmers is a core of geek culture.

  • Open is about attempting to share power in society.
  • Closed is about attempting to block social power.

The #geekproblem at root in our society is about liberalism excepting the division of the state and the citizen, it’s about the liberal ideal of individualism “the is no such thing as society only individuals and there family” though in the case of the #geekproblem it’s just the individual and not so much the family. Our current #geekproblem is a child of Thatcher and Reagan and the #neoliberalism they embedded into our social minds.

It’s interesting to see that the #dotcons (the right) have overcome this #geekproblem and enslaved code, programmers and the network to the control of the capital (and the state) and it’s sad that the left are children in this game.

A way out of this mess is to clearly reject the “closed” ideas in tech and instead re-embrace “open”. Thus unblocking the social flow, what we do with this flow (dangerous stuff) is up to us. We can recognise the danger yes, but to balance that we MUST recognise the disaster we are in now.

“Closed” feeds and re-enforce disaster and in NO WAY helps society to move from this mess #XR

We need flow, not blocking.

It’s simple.

OMN questions

Need help with this conversation:

Q. trying to prod some movement outa people here in Berlin its a full time job. people are addicted to pointless. Do you think this is to silly b

A. As an engineer this is too woolly to understand. We work with simple unambiguous user stories. In the format “As a … I can do … So that …” Then it is easy to check the feature meets the story. Anything else is just noise. You start with the big stories then add more details to additional stories.

Q. yep trying to express anacky as a coding project… it tends to go round in circles a lot… phwww… its hard to code nobody being in control as that is the definition of computers and why geeks like them… how to express this…

A. For example “As a community owner I can tag one of my users as a spammer so their output is tagged as spam and can be ignored by others.

Q. Of course it’s not nobody being in control, its groups and commnertys. The control is not a part of the code as much as possible.

A. Or: as a community owner I can tag another community as unmanaged spammers so all their out can be ignored

Q. yep would kinda work like that, more likely the user would drop the feed or put the feed on moderation? the tagging would be redirecting the data?
so only tag if you find some value.

A. You could easily adjust the story to say that
Then you have no ambiguity. Which can kill a project.

Q. OK am back to boat in a bit we are back to being in the middle of the bay accessible by rowing. Going to try and sit down tomorrow and talk to an intelligent guy about this and try and map it out tommorow.

What is the OMN

The #OMN its a anything in and anything out – mediated by trust database/network.

It’s up to “commernerty” what they do with this and up to the individuals what commerty they choose or if a bit geeky can be an individual. it’s just soup (data soup) of course my project is to build a media/news network out of this other people can build other things #OMN

The data soup is fed by folsonmeny flows of tagged data objects mediated by trust. The consumption is based on the same. All with a nice UI

Lossy, redundancy, trust are features, the #geekproblem seeing these as problems needs to be overcome.

Being based on the am looking at Odata as the rest API core https://www.progress.com/blogs/odata-faqs-why-should-rest-api-developers-use-odata as this is an outgrouth of #atompub and #RSS and comes from a long process of open development #indymedia What do you think?

The exciting bits are the “flows of trust” bulding commertys, the tech and code are just tools.

* Nothing new

* All #4opens

* Good UI

 

All code is ideology manifested

Q. Some interesting things, mostly the collaborative pad. As I said some time back, this is how I would (obviously) try running this effort – pads not threads.

In terms of general direction, the activitypub etc doesn’t inspire me in terms of rethinking media. I will continue my #postmedia project, which has quite different axioms, and release when ready.

In general I don’t see the linked info neither as theoretically(specs) nor practically(code) strong

A. Diversity of strategy is a good thing but the #geekproblem of everyone doing there own thing is a bad thing – riding the contradictions 🙂

* What’s your argument against activertypub exactly?

* What do you think of rebooting the indymedia project?

One thing I can say the desire to be king is pointless when it fails and dangerous when it rarely succeeds. If this is a main motivation then no good humain outcome is possible. Basic st

A. What is a #postmedia project? it sounds like a alt-right libatrean, which is simply incompatible with social ?

linked info? is being done without coding – it’s a folksonomy. A trust based social project not a technological project. It’s not there on purpose, which is obviously why you cannot find it 🙂

The social nature of the project. Because there is no code as we are simply in every case repurposing existing codebases, existing social relations and existing processes.

it’s an interesting subject.

I am trying to get coders to stop doing pointless/dangerous things with their skills and time. This sums up why i talk a lot about the #geekproblem

* pointless, that’s just about everything they do have always done.

* dangurus, that’s when they push #dotcons and make it work.

Of course this is more complex than it looks, how do you define “useful” we can wank ideology at this point.

