It’s encouraging that more people are questioning whether we really need another new tech project. The truth is that most new projects are unnecessary. They solve imaginary problems, reinvent existing tools, or add to the growing pile of #techshit.
Before building anything, do a #4opens review. Ask simple questions: Is it open? Does it strengthen the commons? Does it distribute power? Does it solve a real social problem? Then publish that review. Let’s build a culture where communities evaluate technology together instead of chasing novelty. We need to do better.
The last decade of #techchurn has buried us under mountains of abandoned apps, duplicated projects and half-finished platforms. This isn’t just a technical problem; it’s a social one. Years of #mainstreaming have stripped away social purpose, while endless reinvention has consumed the time and energy that could have gone into maintaining and improving what already worked.
Some of this mess needs to be composted, not everything should be saved. The useful ideas, working code and lived experience should be recovered and reused. The rest can decompose into fertile ground for building something more humane.
From a grassroots perspective, one of our biggest problems is that many of the alternatives we once had have been hollowed out. Community media, social centres, cooperative technology and radical organising didn’t disappear because they failed completely. Many were absorbed, professionalised or defunded by the #NGO world, turned into projects for #fashernistas, or simply worn down by forty years of #deathcult thinking disguised as “common sense”.
That history matters. Many people wonder why motivation feels so low today. Part of the answer is that previous generations experienced real alternatives. Imperfect, often messy, but real. Anarchist projects, ecological movements, cooperative media, community technology and socialist experiments created spaces where people could participate rather than simply consume.
Most of those spaces have been dismantled, enclosed or forgotten. So let’s stop pretending we have to invent everything from scratch. Let’s recover what worked. Let’s learn from what failed. Let’s reboot the best of those traditions using federated, #4opens infrastructure like the #Fediverse and #OMN. Not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as the foundation for new experiments rooted in today’s reality.
Innovation isn’t about endless novelty, it’s about carrying forward what has lasting value. That’s the path beyond #techchurn.
