Tag: geekproblem

A conversation

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 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.

The problem with closed code

If you look at contemporary programming, I don’t think we have properly understood the social damage that our coding culture has already done, and is still doing. We have built enormous parts of modern life out of software, while pretending that software is somehow separate from society. It isn’t, code structures how we communicate, what we can see, who can participate, what gets remembered, what gets deleted, who gets heard and who gets ignored. And much of contemporary programming culture has a deeply contradictory relationship with this power.

In theory, the culture talks like anarchism: decentralisation, freedom, hacking, autonomy, permissionless innovation, open protocols. In practice, the resulting infrastructure feels closer to an authoritarian bureaucracy: rigid hierarchies, centralised control, surveillance, locked-down permissions, opaque decision-making and an almost obsessive belief that more control and more security will produce a safer society. This is part of the #geekproblem.

Closed systems hide power – in a #closed system, the monsters can operate without being easily seen. They can plot, manipulate, divide and control because the surrounding community cannot properly see what is happening. There is no shared social process for checking the claims being made or comparing them against what everyone else can see.

You cannot easily create social “truth” inside a closed system, you can have an official truth, corporate truth, an algorithmically manufactured truth. You can have whatever the people controlling the system want you to believe. But social truth is different, it emerges from people being able to see, question, compare, remember and challenge what is happening, that is one of the powerful things about #open. With genuinely open systems, the monster becomes more obvious. It becomes easier to see the relationships, the decisions, the contradictions and the consequences.

It becomes easier for other people to say – hang on, that’s not what happened – open systems don’t magically prevent abuse, they don’t make people good, but they make some forms of abuse harder to hide. Closed breeds monsters. Open pushes them out of the shadows where they can be seen.

The security paradox – this is where programming culture gets particularly strange. The demand for control and security is to often presented as neutral engineering. We are told that systems need permissions, authentication, central administration, surveillance and increasingly complex layers of security because the world is dangerous.

Of course some security is necessary, but when security becomes the organising principle of the whole system, something changes, the technology begins to reproduce the social assumptions of its creators. People become permissions, communities become accounts, relationships become access-control lists, trust becomes authentication and thus social problems become technical problems. Uncertainty becomes something that must be eliminated rather than something that society needs to learn to live with – this produces systems that are technically impressive but socially impoverished.

The fantasy of perfect control is a deeper problem here. We keep trying to build technology that removes mess, but human society is messy. People disagree, misunderstand each other, change their minds. Communities develop traditions as different groups have different needs. Sometimes things fail or somebody has a better idea, that isn’t necessarily a bug, it is social life. The #geekproblem treats this mess as something that technology should solve. The result, an endless attempt to build cleaner abstractions over increasingly complicated social realities. But the cleaner the technical abstraction becomes, the more human reality gets pushed outside the closeing system.

Then the system becomes brittle, and when it breaks, everyone is surprised. Code should be allowed to be messy – this doesn’t mean writing bad code. It means recognising that good social technology cannot be based on the fantasy of perfect control. We need systems that accommodate disagreement, forks, experiments, mistakes, local variation, negotiation and repair. In that sense, code should be a little bit messy, because society is messy. The goal isn’t to eliminate the mess, it is to create structures that help us live with it. That is different from the programming culture of trying to close every possible hole, define every possible behaviour and control every possible interaction.

#OPEN is a direction, not an endpoint – there is also a danger in treating #open as another purity project. Yes, the #openweb isn’t automatically good as open systems can contain abuse, misinformation, exclusion and power games. The #openweb itself contains plenty of contradictions. The #dotcons have their own versions of “openness”, often while retaining enormous concentrations of corporate power. So this isn’t a simple story of good open people versus bad closed people, more a balancing process.

#OPEN is a way to step away from #CLOSED – it creates space for transparency, plurality, experimentation and social accountability, gives communities more opportunities to see what is happening and to build alternatives. And that matters because we are currently living inside an enormous pile of inherited closed #techshit – closed platforms, closed data, closed algorithms, closed governance, closed infrastructures and assumptions about what technology is supposed to do. As a first step we need to compost a lot of this closed crap.

