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

The blocking happens when criticism can become a substitute for action

There is an important argument within environmentalism that often gets lost between the lifestyle politics of the light greens and the anti-industrial politics of the dark greens. It is humanistic green environmentalism – the idea that ecological sustainability does not require us to abandon technology or progressive modern life. Instead, we need to radically redesign the systems that produce them. Humanistic green thinking is about bringing humanity’s ecological footprint within the limits of the planet while improving the quality of human life.

Light green environmentalism turns ecology into a lifestyle choice: buy the right things, recycle, consume less, and make better individual choices.

Dark green environmentalism goes further, arguing that ecological destruction is built into industrial capitalism, growth, consumption and production. Technology is treated with suspicion, and dark-green traditions argue for degrowth, radical reductions in consumption, or even a retreat from technological civilisation altogether.

Humanistic environmentalism takes another, balanced path: we need radical systemic change, but technology and design can be part of the solution rather than simply being part of the problem. However, this approach can create another problem: #technocracy.

Technocracy is the idea that complex social problems can be managed through expertise, scientific evidence, measurement, efficiency and technical rationality. In its strongest form, political legitimacy shifts away from popular participation and towards experts who are assumed to know how systems should work.

For humanistic politics, the danger is that we move from collectively changing how society works to experts designing the sustainable society for us. Those are not the same thing. Technocratic thinking is attractive because the problems are genuinely complex. Climate change, energy systems, transport, food production, biodiversity, housing and resource use involve enormous amounts of technical knowledge. Evidence matters. Expertise matters. Science matters.

But science cannot decide our political values for us. Technocracy present political choices as technical problems. Once something has been reduced to a question of efficiency, optimisation, cost-benefit analysis or measurable outcomes, the underlying political arguments can disappear. This creates a real #geekproblem: claims of value-neutrality conceal assumptions about whose interests matter, what counts as prosperity, and what kind of society we actually want.

This is where the needed environmental debate becomes much more interesting. The question isn’t simply – Technology or no technology? It is more, who controls technology, for what purpose, and through what social process?

A solar panel can be part of a community energy project, controlled collectively and used to change our lifestyles so that we reduce energy use and learn to live closely with nature. The same technology can be embedded inside a corporate energy system where communities remain passive consumers, with little change to user behaviour or the underlying system.

Open-source software can distribute technological power; closed platforms can concentrate it.

Electric vehicles can reduce some forms of pollution while still leaving questions about mining, manufacturing, urban design and transport dependency.

AI might help optimise energy systems, or it could become another enormous infrastructure of corporate and state control.

Technology itself does not answer these questions. Politics does. This is why the environmental movement needs to avoid both technological utopianism and technological nihilism.

The dark green critique is right to warn that technological efficiency does not, by itself, solve the political economy of endless growth. Efficiency can make consumption cheaper and therefore increase total consumption.

But the humanistic path cannot simply tell billions of people to consume less. That is not a sufficient political programme. People want decent homes, transport, healthcare, communications, food, energy and security. We cannot build a humanistic future by pretending that technological development can simply be switched off.

The missing piece is democratic technological development. We need the tools of humanistic environmentalism without surrendering political agency to technocracy. That means #4opens technologies, open standards, open data, open processes and democratic institutions. It means building infrastructure that communities can understand, modify and govern, rather than systems that require permanent dependence on technical elitists. It means treating technology as part of the social commons, rather than assuming that innovation must flow from corporations, governments or specialist institutions down to passive consumers.

The environmental challenge therefore isn’t simply about making capitalism greener. Nor is it about retreating into a fantasy of pre-industrial simplicity. We need to build a different kind of modernity – a modernity where technology reduces ecological damage and increases people’s ability to participate. Human progress is measured not only by efficiency or profitability, but by resilience, autonomy, repairability, accessibility and ecological impact. Where communities can understand and govern the infrastructures on which they depend. And where experts are valued for what they know without being allowed to become a substitute for democracy.

This is the point where humanistic environmentalism needs to meet the #openweb, #FOSS, the commons and grassroots organisation. The choice is not technology vs nature, nor experts vs ordinary people. The challenge is to grow social systems where knowledge, technology and democratic participation reinforce each other.

We don’t need less thinking, we need more people able to think, participate, organise and understand the systems shaping their lives. That is the difference between a technological future imposed from above and a technological future built as commons from below – using the best tools we have to build a society that is more ecological, more democratic and more capable of changing itself.

The #blocking of this is not that people disagree, challenge and disagreement are necessary, the blocking happens when criticism becomes a substitute for action.

Demanding proof before engaging with the alternative.
“What have you done?” can be a useful question, but it also becomes a way of putting the person making the challenge permanently on trial. The response then becomes about defending credentials rather than building the alternative.

Reducing action to individual performance.
“What have you done today?” is reproducing the very #stupidindividualism being criticised. The important question is not what heroic thing did one person do? But what are we building collectively?

Moving the conversation onto legality or uncertainty.
“The answer may not be strictly legal” and “Not sure…” don’t engage with the central question: how do we move communities away from the #dotcons? They redirect the conversation away from the structural challenge.

