The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy.
Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, culture, and governance. It’s often like herding cats. This can be frustrating, but it’s also what makes the network resilient. There is no single point of failure, no CEO to sell it, and no corporation that can simply shut it down. The challenge this leave us with is not eliminating the mess, but learning how to live with it productively.
The invisible problem that keeps blocking this path is in part the limits of “common sense”, what the #geekproblem refuses to see is that the difficulty isn’t primarily technical. For over forty years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what people experience as “common sense.” Competition replaces cooperation. Individualism replaces commons. Endless critique replaces collective construction. People absorb these assumptions without realising it, then push them over real alt paths.
When alternative ways of organising are introduced, many people instinctively react with hostility or retreat. Push too hard, and they disappear back into familiar habits, like snails retreating into their shells. This isn’t usually bad faith, it’s learned behaviour.
We have a project to mediate this mess, native governance without hierarchy. This is where the Open Governance Body (#OGB) comes in. The goal isn’t to control the #Fediverse or impose bureaucracy, the goal is to create lightweight, transparent ways for communities to coordinate, resolve conflict, share responsibility, and make decisions together.
Governance should emerge from the grassroots, not be imposed from above. That’s why #OGB builds on the principles of the #4opens:
Open Data
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Process
The last of these – Open Process – is the missing piece. Technical openness alone isn’t enough. Communities also need visible, participatory ways of building trust. What matters is creating processes that turn #mainstreaming failures into shared learning instead of endless conflict.
The future of the #openweb won’t be built by perfect software, it’s built by imperfect people who learn how to cooperate despite their differences. That’s the real work of #OMN and #OGB: not replacing the mess, but giving it enough structure to grow into a healthy commons.
The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality.
This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) matters. The “free” in #FOSS is about freedom, the freedom to use, study, modify and share the tools that shape our lives. Those freedoms create something much more important than software, they create #4opens social power. Open code means community accountability.
Instead of trusting #closedweb corporations, we can build “native” trust through transparency. That changes how communities work as closed platforms create consumers, open projects create participants. The community doesn’t just use the infrastructure, it becomes in part responsible for maintaining it. We can exit to a more #DIY path, were anyone can inspect, improve, challenge and adapt to disparate community needs.
This isn’t always the fastest path as open collaboration is often messy. Consensus takes time, criticism can be uncomfortable. But these are social strengths, not weaknesses. Diverse communities find problems earlier, reduce hidden bias and create paths and systems that are more resilient because they are shared.
The #OMN approach builds on this real world path and body of ideas. That technology can strengthen communities rather than replacing them, code can support human trust rather than algorithms deciding everything. Infrastructure should belong to the commons rather than becoming another private enclosure.
Today’s #closedweb social media platforms are digital landlords. Yes you may build a following, create value and invest years of work, but you’re still a tenant. The rules can change overnight, your reach can disappear, your community can be fragmented at the click of a button.
The #openweb offers another path were we have control of identity and content to connect through open protocols instead of closed silos. We need this more than ever to building communities that can survive the failure – or hostility – of any single platform.
We can’t keep repeating the same mess, this composting matters even more in the age of #AI. If the software, models and infrastructure are closed, then a handful of companies determine how knowledge is created, filtered and shared. If they are open, communities can inspect them, improve them and govern them together.
The future isn’t simply open source software, it’s open source society. That means investing back into the commons we depend on. Maintaining infrastructure, supporting contributors, building institutions that outlast individuals. Planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.
That’s what #OMN is about. Not simply writing better code, but helping build a better social fabric for the #openweb. Because freedom isn’t something technology gives us, it’s something communities build together.
The current common sense of #neoliberal worldview replaces trust with greed as the social motivator. The problem is that every successful society is built on trust. When you undermine trust, you build a #deathcult. Climate breakdown, inequality, social isolation and failing public institutions are not accidents – they’re the predictable outcomes.
When people recognise the problem, ask them what the solution is. Most will instinctively reach for the same neoliberal “common sense” that created the crisis. That’s the moment to gently point out that those ideas are part of the #deathcult, not a way out.
The alternative starts with rebuilding trust, commons and community, #FOSS needs to become a core to this.
Facts matter, technology matters, governance matters. But people rarely change because they read theory, a specification or a list of features. People change because of stories, this is why storytelling is central to the #OMN path. A story gives people somewhere to stand, it connects ideas to lived experience.
Instead of explaining the #4opens as an abstract framework, tell the story of a community escaping a #dotcons platform by building trust on the #openweb. Instead of arguing about governance, tell the story of how a group solved a conflict through #OpenProcess. Instead of listing technical features, tell the story of someone who regained control of their community tech after years of platform lock-in.
Stories carry values, the last forty years of #mainstreaming have been held together by stories about competition, consumption and individual success. These stories have normalised the #deathcult, making extraction and enclosure feel like “common sense.” We now need better stories about cooperation instead of competition, commons balancing ownership, about trust instead of surveillance. Stories about building rather than consuming.
The #Fediverse itself is a story, an accidental reboot of the #openweb that proves another internet is possible. It isn’t perfect, but it demonstrates that people can build social infrastructure without billionaires directing the conversation.
