What do you think *should* be closed? Or at least is OK to be closed?
Let’s start from a traditional liberal view: The majority of social interactions should be done in the OPEN and some private interactions should be done CLOSED.
We can discuss from this.
What the current dogma misses is that just about all good social power comes from OPEN
And meany social evils come from CLOSED
If we close/lock everything down, we are left with the evil, a bad outcome.
There are world-view gaps that make this a hard bridge to hold in place.
Example Diaspora and RSS based networks – the young Turks did a CLOSED network and shouted down the existing OPEN networks… 10 years go by, and we have to reinvent RSS+ as #ActivityPub to launch open networks a new – lets talk more about examples like this when we talk about the #geekproblem and #encryptionists. The 10 years that is missing is the problem.
It’s mostly a view of human nature, thus sociology and politics, applied to social groups who make and use #openweb technology. So if you are new to thinking about this maybe start with some basic wikipedia though the quality has become well muddy over the last 5 years.
A. It’s a valid point that Google and Amazon have monopolist interests and are trying to enforce them. Nevertheless, TLS is an open standard and the owner of that blog would have many other possibilities implementing it. Not having transport encryption is nowadays highly deprecated for good reasons and I don’t see any valid point in not adopting it. Not saying you have to use Google’s or Amazon’s infrastructure for that.
Q. Good to rethink this view. Have a look at his thinking. This is the difference between closed/open as a world view that #encryptionists blow smoke over to push an agender that does not challenge the #deathcult we all live and breath…
A. Sry, but what? 🤔 Encryption is one of the central tools for a free and open internet, as it enables a much better level of privacy, or in fact even is a hard precondition to it.
Q. if you say so… I have been working for more than 20 years on this and always say clearly that we need 90% open and 10% closed – the #encryptionists are dangerously wrong in their view of 90% closed and 10% open. Its a problem we need to overcome and in no way a solution. Take note you are posting this on mastodon that is 90% open and 10% closed. We are not having this conversation on diaspora (the #encryptionists network) very few people are.
A. 1) What the hack is an “encryptionist”??
2) My friend, all Mastodon instances I know use TLS.
3) What is your definition of “open” and “closed”? Encrypted vs. unencrypted? 🤔 I think YOU should really rethink this kind of definition. A blog for instance can be openly available to everyone and still offer secure transport encryption to protect the privacy of its readers.
4) You are mistaken, almost everyone I met on Mastodon is a huge proponent of encryption. And no, I’m not for 90% encrypted and 10% unencrypted. I am for 100% encrypted.
Q. Nuttiness is good in moderation. You are talking to me on a #openweb project, there are some #closedweb one’s, but they tend to be full of nutters, so can understand why you are here 😉
A. You are calling me nuts? Well, thanks… So please define to me, what “openweb” and “closedweb” have to do with encryption per se.
A. Our current dogmas are a mess… good to take a step away.
Q. Uhm… there is nothing written about why encryption is supposed to be bad… It just uses “encryptionists” as some weird swear word. In general, I don’t really get the text. Sounds very confused to be honest. That being said, I am also against neo-liberalism, individualism and esoterics and for an open web. What this does have to do with encryption remains obscure to me…
And it’s not a dogma. It is a scientific fact, that eavesdropping on well encrypted communication is close to impossible.
A. This is an interesting point:
2) all Mastodon instances I know use TLS.
The dev of mastodon told “white” lies about privacy and security as few #fashernistas would go with a #openweb project that did not pedal this dogma.
#TLS is a fig leaf, everything on the server is in plain text and the admins can read most of what you post and the sysadmin can read and change anything. it’s a trust based #openweb project and works well Because of this building of trust.
“Trust nobody” is the rallying cry of conservatism and an easy-to-understand worship of the #deathcult we need to stop pushing this shit.
It would be an #ecryptionst#geekproblem to call any online project secure in any real senses as the operating steam it runs on for 99.9% of users is insecure and likely backdoored for the state and corporate spy. And even if you are in the 0.1% who run something that just might be secure then the firmware is all insecure with issues that CANNOT be fixed in contempery devices…
The mind set is the problem am talking about – you can blow smoke over conversations by not looking at the big picture.
Think we currently have a pile of shit for home hosting tech. Might have to break my #nothingnew pledge as the is literally nothing normal people can use/do. Plan/idea/focus?
Nothing is useable – have tried them all. Good to start from where we are we need to stop going round in circles and start to look at why we HAVE FAILED and if the is a path to failing less badly. Or better how to build something that is not fail.