Treating posting as either everything or nothing.
The question is whether communication is leading somewhere. A post that recruits people into an open project is different from another argument that generates clicks for Facebook.

Confusing criticism with change.
“I try to subvert the acolytes of the status quo every day” sounds active, but the important follow-up is: what does that produce? Does it build a relationship, an organisation, a tool, a migration, a community or an alternative infrastructure?

The “positive alternatives” argument also become blocking.
“Just make positive posts about projects” sounds constructive, but if it means don’t criticise the existing system, it becomes a form of depoliticisation. People need to understand what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what they can actually do instead.

The useful distinction is: Criticism → understanding → organisation → action → alternative. Blocking looks more like: Criticism → argument → personal challenge → argument → more criticism. That is the #block.

The #dotcons argument is strongest when the hashtag isn’t treated as an answer in itself. #dotcons names the problem. #openweb names part of the alternative. #OMN is an attempt to build infrastructure for that alternative. The missing middle is the community that connects the three.

So the question “What have you done today?” is potentially powerful, but it should mean – What have we done together today that makes the alternative more real? That shifts the conversation away from individual virtue and towards collective agency. And that connects directly to the compost metaphor: don’t spend all day arguing about how bad the pile of mess is. Grab a spade, organise some people, and start turning it into something useful.

#BrightGreen #Environmentalism #Technocracy #ClimateChaos #OpenWeb #FOSS #4opens #Commons #Democracy #Technology #Ecology #Sustainability #OpenSource #Degrowth

Just put a # in front of words

Let’s look at stepping away from the #dotcons as an example of hashtag affinity group organising. A hashtag can help name a problem, but it cannot by itself create a movement. It only becomes a tool for social change when shared language connects people to shared relationships, practical projects and action. The “spade and compost” metaphor is useful for this, the hashtag helps identify the mess, but the point is to pick up the spade and compost with them. A useful progression is: Name → Connect → Organise → Act → Build → Repeat:

Name the problem: #dotcons, #stupidindividualism, #deathcult, #techshit give people a shorthand for something they already experience but may not have language for.
Connect the people: hashtags allow people who recognise the same problem to find each other. But this needs to become an affinity group of action, not just a pile of accounts using the same word.
Make the metaphor understandable: explain what the hashtag means and give groups lived examples. Otherwise, it becomes just another insider language.
Turn criticism into a question: What can we do about this? Or What did you do today to help your community step away from the #dotcons?
People need a next step: join a project, move a community conversation to the #openweb, install something, help document a project, host a server, organise an event, teach somebody else.
Create visible alternatives: this is where #OMN matters. If you tell people to leave something, you need somewhere meaningful to go.
Build collective habits: the hashtag becomes useful when a community consistently uses it to recognise problems, share experience and coordinate action.
Compost the criticism: don’t only keep producing negativity about the #dotcons. Turn the accumulated criticism into knowledge, relationships, tools and projects.

These are the messy problems we need to compost. The path of “making positive posts about specific openweb projects” is part of the answer, but positive promotion alone isn’t enough. People also need a shared explanation of why the existing system is a problem and a language for understanding it.

So the hashtag isn’t the movement, it is the flag, vocabulary and filing system. The movement is the people who organise around it and actually do something. And that’s the bit missing from “just put a # in front of the words.” 🙂

The Politics of Ignorance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Data means information can remain accessible.

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

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

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

Together these create a technical architecture of social resilience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a serous problem at the moment in progressive technology

The language around #climatechaos is changing

For years, climate breakdown was treated as distant, a problem for activists, scientists, future generations or places somewhere else. That blinded view is now harder to sustain. Heat, fires, floods, crop failures, infrastructure disruption, rising insurance costs and the growing difficulty of simply keeping homes and communities safe are making climate disruption part of our everyday life.

As we are talking about tech on this site – the important question for the #OMN is therefore not only how do we stop climate change? It is also – how do we build the social infrastructure needed to live through the disruption that is already here? This is where the climate conversation needs to become broader, and treat adaptation not surrendering, due to the fear that talking about adaptation means giving up on mitigation, it doesn’t.

We still need fundamental social change to reduce emissions, change energy systems and challenge the economic structures pushing us to ecological destruction. But we also need to mediate the very real mess and disruption is already here, we need to be honest about that. A community facing repeated flooding needs flood planning, when homes become dangerously hot, people need cooling, insulation and better housing. When extreme weather repeatedly disrupts transport, energy or communications, communities need resilient alternatives, insurance companies withdraw from areas they consider too risky, it is basic that communities also need better ways of thinking about collective risk and resilience.

These are not future problems, they are now simply ordinary infrastructure questions. And this infrastructure is never only physical, we also need social infrastructure too. This is needed to grow climate resilience, information resilience, on this path we need native #openweb systems where communities can publish what is happening, preserve local knowledge, compare experiences, challenge bad information, coordinate responses and maintain collective memory. That is very different from the current model of social media, where information is filtered and controlled through commercial algorithms, engagement incentives and platform ownership.

