“A river that needs crossing political and tech culture – On the political side, the is arrogance and ignorance, on the Geek side the is naivety and over-complexity”
What I am highlighting here, Geeks think this is too simple to think about, the politicos have no understanding of this. Both are happy with silos as it gives them “total control” of their tiny things. These isolated siloed islands are no match for the continents that the #dotcons control. The issue here is that nobody cares for the big thing that all these tiny things grow from, this big thing the #openweb is withered from neglect. The shrinking “open internet” is further perverted by political legislation and #dotcons grasping/enclosing in till it becomes a ghost of its old self.
Thinking to escape this sad and bad fate.
The web is made of links:
* Articles are just data objects
* Data flows
* Feeds are living links to move data object flows
* The link is where the value is (google learned this a long time ago)
* Synchronisation and redundancy of data is key to resilience and remembering the past links (value)
This is hard for the politicos to hear, but, content is just something to link to.
Open source – as in “free software” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software this keeps development healthy by increasing interconnectedness and bringing in serendipity. The Open licences are the “lock” that keep the first two in place, what we have ain’t perfect, but they do expand the area of “trust” that a project needs to work, creative commons is a start here.
Open “industrial” standards – this is a little understand but core open, It’s what the open internet and WWW are built from. Here is an outline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
Open process – this is the most “nebulous” part, examples of the work flow would be wikis and activity streams. Projects are built on linking trust networks, so open process is the “glue” that binds the links together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process
The are a lot of “insane” people in activism and counter-culture, its what makes it exciting, dynamic and affective. However with everything its a question of balance, lets look at how a movement stagnates, fails or growes and blossems.
A short off the top of head list
NGO’ists push limited bureaucratic thinking over everything, they get into bed with anything that can be shaped to their mind set and is fashionably fundable. They take up mind space and squander resources. The vast majority of “institutional” money goes into this.
Encryptionists – service the paranoid fuckists, they have a strong tendencies to reduce usability and create dangerous fantasises of security and anonymity. The are a lot of these as this has been a dominate way of thinking for the last 5-10 years.
Traditional media panderers have there uses for a companion, but soon start to misshape the movement to mainstream agenda’s – hard not to have this outcome.
Horizontal dotcom’sts try to use our movement to jump start their dotcom, fine if its built with the #4opens, if its not then distraction if failur and disaster if people use it – so bad outcome both ways.
Insecure and nasty lifestyles are endemic and are attracted like fly’s to any successful grassroots project and they are feed by the felandering of the Traditional media panderist – this can easily tip into being a movement death spiral.
Hidden careerist are good for movement building as tend to be the competent ones, but start to drift to NGO and media philanders to build their careerer rather than the grassroots movement.
Paranoid fuckwists are the bedroock of most grassroots campines and in small doses help hold things together, get to many of them in places of responsibility and you have out of control infighting.
Dogmatic liberals are lovely people, but a strong force for blocking sustainable alternatives, its imposable to meditate the breakdowns with a few of these at the core of any counter-culture.
Now for a corresponding “good” list of activist “insanity’s”
On this subject it helps to be a bit “mad” to stay in grassroot movement for any leaghnth of time
The hand’s off NGO’s the is a long (hidden) history of healthy NGO/atavism synergy
The user focused KISS per2per’ists are working on the uphill project of (re)booting the #openweb.
Traditional media outreach’sts are promoting grassroots media and technology by linking it into traditional media narratives to build the world rather than misshape it.
Horizontal dotcom’s are working on “open” federated sustainability rather than closed client server “solutions”
Lifestyles are though opening up in the campaigning lifestyle flow and learning to let go and build healthy connected lives.
Open careerist, are bootstrapping the campaign while bootstrapping themselves, they take the open energy like a trosion horse into the belly of the traditional beast. Some one has to do this…
Secure organising crew is everyone job to keep it calrm and focus, and help out with the very real “offline” security and communication that activism needs.
Liberal liberals the calm and the balance of “common sense” that’s needed to keep things from going horribly wrong.
Activism is a dynamic and crazy place full of “insane” people doing fantastic things, its a balancing act to hold it all together, to much of the top and not anufe off the bottom and it quickly slides into something few people wont to be involved in – then disappears with little trace.
