The sins of #openweb chat

Q. A bridge for #matrix to #XMPP this is the most important “political” bridge they could build and support so not to look like a #meto #NGO project. Look at what groups do, not what they say.

A. The moment that both communities manage to provide a seamless, first-class, stable integration of #Matrix and #XMPP without finger-pointing each other for the responsibility to do that, the very moment it doesn’t matter anymore which of these networks you initially signed up to, we could see a huge leap forward for open decentralized messaging.

Q. Think the needs to be a carrot and stick aproch to making this happen. Both supporting the coding and hitting them with the shaming stick. #Matrix as a #meto project likely has to make the move.

A. What if for a moment we gave up on blaming each other and started accepting that #matrix started rather late, tried to learn from experiences and tried to fix some things #xmpp folks weren’t able to address for roughly two decades, for whichever reasons? I see stubbornness on both sides as a main cause for this messy situation. 😑

Q. Its completely understable why we are in this #openweb chat mess.

A. Exactly. The only way to resolve this probably is not to let technical people come up with final product decisions. This overemphasizes the importance of technology and downplays the need to solve actual problems. We end up designing better mousetraps while never even trying to actually catch mice.

Q.  The #matrix project being a #NGO has reason not to build the bridge, but more power to build it if they are pushed to do so. The #xmpp folks being a disorganization have less power to build the bridge but more reason to do so. Neither wont to do it and feed off the current mess in different unhealthy ways. Thus, both are actually feeding off the dying #openweb looked at it this way the need for change becomes more obvuse and active carrot and stick work important.

Rolling out the test #indymediaback projects

https://indymedia.hs2rebellion.earth

https://roadstonowhere.openworlds.info

https://indymedia.openworlds.info

We have a #activertypub codebase ready for testing, we have two campanes that asked for instances. We have stable hosting paid up for the next few years.

What we don’t have is any on the ground outreach/training/networking due the covide shutdown. We have limited tech dev needed to update the code from user feedback as a part of the roll out.

With this level of commitment we would be in danger of taking focus away from their current #dotcons outreach and taking up energy rather than helping with good outcomes for the campanes.

What do you think we should do next?

#indymediaback #OMN

The #OMN is built from 30 years of working at the coal face of grassroots media and tech

Just about all tech and political projects are pointless “A river that needs crossing political and tech – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over complexity”

A solution to this churning is “nothing new” as most of the issues we face have already been solved or at least mediated. #nothingnew and #4opens is a way of stepping away from the current tech mess. The politics is a bit more complex.

What is not pointless is an interesting challenge for tech and politics. To start this conversation, you HAVE to use the #4opens to remove 99.9% of the #dotcons #NGO and #fashernista fluff.

The is NO conversation before you do this. When this is done you need to look at the #geekproblem, which is both a curse and a delight.

The #OMN is built from the experience of 30 years of working at the coal face of grassroots media and tech, its a path people can take to start the composting.

What do you mean by “mainstreaming”

Q. what do you mean by “mainstreaming”.

A. we all worship the #deathcult (neo-liberalism) in polatics, economics, most of the food we eat, our jobs and social lives are all mediated/mostly created by this invisible world-view. In progressive terms #mainstreaming is pushing this agender to build carriears and social structures to further the personal #stupidindividualism created by the #deathcult we live in. This is a circle that is going to kill and displace billions of people over the next 100 years from #climatechaos and the social feedback loop of political #fascism

#stupidindividualism is created by the social disintegration of the last 40 years of neo-liberalism, fascism is an outcome of this.

Examples from the UK groups @NovaraMedia while producing fab content its all distributed through the #dotcons and in the end they aspire to be the new @guardian to take the role of #traditionalmedia This is fair anufe but the wider “we” need to balance this with #grassroots media which is a non #mainstreaming mission.

Most #NGO agrenders are #mainstreaming this is an easy to see view.

I played a role in training thousands of grassroots “journalists” over the last 25 years at #undercurrents, #indymedia, #visionontv and now #OMN the majority that are still creating media went onto build there carriears in the mainstream and #NGO sectors few stayed in non #mainstreaming production missions. Cant blame them for this, though no alts were sustained from this which was why we did the training.

In each case grassroots/alt structures were devoured by the #deathcult pushing the need for mainstreaming survival – cant blame people for this.

BUT we need a working alternative if we are going to change the world that does not kill and displace billions of people over the next 100 years #XR

learning for expirence the #OMN is a political/tech tool to mediate this issue.