The #climatecrisis is already difficult enough – we don’t need our communication systems making it harder. Thus, the climate crisis is also a media crisis: When a flood happens, what matters? People need to know where the water is. They need to know which roads are closed, where vulnerable people are, which services are operating. They need to know what happened last time to know who they can trust.

And afterwards, someone needs to record what actually happened, this last part is particularly important. Without good local records, every disaster becomes an isolated event. Communities repeatedly rediscover the same problems because institutional memory disappears. This is one reason the #OMN #makinghistory matters, the idea is simple: communities should create living, collaborative records of what is happening around them. Not just journalism in the traditional sense, but a shared memory infrastructure. Stories, events, places, people, evidence, changes and responses connected over time to give communities something valuable during #climatechaos – memory.

You would be right we already have more information than ever, the problem is that information is fragmented into disconnected #closedweb platforms. One person posts on Facebook, someone else posts on X, another publishes a video on YouTube. A council puts an announcement somewhere else, a local activist keeps information on a personal website were a journalist publishes an article that disappears behind a paywall.

Then the flooding comes, and suddenly nobody has a reliable picture of what happened. This is the #datasoup problem. The answer isn’t simply more information, we need better ways of connecting information while keeping its provenance, context and history. This is why open standards matter – #RSS, #ActivityPub, open metadata, decentralised publishing, archives and interoperable tools are not just technical preferences, they are pieces of a social resilience infrastructure. The #4opens is a useful starting point: Open Data. Open Source. Open Standards. Open Process. These matter because climate resilience cannot depend entirely on proprietary systems controlled by a few companies.

We shouldn’t respond to the crisis by creating another centralised technological solution and declaring it the answer. This is not about building one perfect system, there is another lesson here – climate chaos is too complicated for that. Different communities have different needs, the important thing is that these systems connect and remain open. We already have a path for this – the #openweb is already a diverse ecosystem rather than another platform monopoly. This is why the #OMN approach is deliberately practical and pluralistic, we don’t need technological purity, we need useful tools that work together and remain in the commons.

Yes, finally the wider #mainstreaming is noticing the physical problem. Heatwaves are no longer exceptional, flooding is no longer unimaginable, insurance withdrawal will become a political issue. Food and energy security need to become part of everyday political discussion. The mainstream is beginning to understand the hard infrastructure problem, but the social infrastructure problem remains much less visible.

We need to build paths through this before we need them – The worst time to discover that your community has no communication infrastructure is during a disaster. The worst time to discover that nobody knows what happened during the previous flood is during the next flood. The worst time to discover that all your community information lives on somebody else’s platform is when that platform changes its access rules or goes away.

Resilience therefore means building before the emergency, but not another giant centralised project, more lots of small interconnected pieces. Open tools, local archives, community websites, federated publishing sharing metadata based on open standards. Then the social side is people who know how to maintain servers, know how to tell stories, how to moderate and systems that allow all those pieces to connect, as climate resilience is also social resilience.

The deeper point is that climate chaos exposes the weakness of the current #dotcons social model. A society organised around individual consumption, competition, private ownership and short-term profit is poorly equipped for long-term collective disruption. The response has to move in the opposite direction: balancing individualism towards community; from enclosure towards commons; from proprietary platforms towards open infrastructure; from disposable information towards collective memory and from centralised control towards distributed resilience.

Technology cannot solve #climatechaos, but the wrong technology can make it much worse, while the right kind of technology can help communities organise, remember, communicate and cooperate. That is the space we are interested in with the #OMN to build the open social infrastructure underneath society – infrastructure that can survive the platforms, the political fashions and hopefully some of the climate disruption coming our way.

The climate crisis is not only asking whether we can build stronger walls, better drains and cooler buildings, it is asking whether we can become better at being a society. That is where the #openweb has a role – you need a shovel #OMN

#OMN #MakingHistory #climatechaos #openweb #4opens #IndymediaBack #OGB #resilience #commons #federation #community #climateadaptation

The Politics of Ignorance

Religion, mystery and the #openweb

I am not religious, but that does not mean religion is something that can only be dismissed as irrational, stupid or obsolete. There is a useful distinction between believing in a religion and understanding the social, cultural and philosophical work that religion has historically done.

This matters for the #OMN because we are interested in how human beings make meaning, build communities and organise themselves when they don’t have complete knowledge of the world. We don’t know everything – one of the interesting things is that science and theology both eventually run into the same thing – mystery.

Science starts with observation, evidence and experiment, to builds theories from what we can discover and then changes those theories when better evidence appears. Religion starts where empirical knowledge runs out and tries to construct stories, symbols and ethical frameworks around the things we cannot yet explain.

That doesn’t mean the paths science and religion are on identical, they aren’t. A scientific theory is not the same thing as a religious myth, evidence, testing and falsifiability matter. But there is a shared human problem underneath both – we are trying to understand a world that is bigger than our ability to understand it. The problem begins when either side claims to have finally solved the mystery.

In my view It’s useful to look at religion as a social technology – for thousands of years, religion has been a kind of social technology that helped people organise communities, explain death, create rituals, transmit stories, establish ethical expectations and give people ways of dealing with uncertainty. Before modern science, medicine and large bureaucratic institutions, people had very few tools for dealing with an unpredictable world.

