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!
(For the complex crew, hold the shit and mud throwing as this post is not speaking to you)
You might be wondering and feeling depressed from all my posts talking about YOUR responsibility for creating the current mess. And yes I do point my finger at YOU as you clearly are responsible, you empowered the current social and political shit heap we live in. So, why is this a positive statement you might be wondering, in a negative depressed sought of way. The ansear is clear and positive you had the power to create this mess, thus you have the power to clear up this mess, a better world is up to YOU.
The example I always use is the growth to globe domination of the #dotcons such as #failbook and its siblings, YOU feed this domination by posting cat pics and memes, all the “user generated” platforms have nothing and no value without YOU feeding this value to them. YOU gave them control of the media that shaped Trump and Brexit.
It’s important to separate course and affect, the effect is Trump and Brexit, the course is complex and on the level I am talking about here goes back 40 years, though has seeds deeper.
Worth the time to watch a few times as this is the history of the mess we are in and how our current technological/social shitheap was built to shape this agender.
Liberalism, fascism and the neo-liberal #deathcult share a NEGATIVE view of the human condition, of human nature. Socialism, communism and anarchism share a POSITIVE view of human condition/nature. Of course there are meany who throw mud and shit onto this simple view/divide but It’s useful to clear this mess off to look at the human scale #KISS ideas that these complex views are based on.
My thinking in this post is that YOU get to choose the POSITIVE or the NEGATIVE and are empowered to do this, in my example above, by stepping away from the #dotcons and back onto the #openweb the main thing you have to do is choose and stick to that choice, keep it #KISS, and clean the shit and mud off the simple things in life, compost, grow flowers in the digital realm as well as in the soil that shapes us all.
POSITIVE NOTE: And yes, for the complex crew, I am feeding #stupidindividualism to itself, eat and grow, plant and sow, build and prosper, be happy, keep it simple.
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.
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.
Report back on peertube/youtube video posting experiment. #XR video posted only to peertube got 18 views in 48 hours. Video posted only to youtube got 26 views in 24 hours so far. Both videos were nice fluffy #XR shared widely in meany #dotcons groups with 1-10k subscribers so in theory to 20-50k people based on “simple” subscription count.
Posted to peertube
Posted to youtube
Let’s look back for a moment. Last year posting similar video you #youtube would have received 100-250 views
10 years ago 2000-4000 views would be normal.
Thoughts on this the #dotcons algorithm affectively #BLOCK straight grassroots video reports – only by shaping your media to #SEO games can you get any views in the #dotcons. This behaviour has shifted popular radical messages/media makers to #deathcult agenders to have any hope of achieving personal “success” and will continue to malform our media if there is no working alternatives for them to use.
I think our “digital addictions” explains the failure of the videos to organically spread inside the #dotcons with views not being feed by the algorithms which prefers #clickbate and people have been trained to push #clickbate so no longer see the need to push straight content – “vanilla” radical grassroots content does not feed their digital addictions or the hole mainstream culture leaves inside us all.
On one hand, if we keep going down the #dotcons path our media will become more and more malformed to #deathcult agender simply to get views and attention. on the other “straight” grassroots coverage will be affectively BLOCKED.
A note here for the #fashionistas “Gaming” the algorithms is just SEO under a new path. Let’s worship the “cargo cult” mentality and not a helpful comment/reply please have a think on this point.
For the last 10 years I have been pushing anti-algorithm content to amplify the exclusion affect. Looking at these numbers I think we are starting to get peek exclusion as our visionontv youtube channel has 7k subscribers so to get only 26 views in 24 hours is notable bad, just on this subscribe base not to mention the #failbook groups embed postings etc.
Talking about the #deathcult is not advertising friendly no matter how fluffy some of your content is 🙂
To conclude. Two points for #openweb media we need to remove “advertising friendly” as criteria. Second we need to actively detox people from their digital addictions. We do the first one, but we have no real plan/implementation/ideas on the second.
The #OMN has PGA and #4opens as concrete foundations, so we have firm ground to build the second needed part down the line.
Yes. Lots of #NGO’sh people will want to add “common sense” #dotcons ideas and process to #openweb projects as they take off. There will be a pile of shit shovelling need to get past this “common sense” issue. We need good shovels #OMN
The reason we are building out the wide #OMN network to provide a space for our messages and to make compost out of our current shit pile;)
UPDATE: the youtube video got to 42 views in 2 days the peertube stayed at 19 views both are very poor numbers but the #openweb one is growing and the #dotcons one visible declining which is positive.
1) One of the main ones is co-option by #NGO agender, both, by organizations who push for “common sense” #dotcons paths and individuals who strive to build their careers by trampling over the grassroots horizontality.
2) Second, I know a lot of people who would fuck over the future for petty personal grudges and narrow self subsistence. It’s a problem with rolling out positive grassroots projects like #indymediaback that we need to actively mediate for a good outcome.It’s interesting to think about this at a small personal scale and the wider social issue of #stupidindividualism and the #deathcult that breeds this.
3) Third, let me say something unfashionable, am a fan of liberals, they created meany of the good social things in the world. BUT Intolerant and dogmatic liberals are a constant drain, pushing of “common sense” agender over every issue they touch. This shit smeared problem needs constant mediation.
4) Fourth, the #geekproblem which is looked at in other posts on this blog – click on the hashtag to find them.
5) There are more please comment so i can add them.
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.
With the current #openweb reboot going on there’s a lot of default thinking that is bad, and we do need to learn to judge between the good and bad paths if it’s to live up to its potential. Let’s start to give examples:
* Promoting silos vs promoting networks – as our current thinking is based on closed/silo thinking then when we promote #openweb projects we continue to use this thinking and promote silo/closed thinking rather than harder to understand open/network thinking.
– Protocols rather than platforms, balance talk about #Fediverse/#ActivityPub and #mastodon or branded projects. Our brand thinking is a failure of networking and contains strong unseen #deathcult thinking.
– Always outreach a wide selection of instances rather than a single one, the strength is in the network and not in the silo. Networks scale downwards, more/balanced, with stability is better than one “solution”. Be weary of sites that push themselves as the “place”.
– Networks are based on trust, in this look for groups/families of projects to support. Lose is always good, do not support “we are THE solution” closed siloed thinking. Write articles about a spread of views is better outreach as this is actually the project.
– be weary of projects that promise digital security/privacy first – these projects are always lying and thus dangerous and unhealthy for trust based networks. This is a hard-to-understand open/closed issue, we all need to have real conversations about this.
So we live in a #deathcult that we all have worshipped at for the last 40 years of neoliberalism. This is #XR now a normal understanding that we all have to face. What do you think of this mess?
My initial thought on most academia is wank, most is poisoned by the last 40 years of the #deathcult It’s better to go back to radical basics and reboot something from outside the poisoned mainstream, we are doing this with #indymedia reboot.
Most “activism” from this source is little more than a funding drain 99.999% of progressive funding goes straight down the #fashionista drain in academia and #NGO land.
Q. “We’re supposed to think of 