Thinking about a bigger lifeboat fit out for Russian voyage

When we bring our boat back to London am looking at getting a bigger boat for longer expeditions

Looking at something like this https://www.apolloduck.com/boat/commercial-vessels-life-boat-for-sale/282352/4701297 but likely a bit bigger

Looking for a bigger boat

As near to 10m as possible but not over due to ICC (though after more reading around we can go up to 15m with a little more bureaucracy)

Ability to walk round the gunwales of the boat with out danger of falling

Heavy rubber rubbing/side strips

Some outdoor space or the possibility of adding some space.

Side door or rear doors for easy access, preferable not hatches.

Easy removal of inside fittings to open up the living space.

Optional
BSS safety work.
Removal of the davite hooks
A hatch in roof for head out driving or fold down windows
Pre-insulated as much as possible.
Access to the keel for adding ballast – we will need ballast.
Original safety equipment and radio
Extra water tank
(Electric ancour windless)

Power

4PCS 3.2V280AH LIFEPO4 battery cell 2020 new Rechargeable Batteries Lithium iron for 12V300AH for RV SOLAR EV EU US TAX FREE https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000450142400.html

Daly Smart BMS LiFePo4 With Bluetooth 4S https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001803913333.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000060.1.6cd04db7AaOsBP&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreThisSeller&scm=1007.13339.169870.0&scm_id=1007.13339.169870.0&scm-url=1007.13339.169870.0&pvid=1e0e57b5-6648-466c-ac91-4228b85f0f7f&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreThisSeller,scm-url:1007.13339.169870.0,pvid:1e0e57b5-6648-466c-ac91-4228b85f0f7f,tpp_buckets:668%230%23131923%2393_668%23888%233325%2318_668%232846%238109%231935_668%232717%237563%23586_668%231000022185%231000066059%230_668%233468%2315616%23779

270W Smaller Size Perlight All Black Mono Percium Solar Panel – 54 cell smaller 1.48m size – great for vans and motorhomes
https://www.bimblesolar.com/solar/large-panels/270w-perlite-54cell-small

20A 12V/24V MPPT charge Controller – EPever XTRA 2210N – 100VOC PV – LCD Meter
https://www.bimblesolar.com/offgrid/mppt/XTRA2210N-XDS2-20a-mppt-solar-controller

heating

wood burner stove with back boiler http://boatmanstove.co.uk/

To be specked out

insulation for single hull sections

sound deadening for engine box

folding mast for aerials and nav lights

electric windlass for anchor + chain and anchor

Sonar

navigation lights

internal lights

Water and plumbing with calorifier from engine.

Gravity feed passive radiator system to heat front of boat.

Cinema setup and screen.

Wi-Fi rooter and navigation computer – with external aerials

VHF and external antenna

build wet room and shower

electric for cooking? or gas?

Laser cut plexyglass portholes

fuel level meter

engine temp/oil meter

auxiliary electric motor for main engine would be looking for sponsorship for this to cover the engine/solar and extra battery’s https://www.bimblesolar.com/solar/large-panels/290w-mipv-flexi 4 of these would stick to the curved boat sides.

 

A humane project to push balance back into the current #deathcult flow

I think it is time to talk about giving up our desire for total control and moving to thinking about the world as flows rather than static. Our illusionary “static” individualism is a mental illness that makes us powerless to resist the displacement and death of billions of us over the next 100 years due to fascism/ #climatechaos forcefully rebalancing the human/natural world.

Static view is “individualism” its all about you as a selfish mythical island.

Flow view is “social” is all about you embedded in the flow of social/ecological realty.

You need “power” to urgently rebalance these views, social tech is a good step to this “power”. The #OMN project is a clever useful humane project to push balance back into the current #deathcult flow. For the religious crew this is a #lifecult for the humanistic its just the right thing to do.

Shovels and compost are a good metaphor.

Shifting power in #openweb projects

Before diving into the whole open/closed misunderstanding and conflict, it helps to step back and look at the different roles inside a project, and who has the power to say yes or no at each level. A healthy project usually has something like this structure:

admin
mod
producer
user
reader

The real difference between “closed” and “open” systems is mostly about where power sits inside this stack. In a “closed” system, power is concentrated at the top – admins control everything, moderation is restricted, producers have little autonomy, users are mostly passive consumers, and readers have no meaningful agency at all.

This is the standard #dotcons model, centralised control with limited participation. In a more “open” system, power shifts downward toward the producers and community.