Storms happened.

Crops failed.

Children died.

People became sick.

Wars arrived.

People didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow, religion provide a framework for living with that uncertainty. Prayer, ritual, myth and community provide a sense of meaning when there was very little else available. Yes, that doesn’t mean the explanations were factually correct, it means they performed social functions.

And this is where the conversation becomes interesting for the #OMN – the danger is false certainty – there is a big difference between living with mystery and selling people certainty. The religious con begins when somebody says “I know exactly what God wants.”,”I know what happens after death.”, “I know the future.” or “Give me money and I can protect you from it.”

This isn’t limited to religion, modern society is full of people selling certainty – politicians, corporations, economists all sell certainty. As do most of our #dotcons technology companies which are pushing the cult of influencers trying to sell certainty. And on the other side increasingly the #geekproblem sells us the idea that every social problem can be solved with the correct application, platform or algorithm.

That #techshit is another kind of theology, the technology of certainty, a lot of contemporary technology culture is built around the assumption that uncertainty is a technical problem waiting to be eliminated. We want perfect systems, perfect moderation, perfect security, perfect prediction etc.

But human society doesn’t work like that – people are messy, cultures are messy, communities disagree, knowledge changes. Context matters, things break, and sometimes we simply don’t know. The attempt to remove all of this uncertainty produces something worse than the original problem – systems of control.

This is one reason the #openweb matters – #OPEN is about living with uncertainty – on this native path the #OMN isn’t an attempt to build a perfect system, quite the opposite. The aim is to build social and technical infrastructure that allows people to work together without requiring perfection.

The #4opens approach is useful precisely because it doesn’t require everyone to agree. It creates conditions where disagreement can remain visible and productive, this is very different from trying to create one system that finally gets everything right.

We need better stories, not final answers – human beings need stories – we need ways of explaining where we came from, where we are going and what we should care about. Religion has historically provided some of those stories, art, politics, philosophy and community life provide others. Now science is trying to provide new ones to replace the dieing religions. The mistake is thinking that one of these “correct paths” has to completely replace all the others.

The #OMN is interested in the space between – how do we build the communication systems through which communities can create, challenge, preserve and share their stories? That is what #MakingHistory is about too – history isn’t just a collection of “facts”. It is a living social process of deciding what happened, who experienced it, what mattered and what we should remember.

If we leave that process to corporations, governments, algorithms and closed platforms, we increasingly lose control of our collective memory. In this mess, there is an uncomfortable parallel between religious fundamentalism and technological fundamentalism, both can become systems of faith. Both create sacred texts, produce priesthoods, punish heresy and both can promise salvation.

The work to compost this mess, is to keep thinking, keep questioning and keep the systems open enough for other people to challenge us. That is a very #KISS principle – we don’t know everything – so build systems that allow us to learn. We need a culture of epistemic humility, an acceptance that our understanding is partial, provisional and socially constructed.

We need tools that help communities see what they know what they don’t know – what they disagree about and how their understanding changes over time. That means moving away from closed systems that manufacture certainty and toward open systems that make the process visible. That is the #openweb, and the social purpose of the #OMN.

And perhaps the most important lesson from religion, science, art and everything between them is remarkably simple “We don’t know.” so let’s build systems that help us find out, together.

#OMN #OpenWeb #4opens #MakingHistory #IndymediaBack #OGB #KISS #geekproblem #stupidindividualism #commons

OMN: Activity, culture and why Soviet experiments matter

One of the interesting things about the history of the #Fediverse is how many of its ideas come from places that, at first glance, seem completely unrelated to social media or network technology. #ActivityPub is a good example – the word activity carries a much older intellectual history, including the work of Soviet psychologist Alexei Leontiev, who developed what became known as activity theory. His work grew out of the cultural-historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, and eventually became a major school of psychological thought.

For #OMN, this history is interesting because it points toward a different way of thinking about technology. The important question is not simply – what does a person do with a piece of technology?It is – what activity is the technology part of, what social relationships make that activity possible, and what happens when those relationships change? That is a much more useful starting point for grassroots technology, from the individual to activity

Leontiev’s work developed around the idea that human life can be understood through activity: the processes through which people actually live in and engage with the objective and social world around them. He described activity as encompassing human life in its social richness and variety. His model breaks activity down into connected levels:

Activity → motive

Action → goal

Operation → practical means

This is useful because it stops us treating technology as an isolated object. A button, interface, server or protocol does not have much meaning by itself, its meaning comes from the activity surrounding it. A publishing system exists because people are trying to communicate, moderation exists because communities need to negotiate trust and boundaries. An archive exists because people want to remember, a federation protocol exists because independent communities want to exchange information without becoming one organisation.

The technology is the means, the social activity is the larger thing, this matters for the #openweb – A lot of blinded technology culture starts from the opposite direction, it starts with the tool, a protocol, an application, a database. Here is a new platform, then we ask people to reorganise their lives around the technology, one of the roots of what I call the #geekproblem. The problem isn’t that programmers are bad people or that technical knowledge is somehow illegitimate. The problem is that technical systems become disconnected from the social activity they support. The result is often tech-first thinking, we build something technically impressive and then ask – what can people do with it?