The mistake, we make to often today, is that we believe that we can build the perfect open system and finally end the struggle, we can’t, and we shouldn’t. There is no final technical architecture for society. There is no perfect governance model, no moment when we finally solve disagreement, power or human contradiction. Anyone promising that is either selling something, hiding something, or has fallen deeply into the #geekproblem.

The point is not to end the mess, it is to keep the mess visible, social and negotiable. We need technology that leaves room for people to challenge each other, organise, experiment, repair and move in different directions. That is why the #OMN work matters – to build practical #openweb infrastructure where media, metadata, moderation, governance and community relationships can remain visible, shared and contestable.

To make this happen we need starting points, #OGB experiments with governance, #MakingHistory to keep collective memory alive and #IndymediaBack to remember what grassroots media learned before the current wave of #dotcons.

hashtag storys #4opens

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. 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 and #OMN which are planting seeds for.

Open/closed, hard/soft or trust/fear.

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 #hashtags tell a storie

Dot for profit for few con for the rest – took over the #openweb during the #dotcom era.

#stupidindividualism is our internal poison that we breed from the #deathcult

#failbook will/has failed us as individuals and as a society.

#openweb is a good view of what we had and what we won’t.

is a path out of the #geekproblem

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.

 

All “standards” are social agreements/consensuses

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 process which is a bit circler as open “industrial” standards is one of the 🙂

#nothingnew is a guiding light in this project to mediate the #geekproblem #stupidindividualism and the #deathcult (understanding comes from fallowing flows to their source )

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 body’s – go slow on this as concessions are hard and only worthwhile if you do the hard work to achieve them.

Shovel and compost comes to mind.

Churning of pointless tech projects

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.

The #OMN is built from 30 years of working at the coal face of grassroots media and tech

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 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.

Security concepts tend to be from the conservative ideological viewpoint

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security

If we are building projects for progressive ends, we need to balance the conservatism in these ideas with approaches, this is a little understood simple path.

Why use the hashtags?

The #OMN is based on “nothing new” as a core project process. Though we do describe things in different ways than they are normally described, we use everyday metaphors for the language of computing and coding where necessary, we use nature metaphors where possible.

We have lived in a deeply damaging era for the last 40 years in economics we have neo-liberalism (metaphor #deathcult) in thinking and education post-modernism these two have created many bad effects (metaphors #geekproblem #encryptionist #stupidindividualism #dotcons #fashernista etc) that have shaped how people act and think, we have internalised these post-truth into normal everyday worldviews. These are going to undermine our cultures, society, and most impotently destroy our ecology (metaphor #XR)

We change the language to brake out of this “normal” world-view to build an opening for people to see a different view (also am dyslexic and can only think by making up ideas so its a good fit for me). The current “normal” thinking and expressions are too damaged to be of much use in real social change.

On every measurable indicator, Bitcoin has been a failure

One simple metric for judging #Bitcoin, is has it actually replaced or seriously disrupted the banking system? The answer is obviously no. The same financial institutions still dominate global economics. The same scams continue. The same offshore tax havens still hide elitist wealth. Politicians and oligarchs continue stuffing money into secrecy jurisdictions exactly as before. The banking system remains firmly in place, untouched at its core.

Bitcoin promised disintermediation, it promised liberation from financial power, it promised decentralisation. What it delivered instead was a speculative asset bubble.

Another useful metric is, do ordinary people use Bitcoin for everyday life? Again, no. No people buy food, pay rent, organise community infrastructure, or sustain local economies through Bitcoin. Almost nobody accepts it for normal goods and services. What dominates instead is speculation, hoarding, market gambling, and endless “number go up” culture.

This is important because technologies reveal their social meaning through actual use, not ideological promises.

And then there is the ecological cost. Bitcoin’s energy consumption exceeds that of entire countries, it consumes more electricity than the Netherlands. This is an extraordinary level of waste for a system that has failed to achieve all of its original social goals.

At a time of accelerating #climatechaos, building gigantic energy-hungry computational systems dedicated to financial speculation is not innovation, it is social and ecological vandalism.