  • The reader still has little direct power because they have no real buy-in yet. They are consuming information, not helping shape the space.
  • The “user” gains a small amount of power through posting, commenting, tagging, reacting, and participating from their own account.
  • The “producer” is where things start becoming socially valuable. Producers create content, organise discussions, document knowledge, and help sustain the commons. Once producers become trusted through practice and participation, they should naturally begin moving toward moderation roles.
  • The “mod” should hold as much practical power as possible without endangering the stability of the instance or project. Moderation works best when it is close to the lived reality of the community rather than imposed from above.
  • The “admin” still needs strong technical power because someone has to maintain infrastructure, security, backups, federation, and legal responsibility. But socially, there should be a very strong cultural rule against using that power casually or politically.

In a healthy #openweb project, the day-to-day running of the space should mostly sit with the mod/producer layer, not with the admin layer. That distinction matters, admins maintain infrastructure, mods and producers maintain community.

When admins dominate community decisions, projects tend to slide toward enclosure, control, fear, and eventually stagnation. A recent example, this is what happened with #socialhub in the Fediverse. The path to making this work is social mediation through the #4opens, combined with transparent audit logs and visible decision-making, this creates accountability without needing rigid top-down control.

The goal is not “no power.” That is fantasy, the goal is to distribute power socially, visibly, and responsibly, so communities can self-organise without constantly collapsing into either chaos or authoritarian control. That balance is the real challenge of the #openweb path.

Security concepts tend to be from the conservative ideological viewpoint

With the #OMN building progressive alt tech we cannot repeat the behaver of the #dotcons as it’s a different environment, we need different amenders.

“The security context is the relationships between a security referent and its environment. From this perspective, security and insecurity depend first on whether the environment is beneficial or hostile to the referent, and also how capable is the referent of responding to its/their environment in order to survive and thrive.”

Approaches to security are subject of debate.

For example, some argue that security depends on developing protective and coercive capabilities in order to protect the security referent in a hostile environment (and potentially to project that power into its environment, and dominate it to the point of supremacy). The #geekproblem strives for this outcome without putting it into words.

The #OMN argue that security depends principally on building the conditions in which equitable relationships can develop, partly by reducing antagonism between actors, ensuring that fundamental needs can be met, and also that differences of interest can be negotiated effectively.

Some traditional view of security

* Access control – the selective restriction of access to a place or other resource.

* Authorization – the function of specifying access rights/privileges to resources related to information security and computer security in general and to access control in particular.

* Countermeasure – a means of preventing an act or system from having its intended effect.

* Defense in depth – a school of thought holding that a wider range of security measures will enhance security.

* Identity management – enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times and for the right reasons.

* Resilience – the degree to which a person, community, nation or system is able to resist adverse external forces.

* Risk – a possible event which could lead to damage, harm, or loss.

* Security management – identification of an organization’s assets (including people, buildings, machines, systems and information assets), followed by the development, documentation, and implementation of policies and procedures for protecting these assets.

* Threat – a potential source of harm.

* Vulnerability – the degree to which something may be changed (usually in an unwanted manner) by external forces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security

If we are building projects for progressive ends, we need to balance the conservatism in these ideas with #4opens approaches, this is a little understood simple path.

Why use the hashtags?

The #OMN is based on “nothing new” as a core project process. Though we do describe things in different ways than they are normally described, we use everyday metaphors for the language of computing and coding where necessary, we use nature metaphors where possible.

We have lived in a deeply damaging era for the last 40 years in economics we have neo-liberalism (metaphor #deathcult) in thinking and education post-modernism these two have created many bad effects (metaphors #geekproblem #encryptionist #stupidindividualism #dotcons #fashernista etc) that have shaped how people act and think, we have internalised these post-truth into normal everyday worldviews. These are going to undermine our cultures, society, and most impotently destroy our ecology (metaphor #XR)

We change the language to brake out of this “normal” world-view to build an opening for people to see a different view (also am dyslexic and can only think by making up ideas so its a good fit for me). The current “normal” thinking and expressions are too damaged to be of much use in real social change.

On every measurable indicator, Bitcoin has been a failure

One simple metric for judging #Bitcoin, is has it actually replaced or seriously disrupted the banking system? The answer is obviously no. The same financial institutions still dominate global economics. The same scams continue. The same offshore tax havens still hide elitist wealth. Politicians and oligarchs continue stuffing money into secrecy jurisdictions exactly as before. The banking system remains firmly in place, untouched at its core.

