An #openweb organic intellectual,technologist and part of the #OMN
Funding structures are built for #NGO nonsense, not grassroots projects where actual value is created. The #OMN, #indymediaback, and #OGB challenge this, but funders can’t grasp it because they don’t understand value outside institutional framing. Fixing the funding #blocking, funders need to THINK, not just UNDERSTAND. Right now, they “understand” in the framework of existing … Continue reading We need to break out of this cycle
The reality of trying to build real alternatives, without deep-rooted community support, even the best projects wither. The liberal/progressive crowd shouts into the void, but when it comes to actual action, they tend to retreat into safe, performative bubbles rather than engaging with real, messy change. The Mastodon codebase is an example here, it was … Continue reading Maybe it’s time to stop trying to fix broken tools, to build with a truly native approach?
Activism is messy. When we push against #mainstreaming, bad faith actors will come at us hard. Our best, often only, defence is sticking to good faith, telling our own stories, and holding onto process. Without this, the dominant narrative (which serves power) will drown out our voices. The Problem is well-meaning people who wreck everything, … Continue reading Mediating bad faith missteps in grassroots movements
Professor Ciaran Martin and Dr Max Smeets talk about his new book, Ransom War: How Cyber Crime Became a Threat to National Security. What did I get from this event: Cybercrime is no longer only about stolen credit cards and leaked emails, it has become a battleground for national security. This was the focus of … Continue reading Ransom War: The Rising Threat of Cybercrime and National Security
To look at why this is important, we need to move outside the comfort zones of current #mainstreaming thinking. Let’s start by touching on the role of #protestcamps in direct action: protest camps are temporary activist spaces set up in public areas to bring attention to social, environmental, and political issues. These camps create a … Continue reading Activism for tech development and #FOSS paths
The Open Governance Body (#OGB) is a radical approach to decentralized governance, designed from the experience of the failures of existing governance models by combining activist organizing techniques with decentralized federated technology like #ActivityPub. It provides a very flexible governance framework that can be used across different communities, from local markets to the #Fediverse itself, … Continue reading We need real shifts to things that matter in #openweb tech dev
Power in tech isn’t neutral, and our issue over the last 20 years is that we have allowed the #dotcons to hoarded and weaponised it. The answer to our failer isn’t to retreat or seek more “ethical” enclosures, it’s to reclaim our power through radical, commons-based networks like #indymediaback and the #OMN. This argument is … Continue reading The difference between struggle and #fashernista ethics. The latter is comfortable. The former matters.
Many years ago, I wrote on my website sidebar: “A river that needs crossing—political and tech blogs: On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance; on the geek side, there is naivety and over-complexity.” Decades later, we still to often find ourselves standing on opposite shores of this river, struggling to bridge the understanding … Continue reading Bridging the gap: Building a human-first #openweb
As the #fashernista and #geekproblem “debate” over social media platforms intensifies, the choice between public, decentralised networks and corporate-controlled #dotcons has never been clearer. Let’s look at a simple example: The choice between #Mastodon and #Bluesky reflects a broader conflict between decentralisation and #dotcons corporate control. It should, but often is not easy to see … Continue reading Public Social Media: The Choice is Clear
The web wasn’t built by solo tech geniuses, finance firms, or flashy luminaries making illusionary promises. It was grown by the collective time, energy, and creativity of millions of grassroots people and communities working together to create something greater than themselves. The internet as we know it emerged not from the top-down visions of elites, … Continue reading The web wasn’t built by solo tech geniuses
The billionaire problem, Elon Musk, tech oligarchs, and the #deathcult of wealth as a social path. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is emblematic of a larger issue: the unchecked power of tech oligarchs. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill millionaires; they’re part of a nasty few, the class that operates above the ultra-wealthy, shaping politics, economies, and … Continue reading Tech princes and the #deathcult
Can you smell it? Can you feel the unease in the world the hard shift to the right is feeding off? The dead ideology of Neo-liberalism is everywhere. It’s a rotten corpse in everything we look at, everything we touch. And yes while it might feel uncomfortable, we should actively feel distaste when we look … Continue reading A world we see as normal