Leontiev’s work also sits inside a wider tradition of thinking about human beings as fundamentally social. People don’t arrive in the world as fully formed independent economic or political units. We are born into relationships, language, culture, institutions and communities. We need to balance this, a useful grassroots approach is to start with – what are people already trying to do together, what technology would help them do it better? That is a different question, seeing activity is social.

Our ability to act independently is something that develops through those relationships. This is important for understanding the #openweb because the #openweb is not really about individual freedom in isolation, it is much more about collective capacity. The value of federation isn’t that everyone gets their own little island, it is that many different islands can communicate. The value of open standards isn’t that everybody has to behave in the same way, it is that different communities can remain different while still sharing enough infrastructure to cooperate. That is the social possibility sitting underneath the technical architecture.

ActivityPub is therefore more interesting than a protocol

ActivityPub carries the word activity for a reason.

The protocol doesn’t just describe pieces of content, it describes things happening between actors. Someone creates something – someone follows someone – someone likes something – someone shares something – someone blocks someone – someone undoes an action. These are social actions represented through technical infrastructure. That distinction matters, a closed platform can treat communication as a product. An open network, instead treats communication as a social activity that needs infrastructure. That is much closer to what we are trying to build with #OMN.

The #OMN approach is not inventing the perfect social media platform, that would be the wrong starting point. We are interested in building practical infrastructure for grassroots media activity: Publish. Subscribe. Moderate. Edit metadata. Rollback. These are not simply software features, they describe parts of a wider social activity. People create media, communities decide what they trust, information moves between communities, where people correct mistakes and stories develop over time. Archives preserve collective memory.

The technology should make these activities easier rather than forcing communities into somebody else’s business model, a simple needed step from activity to commons. This is also where the #4opens becomes important, #FOSS is useful, but it isn’t enough. A project can publish its code and still reproduce closed governance, concentrated power and dependency. For a genuinely useful grassroots infrastructure we need openness across the whole activity: Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process. That creates larger commons around the technology, the code becomes something people can inspect and improve, data becomes something communities can work with, standards allow different systems to communicate, the process makes decisions visible and contestable.

This is not about creating a perfect system, it is about creating systems that can remain changeable by the people who depend on them, technology as a part of culture. We can build the most technically decentralised system imaginable and still reproduce centralised social behaviour, we build open-source software that puts us under authoritarian governance, federation can create little kingdoms. We can build democratic tools and allow a small group of developers or funders to control everything.

If communities have no control over their communication infrastructure, their social organisation remains vulnerable to whoever owns that infrastructure, the #geekproblem again. The technical architecture matters, but it cannot solve the cultural problem by itself. The opposite is also true, a healthier culture needs appropriate technology to support it.

This is why maybe Leontiev’s idea of activity is useful today, it gives us a way out of the endless argument about whether technology is inherently good or bad. Technology is neither the beginning nor the end of the story, it sits inside activity. The question becomes – What activity does this technology encourage? Who controls the means of that activity? Who benefits? Who gets excluded? Can the community change the system? Can people leave without losing everything? Can different communities connect without surrendering their independence?

Those are much better questions than simply asking whether a technology is “innovative”. This is also why native projects such as #OMN, #IndymediaBack, #MakingHistory and #OGB matter, as paths for growing infrastructure around social activities rather than trying to manufacture another attention platform.

#MakingHistory is about collective memory and living archives.

#IndymediaBack is about grassroots media infrastructure.

#OGB is about experimenting with governance structures.

#OMN is about federated publishing and the movement of trusted media between communities to rebuild collective capacity in a time when much of our communication infrastructure has been enclosed by the #dotcons. Human beings do not exist outside their activities and relationships – Technology is one of the means through which those relationships are organised – So the challenge for the #openweb isn’t simply to build better software – It is to build better relationships between people, communities and the tools they use to act together.

That is the part of the #Fediverse story that interests me, and it is where the #OMN project starts.

https://o.ee/blog/activitypub-won-by-being-boring

The individual, is not, the starting point for the #OMN

One of the most useful ways to understand the mess we are in today is to ask a deceptively simple question – what comes first – the individual or the network? #Mainstreaming economics startes with the individual, were sociology, anthropology and related traditions start somewhere else – with relationships, institutions, communities and the social structures into which individuals are born.

This difference matters enormously, when we start thinking about technology, politics, economics and the #openweb. It is one of the reasons I keep coming back to the problem of #stupidindividualism – the point isn’t that individuals don’t exist, of course they do, the problem is treating the individual as if they exist independently of the social world that produces, supports and constrains them.

Why? we are not born as isolated economic actors, we are born helpless. Other people feed us, protect us, teach us language, teach us how to behave, introduce us to culture and eventually help us become capable of acting independently. Before there is an autonomous economic actor, there is already a network of care. That simple observation has consequences, that the network come first. that nobody invents themselves, every person was born into an existing social world, where there are families, communities, languages, institutions, infrastructures, histories and expectations already.

