Enforcing artificial scarcity when we finally have the technology to move towards a post-scarcity world is what’s driving us towards real scarcity. And if you think artificial scarcity is bad, wait until you experience the real thing. Much of this mess is avoidable, but we keep prioritizing #nastyfew wealth and profit over building a sustainable future. We have the technological potential to do better, but we’re choosing to keep worshipping a #deathcult that protects scarcity for the few at the expense of survival for the many
In the #OMN story, #encryptionist describes the tendency to priorities technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem. It is the belief that social and political problems can primarily be solved through cryptography, protocols and mathematics, rather than through communities, relationships and accountable governance.
Encryption itself is not the problem, strong encryption is essential, private communication and secure infrastructure matters. People living under authoritarian governments, journalists protecting sources and activists defending themselves from surveillance all depend on robust cryptographic tools.
The #OMN critique is directed at #encryptionist – the narrow view that elevates technical security above every other social value. The assumption becomes – If we can encrypt everything… .we have solved the problem. But technology cannot replace trust, Encryption can prove that a message has not been altered, it cannot prove that the sender is honest. Encryption can protect communication, it cannot build community. Encryption can hide information from attackers, it cannot help people resolve disagreements, share responsibility or govern themselves.
These are social problems, they require social solutions. This is where #encryptionist thinking becomes a form of the #geekproblem. Faced with messy human questions, the instinct is to build another protocol, another identity system, another blockchain. More cryptographic layers, another clever piece of infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the harder questions remain untouched. Who controls the community? Who moderates abuse? How are decisions made? How social trust is earned? And finally how is social power distributed? These questions cannot be encrypted away.
The history of the internet is full of examples of technically elegant systems that failed because nobody wanted to use them. Perfectly secure software abandoned because there was no community around it. Projects that solved fascinating engineering problems while leaving ordinary people confused, excluded or dependent on technical specialists.
This is why #OMN puts people before protocols – the phrase #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer captures this perfectly. The purpose of technology is to strengthen human relationships, not replace them.
The #encryptionist mindset often begins from an assumption that people are the weakest part of any system. Humans make mistakes. Humans cannot be trusted. Humans introduce uncertainty. Therefore, remove humans from the process wherever possible.
The #OMN path starts somewhere different, humans are not bugs, they are the point. Technology should help people build trust – not eliminate the need for it. A healthy community is not one where nobody has to trust anyone. It is one where trust can grow because people have transparent processes, shared history and accountable relationships.
This is why #openprocess is just as important as encryption, if governance happens behind closed doors, secure communication does not create democratic accountability.
This is why #openweb native projects like #makinghistory matter. Communities need memory as much as secrecy, this is why #grassroots matters, people need relationships as much as protocols. This is why the #4opens fit together.
- Open systems create public accountability.
- Encryption creates private security.
These are complementary values, not competing ones, the danger comes when security blindly becomes the only value. An obsession with technical purity can easily produce systems that ordinary people cannot understand, maintain or participate in. Complexity becomes a gatekeeper. Technical experts become the hidden authorities. Communities become dependent on those who understand the cryptography.
Ironically, systems designed to eliminate trust often end up demanding enormous trust in a small group of experts. Trust the developers, trust the protocol, trust the mathematics. Trust that someone else has implemented everything correctly. The trust never disappears, it merely becomes invisible.
The #OMN approach argues that invisible trust is more dangerous than visible trust. Better to acknowledge that communities depend on relationships and build institutions that make those relationships accountable. This is where the #Fediverse offers an interesting lesson.
Its success has come less from cryptographic innovation than from federation, shared standards and community moderation. It works because independent communities develop their own norms while remaining connected through open protocols. The technology enables the relationships, it does not replace them. The same lesson applies across the #openweb.
In the #OMN story, #encryptionist is a warning against forgetting this balance. The path is not to build a world where nobody has to trust anyone, it is to build a world where trust is deserved, distributed and supported by technology rather than replaced by it.
Technology should secure the commons, it should never become a substitute for the commons itself.