The challenge is that the academics or the #geekproblem tell stories only to other, academics or geeks, technical and academic paths are important, but they don’t inspire people to act, so we need stories that people can understand:
A neighbourhood rebuilding local media.
Boaters organising to defend the waterways as a commons.
Volunteers composting #techchurn into useful tools.
Ordinary people discovering that they can build infrastructure together.
These stories become shared memory, shared memory becomes culture, culture shapes “common sense.” and changing common sense is how lasting social change happens. So don’t just build software or academic theory, tell stories that help people imagine themselves as part of a healthier #openweb.
People often ask which messaging platform they should use. Matrix? XMPP? Signal? Something else? The honest answer is there is no perfect option.
At the #OMN we’ve tried running #XMPP servers for years. From a #4opens prospective it’s probably the strongest foundation. Socially, though, it’s still trapped by the #geekproblem, despite years of outreach, we never found any implementation simple enough for normal communities to adopt at scale.
#Matrix is in meany ways worst, but for different resigns. Its governance and development have drifted towards an #opencore and #NGO model that doesn’t sit comfortably with grassroots #openweb values.
#Signal is the best of the bad options. It’s centralised and reproduces many of the patterns of the #dotcons. But people will actually install it and, sometimes, keep using it. That’s worth something.
The point is that these aren’t just technical choices, they’re social ones. Too much of the conversation gets trapped in feature comparisons, cryptography debates and protocol wars, while the real challenge is helping ordinary people communicate, organise and build trust together. That’s why #KISS matters.
Simple tools people actually use are often more valuable than technically perfect tools that remain confined to narrow inward looking communities.
The same lesson applies across the #Fediverse. We have seeded good technology, but we’re allowing the #fashionistas and chattering classes to dominate the conversation while practical grassroots organising gets pushed to the margins.
This is a recurring pattern, and one we need to compost. The future of the #openweb won’t be decided by having the cleverest protocol. It will be decided by whether we build communities around tools that ordinary people can understand, trust and participate in.
Technology matters, but social process matters more. That’s the path we’re trying to grow with #OMN and the #4opens.
The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content.
Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs.
The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the #deathcult, where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking (and acting on) questions the tech industry never asks.
This is where the #OMN approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems.
This mess is a part of our long-standing #geekproblem, that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless #techchurn: one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power.
We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these #techshit outcomes. The #4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the #nastyfew.
That’s the work of the #openweb, and the path of #OMN.
What part can you play? The #openweb is one place to start, keep it simple (#KISS), build commons, compost the mess. The political centre created this mess. Four decades of neoliberal “common sense” deepened inequality, weakened democracy, privatised public goods, and pushed us beyond ecological limits. Yet much of the centre still offers only more of the same: better management of the #deathcult rather than a path beyond it.
That leaves a dangerous vacuum. If progressive movements cannot offer practical alternatives, the far right will continue to grow by presenting itself as the only force willing to confront the crisis. Their answers are built on fear, exclusion and authoritarianism – but they resonate because they acknowledge that the old system is failing, while the centre too often pretends it can be repaired.
Simply defending the status quo is not enough. Nor is retreating into abstract radicalism disconnected from everyday life. We need practical, grassroots alternatives that people can participate in and build themselves.
This same pattern appears in technology. Our #geekproblem isn’t primarily bad code – it’s a culture of arrogance and ignorance. Technical communities often reproduce the assumptions of the wider society without questioning them. They celebrate disruption while recreating centralisation. They mistake individual freedom for collective liberation, reproducing #stupidindividualism while unconsciously serving the logic of the #deathcult.
This isn’t usually malicious. It’s a feedback loop. The culture produces the technology, and the technology reinforces the culture. The answer isn’t to reject technology. It’s to mediate it socially.
The #4opens offer a simple path:
Open Data keeps knowledge in the commons.
Open Source keeps tools accountable.
Open Standards prevent enclosure.
Open Process ensures communities – not just developers or investors – shape the progress.
We need to use this to composting 40 Years of “Common Sense”, For the last 40 years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what passes for “common sense” in #mainstreaming society. Their influence runs so deep that many assumptions now feel natural rather than ideological. When these assumptions are challenged, people react defensively, not because they’re bad people, but because their worldview feels under attack.
This isn’t just a mainstream problem. Activist spaces reproduce the same patterns. The result is endless circular arguments, performative politics, and fragmentation rather than solidarity. Our task isn’t simply to oppose this culture, it’s to mediate it, to compost the mess rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Composting means taking the waste of the last forty years – failed assumptions, captured institutions, #techchurn, #fashionista politics, and individualism – and turning it into fertile ground for something better.
The worrying trend is that the grassroots signal is being submerged beneath an echo chamber of #mainstreaming voices. On many #fashionista threads, noise overwhelms practical action. We spend time performing politics rather than building the infrastructure movements need. That requires empathy, patience, and practical organising. It means creating spaces where people can step outside inherited “common sense” without feeling they have to defend it. It means building working alternatives instead of only criticising broken systems.
The answer isn’t to shout louder, it’s to build better spaces, better tools, and better processes. The signal-to-noise ratio can change again, but only if we do the patient work of mediation, trust-building and commons creation – The work of #OMN.
