You do realize that all our data is HORRIBLY centralized and thus could vanish at any moment, come the revolution/evolution/ #climatechaos tsunamis.
Our end plan in the #OMN is that all the content is redundantly stored in the network in a #KISS way, so traditional backup is less important -when it goes wrong, and it will sometimes as we are home hosting. Just boot up a new instance and put your hashtags and user info in and all your content will be sucked back in a #lossy good enough way. This makes home hosting work well enough to scale outward to build a #openweb
* Fluffy – asking/pressuring for change though the system
* Spiky – fucking shit up to enact change and directly and sometime ethically using “violence” to property – not to people.
* Beyond spiky the is WAR where direct harm to people happens – that’s outside the metaphor.
It’s interesting to take a few moments to look at this more. #XR talks spiky by blocking bridges and occupying spaces, but they do it for a #fluffy agender of asking for change. As we are seeing now with their co-opting into “normal” this has limits on outcomes.
Where #climatecamp invaded and shut down the direct courses of #climatechaos with some limited property damage – though there were some in the movement that pushed for more property damage, was always “non-violent” to people. Though the police did regular violence to people in return, so was a one-sided agreement. This was lived “respect for diversity” and was affective in till the internal process ossified and #mainstreaming moved it to a more #XR agender where it promptly failed.
The #animalrights crew were #spiky doing damage to property, and some were not above doing damage to people. These guys were pretty intolerant but got stuff done and seceded in many of their objectives, though at heavy personal costs.
In the UK we have not had war in our movements since the Irish “troubles” though the has been way too much state violence around the world in our name.
Q. I remember when people were spiking trees to break chainsaws. Do you think the name came from that?
A. yes, the same movement. Spiky in both ways damage to the chainsaws and with possibility of hurting the users of the chainsaws this is meditated by clearly MARKING the area as spiked so sorted “diversity of strategy” #spiky in hand with #fluffy it works.
The problem is often from the dogmatic #fluffy crew collaborating with the police to stop this direct action. Due to the possibility of hurting the people with the chainsaws, this blocking effective action. Not respecting the diversity of strategy.
UPDATE
It’s interesting to look at this more as it’s an example of the success of the “Diversity of Strategises” and also their failures. Many spiky protesters see protecting nature from commercial logging as a war, with the possible injuries to the chainsaw works as exceptable to save nature. BUT in respect for the fluffy side of “Diversity of Strategises” they generally put up the notices about the spiking to stop the workers getting injured while destroying the trees. A good balance of spiky/fluffy, the fail is the liberal protesters then betraying them to the police as often happens which is a clear non respect for “Diversity of Strategises”. Possible social/ecological change is thus BLOCKED by this failing.
A. we all worship the #deathcult (neo-liberalism) in polatics, economics, most of the food we eat, our jobs and social lives are all mediated/mostly created by this invisible world-view. In progressive terms #mainstreaming is pushing this agender to build carriears and social structures to further the personal #stupidindividualism created by the #deathcult we live in. This is a circle that is going to kill and displace billions of people over the next 100 years from #climatechaos and the social feedback loop of political #fascism
#stupidindividualism is created by the social disintegration of the last 40 years of neo-liberalism, fascism is an outcome of this.
Examples from the UK groups @NovaraMedia while producing fab content its all distributed through the #dotcons and in the end they aspire to be the new @guardian to take the role of #traditionalmedia This is fair anufe but the wider “we” need to balance this with #grassroots media which is a non #mainstreaming mission.
I played a role in training thousands of grassroots “journalists” over the last 25 years at #undercurrents, #indymedia, #visionontv and now #OMN the majority that are still creating media went onto build there carriears in the mainstream and #NGO sectors few stayed in non #mainstreaming production missions. Cant blame them for this, though no alts were sustained from this which was why we did the training.
In each case grassroots/alt structures were devoured by the #deathcult pushing the need for mainstreaming survival – cant blame people for this.
BUT we need a working alternative if we are going to change the world that does not kill and displace billions of people over the next 100 years #XR
learning for expirence the #OMN is a political/tech tool to mediate this issue.
I think it is time to talk about giving up our desire for total control and moving to thinking about the world as flows rather than static. Our illusionary “static” individualism is a mental illness that makes us powerless to resist the displacement and death of billions of us over the next 100 years due to fascism/ #climatechaos forcefully rebalancing the human/natural world.
Static view is “individualism” its all about you as a selfish mythical island.
Flow view is “social” is all about you embedded in the flow of social/ecological realty.
You need “power” to urgently rebalance these views, social tech is a good step to this “power”. The #OMN project is a clever useful humane project to push balance back into the current #deathcult flow. For the religious crew this is a #lifecult for the humanistic its just the right thing to do.
One simple metric for judging #Bitcoin, is has it actually replaced or seriously disrupted the banking system? The answer is obviously no. The same financial institutions still dominate global economics. The same scams continue. The same offshore tax havens still hide elitist wealth. Politicians and oligarchs continue stuffing money into secrecy jurisdictions exactly as before. The banking system remains firmly in place, untouched at its core.