Bitcoin promised disintermediation, it promised liberation from financial power, it promised decentralisation. What it delivered instead was a speculative asset bubble.

Another useful metric is, do ordinary people use Bitcoin for everyday life? Again, no. No people buy food, pay rent, organise community infrastructure, or sustain local economies through Bitcoin. Almost nobody accepts it for normal goods and services. What dominates instead is speculation, hoarding, market gambling, and endless “number go up” culture.

This is important because technologies reveal their social meaning through actual use, not ideological promises.

And then there is the ecological cost. Bitcoin’s energy consumption exceeds that of entire countries, it consumes more electricity than the Netherlands. This is an extraordinary level of waste for a system that has failed to achieve all of its original social goals.

At a time of accelerating #climatechaos, building gigantic energy-hungry computational systems dedicated to financial speculation is not innovation, it is social and ecological vandalism.

Bitcoin is not a “net positive for humanity.” It did not dismantle banking power. It did not democratise wealth. It did not create meaningful commons infrastructure. It did not produce resilient local economies. What it did do was make already-rich people richer while burning staggering amounts of energy.

The winners were early adopters, speculators, venture capital, crypto exchanges, and existing elitists with enough surplus wealth to gamble. The losers are everybody forced to live inside the accelerating ecological and social consequences.

Bitcoin is a classic expression of the #geekproblem. It approaches deeply human and social issues through abstract technical absolutism. Instead of rebuilding trust, community, accountability, and collective institutions, it attempts to replace them with cryptographic mechanisms and computational systems. It is the worship of mechanism over humanity.

The #encryptionist mindset imagines that social trust can be replaced by mathematical trust. That code can replace culture. That computation can replace politics and markets can replace community. But humans do not actually live this way, human life runs on trust, care, reciprocity, relationships, mutual aid, shared stories, and collective responsibility.

The real currency of life is not cryptographic tokens, it is the smile, the helping hand, the shared meal and the neighbour who shows up when things fall apart.

Making machines into gods is profoundly inhuman. And the last 40 years of neoliberal money worship have pushed this pathology by reducing value into market value, relationships into transactions, and all meaning into competition and accumulation. This is the #deathcult logic, that in the era of ecological breakdown, this path is becoming openly suicidal.

The answer to this mess is not better speculation technology. We do not need more #techshit built to accelerate extraction, surveillance, financialisation, and social fragmentation. We need technologies designed to grow commons, this is where projects like #OMN matter. The #OMN path starts from a different assumption that technology should support human relationships, not replace them.

Instead of building systems around profit extraction and artificial scarcity, we can build systems around shared infrastructure, open process, collective publishing, federated trust networks, mutual aid, community governance, and resilient local organisation.

The point is not technological purity, the point is social usefulness as healthy technology should be about lowering barriers, strengthen communities, distribute power, encourage participation, and help people organise collectively. On this path the #4opens matter because they expose power instead of hiding it – open data – open source – open standards – open process. This visibility allows communities to compost problems before they become entrenched systems of control.

The opposite path – the dominant #dotcons and crypto worlds – increasingly hides power behind complexity, branding, speculation, and artificial technical priesthoods. People become users, consumers, and data points instead of participants.

We need compost, not worship, we need to stop worshipping the systems that are actively destroying the conditions for human life. Compost is a much better metaphor as compost takes waste, failure, and breakdown and turns them back into living systems. That is the #KISS task ahead of us, not denial, not technological salvation myths, not billionaire futurism. Practical rebuilding, shovels matter more than fantasies.

#OMN is a shovel, and compost is the basis of life.

A conversation on #OMN issues around metadata

* Capitalism wants to privatise metadata to the #dotcons and the capitalist then control the government – fascism is back into fashion.

* Chinese communism, wants the state to control the metadata, so they can control capitalism, we are back to the command economy just digitised.

* Liberalism want to privatise metadata to the individual to return to a mythic free-market past, a better outcome than the first two but clearly not the one we are building with the #OMN

* What does anarchism want #4opens #OMN is an attempt to answer this last one.

https://wp.me/p9Vw7k-oA

CB. My thinking here is that Anarchism wants the social conditions for free association. The implication for metadata is autonomy over how that’s shared and used

HC. Am thinking about power. Metadata has power in aggregation so bad power is about hoarding the aggregation to use for your power agenders. Good power has to be a diffrent outcome.