Three years ago I wrote: “I get the feeling we are running on dregs on the #fediverse dev side. Social movements come in waves; this one is ebbing into the #mainstreaming. No bad thing, but not, I think, what any of us want for ‘our’ #openweb.”
Looking back, I wonder what has actually changed – and more importantly, what have we learned? The #Fediverse has grown, more people know about decentralised social media, more organisations are paying attention, and the ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to the #mainstreaming.
But growth always brings questions – What happens when movements become successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions that people have agency, communities shaping their own spaces, experimentation over optimisation, trust over control and commons over platforms. The #mainstreaming process brings different pressures of scale, professionalisation, funding, institutional legitimacy, standardisation and “safe” governance structures.
None of these things are automatically bad. A movement cannot stay frozen in its early phase forever, but there is a risk that the thing being scaled is only the technology, while the culture that gave it meaning gets diluted. Maybe we need to talk more about how the #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is a technical idea, living commons is a social one. Three years on, the challenge is still the same, how do we grow without losing the roots? The #OMN view has always been that we need both:
The fluffy path — welcoming people, building bridges, making things usable.
The spiky path — challenging capture, resisting enclosure, keeping power visible.
Without the fluffy path, alternatives stay small and isolated. Without the spiky path, alternatives get absorbed into the same systems they were meant to challenge. So maybe the question is not “did the Fediverse win?” The question is more what kind of victory are we building towards? A bigger version of the old internet? Or a genuinely different culture of communication? This question is still the work, the seeds are there, but are we are tending the garden, or just watching the weeds grow.
It might be useful to look at a narrow view of this. The #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) world is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure, no Fediverse, and much of the internet would simply not function. The culture has produced extraordinary amounts of shared value. But from an #OMN perspective, success should not stop us looking critically at the social dynamics underneath. The question is not whether #FOSS works. The question is: who does it work for, where does it struggle, and what can we learn from both?
A resent example, from a native #openweb perspective, this non “just fork it” diatribe is not about code at all, more how we misunderstand collective work in an age of growing #stupidindividualism. The #geekproblem framing treats open source as a marketplace of sovereign individuals – I do my work. You do yours. If you don’t like it, go away and rebuild it alone. That looks like freedom, but it’s actually a deep cultural narrowing. Because what gets erased in that framing is the social fabric that makes FOSS work in the first place, yes, technically you can fork, walk away and rebuild. But socially, that’s not neutral. It assumes that collective effort is disposable and that coordination is optional. That’s where #stupidindividualism kicks in, the fantasy that all meaningful action is just isolated agents choosing between exit options.
In reality, most functioning open source systems are not built on exit, they are built on ongoing relationships between contributors, trust built through repeated interaction, informal negotiation of direction, shared norms about responsibility and maintenance and a lot of invisible care work that never shows up in the code. The “just fork it” response hides this by pretending power is symmetrical, it isn’t. Maintainers don’t just “own code” – they sit at choke points of attention, merge authority, reputation, and continuity. Forking isn’t just copying code; it’s rebuilding all of that social infrastructure from scratch. So when “just fork it” is used as a dismissal, it’s not a statement about technical freedom, it’s a way of closing down negotiation while maintaining the appearance of openness.
That’s the concern, not whether forks are possible, but how often they are used to avoid the harder work of collective problem-solving in shared space. Because there are two very different meanings of forking:
Healthy fork (fluffy) based on experimentation, divergence where needs differ, pluralism in practice and sometimes leading back to upstream collaboration.
Fragmentation fork (spiky reality of #stupidindividualism) growing from social breakdown disguised as technical freedom, loss of shared direction, duplication of effort due to failed mediation and communities replaced by isolated projects.
The distinction is not technical – it’s social coherence before the fork happens. In a healthy #openweb culture, “fork it” is a last resort after dialogue has failed, differences are irreconcilable or experimentation genuinely needs independence. Were in #stupidindividualism culture, it becomes the first reflex with disagreement → exit → rebuild alone → repeat fragmentation cycle. That cycle produces the illusion of freedom while steadily destroying any shared capacity that builds real freedom.
The real question is not “Do you have the right to fork?” Of course, you do. The real question is “Are we maintaining enough shared social infrastructure that we don’t always have to?” Because if every disagreement becomes a fork, then we don’t have ecosystems – we have atomised toolboxes with no collective memory. And at that point, the system is no longer open in any meaningful sense. It is just individualism with better licensing.
The commons → #geekproblem → meritocracy → forking → #stupidindividualism. But on a positive note from an #OMN perspective, #FOSS remains one of the healthiest cultures we have. The challenge is not to abandon it, but to compost the #geekproblem and grow stronger social practices alongside the technical ones. The future of the #openweb depends on both.
In this mess we have to keep shovelling to compost the negative smell of #fashionista – That is a socio-political and tech-subculture #hashtag used to describe performative activists, influencers, or lifestyle subcultural participants from the grassroots, open-source tech, and radical political communities who prioritize the aesthetic and language of activism over the unglamorous, foundational work of building actual structures.
Performative engagement, trendy slogans and identity-driven rhetoric over substantive, embedded organisation.