The is endless circulating in our #geekproblem communities – the subject matters, but we do nothing but circal failer. Good to start from where we are.
We are here… we need social tech that works for normal people…
Update
Maybe build a #KISS set of lightweight apps that use tor as the backend communications standard and talk to the tor browser as web apps so you don’t need the app to dip in, but the apps do the work of lifting p2p hosting. Feasible?
UPDATE (from a chat room on home web hosting)
A. calling everyone’s project a pile shit and not apologising even when some of those project devs sit in this room is not ok
Q. But obviously it’s all well shitty otherwise we would not be in the stinking mess we are with everyone (well 99.99% if you nitpick) on the #dotcons if that is not a pile of shit then we kinda need to start calling a rose a rose and a pile of shit a pile of shit… we are not sniffing roses in this chat i can say this as have been here in the chat for a while and here in the alt tech world for a very long time.
Maybe “wishing” shit way is no replacement for working sewers? We need working p2p tech that normal people can use. So lets compost the shit so we can smell the roses 🙂
A. 🙄 request for moderation plz thanks bye
UPDATE (from a chat room on home web hosting)
A. i concur with *** that the language is neither helpful nor respectful towards people trying to make things. So please mind it.
Q. Fair anufe, though shit in moderation makes good compost and compost is needed for beading seedlings and seedlings grow into everything that feeds life… and https://homebrewserver.club is about grassroots DIY life… some shit in moderation is needed for this cycle 🙂
Let’s water some seeds that “normal” people can grow.
The children of Thatcher and Reagan are limited in their world views – they have been brought up and nurtured in the neo-liberal #deathcult and have limited experience in the nurturing and socialisation of anything else. Academic and book learning are a poor substitute for evolving in a non #deathcult era, so it is no surprise that they find themselves trapped in the circle of #stupidindividualism
In this #deathcult era, individualism is stupid and individualism makes you stupid. This is a degrading circle that no “self-help” or “whoo spiritualism” can help you to escape.
This manifests like dark “social magic” in many areas:
In social movement we have the take-over of #fashernistas who push “alternatives” aside in their “commonsense” self-interest, building careers and grasping at the illusionists of fame and “influence” they are slaves to #mainstreaming
In tech the #geekproblem has pushed emancipation into darkness. The #encryptionists have dominated alt-tech and the #dotcons of the #mainstreaming path, both are born of this world view and the socialisation that keeps it from sight.
The mainstream is blind in its worship “there is no alternative” for #mainstreaming agendas in this era. Our words and actions are simply spewing shit while the world burns, our ecosystems die and communities implode in manufactured (for profit) infighting #failbook
It’s actually easy to step away from this mess, the issue is: are you brave enough to fall and WILL your community catch you when you do? (both valid worries i’m afraid).
We need hand-holding and most importantly we need alt-social/tech structures in place to build and bind – all human communities are built/bound with/from these structures.
The #OMN and the #4opens are there as shovel for the shit and binding for the community – neither of these have any power but the power you use them with – the steeping and away and dreaming and digging is all down to you and your community.
I don’t think our coders have ANY understanding of the damage they have done and are doing.
The state we live in is full of monsters.
In #closed the monsters can plot and destroy/divide and control because there is no way to make a judgment, you cannot have social “truth” in closed.
With #open, the monster is more obverse and much easier to trip up. As social “truth” is all around you.
Closed breeds monsters/open pushes them into the shadows.
We need to compost a lot of closed crap on the #openweb
If you look at contemporary programming – you will see in theory something that looks like anarchism and in realty something that feels like Stalinist USSR or Nazi Germany. The need for control and security is at the base of our #geekproblem culture, it is an inhumane outcome, code should always be messy as should our society.
Of course, like the above social abominations the real #geekculture hides COMPLETE insecurity and SECRET control by both the #openweb and the #dotcons it’s a mess, but not in a good way.
We never END in this social balancing, you would be an idiot or a Nazi or more often suffering from unexamined #geekproblem to think that we could or should be building towards ending the mess.
Q. While I agree with everything you wrote in that post, I don’t get how that illustrates the geekproblem. Is the #geekproblem the same as the #encryptionists?
A. The #geekproblem is illustrated here http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/2021/03/06/over-the-last-10-years-we-have-been-told-a-lie/
Q. In one post you wrote that the geek problem is replacing trust with control. That immediately communicated clearly to me.
