The #openweb is #4opens, where dues this place the current #AI path?

To understand and walk this, lets look at an example of the mess we need to compost – by lifting the lid on the current #AI noise. The problem, isn’t simply whether #AI is intelligent; it is who controls the infrastructure, what incentives drive it, and whether technology serves people or turns people into components of the machine. When can see this we might be able to see, thus act on the #OMN trajectory: technology → power → participation → open infrastructure → commons, let try and get past the #fashionista mess of whether #AI is or isn’t “really intelligent.” as this is a lot of #mainstreaming noise.

AI is going to take all our jobs.
AI is going to transform everything.
AI is going to become conscious.
AI is going to kill us.
AI is going to save us.

Some of these claims might be true, some are noise and others certainly nonsense. The more useful questions are simpler – Who controls the technology, what are they trying to achieve, and who gets to decide how it is used? This is where the #OMN view of technology starts, don’t believe the hype – but don’t ignore the technology.

One of the problems we need to mediate, is, we should be careful about criticizing AI by repeating the claims made by the #dotcons (AI companies). If a company tells us its system is basically becoming a digital human, and we respond by saying “yes, but this digital human is dangerous”, we have already accepted their framing, we are helping improve there profits and power by repeating there story.

The same thing happens with the last generation of #dotcons, #Facebook told us its algorithm understands us, #Google tells us its systems are intelligent, #AI companies tell us their models are reasoning. Most of this is smoke and mirrors that we should be ignoring if we actually wont to see anything real.

This next #dotcons #AI boom involves enormous amounts of investment in computing infrastructure, data centres, chips and energy. The companies involved are under pressure to keep growing because the financial system only rewards growth. This produces a dangerous feedback loop, a company needs to keep growing as investors expect growth, the company therefore needs a new story about future growth, the technology becomes that story. The investment creates infrastructure, the infrastructure creates pressure to find uses for it, the uses become evidence that the technology is inevitable. Then more investment follows, it isn’t only a conspiracy, it is a #KISS system of incentives.

The better approach for us is to look underneath the noise. Q. What does the system actually do? What infrastructure does it require? Who pays for it? Who owns it? Who benefits? What happens when it fails? What happens to the workers? What happens to the users? What happens to the communities around it? All are more interesting than arguing about whether a snake oil chatbot is “really thinking”.

And this is an important #OMN lesson – technology does not exist outside society – the code is one layer, underneath the code are ownership, money, labour, institutions, energy, law, culture and power, when we get distracted and ignore those lower layers we don’t understand the technology at all. When this happens the mess we constantly have to compost is that this pushing of #techchurn isn’t innovation. We’ve seen this before, #web02 was going to transform everything, then crypto, NFTs. Then the metaverse, and then whatever the next shiny thing was.

Each wave arrived with claims about revolutionary transformation, yes some of the technologies were useful, but the investment system doesn’t reward usefulness, it rewards growth stories. This produces #techchurn, endless technological change driven partly by the need to find the next thing to invest in, rather than by any clearly identified social need. This is not new, we have been pushing this kinda mess since the industrial revolution.

So, how can we compost this mainstreaming mess, one path we tried and it kinda worked in the 20 century was socialism, or in the western guise social democracy. This is a different politics from simply saying “technology bad”. That older question takes us directly into #4opens territory were there is another mythology we need to challenge – Markets don’t produce good technology, the idea that if a technology is useful, the market will automatically discover the best version of it. History doesn’t support this well, this is why the #openweb matters. A genuinely open network gives people alternative paths. Open standards reduce #dotcons lock-in. Open source makes systems modifiable. Open data makes information reusable. Open process makes power visible.

The fourth one of these is especially important, so that the social consequences of technology aren’t hidden inside the code. We can find them hidden inside the process, who funded the project? Who decided the priorities? Who was consulted? Who wasn’t? Who owns the infrastructure? Who gets to change it? Who carries the social and ecological risk? Who gets the benefit? If those questions aren’t visible, the technology is normally reproducing the same old power structures, we need to compost.

This mess is not only to be found in technological we can use the #4opens to look and judge social paths. The same thing happens with markets, with bureaucracies, algorithms. The system follows its incentives, consequences emerge from the interaction between the system and the world. This is the reason #KISS matters, don’t invent unnecessary mythology when a simpler explanation works.

Open source is a social technology, one of the strengths of #FOSS is that people can inspect the system. That doesn’t magically make it secure, but it creates a culture in which claims can be challenged, problems exposed and were people can build alternatives. The current #mainstreaming path is not this, its repeating trust us:

Trust the company.

Trust the algorithm.

Trust the secret model.

Trust the security team.

Trust the executives.

Trust the experts.

Trust the investor story.

That is the kind of technological hierarchy that the native #openweb paths needs to challenging with a shovel. Native paths, need native technologies, with community participation, not #dotcons or #geekproblem technologies of obedience. Our path is about composting the layer of abstraction between people and reality – technology can make people more capable or it can make people more manageable, this simply understanding is what makes #OMN a shovel.