Echo chambers, exclusive, inward-facing discussions that fail to translate into any impact.
Trend hopping, between “ethical” or radical tech and social projects without committing in meaningfully ways to their development or maintenance.
A #blocking cultural tendency to adopt a radical or alternative aesthetic without understanding or participating in the unglamorous work required to enact actual change or challenge.
Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.
The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.
The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.
So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.
But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.
The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.
The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.
The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.
The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.
The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”
The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.
The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.
The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.
From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.
But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.
The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.
Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.
The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.
The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.
If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.
The recurring argument around violence and nonviolence gets trapped in a false choice. One side says “Violence is never the answer.” the other says “Violence is the only thing that has ever changed history.” Both are truth, but both miss real working humanistic paths. So, what kind of society creates the conditions where violence becomes the only option?
A first step is looking at the systems, cultures and social infrastructure that shape how people respond to conflict. If we want people to choose nonviolent methods, then those methods have to actually work. People need meaningful ways to participate, organise, challenge power and create change. Protest without consequence, dialogue without accountability and institutions that ignore people create dangerous paths.
When people feel that peaceful routes are closed, violence becomes a real option. But there is a second social problem to look at – violence is not just a tool, it creates its own culture. A movement built around destruction can easily reproduce the same power structures it fought against. Removing one oppressive system does not automatically create a better one, without new social foundations, history shows new forms of domination grow from the ruins.
Yes, history is written through moments of confrontation, but the is deeper work happens before and after those moments – building the commons that allow people to organise differently. This is where the #openweb lesson matters, change is not only about removing something, it is about building something. The strongest movements create alternatives – new relationships – new institutions – new forms of cooperation – new ways to share knowledge and power.
To build meaningfull alternatives we have to start by compostsing commen sense mess. What meany people do not understand is that our states are based on violence, what we see as private property is based on violence, just about everything we hold and touch is founded on violence. But when we look wider, a narow posative view is the state monopoly on violence is only legitimate when the state itself remains accountable to people. When power becomes accountable only upwards – to wealth, corporations or institutions – then the monopoly becomes simply control.
The same applies to grassroots movements, a movement cannot claim liberation while creating unaccountable power inside itself. The #geekproblem appears here too, reducing social problems to technical solutions – “Use violence.” – “Never use violence.” are simple answers to complex social questions. The harder work is asking, why are people unheard? Why do peaceful methods fail? Who controls the institutions? What alternatives exist? How can we build systems where people have agency before conflict reaches breaking point?
The #OMN path is not about pretending conflict does not exist, it is about understanding that the long-term answer is not simply winning a hard short fight. It is slower, growing a culture where fewer fights become necessary. The #4opens is part of this – transparent processes, shared ownership and accountable structures are not side issues. They are a foundation that allows movements to stay democratic instead of becoming another “common sense” version of the mess they oppose.
Violence is often a symptom, the deeper question is what social conditions keep producing it.
The biggest question is not whether #AI becomes useful. It is who shapes the surrounding paths? A future controlled by a few #dotcons will reproduce the same mess we have now of centralisation, extraction, enclosure. Were a future built through #4opens paths would look different.
The #geekproblem is believing the next tool solves the old problem. But many problems are not tool problems, they are relationship problems. The next stage is not replacing humans with smarter machines, it is building better human paths that can use machines without becoming dependent on them. Beyond AI is about making communities capable, the real upgrade is not artificial intelligence, it is collective intelligence.
AI is changing the scale of content creation, but not raising the quality. Generative AI tools have lowered the barrier to producing average books, apps, music, legal documents, academic papers and endless streams of text. The result is a massive increase in output, but what happens when production grows faster than our ability to filter, discuss, trust, maintain and give meaning to what is produced?
More books, but more noise, more apps, but more clutter, more papers, but more pressure on systems of review, more music, but a harder struggle to recognise human creativity and care. The #dotcons logic says – more content = more value – were the #openweb lesson is different, value comes from communities, trust, context and care. The challenge is not creating more things, the challenge is building better commons around the things we create.
The AI question is bigger than the technology, as the current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented by our #fashionistas and there servants as inevitable. The message is everywhere to adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is never neutral, every tool carries assumptions about who benefits, who controls it, what values it embeds and what damage is accepted as the “price of progress”.
From an #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “Can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The real question is “What kind of society does this technology build?” Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? This is the wider #openweb question we should be focusing on.
Large language models (#LLM) and generative AI systems represent a real technical development. They can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are useful capabilities, but the hype jumps from assistance to much larger claims – That AI will replace expertise – That it will solve social problems – That it will transform education and science – That it will create a better future automatically.
The problem is that current AI systems do not understand the world, they generate patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability. A convincing answer is not the same thing as understanding.
The missing social layer in our narrow conversations is that the #openweb was built around a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, from communities, discussion, correction, disagreement and shared responsibility. This is where the #geekproblem appears – the tendency to confuse technical capability with social wisdom – the technical question becomes “Can we build it?” the social question “Should we?” often disappears.
A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the culture around the technology, as technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power.