Even our ability to imagine ourselves as an individual depends upon other people. Language is social, knowledge is social, culture is social, markets are social and technology is social. The idea of private property depends on a society capable of recognising and enforcing it. Yet a great deal of mainstream economic thinking narrows it self to begin with the individual as though they are already standing outside society, deciding what they want and entering into relationships with other individuals through voluntary exchange. That is a very particular, narrow, way of not seeing the world, and it is not neutral, this blindness is historically produced.

One of sociology’s important contributions is to make the background visible. The individual is not simply a natural fact. The particular kind of individual we imagine ourselves to be is shaped by the social structures around us. But yes, modern societies are unusually good at producing the experience of being an isolated individual. We can move cities, change jobs, rent instead of own, interact with strangers. We can buy almost everything we need through markets, communicate with people thousands of kilometres away. We can participate in institutions without ever knowing the people who operate them.

This creates an extraordinary experience – we can feel independent while being massively interdependent. That is one of the great illusions of modernity, that the person sitting alone in a flat, ordering food through an app and working remotely from a laptop can feel completely autonomous. But underneath that apparent autonomy is an enormous network of other people and systems: farmers, delivery workers, programmers, electricity grids, telecommunications networks, roads, warehouses, financial institutions, governments, data centres and countless forms of unpaid and paid care.

So to put this simply, the individual is not independent, the individual is networked and the current narrow economic model hides the network. Composting this mess is where the distinction between mainstream economics and sociology becomes politically important. A simplified economic model can begin with individuals who have preferences, resources and choices. They meet in markets, supply meets demand, prices coordinate activity. The model can be useful for analysing particular situations.

The problem comes when the model becomes a description of human reality itself. A market is not simply a mathematical relationship between isolated individuals, it is a social institution, requireing rules, trust, a state thatrequires infrastructure, property rights, requires enforcement, communication of shared expectations. It requires people who know how to behave within this narrow system.

In other words – the market sits inside society and society does not simply emerge from a collection of markets. This distinction becomes particularly important when discussing capitalism, it is not some natural state that appears whenever humans are allowed to trade. It is a historically, involving particular institutions, property arrangements, states, legal systems, technologies and cultural assumptions.

Once we recognise this, the supposedly inevitable starts to look contingent, and that is where sociology becomes politically interesting. The state doesn’t disappear, just because the market exists. The current story presents the market and the state as opposites:

state = control
market = freedom

But historically, the development of modern markets has depended heavily upon states, to establish property law, currencies, enforce contracts. States build infrastructure, define corporations and regulate labour. States establish borders, create legal identities, enforce debts. The market and the state are not simply opposites standing outside one another, they are entangled.

This matters because when we look at modern capitalism as though it emerged from naturally individuals making voluntary exchanges, we erase much of the infrastructure that made those exchanges possible – again, the network disappears. The problem with universalising capitalism is one of the most damaging intellectual habits, taking the economic system we happen to live inside and treating it as though it describes human economic behaviour everywhere and throughout history.

Capitalist monetary exchange becomes “the economy.”

Market behaviour becomes “human nature.”

Competition becomes inevitable.

Private ownership becomes normal.

Debt becomes morally obvious.

Money becomes something humans must always have invented because they wanted a more efficient version of barter. But history repeatedly show much greater diversity, human societies have organised production, distribution, care and exchange in many different ways. There have been gift economies, commons, reciprocity networks, redistributive systems. There is no single timeless human economy – there are economic cultures. It is our assumptions about what is “normal” are themselves historically specific.

That lesson is directly relevant to technology of the #OMN project, as technology has its own version of this problem. We often start with the assumption that the individual user is the basic unit. The user creates an account. The user chooses a platform. The user posts content. The user chooses whether to participate. The user accepts the terms. The user leaves if they don’t like it. Doses this sounds reasonable?

But yes, as we have said, its not, as it ignores the network, if all your friends are on Facebook, “just leave Facebook” isn’t an individual decision in any meaningful sense. If your local council publishes important information only through Facebook, leaving becomes a civic problem. If your community organises through WhatsApp, leaving becomes a social problem. If your employer requires a particular platform, leaving becomes an economic problem. If your political movement organises somewhere, leaving becomes a political problem.

The individual appears to have a choice, but the network determines the cost of exercising it. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current #dotcons as they don’t simply sell software to individuals, they capture networks. Network effects become political power – once enough people are locked inside a platform, the platform becomes difficult to leave. This is often described as a “network effect”, as though it were simply a technical feature, it isn’t, it is a abusive social relationship.

The value of the platform increases because other people are there, that means the individual cannot solve the problem individually. You cannot build a better social network merely by downloading better software. You need people, communities, trust, shared practices. You need governance – you need ways for information to move and institutions that can maintain the infrastructure.

This is why simply telling people to “move to Mastodon” is insufficient. The problem isn’t that Mastodon exists or doesn’t exist. The problem is social infrastructure, the #openweb is a social project, this is why we don’t see the #openweb simply as a collection of technologies. #RSS, #ActivityPub, #PeerTube, #blogs, #wikis, distributed hosting and open-source software are tools. They become socially transformative only when communities use them to create different relationships.

