The #hashtags tell a storie

Dot for profit for few con for the rest – took over the #openweb during the #dotcom era.

#stupidindividualism is our internal poison that we breed from the #deathcult

#failbook will/has failed us as individuals and as a society.

#openweb is a good view of what we had and what we won’t.

is a path out of the #geekproblem

The #geekproblem is a humane failure of trust and its replacement with control.

The #hashtags add up to tell a story and thus build a way out of this mess.

The #deathcult is the last 40 years of neo-liberalism.

Need to work in shovels, shit and compost to the story. Hashtags a tool for #openweb organizing ideas/stories/community’s. The is obviously a balance with self-expression. At the moment this “balance” is pure #deathcult being pushed by our shared #stupidindividualism

We have a #shoval, common storied #hashtags we have piles of #techshit to shovel for #compost to build up fertile soil for planting flower and vegetables to nourish our soles and actions.

Why talk in “soft” metaphors?

The issues are soft as are the explanations/metaphors. You can’t have a hard explanation of the social world without building it up from an ideological foundation. As most people are in denial of the possibility of different world views/ideologies this makes “hard” conversations a largely pointless way of communicating. People asking for them have not taken the first step so talking their hand to help them will soon lead you down a different/ideology path. As the project is about #KISS and focus this is something we have limited time/focus for.

 
If you can glimpse the world from different views/ideologies than the soft/metaphor will talk to you and the attraction for hard will be less strong. These people have a hope of building a different/ideology world/process so can help in real ways.
 
As we need to focus, it’s not an issue to talk to the first and more important to consolidate around the second… question is finding people that have not been “broken” by #mainstreaming agenders.

 

All “standards” are social agreements/consensuses

Q. I am looking for the definition of open standards, and it’s quite foggy. I found on opensource.com something useful, but it’s still a candle in the dark

A. it’s an under resourced process for the #openweb that need input. It’s at the heart of the #OMN project. How we define it at the #OMN is a standard produced with process which is a bit circler as open “industrial” standards is one of the 🙂

#nothingnew is a guiding light in this project to mediate the #geekproblem #stupidindividualism and the #deathcult (understanding comes from fallowing flows to their source )

All “standards” are social agreements/consensuses thus they CANT BE built form #geekproblem #stupidindividualism and the #deathcult we have wasted and will waste more time if we keep pushing this shit.

The idea of the #OMN is that it does NOT host any/meany of projects it incubates rather it is the “holder” of the standards that glues the projects together. Some of these will be “standards body” some will be defacto by use and consensus. In the end we need to look beyond #nothingnew and create new standards body’s – go slow on this as concessions are hard and only worthwhile if you do the hard work to achieve them.

Shovel and compost comes to mind.

Thinking about #OMN from 4 years ago

I have found memories of fighting the Power Politics of the “undead left” during the London Social Forum many years ago – lots of knotted strings of organic garlic around the top “taking the power table” to highlight the uncomfortable “undead left´s” grasping for power.

Then the ad hock crew taking away the top table altogether during the lunch break and arranging all the chairs in a circle. Their faces were a delight, coming back after lunch and it kinda/might have worked… but the splits of “not thought of here” took over and the undead were permissioned to take back the space at the next meeting.

The ESF movement faded and now is a shadow – no alt was built.

The use of cultural myths and traditions will mediate and disempower “power politics” but it’s a chicken and an egg to get these embedded in groups that are already ensnared in “power politics”.

The rainbow gatherings used to work this way till they were “disrupted” by the digital shift and capture by the #dotcons now the gatherings themselves are broken due in part by being organized through #failbook

The #OMN could fail from the same issue. The myths and traditions are in place PGA and . But the project does not have deep roots to weather the inrush of success. And on the other hand will likely not last the slow growth needed for the roots to dig deep.

In activism when you have a shitty stinky process situation due to control freekery. You have two options:

  • Open
  • Closed

If its a open process project, the closing things down and hiding the crapness/mess will not help at all. The stink will leak out of every bit of the project from relations of core personals to the compromises involved in every piece of design/interaction during the project. This “low” misama might not to be immediately visible but it will cling to everything the project touches.

Open projects become dysfunctional when controlled by closed process, this is a feedback loop that this dysfunction is solved by more closed working/thinking till you are running a closed project.

If it’s a closed to start with then kick the people out – information can be controlled – power kept – and agendas pushed through till the funding runs out or people lose wider goodwill. Opening up a closed project without a revolutionary explosion is nearly impossible – all the repressed and hidden crapness that is needed to keep a closed project going will feed on itself when let loose.

Almost all NGO and activist groups are a mixture of open/closed.

The NGO´s falsify openness in consultations and meaningless focus groups. But always work closed at the core to continue funding and careers of the benefiting group – those who control the closed – not the community the NGO is setup to serve.

Activist by their nature tend to start out open then grow closed as they grow bigger – it’s a human scale thing. Interestingly affinity group organizing is trust based and another subject.