This is not even touching on that the ecological cost of scale is a catastrophe in the era of #climatechaos and social backdown. The current AI boom depends on enormous infrastructure, huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware with constant replacement cycles leading to the large-scale resource extraction. At a time of #climatechaos, we should question whether endless expansion is the only possible future. The #dotcons model has always worked through scale, more users, more data, more infrastructure and more dependency. Generative AI is arriving inside the same economic system that created the catastrophic problems it claims to solve.
Then we have the open internet problem, the #openweb was built around participation, people created #4opens websites, communities, documentation, software and culture. GenAI introduces a different path, that the internet becomes raw material, this human creativity becomes training data. Communities produce knowledge, while large companies extract and monetise it. This creates a dangerous cycle were there is less support for creators → less motivation to create → less genuine knowledge → more dependence on generated content. Its #KISS to understand that healthy commons cannot survive if everything is extracted and nothing is returned.
The #Fediverse and the question of growth, a few years ago there was a feeling that the #Fediverse development culture was running on leftovers. Social movements arrived in waves, and many feared that more waves was moving into #mainstreaming. Since then, the Fediverse has grown, with more people knowing about decentralised social media, more organisations paying attention. Ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to wider adoption.
But growth always creates a question – What happens when a movement becomes successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing it? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions – People have agency – Communities shape their own spaces – Experimentation matters more than optimisation – Trust matters more than control and Commons matter more than platforms. #Mainstreaming brings pressures, these are not automatically bad. But there is a danger that the technology scales while the culture that created it gets diluted. Federation is a technical idea. Living commons is a social one, the challenge remains – now do we grow without losing the roots?
The narrow lesson from #FOSS – it is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure and no Fediverse ecosystem as we know it. It has created extraordinary shared value, but success should not stop us asking difficult questions. The question is not whether FOSS works, the question is – Who does it work for? Where does it struggle? What social lessons can we learn? One recurring problem is the idea that open source is simply a marketplace of independent individuals.
When building the future we actually want – The question is not whether we use AI, more It’s whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The future depends on whether tools strengthen human networks or replace them. Whether they support commons or enclosure, whether they increase agency or dependency.
But what we are seeing is that the tools we need most are often the first things stressed, messy and elitist systems try to defund, discredit and dismantle. Why? Because they require uncertainty, require questioning assumptions, require admitting complexity. Those are not weaknesses, they are survival tools.
The thing about #techbro culture is that some of the most #elitists people grew up loving stories that warned us about the #techshit they are building. They read the dystopias, watched the films, they understood the dangers of unchecked capital, concentrated power, surveillance, artificial intelligence, inequality, and corporate control.
Then many of them decided “Great idea. Let’s build it.” as the #geekproblem made them think they knew better. This is what our #fashionista class call the #tormentnexus problem – the moment when a warning about a future goes wrong becomes interpreted as a blueprint for that future. The issue is not that people like technology, science fiction, fantasy, or engineering. The #openweb itself grew from people who loved exploring what technology could make possible. The problem is when technical possibility becomes separated from social consequence.
A story like Dune is not simply about a powerful individual changing history. It is a warning about charismatic power, messianic thinking, and the danger of believing one person can control complex systems. A story like Snow Crash is not just a cool vision of virtual worlds. It is a satire of corporate fragmentation, private control, and a society where everything becomes a service. A story like Blade Runner is not simply a stylish future aesthetic. It asks what happens when technology creates beings and systems that challenge our ideas of humanity, rights, and exploitation.
But our blinded #mainstreaming started removing the politics from the stories. They kept the shiny machines, they kept the aesthetics, the power fantasies. They discarded the warnings, the #geekproblem is about capability without consequence. A recurring problem in technology culture is that engineering thinking often asks:“Can we build this?” That is an important question, but society has to ask “Should we build this?” And “Who benefits?” And “What happens to the people who have no power in this system?”.
The #geekproblem is not that engineers are bad people. It is the cultural mistake of believing technical problems can be separated from social reality. A better algorithm will not automatically solve inequality, more data will not automatically create wisdom, more automation will not automatically create freedom.
The blinded #geekproblem myth of the chosen builder, is another pattern that appears again and again. The people building these systems imagine themselves as the exception, the story says “Yes, this technology could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but I am different, I will use it responsibly.” This is the same #elitists fantasy that many cautionary stories warn against.
A system can be technically brilliant and socially destructive, the history of technology is full of examples where innovation created new problems alongside the solutions. The factory increased production but created new forms of exploitation, the car increased mobility but reshaped cities around machines. #dotcons social media connected people but also created control, surveillance, manipulation, and attention extraction. The question is never only what technology can do, the question is what kind of society technology grows.
The problem is not bad individuals, though they exist. The problem is social and economic paths that concentrate power and reduce accountability. The danger is not only the evil ruler, more it’s creating structures where rulers become inevitable. This is why the #openweb matters, real power is not finding a better king, it is building #KISS systems where power is distributed, visible, and accountable.
Our current worship of capital rewards the wrong interpretation, is another uncomfortable part of this. The market rewards the most dangerous reading of a story. The cautionary version says “Maybe we should not build this because it creates harm.” The investment version says “Can we build it faster than everyone else?” The version that creates companies, funding rounds, patents, and control is usually the one that wins. The result is that technology is shaped by incentives that favour scale, speed, and ownership. Not care, community, resilience or long-term social health. This is the mess we need to compost to not end up with a world where the same systems criticised in dystopian fiction become business opportunities.