The #OMN isn’t trying to build another AI-powered social media platform or creating a better algorithm, it isn’t trying to replace one technological priesthood with another, the #OMN is much more basic.

News.
Archiving.
And eventually, down the road, governance.

The idea is to build infrastructure where people participate in the flows of information rather than being only consumers. Events come into the network – People and communities add context – Stories connect and organize those events – Objects move between nodes – Metadata gets added and corrected – Different communities can see different things – Useful information can spread – Useless information is allowed to decay.

And, nobody has to maintain one giant master database containing the “correct” version of reality. This is a what we call a #datasoup, messy, living, federated information environment. And that mess isn’t weakness, it becomes the very resilience we need. Distributed systems need distributed understanding.

The #OMN path is deliberately different from the dominant AI model, were the dominant model says: collect everything → centralize it → train the model → produce the answer. The #OMN is closer to: collect from many places → connect → tag → contextualize → challenge → correct → archive → feed back into the network.

As I keep saying, this is not an attempt to create a perfect database, it is an attempt to create flows of trust. The network flows become the process of understanding. That is why federation matters, open process matters, why human moderation matters. It is why disagreement matters, and why we don’t need another central algorithm deciding what everybody should see.

In our current economics: People are inputs, workers are costs. Communities become markets. Attention becomes a resource. Knowledge becomes training data. Care becomes an inefficiency. That should reveal to you the common sense #deathcult mess we need to compost. That is the #OMN path, technology is a tool, the question that matters is who holds it, who maintains it, who benefits from it, and what kind of society it helps us to build.

Care is missing in the current mess, in a better world, a worker cares about the person using the product, a journalist cares whether the information is true, a nurse cares whether the patient gets better, a programmer cares whether the software actually works, a community cares whether its infrastructure remains useful after the funding runs out. This is difficult to understand for only automated paths because care isn’t an optimization problem, it is a social relationship.

The future doesn’t need more technological priests, it needs people able to pick up the tools, understand how they work, challenge the assumptions behind them and use them together.

That is the #openweb path, that is #4opens.

A more progressive liberal view of this same #AI mess

#OMN #openweb #4opens #FOSS #AI #automation #techchurn #techshit #dotcons #geekproblem #commons #KISS

It’s how humans have always lived – together

For 200 years, capitalism, for the last 40 years #neoliberalism, taught us that we’re isolated individuals who compete to survive. But any real view of our actual history – and our biology – say the opposite: we’re interdependent, social, and ecological beings. For almost all species time before the current mess, we thrived through commons-based systems, shared forests, grazing lands, rivers, and community knowledge. Villages maintained open wells, fishermen shared tidal calendars, and guilds protected collective craft standards. Cooperation, not competition, is what allowed us to endure.

This is why now alt tech, matters, it is about rediscovering, what makes us human, the digital form of that is commoning online. Just as medieval commons were fenced off during enclosure, our early digital commons were captured by #dotcons. Rebuilding the #openweb is the act of reclaiming that shared ground, not nostalgia, but in the era of #climatechaos and hard right shift its #KISS survival.

What we need to compost is our own-shared memory. The commons are missing from today’s “common sense”. The idea that people can manage shared resources together has vanished from public imagination. Yet the commons is the older, more adaptive, and far more humane way of organizing.

In tech, the #Fediverse shows this in action, thousands of community run servers cooperating through a shared protocol, ActivityPub. Projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, or #Funkwhale replace enclosure with federation, showing that open paths can scale through trust rather than control. Alt tech, built on open protocols and co-governance, is simply the digital commons rebooted, a network of networks where no one owns the whole.

We need much more resources and focus pushed into this real grassroots path of reclaiming the means of communication, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was all ready a commons: decentralized, people-driven, and impactful. Early #Indymedia collectives covered protests outside mainstream #blocking narratives. #4opens email lists and wikis built movements across borders. Then capital pushed in, WE let the #nastyfew of #Facebook, #Google etc privatize our collective infrastructure, turning participation into surveillance and creativity into content.

Alt tech projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), Mastodon, and wider #Fediverse are attempts to rebuild what we keep forgetting, this time, protected by #4opens shield to build shared governance. This path is not a nostalgic throwback, but living/acting paths for post-capitalist communication we need in the growing era of social backdown.

It’s not only “tech” – it’s social trust infrastructure. A common is not only software; it’s the culture of cooperation that surrounds it, shared values, mutual aid, and relational ethics, you can’t “code” trust into hardware, as the last decade of #blockchain and #AI mess proves. Smart contracts failed to make people honest; they just automated mistrust, it’s on going #geekproblem blindness we need to be working to compost.

What works, the resilience, comes from people, not algorithms. Through frameworks like the #4opens: open data, open code, open standards, open process. We can build transparency and accountability into the social layer of the network. Trust is a practice, not a protocol #KISS

We need a future that’s better, not just less bad. The #deathcult story – neoliberalism’s great myth – says “there is no alternative.” Alt tech is the alternative, working proof that cooperation scales, that people build shared infrastructure without extraction and less coercion. Look at LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Linux, or the #Fediverse, all imperfect, collaborative systems built on trust, not profit. They are real-world examples of how collective will outperform the normal deadened paths of corporate hierarchy.