Hopefully we get an idea for the “dogma” of open and the clear rejection of “closed”.

The #OMN is built from the experience of 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. 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 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.

Shifting power in #openweb projects

Before we dive into the whole open/closed misunderstanding/fight it would be good to look at the different roles in a project and who has the power to say yes/no at each level.

admin
mod
producer
user
reader

“closed” the power is concentrated at the top.

“open” it is shifted down to the producer.

The reader is not given power as they have no buy in – the “user” gets a little power to post/comment from their account. The “producer” should likely be promoted to “mod” as soon as they are trusted.

The “mod” should have as much power as possible without endangering the instance.

The “admin” should have strong power BUT a VERY strong social rule not to use it. The running of the instance is in the hands of the “mod/producer”

All actions are socially mediated by the with audit logs to bring transparency to the process.

 

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 approaches, this is a little understood simple path.

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 #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 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 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.

The senate “insurrection” and the media

We are seeing a stinking mess of shit posting from the left and the right on the role of tech big and small in the senate “insurrection” . The voice of the centre right #traditionalmedia will push us back to the #dotcons gatekeepers they have started to criticized over the last 10 years.

The opening we have is this mess is, light, transparency building trust. What we do not have is darkness building fear as an option. In the battle of open/closed the sides to fight on are far from obvious on the surface – we have a tool the to lift the lid, and we have a shovel to shift the shit to the compost heap #OMN

We need you, the crew, to build this out to change the world for the better.

https://unite.openworlds.info/explore/organizations

#4opens #review Threema GmbH Seriously Secure Messaging

#review

Threema GmbH Seriously Secure Messaging

https://threema.ch

The :

Are a simple way to judge the value of a “alt/grassroots” tech project.

* Open data – is the basic part of a project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data without this open they cannot work.

– you can likely download your chats and metadata, seams to be there so that a open

* 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 isn’t perfect, but they do expand the area of “trust” that a project needs to work, creative commons is a start here.

– its maybe be technically open-source but it is the most restricted open-source you can get so give it half a open

* Open “industrial” standards – this is a little understood 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

– it looks like it uses no open standed for chat? Not sure for encryption so no open for now

* 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

– looking at the github the process is locked down and not excessable to normal people, the company structure is a #dotcons so no open.

– so its 1 and ½ opens and is thus not a project so do not recommend using it.

It’s easy to become a 4opens project and join the #openweb family:

2 opens a bronze badge

3 opens a silver badge

4 opens a gold badge

Next step in the #OMN

The majority of #mainstreaming #openweb tech projects have the assumption that human nature is a fixed thing and that every project has to be built in reaction to the 40 years of neo-liberal #deathcult that we all live in now as this is the “only” human nature visible. They completely miss/ignorer the social nature of people in groups in this look back at the 20th century, and we have clearly different views of human nature as examples to build society. Call it social democracy, call it communism, call it what you like. We DO NOT have to build tools in relation to the #deathcult, and we clearly should not base “hope” on tools that are built in this relation.

Mastodon, activertypub and the fedivers took a small #stepaway from this mess. The #OMN takes the next step away. For the rest #compost and #shovels come to mind.

The #OMN is a simple #KISS social tech project.

All these projects work off the same core code/workflow of tagging and editing metadata.

#Indymediaback is the news part of the project. This is to grow journalism from the grassroots and to make our news mainstream.

#Makinghistory – is the archiving project. This is to preserve and grow our history from the grassroots and make our history mainstream.

#Friendsandfamily – is the social networking project. For family/affernerty groups to move away from the mainstream #dotcons and to nourish the grassroots.

All the projects are and federated.

Can you host videos over Tor?

Q. lf we know someone who could host videos over Tor, could that help you? Is the software Tor/clearnet agnostic?

A.  it might be an abuse of the #tor network to stream videos over it as it has limited bandwidth and is run on a volunteer bases. It would be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons please have a look into the pros and cons of this as am interested.

Some answers from a brief search:

Q. under what circumstances Tor can handle streaming video?

A. What Tor can’t handle is lots of people consuming lots of bandwidth simultaneously. There’s no clean way to load balance and everyone is at the mercy of independent relays.

A. We’ve been saying for years not to run BitTorrent over Tor, because the Tor network can’t handle the load

Interesting most people talk about security/privacy and only respect for the commons as an afterthought – this is clearly a #geekproblem

update

Q. I2P is run by volunteers and encourages the sharing of videos. The internet is a Commons and depends on trust, not just Tor. ISPs have Fair Use policies etc. If not Tor maybe this person can share over I2P.

A. This one kinda fails one of the – open “industrial” standards. Only people who went through the process of installing bad UX code could watch the videos so not a good outreach project. The is a resion we are building out a OPEN media network. Worth thinking about this issue “It easy to keep crossing wires with “media” vs. personal. Media should be open, with clear sources, except when protecting them. Whereas personal data should default to private”