CB. So fragmentation of metadata (decentralized storage and tactical use of aliases) is a way to defeat accumulation of power through accumulation of metadata. An interesting quality of power is that it is relative, rather than absolute. So an entity doesn’t have power *over* you unless it has more power to wield constructively relevant to the situation.

HC. ‎in the #OMN we are using metadata to replace the market – the only interesteing question is who has the aggregated metadata power. The capitalists, The state or the Commons – if we divide and privatise the metadata we have nothing to replace the market with. Its all about building a post capitalist economy. We need to replace the “free-market” and it’s police man with a commons and its community – the metadata replaceing the “invisible hand” with visible knowledge in #4opens commons.

CB. Here’s a thought about how a knowledge economy works that may be relevant to the metadata issue. You have transparency and trust building at the local level.

HC. We using social/tech to replace capitalism, not just do social networking the #4opens is a VERY political project that is soft/strongly ant-capitalist. Yep the #OMN is a trust based network of flows (community/subjects/people). We do need a good explanation of the political nature of the project, but also do not wont to terrify the NGO crew, tread softly. Thinking about this, we are pro “power” just wont to horizontalize it. Were meany people, asperly #geekproblem are against power and wont to minermise it (while having total power of there code).

CB. For a press release? “It’s about promoting individual and community autonomy”. For me, the #geekproblem is trying *too* hard to have a perfect system, a way that the bad thing never happens.

HC. Yes but that’s unbalanced, and rebalancing individualism/community in a world of neo-liberal individualism…

CB. That’s unrealistic. You want to make the bad things selected against statistically. Emphasizing autonomy (including community autonomy) is transient.

HC. being less human – its the blemishes were buty lie and its the users saying your code is unusable that make it better etc. if you don’t have any users you can do any code you like – almost all open-source projects are built this way.

CB. We have situations that are unbalanced currently, and the way to achieve balance involves building force in opposition to the current power.

HC. Autonomy comes for stable/trust based society – not from isolated (control) individuals – but yes we talk about the same thing just different processes.

CB. Yeah, I phrased our shared value “for a press release” and you said that’s “neo-liberal individualism”. Well, yeah. 😀 But it introduces the idea of community autonomy, which isn’t quite anarchy ready, either, but it’s a step towards free association and away from thinking about autonomy as strictly an individual value, which is my *estimation* of the most that words can accomplish tactically in that situation.

HC. OK “community autonomy”… am trying to expand my whole composting metaphor to cover this stuff, shovels.

CB. There’s shovels, spades, pitchforks, and dung forks. You can do everything with a shovel, but your back will thank you if you don’t. Either way, it’s the worms who do all the heavy lifting. I’ve been tackling the metadata issue with a friend doing some tech work for a Native American resistamce movement, and who’s very interested in making dirt. The most important aspect of metadata for em (pronoun) is being able to reliably communicate intent. It’s not sufficient or practical to say who should read it and who shouldn’t. There’s aspects of communicating approach to the topic and assumptions about sharing and replying that social networking, including Activity Pub, doesn’t address. These are communicated by a language like Lakota in introductions and closing on speeches, like formal practices in business correspondence.

HC. What do you think about replacing capitalisms free-market with a metadata “commons” as the free market is based on selfishness and access to exclusive knowledge, were the data commons is based on sharing the “open” knowledge for “community” ends. Both are based on “invisible hands” just one is human fucking each other over for a mythical good outcome and the other is more “democratic/diversity” that word “community autonomy” 🙂

CB. The most important aspect of metadata for em (pronoun) is being able to reliably communicate intent for both individual and social communication and trade. I do agree with that. I’m also working with some old school coop-style communists on adapting economic vocabulary to Activity Pub. It’s not sufficient or practical to say who should read it and who shouldn’t. There’s aspects of communicating approach to the topic and assumptions about sharing and replying that social networking, including Activity Pub, doesn’t address

HC. We are purposely not doing social networking for the #OMN only news and archiving as it has a much less privacy issues. News is done in the open/trust by default and sources are protected when needed. And archiving is history, you can choices to add information or not.

CB. And, assuming that you’re talking about locally generated data being propagated through networks of relationships (as opposed to being global by default), then you have a situation where parties local to one another can reliably leverage the advantages of openness, without centralized accumulations of metadata for fascists (or capital) to capture and leverage to exert control. That’s economic activity, which also has differences as well as similarities relative to OMN

HC. Its open data and open license by default so the enemy can take all the metadata by working there way into the syteam. We don’t recommend doing anything hardcore in #OMN or online in any way. The project is about assuming the world CAN change then building in that direction.