The missing piece is growing the commons, not with anti-technology (the wrong lesson) – The answer is technology embedded in social systems that understand responsibility. This is where the original #openweb ideas matter – growing from open processes, transparent development, shared ownership, community governance and public interest infrastructure. The lesson of #FOSS was never simply “Anyone can copy the code.” The deeper lesson was “People can collectively build and maintain things outside pure market logic.”
It should be obverse that the technical commons will need social commons, without that, open code can still become captured by closed paths. The solution is the challenge for projects like #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, and #indymediaback – not to reject technology – to keep asking a different question not “How do we build the next big thing?” but “How do we build things that help people build together?”
The future does not need more isolated #eletist builders trying to control complexity, it needs communities capable of navigating complexity. The opposite of the #tormentnexus is not rejecting technology, its is more about creating technology where the social relationships come first.
The #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is technical – a commons is social. The work now is making sure we do not build the dystopias our own stories spent decades warning us about. The warning signs are there, the question is whether we listen.
Building beyond the #deathcult – Our current model of #tech funding and developer agendas is not neutral. The way we fund technology shapes the kind of technology we build. For the last 20 years, the dominant tech culture has followed the same path:
venture capital growth
platform monopolies
extraction of attention and data
endless scaling
short-term metrics
private ownership of public infrastructure
This has produced #techshit – technology built because it can make money, not because it improves society. And now we are facing an era of #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, and social instability. The question we have to ask is uncomfortable – Has our current model of technology funding become part of the problem?
The answer cannot simply be “more innovation”, we have had decades of innovation. The problem is that innovation has been pointed in the wrong direction. The #openweb and #FOSS communities contain many of the seeds of a different path, but we still fall into the same trap of building tools to optimise code, solve technical problems, but we struggle with the social question of how do we build and sustain commons?
This is the #geekproblem, not that technical people are bad, not that code does not matter. But that we treat social systems as if they are just technical systems waiting to be fixed. They are not: A community is not a server, a movement is not a repository, a network is not just infrastructure. The missing piece is grassroots funding models that support the social work around technology.
What could grassroots tech funding look like? Instead of asking “How can we create the next unicorn?” Ask “How do we support useful things that communities actually need?” This means funding – Maintenance, not just invention as a huge amount of valuable #FOSS work is boring. Keeping things running, helping users, writing documentation and supporting communities to do governance. This is invisible labour, but it is what keeps the commons alive.
We need networks, not just products, the #dotcons model asks “What is the product?” The #openweb question should be “What relationships are we strengthening?” On this native path, funding needs to support ecosystems, not just individual projects. Long-term contribution, not short-term growth.
A grassroots project does not need to become a company, it might need small sustainable funding, shared infrastructure, community support, public accountability with open processes. Growth is not always success, sometimes resilience is success. Funding the gaps between technology and society – The hardest work is often translation by helping activists use tools, developers understand communities, so communities can shape technology.
This is where #OMN sits, not just making software, but more importantly building the social infrastructure around software. The hardest problem is cultural, the block is not only money. The block is “common sense”, living inside a #neoliberal idea where something is only useful if it produces financial return. Anything outside that looks interesting but “unrealistic”.
The #deathcult assumption is if it cannot become a profitable business, it has no value. But the internet itself was not built this way, the #openweb grew from public investment, shared knowledge, volunteer contribution, and communities building things because they mattered. We need to recover that thinking, but to breaking out of the cycle is difficult because it requires changing what we measure.
Not, how much money did this make? But how much capacity did this create? How many people can now participate? How much commons did we grow and how much power moved away from concentrated systems?
The challenge for #OMN, #OGB, #4opens and #indymediaback is not only technical. It is creating a different economic imagination, a way of funding technology that helps communities grow instead of helping platforms extract.
The future will not be built only by companies, it will be built by people creating alternatives together.
To make this path work we need a hand reaching back across the gap – Stepping away from the #dotcons is not a simple a moral judgment to jump from one world to another. A native path is one foot in, one foot out. To stay connected enough to understand where people are, what they need, and how they think – while building alternatives that move beyond the worship of the #deathcult.
The hand reaches back across the gap, not to pull people into the past, but to help people cross into something different, change does not happen by shouting from the other side. It happens by building bridges while growing the new.
So the question is: why are so many people not acting? In the era of #climatechaos, people #blocking social change in society and technology are not just slowing things down, they are helping maintain systems that are driving social and ecological breakdown.
The question is not only what is wrong, more what are we building instead? Different paths already exist with the #4opens, #penweb, #OGB, #indymediaback and wider #OMN projects. These are paths to move away from the failures of #mainstreaming and towards more open, collective ways of organising.
There is no profit in this for us, we are not building this to cash out. So maybe the more useful question is not “What’s the agenda?” Maybe ask – Who benefits when alternatives never get built People often look for who gains from creating something. But power also exists in maintaining the status quo.