Bitcoin promised disintermediation, it promised liberation from financial power, it promised decentralisation. What it delivered instead was a speculative asset bubble.
Another useful metric is, do ordinary people use Bitcoin for everyday life? Again, no. No people buy food, pay rent, organise community infrastructure, or sustain local economies through Bitcoin. Almost nobody accepts it for normal goods and services. What dominates instead is speculation, hoarding, market gambling, and endless “number go up” culture.
This is important because technologies reveal their social meaning through actual use, not ideological promises.
And then there is the ecological cost. Bitcoin’s energy consumption exceeds that of entire countries, it consumes more electricity than the Netherlands. This is an extraordinary level of waste for a system that has failed to achieve all of its original social goals.
At a time of accelerating #climatechaos, building gigantic energy-hungry computational systems dedicated to financial speculation is not innovation, it is social and ecological vandalism.
Bitcoin is not a “net positive for humanity.” It did not dismantle banking power. It did not democratise wealth. It did not create meaningful commons infrastructure. It did not produce resilient local economies. What it did do was make already-rich people richer while burning staggering amounts of energy.
The winners were early adopters, speculators, venture capital, crypto exchanges, and existing elitists with enough surplus wealth to gamble. The losers are everybody forced to live inside the accelerating ecological and social consequences.
Bitcoin is a classic expression of the #geekproblem. It approaches deeply human and social issues through abstract technical absolutism. Instead of rebuilding trust, community, accountability, and collective institutions, it attempts to replace them with cryptographic mechanisms and computational systems. It is the worship of mechanism over humanity.
The #encryptionist mindset imagines that social trust can be replaced by mathematical trust. That code can replace culture. That computation can replace politics and markets can replace community. But humans do not actually live this way, human life runs on trust, care, reciprocity, relationships, mutual aid, shared stories, and collective responsibility.
The real currency of life is not cryptographic tokens, it is the smile, the helping hand, the shared meal and the neighbour who shows up when things fall apart.
Making machines into gods is profoundly inhuman. And the last 40 years of neoliberal money worship have pushed this pathology by reducing value into market value, relationships into transactions, and all meaning into competition and accumulation. This is the #deathcult logic, that in the era of ecological breakdown, this path is becoming openly suicidal.
The answer to this mess is not better speculation technology. We do not need more #techshit built to accelerate extraction, surveillance, financialisation, and social fragmentation. We need technologies designed to grow commons, this is where projects like #OMN matter. The #OMN path starts from a different assumption that technology should support human relationships, not replace them.
Instead of building systems around profit extraction and artificial scarcity, we can build systems around shared infrastructure, open process, collective publishing, federated trust networks, mutual aid, community governance, and resilient local organisation.
The point is not technological purity, the point is social usefulness as healthy technology should be about lowering barriers, strengthen communities, distribute power, encourage participation, and help people organise collectively. On this path the #4opens matter because they expose power instead of hiding it – open data – open source – open standards – open process. This visibility allows communities to compost problems before they become entrenched systems of control.
The opposite path – the dominant #dotcons and crypto worlds – increasingly hides power behind complexity, branding, speculation, and artificial technical priesthoods. People become users, consumers, and data points instead of participants.
We need compost, not worship, we need to stop worshipping the systems that are actively destroying the conditions for human life. Compost is a much better metaphor as compost takes waste, failure, and breakdown and turns them back into living systems. That is the #KISS task ahead of us, not denial, not technological salvation myths, not billionaire futurism. Practical rebuilding, shovels matter more than fantasies.
#OMN is a shovel, and compost is the basis of life.
This is an interesting point, but it only makes sense if you see people as isolated individuals and the being no such thing as society. No alternative to the capitalistic free markets and no hope of changing the death spiral we are on – you might be right. BUT this is a deeply reactionary #deathcult point of view and need to be called out as such – LOUDLY.
For the last 10 years we have had a movement to banish metadata on one side and to hoard it on the other. To banish our humanity or to control our humanity. Nowhere is the celebration of humanity to be found… it’s pastime to put our feet back onto the ground and think about this for a moment. Metadata, data about data is what gives humanity its power in both an individualist sense and at a social scale.
One thing we know for sure is that ideas about privacy change, in the feudal era the village priest know everything and policed everyone, the king had sex in front of the counters to prove his line etc. The current capitalist idea of privacy which we all internalise is set to change, what it becomes we do not know.
What is the free-market? it’s a signalling device based on knowledge of metadata. For people who know little about the “free-market” is a flow of horde metadata as is “money”. In meany ways you are made up of metadata, the words that come out of your mouth are the made up names of things, likely the “things” are made up from words handed down through the ages. When you look at it all HUMAN civilization is a flow of metadata.
If we are to have meaningful social change – let’s look at anarchism as an example. How will we replace the “free-market” where will the signals come from to distribute the goods in complex society? And yes we might end up with “simple society” by killing billions of people from #climatechaos that’s true, but that’s a different subject.
Q. Metadata is the currency of surveillance capitalism. Traded as behavioural futures, and used by the military to perform situational spectroscopy upon whole nations. We can try to minimize metadata, but it’s always a tricky problem. When we generate metadata we hand cash to the likes of Google, who call it “behavioural surplus”. And to shadier organisations to use it for disruption and control. In the past there were entire academic conferences about using social media metadata to prevent “contagion” – by which they meant social movements opposing autocratic governments.
Am not in any way disagreeing with the above, I am pointing out that it is actually not the agender you think it is… raising the question of which side are you on. If nothing changes then you are right, but if nothing changes we end up with billions of people dyeing from #climatechaos and the state control/fascism that comes with this. As I outline this is a #geekproblem world view that of only thinking of tech and not social – hope I can help to balance this.
We HAVE TO CHANGE we can’t keep doing this same old shit. Privatizing metadata for a tiny number of geeks is not a social change project. Cant put this any simpler.
Q. This goes back over a decade to the “Freedom in the cloud” talk. What if internet users were to run their own services, and keep the logs (metadata) ? Simply moving the logs from Goog and Zuck to the users would be one of the biggest improvements to the internet. It would pull the rug out from under their business model.
That’s the plan with the #OMN and we go further (but only if the users/producers flick the switches) we have an expanding metadata commons that has two powers – one negative in that it destroys the business model of late capitalism one positive that it expands commons that gives us growing space for creativity and expression.
Summing up the choice we face:
* Capitalism wants to privatise metadata to the capitalists #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 on steroids.
* Liberalism want to privatise metadata to the individual to return to a mythic free-market past.
* What does anarchism want #4opens#OMN is an attempt to answer this last one.
To recap I understand our current push for privacy from the #dotcons BUT am asking what are we to replace this with? The closing/privatizing of metadata to individuals ” is a deeply reactionary #deathcult point of view and need to be called out as such – LOUDLY!”
The fallow flower beds/farm that is #indymedia needs to be bought back to life slowly with as little change to the structure as possible. In our current social tech state just about ANY change will start ripping and when this starts it escalates quickly to do real damage. The original 2000-2008’ish structures cover 90% of issues in a good way, let’s live with that for a while.
The are a host of outstanding big issues in the remaining 10% that are undefined – let’s concentrate our energies on these missing bits and roll out solutions respecting “diversity of tactics”. The ansears to the missing 10% generally cannot be found pre-defined, we should be very weary of people coming in with fixed agender. Diversity and good process in hand with on the ground #4opens working overtime as a part of the real network is the ONLY valued test.
Slow/diversity/nurture vs fast/dogmatic/tearing. To highlight now before we roll out bigger, there will be lots of the second and little of the first much of the time. It is just how it is…
* #4opens is not dogma, it’s simply the last 30 years of open source development codified as social structure.
* PGA is not dogma, it’s the embodied wishes/dreams and planning of thousands of peoples over meany country’s and years of time.
* Indymedia is not dogma, it’s the expirence of meany radical media groups coming together to build an open network to fight neoliberalism (#deathcult) on the ground, in the streets, in the fields and online.
The difference between indymedia and the hundreds of failed “radical” media projects over the last 20 years is that indymedia flourished for a good time before it succumbed to the “forgetting” of the #PGA and #4opens foundation it was built on and was thus helpless against the internal forces that ripped it apart. Leaving no malubilerty to shift to the heavy blows from the forces attacking from the outside.
We core crew need to learn how to become benign older folks who answer every “better” solution put forward by the thrusting young with “how does that work with the #4opens” then fallow up with “lets look to see if that furthers the PGA hallmarks” to all their enthusiastic “youth” energy for “change”. Keep it gentle and most importantly, keep the focus…
At meany stages there will be howling mobs soured by hatred and through wing shit to create a stinking mess… our job is to keep focus and calm… a hard thing to do in a messy/disaster world #Brexit and #climatechaos pushes, but it’s the simple job we are taking on.
Q. I’ve read a lot of your stuff but I’m hoping you’ll clarify something. What’s a “fashernista”?
A. A large part of society who do what’s fashionable. Not what’s right/wrong/best. In the era of the #deathcult of neo-liberalism this has always been the wrong path to take. It’s a simple idea.
The hashtags are designed to make the mainstream as dirty as possible so people see the need to pick up #openweb #4opens tools “spades” to clear the stinking shit and pools of piss #climatechaos is increasingly going to show we live in (consumerism/alienating work/greed is good) Make compost (decay of death) to plant seeds (fertile life) to grow flowers (lifecult). It’s a convoluted metaphor 😉
Its a hard to understand, simple thing. In the era of the #deathcult the fashernisas are almost always wrong and a part of the problem. In the era of the #lifecult fahernistas are mostly right and a part of the solution, does that make it more simple?
Lets look for a moment at a fundamental question few people are asking that already shapes society and will drive social change in the next 50 years.
The question of who has access to data and more importantly metadata.
* Open – everyone can use most of the data and all the meta data
* Closed- only you can use the data only corporations and governments can use most of the metadata.
* Hybrid- the data is open to the hosting corporation, governments and companies that pay for it. Your friends can see only what you share with them. The metadata is owned by the corporations used by governments.
The future will be dominated by this issue if computer networks keep running during the #climatechaos disaster.
Q. “We’re supposed to think of 