The technical layer matters enormously, but technology alone cannot produce a commons. A commons requires people who maintain it, and these people need to be heald tagather by norms, trust, governance. This is where the #OMN comes in – from individual users to communities, we start from a different assumption – media is a social relationship, not simply a commodity produced for individual consumers. Instead of imagining millions of isolated users consuming content through a central platform, we build networks of communities that publish, share, moderate, maintain and archive media together.

This changes the question, instead of “What does the individual user want?” we can also ask “What does this community need?” And “What relationships allow this information system to remain healthy?” And”Who maintains it?” And “Who has power?” Thus “How can that power be accountable?” That is sociology applied to technology and importently why governance becomes unavoidable. Why governance is such a big part of #OMN and #OGB. If we pretend that technology is simply a neutral tool used by independent individuals, governance becomes something we only discover later when things go wrong.

But if we recognise that technology creates social relationships, governance is there from the beginning. Every platform has governance, the question is who governs – A dictator-for-life project is governance – a developer-controlled project has governance – an NGO-funded project has governance – a corporate platform has governance so yes then a community-run project has governance. Even “no governance” is a form of governance because it usually means that whoever has the most time, technical knowledge or social power ends up making the decisions. The #OGB challenge is therefore not to eliminate governance, it is to make governance visible, participatory and appropriate to the culture of the #openweb.

This brings us back to #stupidindividualism, remmber the hashtag isn’t saying that individuals are stupid, it is pointing at what happens when individualism becomes the only permitted way of understanding social problems. If someone says “Our community has a problem.” and the response is “Are you saying I’m the problem?” the conversation has already been derailed. The same happens with technology, if we say “The structure of social media encourages dependency.” and someone responds “But I personally choose to use Facebook.” we have moved from a structural question to an individual one.

Why all this matters now – we are walking a path where many of the systems that previously appeared stable are becoming unstable. Climate disruption, political polarisation, economic insecurity, platform collapse and #enshittification. leading to the current mess of #AI generated information overload. Declining institutional trust, fragmented communities and increasing centralisation of infrastructure. The probelms cannot be solved by millions of isolated individuals making slightly better consumer choices. They require collective action, and collective capacity requires understanding how people actually relate to each other. That means #KISS moving beyond the fantasy of the autonomous individual.

On this path the #OMN isn’t trying to invent some perfect alternative society, the starting point is much simpler – build infrastructure that assumes people are social – build media flows around communities – build governance around participation and trust – build software that supports cooperation rather than only extraction – build open standards so different communities can interoperate – build archives so collective memory survives – build metadata so information can be found and connected. And finaly build moderation systems that recognise human relationships rather than reducing everything to algorithmic scoring and blocking.

This is the job of the #4opens – open data, open source, open standards and open process – that are useful here because they make the infrastructure contestable. No single group gets to say “Trust us. We know what’s best.” keeping the infrastructure inside the commons wherever possible.

The most important lesson from sociology and anthropology isn’t that economists are always wrong. There are economists doing good work, and economics contains some internal diversity. The point is that no single discipline should get to define the whole of human reality. Economics is powerful at asking narrow questions. Sociology asks different questions, Anthropology asks different questions. History asks different questions, ecology asks different questions, technology asks different questions. The problem begins when one particular model becomes so powerful that its assumptions disappear from view.

That is the real danger of hegemony, you stop seeing the assumptions because everyone around you is using them. to work to compost this current mess, the #openweb is valuable because it gives us an shoval to build differently. But we won’t get anywere simply by swapping one piece of software for another, we need to challenge the deeper assumptions underneath the software. The assumption that the user is alone, that networks are collections of individuals, markets are natural, technology is neutral, that governance can be bolted on afterwards. And perhaps most importantly, the assumption that we are independent when we are actually interdependent.

Yes, the individual matters, but the individual is not the starting point, the relationship is. That is why sociology matters to the #OMN. And that is why building a genuinely social #openweb is about much more than writing better code. It is about rebuilding the networks of trust, cooperation, memory and collective power that allow people to live together in the first place.

So keep the path #KISS, technology is the tool, the social network is the foundation, the commons is the direction. Get to growing this please #OMN

An Anthropologyist view of this subject

#OMN #openweb #4opens #OGB #IndymediaBack #MakingHistory #stupidindividualism #mainstreaming #deathcult #geekproblem

Public conversation about public problems

Our current working models of “governance” in #opensource are mostly:

Monarchy – the dictator for life.
Aristocracy – the devs.
Oligarchy – NGOs/funders.
And way out on the edge: Democracy – the users.

We need better governance native to the #openweb. Let’s look at this at a more personal level before the normal wider social view. Yes, in #FOSS development the devs doing the work deserve respect, and #OMN isn’t arguing that users should simply demand things from volunteers.

The point about “aristocracy” is about more where decision-making power sits, less whether devs are privileged people or whether their work has value. If the people who write and maintain the code also decide what the project is, what gets built, what gets rejected and how the project develops, then you have a governance structure where technical expertise becomes political authority.

Hope am clear, that isn’t a criticism of individual developers, it’s a structural observation. The #OMN approach is to separate doing the work from owning the direction. Developers are essential participants, but so are users, moderators, communities and other contributors. Different kinds of knowledge need different kinds of power.