A. The #geekproblem is a general issue of misunderstanding of “total control” and what it is to be human. The #encryptionists are an example of this, that have been dominate for the last 10 years, the solution to everything is “privacy” “lock down” isolated individualism, me only me “no such thing as society only individuals and their family’s”.
The hashtags have different meanings if you look at them from different directions – but always #KISS and radical at base. Metaphors, soft knowledge. The are no hard definitions – but add them together and they tell a story of “control”. The opening is that YOU have the opertinertly… maybe its a bit Qanion, first time I thought about that one 🙂
Q. I assume open data, which is good in some contexts but shades into surveillance in others.
Open processes? Which again I like in most of the contexts I work in,
What else?
A. The is a few pages http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/projects/4opens its a radical “social” definition of the open-source/free-software process. #4opens can be used to judge any tech/social project. It’s needed to lift the lid on what #dotcons and #NGO say and what they actually do, always different. If people make judgments it’s likely to put to one side 95% of the current tech crap and concentrate on real #openweb projects that get lost in the churning of #fahernista and #geekproblem agenders.
With #opendata currently we have a control issue. All the #dotcons data is open to corporations who pay and government agencies who spy, it’s just closed to us. What is the role of data in society is a complex issue that we do almost nothing to talk about in any real sense.
Social (data) ideas to think about:
What is a “free-market”
A. Ain’t no such thing and never has been nor will be
What is a command economy.
A. Any capitalist supply chain.
What are humane relationships.
A. longer conversation…
Q. But this is such a thing as a “free-market” in inverted commers 🙂 it’s the data we have on the things we “value” which we exchange for “data” that is created and guarded by our “states” with lots of guns and bombs.
A command economy is what the soviets tried and failed and china is trying to recreate with a state “manoalay” on data and metadata.
The “humane data” is the interesting one for #4opens and #OMN which are planting seeds for.
Metaphors are human, soft. Code is hard and machine. But something we often do not see is that machines are made/invented/imagined by soft humans, so the idea of hard logic is ALWAYS backed by soft. This is why not seeing the world with “ideology” is a blindness at the root of our current mess. That explains much of the “code” the #geekproblem shapes our digital world. We need to move past this mess to START to shovel compost and plant the seedlings of a humane world.
The #geekproblem is a humane failure of trust and its replacement with control.
The #hashtags add up to tell a story and thus build a way out of this mess.
The #deathcult is the last 40 years of neo-liberalism.
Need to work in shovels, shit and compost to the story. Hashtags a tool for #openweb organizing ideas/stories/community’s. The is obviously a balance with self-expression. At the moment this “balance” is pure #deathcult being pushed by our shared #stupidindividualism
We have a #shoval, common storied #hashtags we have piles of #techshit to shovel for #compost to build up fertile soil for planting flower and vegetables to nourish our soles and actions.
Why talk in “soft” metaphors?
The issues are soft as are the explanations/metaphors. You can’t have a hard explanation of the social world without building it up from an ideological foundation. As most people are in denial of the possibility of different world views/ideologies this makes “hard” conversations a largely pointless way of communicating. People asking for them have not taken the first step so talking their hand to help them will soon lead you down a different/ideology path. As the project is about #KISS and focus this is something we have limited time/focus for.
If you can glimpse the world from different views/ideologies than the soft/metaphor will talk to you and the attraction for hard will be less strong. These people have a hope of building a different/ideology world/process so can help in real ways.
As we need to focus, it’s not an issue to talk to the first and more important to consolidate around the second… question is finding people that have not been “broken” by #mainstreaming agenders.
Q. I am looking for the definition of open standards, and it’s quite foggy. I found on opensource.com something useful, but it’s still a candle in the dark
A. it’s an under resourced process for the #openweb that need input. It’s at the heart of the #OMN project. How we define it at the #OMN is a standard produced with #4opens process which is a bit circler as open “industrial” standards is one of the #4opens 🙂
All “standards” are social agreements/consensuses thus they CANT BE built form #geekproblem#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult we have wasted and will waste more time if we keep pushing this shit.
The idea of the #OMN is that it does NOT host any/meany of projects it incubates rather it is the “holder” of the standards that glues the projects together. Some of these will be “standards body” some will be defacto by use and consensus. In the end we need to look beyond #nothingnew and create new standards #4opens body’s – go slow on this as concessions are hard and only worthwhile if you do the hard work to achieve them.
Too much built in alt-radical tech ends up feeding pointless #fashernista churn. New platforms, new protocols, new branding, new codebases tend to be endless motion with very little grounding in actual social need. People mistake novelty for progress, and the result is a constant cycle of abandoned projects, burnt-out developers, and fragmented communities.