The #openweb has always been about creating spaces outside the usual incentives – spaces based on sharing, participation, and collective ownership. That threatens systems built on keeping things closed, controlled, and dependent.
The challenge is mediation, how do we separate signal from noise? How do we build alternatives while people are still trapped inside the old systems? How do we create spaces where change can actually happen?
One foot in – One foot out – A hand across the gap.
Don’t become part of the blockage, help build the bridge.
Every few months another AI company executive suggests that their latest Large Language Model possess values, ethics, judgement, emotions, or even a form of consciousness. The latest example is claims around Claude, where discussion has drifted toward the idea that the system possess “a functional version of emotions or feelings.” This is a good moment to step back and look at what is actually happening.
They are software, very sophisticated software, certainly. Useful software, maybe. Sometimes surprisingly capable software, but software nonetheless. The current generation of LLMs works by processing enormous amounts of human-produced content and generating statistically probable responses based on patterns found in that content. What people mistake for intelligence is the reflection of our own intelligence. What people mistake for morality is often the reflection of our own moral language. What people mistake for emotion is the reflection of our own emotional expression. The machine is mirroring us.
The #geekproblem strikes again – a recurring problem in technological culture is the blinded tendency to mistake technical processes for social processes. If you spend enough time around code, it becomes tempting to imagine that social problems can be reduced to technical ones. That human complexity can be transformed into engineering complexity. That ethics can be encoded, governance can be automated, community can be replaced with platforms. This is not a new mistake.
For decades, we have watched technologists claim that algorithms can replace editors, platforms replace communities, markets replace politics, and code can replace governance. The result has been a mess. Now the same pattern is repeating with AI. Human judgement emerges from lived experience, social relationships, culture, responsibility, memory, and consequences.
Ironically, the real danger is not that these systems become conscious, the danger is that people increasingly behave as if they already are. The public relations narrative coming from many #AI companies encourages this confusion. The more human-like these systems appear, the easier it becomes to sell products, attract investment, and generate media attention. The result is a kind of digital anthropomorphism.
People begin treating software as trusted friends, therapists, advisers, teachers, and companions. Meanwhile, the actual human institutions that should provide these functions continue to weaken. This is a familiar pattern from the #dotcons, rather than building stronger communities, we build stronger platforms. Rather than strengthening relationships, we optimise engagement. Rather than supporting public institutions, we create private substitutes. The technology becomes a replacement for the social fabric it quietly helps unravel.
The deeper issue is that morality does not exist in isolation, ethics is not simply a set of rules, it emerges through social processes. People learn morality through families, communities, traditions, cultures, institutions, and struggles. We argue about values by negotiating differences. We face consequences for our actions. We inherit stories and experiences from previous generations. This process is messy, often contradictory. But it is fundamentally social.
An AI system can reproduce ethical language because ethical language exists in its training data. It can discuss justice because humans discuss justice. It can talk about compassion because humans write about compassion. But discussing a value is not the same thing as possessing it. Repeating ethical language is not ethical behaviour. Generating moral arguments is not moral agency.
From an #OMN perspective, the important question is not whether machines are becoming human. The important question is whether humans are becoming less social. The #openweb was built around the idea that people communicate with people. The current AI boom increasingly promotes a future where people communicate with machines that imitate people. That should concern us.
Not because the machines are evil, not because AI is an existential threat. But because every step in this direction risks reinforcing the existing trend toward isolation, atomisation, and #stupidindividualism. The challenge is not to fear AI, it is to keep social processes social. To remember that governance requires communities. That ethics requires accountability and culture requires participation. That intelligence without social context is simply computation, machine can generate words, but people can create meaning.
People add a lot of mess, this toot is a diagnosis of a small shift, but it’s thinking is trapped inside a narrow, liberal property lens on what the internet is and was supposed to be. What’s being described as a “split” between a Free-For-All quarry and gated communities is what happens when you assume the web was primarily about enforceable intellectual property contracts in the first place. That framing already accepts the #dotcons worldview – that value is created by ownership, extraction, and legal enclosure.
From an #openweb and #OMN perspective, that was never the path. The early web (and the cultures that fed into it – FOSS, mailing lists, blogs, wikis) wasn’t held together by copyright enforcement. It was held together by norms: reciprocity, attribution, sharing, trust, and rough social accountability. That’s much closer to the #4opens than to IP law. Open code, open standards, open data, open process – not because the law enforced fairness, but because social relations did.
What #AI scraping has broken is not a legal equilibrium, but a fragile social one that the #dotcons had already been hollowing out for decades. They didn’t rely on “fair use” or reciprocity – they relied on enclosure, centralisation, and extraction, #AI simply accelerates that logic. So yes, “anything reachable by HTTP becomes fuel” is accurate – but the mistake is thinking the alternative is stronger copyright walls or more contractual gating, that deepens enclosure. The split you describe is real, but it’s not new, and it’s not caused by #AI, it’s the endpoint of a long enclosure of commons → platform capture (#dotcons), trust → contracts, sharing → surveillance + monetisation and public space → login walls.
The current AI mess is not the origin of this, it’s just a new layer of extraction sitting on top of the #mainstreaming mess. From an #OMN view, the interesting question isn’t how to reassert IP over scraping. It’s how to rebuild social and technical spaces where contribution, context, and reciprocity matter again – where value isn’t just extracted but circulated in ways communities can govern.