Bitcoin is not a “net positive for humanity.” It did not dismantle banking power. It did not democratise wealth. It did not create meaningful commons infrastructure. It did not produce resilient local economies. What it did do was make already-rich people richer while burning staggering amounts of energy.

The winners were early adopters, speculators, venture capital, crypto exchanges, and existing elitists with enough surplus wealth to gamble. The losers are everybody forced to live inside the accelerating ecological and social consequences.

Bitcoin is a classic expression of the #geekproblem. It approaches deeply human and social issues through abstract technical absolutism. Instead of rebuilding trust, community, accountability, and collective institutions, it attempts to replace them with cryptographic mechanisms and computational systems. It is the worship of mechanism over humanity.

The #encryptionist mindset imagines that social trust can be replaced by mathematical trust. That code can replace culture. That computation can replace politics and markets can replace community. But humans do not actually live this way, human life runs on trust, care, reciprocity, relationships, mutual aid, shared stories, and collective responsibility.

The real currency of life is not cryptographic tokens, it is the smile, the helping hand, the shared meal and the neighbour who shows up when things fall apart.

Making machines into gods is profoundly inhuman. And the last 40 years of neoliberal money worship have pushed this pathology by reducing value into market value, relationships into transactions, and all meaning into competition and accumulation. This is the #deathcult logic, that in the era of ecological breakdown, this path is becoming openly suicidal.

The answer to this mess is not better speculation technology. We do not need more #techshit built to accelerate extraction, surveillance, financialisation, and social fragmentation. We need technologies designed to grow commons, this is where projects like #OMN matter. The #OMN path starts from a different assumption that technology should support human relationships, not replace them.

Instead of building systems around profit extraction and artificial scarcity, we can build systems around shared infrastructure, open process, collective publishing, federated trust networks, mutual aid, community governance, and resilient local organisation.

The point is not technological purity, the point is social usefulness as healthy technology should be about lowering barriers, strengthen communities, distribute power, encourage participation, and help people organise collectively. On this path the matter because they expose power instead of hiding it – open data – open source – open standards – open process. This visibility allows communities to compost problems before they become entrenched systems of control.

The opposite path – the dominant #dotcons and crypto worlds – increasingly hides power behind complexity, branding, speculation, and artificial technical priesthoods. People become users, consumers, and data points instead of participants.

We need compost, not worship, we need to stop worshipping the systems that are actively destroying the conditions for human life. Compost is a much better metaphor as compost takes waste, failure, and breakdown and turns them back into living systems. That is the #KISS task ahead of us, not denial, not technological salvation myths, not billionaire futurism. Practical rebuilding, shovels matter more than fantasies.

#OMN is a shovel, and compost is the basis of life.

A conversation on #OMN issues around metadata

* Capitalism wants to privatise metadata to the #dotcons and the capitalist then control the government – fascism is back into fashion.

* Chinese communism, wants the state to control the metadata, so they can control capitalism, we are back to the command economy just digitised.

* Liberalism want to privatise metadata to the individual to return to a mythic free-market past, a better outcome than the first two but clearly not the one we are building with the #OMN

* What does anarchism want #OMN is an attempt to answer this last one.

https://wp.me/p9Vw7k-oA

CB. My thinking here is that Anarchism wants the social conditions for free association. The implication for metadata is autonomy over how that’s shared and used

HC. Am thinking about power. Metadata has power in aggregation so bad power is about hoarding the aggregation to use for your power agenders. Good power has to be a diffrent outcome.

CB. So fragmentation of metadata (decentralized storage and tactical use of aliases) is a way to defeat accumulation of power through accumulation of metadata. An interesting quality of power is that it is relative, rather than absolute. So an entity doesn’t have power *over* you unless it has more power to wield constructively relevant to the situation.

HC. ‎in the #OMN we are using metadata to replace the market – the only interesteing question is who has the aggregated metadata power. The capitalists, The state or the Commons – if we divide and privatise the metadata we have nothing to replace the market with. Its all about building a post capitalist economy. We need to replace the “free-market” and it’s police man with a commons and its community – the metadata replaceing the “invisible hand” with visible knowledge in commons.

