The crisis of the #openweb isn’t just coming from the #dotcons. It’s also coming from us. Our #mainstreaming #fashionistas are dangerously consumptive, forever chasing the next platform, the next funding round, the next shiny self abstraction. Meanwhile, our alternative #fashionistas mirror exactly the same behaviour, endlessly reinventing tools that never escape their own echo chambers.
Both paths produce the same result: more #TechShit, more #TechChurn, less social value. We don’t need another clever framework, another protocol that nobody uses, or another startup pretending to be commons. What we do need is to change and challenge the social norms that reward novelty over usefulness to make the #4opens fashionable.
- Reward open data instead of data hoarding.
- Reward open process instead of closed decision-making.
- Reward open standards instead of lock-in.
- Reward open source instead of proprietary dependency.
And yes, this isn’t about technology, it’s about culture. As Oscar Wilde observed in The Critic as Artist:
“We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
In the current churning mess, that feels even more true today. We are producing more code, more platforms, more content and more noise than ever before, while creating less shared understanding and fewer if any useful durable institutions, structures or networks.
The answer isn’t to work harder. It’s to work differently. The #OMN is a path to do that by stopping repeating the same mistakes by compost the failures of the last forty years, and rebuild the #openweb on social foundations that people can actually live with. If we can’t make this shift, we’ll simply keep rebuilding the same broken systems with newer code.
#OMN #4opens #openweb #TechShit #TechChurn #KISS #NothingNew