CB. But the general shape is that metadata linkage is unavoidable (geek problem), metadata accumulation is undesirable (capital), “metadata is evil” lacks necessary nuance, and communication of metadata is a necessary part of the model and likely a certain amount of verification.

HC. The whole project is built by adding a metadata tail which you can queryed to build trust and serendipity as well as organize in an affective way. You would be right to point out it has NO power to resist the repression of the state if they turn fascist. Though its is a fabulous tool set to build a tool to have power against the state if that happens. So its a race of human creativity vs the “invisible hand” backed up by police with rubber truncheons… the key word is race, if push comes to shove.

CB. Authenticity of metadata in that case is primarily establish through the trust network. It’s hard to corrupt metadata *if* you get a lot of copies distributed quickly.

HC. Metadata is going to happen no matter what you do, to think the geeks can solve this is a fantasy. The ONLY question is who controls this open/closed. Some basic certification to each addition to the tail based on user accounts. The are lots of widely used standards based ways of doing this.

CB. For the example of a state actor trying to control the narrative…. there’s maths to describe the circumstances under which that can occur. And situations where you’re distributing stories to 3 or more peers look bad for the state if they don’t shut it down in the first 2 generations.

HC. Then as you say use this “trust network” to quray the tail. For example how meany people do i know who trust this adition to the tail. You can do the same to get an idea if the tail is trusted over all ect. But the question has to be asked who let the state actor into the trust network… they lose lots of trust (links/flows) etc then rerun the query and you are back to trust. Its all lossy, but this is a how trust works. In this we get away from the #geekproblem ideas of trust.

CB. For the state to suppress a story, they need to identify the source then trace known associates (metadata) to shut down those repeating it. If police don’t discover the story until there are 10+ stations replicating it, that’s not likely to happen.

HC. The network is built up of trusted actors – how dose the state have a voice inside this grassroots level project.

CB. So policing involvement *after* the story breaks is unlikely to be effective in suppression, which is what you want

HC. Yep you are talking strong AI based state manipulations- we don’t have a defence against that.

CB. You actually have the best defence possible.

HC. Yep it will spread widely across the bottom in uncontrollably directions after the first few jumps the is practically no censorship with out visible repression then non effective then as it will bubble back up from the darkweb.

CB. Even if police infiltrate a peer to an activist cell, they still don’t necessarily have enough knowledge to prevent replication through other peers.

HC. But they can pre-empt and kick you door down based on metadata… will happen. We have sudo-anonimerty to mediate this issue. Somebody would have to trust your account with no tail… then the police kick there door down…. Notice the us an escalating level of door kicking.

CB. Takes time to knock down doors, even electronically. With every door they knock down, there’s 3 times as many doors as there were before – potentially. Then you’re crossing lines in jurisdictions and there’s no putting a cork in that

HC. In this it will be censorship resistant. But we make no #geekproblem lies that the “security of the network” will protect you. But you can protect yourself by sudo anonymity and the use of tor. And whispering in the forest to your friends to share the content from the sudo anonymous account. In this way we move security from hard to soft. From #encryptionists to social trust.

CB. Right. Making the network less efficient by routing it over Tor or otherwise requiring cryptography defeats the plan.

HC. Yep, this removes the tail so no trust, no community, no social change. But how to persuade paranoid activists and control freak geeks that having your door kicked sown is socially useful 😉 Also the is no way to root the media objects, no need for federation, no need for community. With one to one encryption you just have isolated individuals and no media

CB. Crypto solutions are fine for first hop in highly sensitive situations, but once you hit a peer that’s outside of your opsec control, infosec is a moot point and you need to go for speed.

HC. Mixed with trust.

CB. I may have overstated “speed”, but yeah. Reasonable assumptions of trust. You only need absolute assurances in specific situations (that you are better off trying to avoid)

HC. With the #OMN we do both the open and the closed path. But we change the balance to 80% open and 20% closed. Yep, best whisper in the forest, second best use the p2p encryption tools in the 20%

CB. That’s a ratio that pops up a lot in various contexts and I agree with it here.

Why do people need power?

To be fully human is to be empowered to live a meaningful life in society. To be sub-human is to live a powerless life outside of society. We are social creators that make our own meaning with this power.

The ONLY important question is how power is shared inside society – all political ideology are based on an understanding of this.

Looking at social power today we find it in metadata. There are 4 views on who should hold this data:

The corporations
The government
The individual
The commons