CB. Here’s a thought about how a knowledge economy works that may be relevant to the metadata issue. You have transparency and trust building at the local level.

HC. We using social/tech to replace capitalism, not just do social networking the is a VERY political project that is soft/strongly ant-capitalist. Yep the #OMN is a trust based network of flows (community/subjects/people). We do need a good explanation of the political nature of the project, but also do not wont to terrify the NGO crew, tread softly. Thinking about this, we are pro “power” just wont to horizontalize it. Were meany people, asperly #geekproblem are against power and wont to minermise it (while having total power of there code).

CB. For a press release? “It’s about promoting individual and community autonomy”. For me, the #geekproblem is trying *too* hard to have a perfect system, a way that the bad thing never happens.

HC. Yes but that’s unbalanced, and rebalancing individualism/community in a world of neo-liberal individualism…

CB. That’s unrealistic. You want to make the bad things selected against statistically. Emphasizing autonomy (including community autonomy) is transient.

HC. being less human – its the blemishes were buty lie and its the users saying your code is unusable that make it better etc. if you don’t have any users you can do any code you like – almost all open-source projects are built this way.

CB. We have situations that are unbalanced currently, and the way to achieve balance involves building force in opposition to the current power.

HC. Autonomy comes for stable/trust based society – not from isolated (control) individuals – but yes we talk about the same thing just different processes.

CB. Yeah, I phrased our shared value “for a press release” and you said that’s “neo-liberal individualism”. Well, yeah. 😀 But it introduces the idea of community autonomy, which isn’t quite anarchy ready, either, but it’s a step towards free association and away from thinking about autonomy as strictly an individual value, which is my *estimation* of the most that words can accomplish tactically in that situation.

HC. OK “community autonomy”… am trying to expand my whole composting metaphor to cover this stuff, shovels.

CB. There’s shovels, spades, pitchforks, and dung forks. You can do everything with a shovel, but your back will thank you if you don’t. Either way, it’s the worms who do all the heavy lifting. I’ve been tackling the metadata issue with a friend doing some tech work for a Native American resistamce movement, and who’s very interested in making dirt. The most important aspect of metadata for em (pronoun) is being able to reliably communicate intent. It’s not sufficient or practical to say who should read it and who shouldn’t. There’s aspects of communicating approach to the topic and assumptions about sharing and replying that social networking, including Activity Pub, doesn’t address. These are communicated by a language like Lakota in introductions and closing on speeches, like formal practices in business correspondence.

HC. What do you think about replacing capitalisms free-market with a metadata “commons” as the free market is based on selfishness and access to exclusive knowledge, were the data commons is based on sharing the “open” knowledge for “community” ends. Both are based on “invisible hands” just one is human fucking each other over for a mythical good outcome and the other is more “democratic/diversity” that word “community autonomy” 🙂

CB. The most important aspect of metadata for em (pronoun) is being able to reliably communicate intent for both individual and social communication and trade. I do agree with that. I’m also working with some old school coop-style communists on adapting economic vocabulary to Activity Pub. It’s not sufficient or practical to say who should read it and who shouldn’t. There’s aspects of communicating approach to the topic and assumptions about sharing and replying that social networking, including Activity Pub, doesn’t address

HC. We are purposely not doing social networking for the #OMN only news and archiving as it has a much less privacy issues. News is done in the open/trust by default and sources are protected when needed. And archiving is history, you can choices to add information or not.

CB. And, assuming that you’re talking about locally generated data being propagated through networks of relationships (as opposed to being global by default), then you have a situation where parties local to one another can reliably leverage the advantages of openness, without centralized accumulations of metadata for fascists (or capital) to capture and leverage to exert control. That’s economic activity, which also has differences as well as similarities relative to OMN

HC. Its open data and open license by default so the enemy can take all the metadata by working there way into the syteam. We don’t recommend doing anything hardcore in #OMN or online in any way. The project is about assuming the world CAN change then building in that direction.