That’s one of the reasons why #indymediaback matters. It is not another pointless radical tech project chasing fashion. It grows from the #nothingnew path, building around things that already worked socially, culturally, and politically before the current mess swallowed the #openweb.
The point of #nothingnew is not nostalgia, it’s mediation. Instead of endlessly reinventing tools and social structures, we look at existing working practices and compost the failures while keeping the value that already exists, we build from continuity rather than disruption.
For the first 5 years of the #fediverse, this often means creating #openweb replacements for existing #dotcons platforms. That has value, people need usable alternatives to corporate systems, but simply copying the logic of the #dotcons into federated code has real limits.
Code is never neutral, all code carries embedded assumptions, social relations, and ideology. When we directly replicate #dotcons platforms, we import the values of the #deathcult along with the interface design. Metrics, branding, influence economies, performative identities, engagement addiction, soft/hard hierarchies – all this gets reproduced inside supposedly “alternative” spaces.
This is where the problem needs mediating rather than denying. The path of #indymediaback is different because it starts from an existing radical social process, not from abstract tech blindness. #indymedia already had working publishing flows, distributed trust networks, collective moderation practices, and real-world activist communities. The technology existed to support those social relations, not replace them.
That means the real value of #indymediaback is not primarily the tech stack, even though the tech matters. The value is in rebuilding the social continuity that made the original project meaningful. Without that grounding, you likely just produce another empty platform that disappears into the pile of forgotten radical tech experiments.
Food for thought: the #geekproblem is often not actually interested in the #openweb as a human value network. Instead, parts of geek culture feed parasitically off the current mess – thriving on fragmentation, novelty churn, status games, and technical abstraction disconnected from lived social reality.
Feeding off the collapse of the #openweb while calling it innovation is still bowing down to the #deathcult. Seen this way, the need for change becomes clearer, that we need active mediation, not passive drift. Both carrot and stick. Support grounded projects that grow from real communities, and challenge the pointless churn that keeps draining energy away from building durable alternatives.
The #OMN is one attempt at this – a shovel for composting the inhuman mess, so something living can grow from it.
Just about all tech and political projects are pointless “A river that needs crossing political and tech – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over complexity”
A solution to this churning is “nothing new” as most of the issues we face have already been solved or at least mediated. #nothingnew and #4opens is a way of stepping away from the current tech mess. The politics is a bit more complex.
What is not pointless is an interesting challenge for tech and politics. To start this conversation, you HAVE to use the #4opens to remove 99.9% of the #dotcons#NGO and #fashernista fluff.
The is NO conversation before you do this. When this is done you need to look at the #geekproblem, which is both a curse and a delight.
The #OMN is built from the experience of 30 years of working at the coal face of grassroots media and tech, its a path people can take to start the composting.
With the#OMN building progressive alt tech we cannot repeat the behaver of the #dotcons as it’s a different environment, we need different amenders.
“The security context is the relationships between a security referent and its environment. From this perspective, security and insecurity depend first on whether the environment is beneficial or hostile to the referent, and also how capable is the referent of responding to its/their environment in order to survive and thrive.”
Approaches to security are subject of debate.
For example, some argue that security depends on developing protective and coercive capabilities in order to protect the security referent in a hostile environment (and potentially to project that power into its environment, and dominate it to the point of supremacy). The #geekproblem strives for this outcome without putting it into words.
The #OMN argue that security depends principally on building the conditions in which equitable relationships can develop, partly by reducing antagonism between actors, ensuring that fundamental needs can be met, and also that differences of interest can be negotiated effectively.
Some traditional view of security
* Access control – the selective restriction of access to a place or other resource.
* Authorization – the function of specifying access rights/privileges to resources related to information security and computer security in general and to access control in particular.
* Countermeasure – a means of preventing an act or system from having its intended effect.
* Defense in depth – a school of thought holding that a wider range of security measures will enhance security.
* Identity management – enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times and for the right reasons.
* Resilience – the degree to which a person, community, nation or system is able to resist adverse external forces.
* Risk – a possible event which could lead to damage, harm, or loss.
* Security management – identification of an organization’s assets (including people, buildings, machines, systems and information assets), followed by the development, documentation, and implementation of policies and procedures for protecting these assets.
* Threat – a potential source of harm.
* Vulnerability – the degree to which something may be changed (usually in an unwanted manner) by external forces.
If we are building projects for progressive ends, we need to balance the conservatism in these ideas with #4opens approaches, this is a little understood simple path.