Step over to the openweb if they wont to keep in touch

When activisty types of people ansear the #openweb posts on facebook with pessimism then trolling. I am assuming they are talking about the last 10 years of the #encryptionists and in this I agree with them it was a wasted 10 years. But over the last few years we have had a #openweb reboot my question in the end is have they tried that at all? if its more trolling I am starting to mute them as the is little value left in #failbook they can of course step over to the openweb if they wont to keep in touch

Not scaling is a feature not a problem in federated networks

With the shift from silos to federation for our core social infrastructure, we need to rethink the values embedded in the technology we use. The first one to look at is scaling, the whole technical stack/ programming thinking is currently based on this value if you want a definition of a #dotcons, it’s this, it scales to dominate and control the market. With federation, the server software, not scaling, is a needed feature to spread the nodes as widely and richly as possible. Yes the network itself needs to scale, but the individual nodes in the network not scaling is an essential feature not a problem to be overcome. This is counterintuitive to most of our current geek thinking.

A federated network is first a community and secondly a software network designed to nurture this community. If the software dominates and controls the social, you break the federation and end up in the place you are trying to leave, a silo.

Not scaling is a feature, not a problem, in federated networks.

#OMN a seed is planted

On the #OMN #indymedia reboot over this winter I planted a seed in the ground, the Berlin community watered it, waiting for it to sprout, then needs nurturing past the seedling stage to a healthy plant, the first step to healthy media forist.

If you are interested in a flourishing alt-media garden get involved in #OMN plant care, till the world you would like to see, water your dreams

http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/2020/02/16/a-message-for-my-dotcons-frends/

 

A message for my #dotcons frends

When people deny the history of reposabilerty then they deny reality and join the “post truth world” of Trump and Boris.

The majority of my #failbook friends are both sad and bad on this subject as they don’t remember the times they argued that the #dotcons were not evil and cat memes were the right thing to do as the world heated up and is now catching fire.

A lot of the more tech minded run workshops on campining on #dotcons as our ones healthy #openweb tools were ripped apart by our home grown #geekproblem

You guys need to get busy with spades to compost the shit you spread around in the digital world. And spreading more shit just makes the alt more smelly and uninviteing.

I put up with years of trolling on this subject. it’s a good time to balance this and for the first time in a while do something useful. At some point you have to support a real grassroots media project.

https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia

Hope you understand that this is not a #geekproblem project and not pushing #fashernistas agenders and a clear move away from #failbook and the #dotcons in general #OMN

Who is the troll?

On Facebook, you guys all bought into this disaster. Arguing it was the best thing to do for outreach media and staying in touch with friends and family. You got angry at people who told you this was dangerous and would fail you as individuals and fail us all as a society. You my friends on #failbook created this mess.

The start of excepting you are in a abusive relationship is to publicly admit this and publicly stepaway from this mess to more healthy relationships #OMN

History is a circal. The last election we had the opportunity to move away to the best of the 20th century. We instead choose the worset and our embrace of the #dotcons is core to this fail.
 
 
This is a lot of trolling going on in #failbook and most do not see themselves as trolls.
The is morality then the is basic common sense (which is a product of ideology/lived experience) people tend to mix them up.
Am thinking most people will see this as the first thus more trolling will happen. WHO IS THE TROLL is an intresting question at this point.
This is a disater as Failbook and Google are in a race to get you to click on cat memes to acheve this outcome
Please dont forget that on #failbook we (the clective we) created this mess nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion by doing exacly what you wont to do now, if we were on a #dotcons (click)
Its basic stuff.

OMN is a trust based project

The idea is to use human moderation flows as a feature to spread federation wider. Each flow has to first be created then is either trusted – ie they are going to keep posting good stuff or moderated that sometimes they post good stuff.

So the system only scales if human beings reach out to each other to build trust links. If everything stays on moderation then the workload soon becomes unmanageable or the site is overrun by irelevance or spam. In both cases the site sesses to be useful. This is a core feature of the network to push human scale federated trust communities.

The only way to get a useful site is to build a big healthy community (with wide groups of admins and moderators) or a small focus trust group based on quality choice of connections. Both are good outcomes, and what the #OMN is about building.

If we build in automation then we will have lots of middling quality sites that are borderline useful. A signal to noise issue. There will be less motivation to spesherlise and the network will likely fail because of this.

Less is more is a core of the project. The #geekproblem is the desire to improve the network with better tools

Spam and low quality posts have to find a way to flow into the network and when they are in they need to then flow to the quality parts of the network.

The problem we face is that there might not be any sites allowing new content in… so this will lead to the need to set up more outlying sites and spread the network wider and narrow the focus of these new sites to keep admin down, spreading the network wider and narrowing the focus etc.

You see an organic growth of base sites narrow/local/subject to middle sites regional/topic to top sites outreach/mainstreaming.

The bottom sites feedup to the top sites both by quality tags subject feeds and aggregation editorial articles. In both cases these directly link back to the bottom content sites.

The traditional value pyramid is reversed – the top sites are easey to setup and admin but hard to add value to. The middle sites are the core of the project sifting and adding value vier aggregation. All the true value lies at the base were the publishing happens

https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia