“So wait, when you buy an NFT, you don’t actually BUY the art, you just buy a receipt that you bought the art? And we’re burning the planet for THAT?“
The #encryptionist project is capitalism in the #openweb where it fits badly. They keep trying https://ethereum.org/en/nft/ as if the #deathcult was common sense, which it’s not, its death, displacement for millions and the wholescale destruction of nature for the next hundred years.
These guys are EVIL, and we need to say this to them #climatchoas is the new normal, and we have to STOP the #encryptionists form feeding this mess.
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.
We live in a “post truth” world where our everyday life is shaped by “cults” on one side you have the air we breathe #deathcult of neo-liberalism on the other you have blocking the bridges and languishing in jails the #lifecult of #XR both in their ways are “cults”.
I am struggling to articulate what a non “cult” world would look like – the 19th century view, while useful and powerful (in a dangurus way) has holes in it. the 20th century way of ecological suicide no matter how meany washing mashions we have, the 21st cemetery way is the #deathcult
Today am enacting the 19th century view, while building the 20th century view to fight the 21st cemetery view.
The is a “good” seed of a different view in the #OMN project that needs water and compost and lots of shovelling to move the current tech shit piles to the compost to grow the seed we water with our daily work.
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 #4opens process which is a bit circler as open “industrial” standards is one of the #4opens 🙂
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 #4opens body’s – go slow on this as concessions are hard and only worthwhile if you do the hard work to achieve them.
Q. Still trying to fix permissions issue for peertube why is there always some piddly little issue (that will likely eventually have an easy fix)
A. Over complexity is fixed by trust and #KISS the problems we face now are complexity built on top of complexity. This is largely pushed by ‘security’ which is a direct result of the failure of ‘trust’. To mediate this we need to balance this, it’s the core process of the #OMN and were the social value grows.
Our instincts are #deathcult we build tools to serve “the is no such thing as society only individuals and their families” everything to do with social tech pushes this. These “piddling little issues” are the need for TOTAL control that comes from this world view. Thinking about it, it’s a theology as ideology tend to be.
Trust or fear is left/right or open/closed or life/death. Today everything is the second… tomorrow if we are to live we need to balance the first/second.
Almost everything built in alt-radical tech ends up feeding pointless #fashernista churn. New platforms, new protocols, new branding, new codebases tend to be endless motion with very little grounding in actual social need. People mistake novelty for progress, and the result is a constant cycle of abandoned projects, burnt-out developers, and fragmented communities.
That’s one of the reasons why #indymediaback matters. It is not another pointless radical tech project chasing fashion. It grows from the #nothingnew path, building around things that already worked socially, culturally, and politically before the current mess swallowed the #openweb.
The point of #nothingnew is not nostalgia, it’s mediation. Instead of endlessly reinventing tools and social structures, we look at existing working practices and compost the failures while keeping the value that already exists, we build from continuity rather than disruption.
For the first 5 years of the #fediverse, this often means creating #openweb replacements for existing #dotcons platforms. That has value, people need usable alternatives to corporate systems, but simply copying the logic of the dotcons into federated code has real limits.
Code is never neutral, all code carries embedded assumptions, social relations, and ideology. When we directly replicate #dotcons platforms, we import the values of the #deathcult along with the interface design. Metrics, branding, influence economies, performative identities, engagement addiction, soft/hard hierarchies – all this gets reproduced inside supposedly “alternative” spaces.
This is where the problem needs mediating rather than denying. The path of #indymediaback is different because it starts from an existing radical social process, not from abstract tech blindness. #indymedia already had working publishing flows, distributed trust networks, collective moderation practices, and real-world activist communities. The technology existed to support those social relations, not replace them.
That means the real value of #indymediaback is not primarily the tech stack, even though the tech matters. The value is in rebuilding the social continuity that made the original project meaningful. Without that grounding, you likely just produce another empty platform that disappears into the pile of forgotten radical tech experiments.
Food for thought: the #geekproblem is often not actually interested in the #openweb as a human value network. Instead, parts of geek culture feed parasitically off the current mess – thriving on fragmentation, novelty churn, status games, and technical abstraction disconnected from lived social reality.
Feeding off the collapse of the #openweb while calling it innovation is still bowing down to the #deathcult. Seen this way, the need for change becomes clearer, that we need active mediation, not passive drift. Both carrot and stick. Support grounded projects that grow from real communities, and challenge the pointless churn that keeps draining energy away from building durable alternatives.
The #OMN is one attempt at this – a shovel for composting the inhuman mess, so something living can grow from it.
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.
The #OMN is based on “nothing new” as a core project process. Though we do describe things in different ways than they are normally described, we use everyday metaphors for the language of computing and coding where necessary, we use nature metaphors where possible.
We have lived in a deeply damaging era for the last 40 years in economics we have neo-liberalism (metaphor #deathcult) in thinking and education post-modernism these two have created many bad effects (metaphors #geekproblem#encryptionist#stupidindividualism#dotcons#fashernista etc) that have shaped how people act and think, we have internalised these post-truth into normal everyday worldviews. These are going to undermine our cultures, society, and most impotently destroy our ecology (metaphor #XR)
We change the language to brake out of this “normal” world-view to build an opening for people to see a different view (also am dyslexic and can only think by making up ideas so its a good fit for me). The current “normal” thinking and expressions are too damaged to be of much use in real social change.
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!”
A. 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!
Q. “We’re supposed to think of 