CB. But the general shape is that metadata linkage is unavoidable (geek problem), metadata accumulation is undesirable (capital), “metadata is evil” lacks necessary nuance, and communication of metadata is a necessary part of the model and likely a certain amount of verification.

HC. The whole project is built by adding a metadata tail which you can queryed to build trust and serendipity as well as organize in an affective way. You would be right to point out it has NO power to resist the repression of the state if they turn fascist. Though its is a fabulous tool set to build a tool to have power against the state if that happens. So its a race of human creativity vs the “invisible hand” backed up by police with rubber truncheons… the key word is race, if push comes to shove.

CB. Authenticity of metadata in that case is primarily establish through the trust network. It’s hard to corrupt metadata *if* you get a lot of copies distributed quickly.

HC. Metadata is going to happen no matter what you do, to think the geeks can solve this is a fantasy. The ONLY question is who controls this open/closed. Some basic certification to each addition to the tail based on user accounts. The are lots of widely used standards based ways of doing this.

CB. For the example of a state actor trying to control the narrative…. there’s maths to describe the circumstances under which that can occur. And situations where you’re distributing stories to 3 or more peers look bad for the state if they don’t shut it down in the first 2 generations.

HC. Then as you say use this “trust network” to quray the tail. For example how meany people do i know who trust this adition to the tail. You can do the same to get an idea if the tail is trusted over all ect. But the question has to be asked who let the state actor into the trust network… they lose lots of trust (links/flows) etc then rerun the query and you are back to trust. Its all lossy, but this is a how trust works. In this we get away from the #geekproblem ideas of trust.

CB. For the state to suppress a story, they need to identify the source then trace known associates (metadata) to shut down those repeating it. If police don’t discover the story until there are 10+ stations replicating it, that’s not likely to happen.

HC. The network is built up of trusted actors – how dose the state have a voice inside this grassroots level project.

CB. So policing involvement *after* the story breaks is unlikely to be effective in suppression, which is what you want

HC. Yep you are talking strong AI based state manipulations- we don’t have a defence against that.

CB. You actually have the best defence possible.

HC. Yep it will spread widely across the bottom in uncontrollably directions after the first few jumps the is practically no censorship with out visible repression then non effective then as it will bubble back up from the darkweb.

CB. Even if police infiltrate a peer to an activist cell, they still don’t necessarily have enough knowledge to prevent replication through other peers.

HC. But they can pre-empt and kick you door down based on metadata… will happen. We have sudo-anonimerty to mediate this issue. Somebody would have to trust your account with no tail… then the police kick there door down…. Notice the us an escalating level of door kicking.

CB. Takes time to knock down doors, even electronically. With every door they knock down, there’s 3 times as many doors as there were before – potentially. Then you’re crossing lines in jurisdictions and there’s no putting a cork in that

HC. In this it will be censorship resistant. But we make no #geekproblem lies that the “security of the network” will protect you. But you can protect yourself by sudo anonymity and the use of tor. And whispering in the forest to your friends to share the content from the sudo anonymous account. In this way we move security from hard to soft. From #encryptionists to social trust.

CB. Right. Making the network less efficient by routing it over Tor or otherwise requiring cryptography defeats the plan.

HC. Yep, this removes the tail so no trust, no community, no social change. But how to persuade paranoid activists and control freak geeks that having your door kicked sown is socially useful 😉 Also the is no way to root the media objects, no need for federation, no need for community. With one to one encryption you just have isolated individuals and no media

CB. Crypto solutions are fine for first hop in highly sensitive situations, but once you hit a peer that’s outside of your opsec control, infosec is a moot point and you need to go for speed.

HC. Mixed with trust.

CB. I may have overstated “speed”, but yeah. Reasonable assumptions of trust. You only need absolute assurances in specific situations (that you are better off trying to avoid)

HC. With the #OMN we do both the open and the closed path. But we change the balance to 80% open and 20% closed. Yep, best whisper in the forest, second best use the p2p encryption tools in the 20%

CB. That’s a ratio that pops up a lot in various contexts and I agree with it here.