AI is not an existential threat to the #openweb, it’s an asshole amplifier inside an already broken system. The real loss we need to compost isn’t only copyright protection, it’s the erosion of the social commons that made openness meaningful in the first place.
The European Commission has published its new Tech Sovereignty Plan. On the surface this sounds promising. Europe talks about reducing dependence on foreign tech giants, strengthening digital autonomy, and supporting open source. These are all things many of us in the #openweb world have been arguing for decades.
But when you look at where the money and attention actually go, a different picture emerges. The plan allocates vast resources to semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, AI, and data centres. Open source gets a much smaller slice of the pie, and native #openweb like the #Fediverse barely registers at all. The one mention is support for decentralised social media, highlighted through the Commission’s continued use of Mastodon. (Digital Strategy)
The problem is that this isn’t new, as the European Commission has already been running a Mastodon server for years. Extending account creation to more EU institutions is not a strategic breakthrough, it is clicking a button that could have been clicked years ago. If this is the flagship example of support for social communication sovereignty, then the ambition is criminally limited.
The issue is that the Commission still does not understand that social infrastructure is infrastructure. We hear endless noise about sovereign AI, sovereign cloud, sovereign chips, and sovereign data centres. Yet the FOSS code and communities through which citizens actually communicate, organise, publish, collaborate, and build are treated as an afterthought.
The result is a contradiction – Europe recognises that depending on foreign cloud providers is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign AI companies is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign semiconductor supply chains is a strategic weakness. Yet dependence on a handful of US-owned social platforms for public discourse apparently remains acceptable. Who needs sovereignty over communication anyway?
The #openweb blind spot is the normal long-running #geekproblem in institutional form. Policymakers see infrastructure as technical systems. Servers, processors, storage, networks. But the real value of the internet was never the hardware, it was always the social layer built on top. The #openweb succeeded because it created shared public spaces based on open standards. Email. RSS. Blogs. Forums. Early independent media. Later, federated systems like ActivityPub.
The Commission’s sovereignty agenda focuses on plumbing while ignoring the public spaces that the plumbing exists to support. Without investment in #4opens social protocols, community governance, and public communication infrastructure, Europe is building sovereign pipes that still carry people back into the same #dotcons corporate platforms.
Open source without communities is the unspoken problem. The Commission talks about open source as a strategic asset for European competitiveness and sovereignty. That’s welcome as far as it goes. But open source is not simply a collection of code repositories, it survives because communities maintain it. The danger is that Europe treats open source as a procurement strategy rather than a social ecosystem. Buy some software, fund a few projects, write a strategy document, then assume the problem is solved.
Real digital sovereignty requires long-term investment in communities of use, admins, mods, maintainers, governance, interoperability, and public institutions that can steward shared infrastructure over decades. Even many open-source advocates point out that procurement rules, short-term funding cycles, and “open-source washing” continue to undermine the ecosystem. (FSFE – Free Software Foundation Europe). You cannot buy sovereignty off the shelf.
From an #OMN perspective, the weakness in the Tech Sovereignty Plan is that it remains trapped inside an industrial understanding of technology. Technology is not just hardware, technology is not just software, technology is social relations embodied in tools. If Europe wants genuine digital sovereignty, it needs to invest in:
Open social protocols.
Federated communication infrastructure.
Community-owned media.
Public digital commons.
Open governance.
Long-term stewardship of shared resources.
The social institutions needed to keep these systems alive.
Without this, “tech sovereignty” is another industrial policy aimed at creating European versions of existing #dotcons platforms. That may reduce dependence on Silicon Valley, but it does not necessarily increase freedom.
Beyond “sovereignty” is the deeper question – not whether Europe controls its technology stack. The deeper question is whether citizens control the systems that shape their lives. The Commission is slowly beginning to recognise the importance of open source. That’s a positive step. But as things stand, social communication sovereignty remains a tiny footnote in a strategy dominated by chips, cloud, AI, and data centres.
For the #openweb, that is the wrong way round, the future of “digital sovereignty” is not simply owning the infrastructure, it is owning the public spaces built on top of it.
The problem with the #EU Eurocracy on social and tech issues isn’t usually only malice, it’s institutional incompetence. They struggle to understand grassroots digital culture, the #openweb, commons-based governance, and the social realities of how technology actually works.
That leaves us with a choice. We can try to engage, push, educate, and help them become a little less incompetent. Or we can focus entirely on tearing down existing institutions.
The danger with the second path is obvious. Vacuums rarely stay empty. If progressive and grassroots voices walk away, the people most ready to fill the space are the nationalist, authoritarian, and right-wing forces already waiting in the wings.
This isn’t just an #EU issue. It applies to most #mainstreaming institutions. They are often failing, slow-moving, and trapped in outdated assumptions. But abandoning them entirely doesn’t automatically lead somewhere better.
The challenge is to build alternatives like #OMN and the #openweb while also applying enough pressure, education, and challenge to stop existing institutions from becoming even worse.
Not a comfortable path, but likely the least dangerous one.