The challenge is building governance where devs don’t get bossed around by users, users don’t get bossed around by devs, funders don’t get to buy the direction, and nobody gets to become the permanent ruler.

That’s what the #OGB work is trying to explore: governance native to the #openweb, based on trust, transparency, participation and voluntary cooperation. This alternative isn’t “users rule”, it’s shared power with different roles.

With this in mind lets talk about the wider issue, a reminder: when I talk about the internet and society, I am not necessarily talking about you, I am talking about groups, cultures, classes, institutions and patterns of behaviour that you might be part of. You can recognise yourself in a critique without the critique being a personal attack – Simple – Take the useful bit and move on.

What is interesting – and a pretty good example of #stupidindividualism – is how difficult this has become. We increasingly seem to believe that we are not allowed to talk about groups any more. Everything has to be reduced to the individual “Are you saying I’m stupid?” “Are you attacking me?”
“Who exactly are you talking about?” This makes it difficult to discuss social patterns, and that matters because many of the problems we face are not individual problems. They are produced by relationships between people, institutions, technologies and economic systems.

If we cannot talk about groups, we cannot talk properly about the #geekproblem, #mainstreaming, the #dotcons, #NGOs and funders, tech communities, activist cultures, class interests, institutional power, #neoliberalism or the wider #deathcult culture. We end up privatising a public conversation.

This is one of the things that makes #dotcons-style social media so destructive, as everything becomes personalised, emotional and reactive when structural criticism gets turned into interpersonal conflict. But a feeling is not a fact, a feeling attacked does not necessarily mean someone is attacking you. Sometimes it means that something has made you uncomfortable, or challenged a worldview you have become accustomed to.

That discomfort can actually be useful as the point isn’t to find individuals to blame, the point is to understand the systems and cultures we are collectively caught inside. We need to get beyond the #neoliberal #TINA – There Is No Alternative – thinking that reduces everything to individual choice and responsibility. We need to be able to say – This is a group pattern, a cultural pattern, a class interest, an institutional problem. It’s about how power reproduces itself, then we can actually talk about what to do about it. That is the conversation we need to reclaim: public, collective and capable of naming the structures that shape our lives.

Remember none of this is about personal attacks, not tribal prat fights, not individualised outrage. It’s a public conversation about public problems.

#stupidindividualism #mainstreaming #openweb #4opens #OMN #deathcult

The #openweb needs diversity, not monoculture

The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is useful? That difference isn’t necessarily a weakness, when we nurture this it can be our strength.

To do this we need to support, fund and actually use a wide range of #openweb technologies, as there is no single “right path” waiting to be discovered. The #openweb should be a messy ecosystem, some projects will be radical, others pragmatic by compromising with existing institutions. Some will refuse every compromise, some will be technically elegant, were others will be slightly ugly but actually useful. Some people will be idealists, some will be organisers, geeks, activists – some will be experimenters, others will be complete weirdos.

We need all of these people. Even the “sellouts” can push open technology into places that fundamentalists cannot reach. The fundamentalists can protect principles that pragmatists might otherwise throw away. The pragmatists can make things usable, while the experimenters can discover things nobody expected and the weirdos can see possibilities that the sensible people completely miss.

The problem starts when any one of these groups decides that they are the whole movement. Then diversity becomes tribalism, difference becomes factionalism and criticism attack. And eventually everyone starts spending more energy defeating people who are broadly on the same side as building the commons we actually need. We’ve seen this mess before, the history of alternative technology is full of splits between people who wanted to build practical infrastructure and people who wanted purity, between technical communities and social movements, between centralised coordination and decentralised autonomy.

The lesson shouldn’t be “pick the correct side” – it needs to be – learn how to work with difference. This is particularly important now because the #dotcons have already demonstrated what happens when a technical ecosystem becomes dominated by a few powerful platforms. Monoculture creates dependency, creates control that leads to vulnerability. The answer to this simply cannot be to build another monoculture with different branding, we need plural infrastructure, based on #KISS #openweb native standards that communicate with each other.

That is where #FOSS based on open standards and the #4opens become important, they give a common floor without demanding a common culture. We don’t need everyone to agree, but we need enough openness that different projects can coexist, exchange knowledge and build on each other’s work. This is also why projects such as #OMN, #OGB, #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory shouldn’t be understood as competing for the one correct future. They are paths, pieces of a wider ecosystem.

Buts yes the important thing is to keep the commons alive while we experiment. The value isn’t in choosing one tribe and defeating the others, value is in creating conditions where difference can coexist, challenge assumptions, learn from failure and grow something wider than any individual project. We need disagreement without fragmentation, criticism without destruction and experimentation without constant reinvention. To make this work we also need pragmatism without selling everything out.

To help compost the #geekproblem we need technology that serves the social projects rather than becoming the social project. That means supporting the native diversity, contradictions and productive tensions that make an ecosystem resilient. And yes, you are right there are to meany people being prats currently on this subject.

Please try not to be one, thanks.

#openweb #OMN #4opens #Fediverse #FOSS #IndymediaBack #OGB #MakingHistory #DIY #commons