A cohesive manifesto is needed as the world we inherited is fractured. Wealth, power, and knowledge are concentrated in the hands of the #nastyfew: platform owners, data hoarders, and corporate monopolies who extract value from our work, our attention, and our trust. Democracy has been hollowed out, captured and controlled by algorithms that decide what is knowable, profitable, and even true. Ecology, community, and care are sacrificed on the #deathcult altar of growth and consumption.
In this mess, the Open Media Network (#OMN) is a #KISS project that exists to reclaim the digital commons, reshape society, and redefine what is possible when power, knowledge, and technology are returned to the people.
In the current #dotcons economy, access to infrastructure, information, and governance is rent-based and extractive. Communities pay to participate, and the surplus flows to distant shareholders.
The #4opens – open code, open governance, open data, open processes – upend this system. Putting tools of creation and coordination into grassroots democratic, collective stewardship. Value no longer flows automatically upward; it stays with the communities that generate it.
On this path, inequality stops being “natural.” Rich and poor are revealed as structural outcomes of enclosure and extraction. By reclaiming infrastructure as a commons, we recompose power, and inequality becomes a historical memory, not a permanent fact.
The logic of capitalism equates growth with progress, but infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. Digital goods – knowledge, code, culture, and coordination – are non-rivalrous, replicable, and shareable. By moving value into open, digital abundance, the material basis of economic expansion shrinks.
This frees human effort to focus on ecological outcomes. Energy systems can localise, circular economies can flourish, and extraction-driven industries can shrink. Consumerism no longer masquerades as culture. Life becomes about care, collaboration, and sustainability. In a post-consumption economy, human needs are met without destroying the biosphere
What we need to compost is the closed, corporate networks, that, reduce people to metrics: clicks, views, and engagement scores, where connection is commodified, communities dissolve into attention economies. Moving to #4opens networks reverse this. Open, modifiable, and transparent paths and systems allow communities to rebuild trust, care, and reciprocity. Collaboration happens without permission, and relationships can persist across distance and time. Communities stop belonging to brands and start belonging to people. Social infrastructure becomes a tool for power and resilience rather than extraction.
The capitalist world naturalised exploitation, scarcity, and secrecy. Our “common sense” became a prison: work more, compete, hoard, distrust. The #4opens world undoes this conditioning. Open infrastructure and governance teach us that scarcity is artificial, cooperation is powerful, and secrecy serves control, not communities. Common sense is no longer what capitalism told us, it is what we collectively choose, this open thinking makes new realities possible.
The transitory shaping of privacy as we imagined it is gone, the #dotcons and surveillance states already see everything. Closed systems cannot protect us; secrecy is a lost battle. The solution is radical transparency. Open metadata, and commons-based governance shift power away from hidden extractors and toward the public. Privacy becomes collective control over visibility: who sees what, and with what accountability. In this world, transparency is justice, and knowledge is a tool of liberation.
In a #4opens world, exchange is no longer driven solely by money. Scarcity loses its grip when knowledge, code, and infrastructure are freely shared. Value can be recognized, tracked, and distributed openly. We give not to accumulate, but to re-balance. Contribution is measured in social and ecological impact, not profit. Capitalism made money sacred; #4opens break that spell, opening paths to redistribute both material and social power.
The next bubble, current #AI – #LLMs and ML #systems – is not intelligent. There is no path from these tools to general intelligence. What exists is pattern-matching, statistical correlation, and corporate extraction of public knowledge. But handing locked-up data to corporate systems strengthens anti-democracy structures. Instead of enabling “innovation”, it reinforces surveillance, centralisation, and algorithmic control. Real intelligence is collective, embodied, and social. True change and challenge emerges not from hype bubbles or closed corporate labs, but from communities building shared knowledge and infrastructure in the open.
Fascism vs. Cooperation – Fascism treats collaboration as weakness, hierarchy as inevitable, and domination as the only path to power. It cannot be trusted and cannot survive in open, cooperative networks. The #OMN path is the opposite: power through participation, resilience through trust, and flourishing through shared infrastructure. Communities that cooperate can sustain themselves, adapt, and grow, while isolationist, extractive paths, systems and tools wither. Cooperation is not optional, it is the foundation of any path to security, survival, and progress.
The choice before us, the world we inherited, is extractive, enclosed, and unsustainable. But the tools to reclaim power, knowledge, and community already exist. In #FOSS, the #4opens – applied to infrastructure, governance, culture, and knowledge – allow us to reduce inequality structurally, not through charity, but with rebuilding social trust and care, aligning human activity with ecological limits to make knowledge a public good, not a corporate asset.
Open Media Network is not a platform. It is a social path, to a world where power is distributed, knowledge is shared, and society is governed by the people who live in it. We are not asking for permission. We are building the commons, the question is not whether we can succeed, the question is whether we will choose to. History will remember what we did in this moment.