Alt tech gives us believable hope, which is the only real antidote to despair and apathy. The ground for grassroots power is in pushing change and challenge. If the liberal state and #dotcons won’t reform, we need to be building parallel structures that work differently.
Projects like the #OGB (Open Governance Body) experiment with federated, transparent decision-making. The #OMN builds tools to connect grassroots media in trust networks, bypassing gatekeepers entirely. Together they form a scaffolding of a working commons, capable of hosting culture, not only control.

Healing the social media wound? We need to compost the lie of #dotcons which spent the last 20 years turning us into consumers and outrage machines. The shovel we need is affinity groups rebuilding social tech around self-governance, interoperability, and most importantly trust to reclaim the human side of the internet. Imagine the world different, feeds that empower communities, not advertisers, tools that nurture relationships, not metrics, platforms that amplify context, not conflict.

This is the work of making the internet human again, working together on the path of alt tech matters because it’s not about gadgets; it’s about freedom, community, and survival. It’s our path to remembering that the #openweb, like the Earth itself, belongs to everyone, or it belongs to no one. And every time we build a shared tool, or hold open a door, we remind the world that cooperation is not naïve, it’s our oldest #KISS technology.

A cross-cultural conversation on this subject

UPDATE: I haven’t touched on two other #4opens projects here, so let’s tap them at the end: #Nostr is a “me-too” project stuck in the #geekproblem loop, it won’t go anywhere until it learns to value community as a building block. #Bluesky, on the other hand, is already drifting into the hands of VC-funded #fluffy elitists who turn every commons into a brand. It’s a very likely a dead-end for real change or challenge, which is why the #mainstreaming #blocking #NGO and #fashionista crowds flock to it.

UPDATE 02: Digesting the comments. For the past 10,000 years of agriculture, 500+ years of Euro-colonialism, 200+ years of #capitalism, and 95 years of #neoliberalism (45 officially declared as such), the #nastyfew practicing control through production have dominated everyone else. Capitalism, as described in Capital, grew wherever it could. By the late 19th century, labour organised and fought back. Social democracy transformed the capitalist state so effectively that capitalist development stalled by the 1930s.

The response? A reorganisation of capital, using anti-communism as its rallying cry (WWII, NATO, Korea, Vietnam) to defeat social democracy and retake control of the state. By the 1980s, “they” felt secure enough to brand reform itself as a product: #Neoliberalism. I’m simplifying, of course – this is for the #hashtagStory outreach, so it can become a #KISS tool people can actually use. Clarifications and deeper dives you can find in the comments 🙂

Now, about this idea that “capitalism told us we’re isolated individuals competing to survive.” It’s partly true, but not in the way people think. Capitalism depends on interdependence, we work together to produce, but in a way that isolates us socially and politically. That’s the contradiction: interdependence turned into alienation. It’s the mess in our heads that recreates these bad social structures, the inner factory of control. That’s what we have to compost.

In the end, it’s not just social control, it’s social destruction. As we rush deeper into #climatechaos and the global hard-right turn, it’s clearer than ever: the ideology of separation keeps power safe and people powerless. I know this isn’t #mainstreaming liberal logic, that’s the point. We have to think differently.

And for context, I’m not speaking from the sidelines – I’ve got an MA in politics and 30 years of hands-on work in grassroots #openweb tech. Isolation is social control, see #stupidindividualism. Let’s keep this grounded and not turn it into trolling, yeah?

Blindness and Compost

Let’s look fresh at an old idea, and useful path that is currently being blocked. Ideologies are frameworks for interpreting and navigating the world, the #mainstreaming “common sense” of rejecting them amounts to rejecting structured understanding. When people claim to eschew ideology, they default to the dominant paradigm, the #deathcult of #neoliberalism, without realizing it. This uncritical stance isn’t radical or alternative; it’s a by-product of mainstreaming and the disorienting effects of #postmodernism.

The act of composting this mess is acknowledging and breaking down these entrenched, harmful systems, for the needed, cultivating healthier, more grounded alternatives. Keeping it simple (#KISS) and reaching for that metaphorical shovel is the first step in transforming decayed ideas into fertile ground for the #OMN and other grassroots projects.

So yes, it’s time to dig deep, break it down, and build anew. Let’s shovel together. 🌱

What can you do? Some actions to reclaim the #openweb and refocus on its core principles of trust, humanity, and grassroots democracy is a good first step. The #posttruth era has eroded the integrity of our media, and tools like #Google—once a gateway to knowledge—have been reduced to serving the agendas of #dotcons and more recently the state, leaving us stranded in a desert of noise and distraction.

To take the different path, we need:

Composting the #geekproblem: Our tech culture has long been trapped in deterministic, myopic paths that prioritize tools over people. This “#techshit” needs to be broken down and repurposed, with a focus on social and democratic values rather than isolated, insular designs.
Pushing aside the #dotcons: These thrive on extraction, disconnection, and control. By putting them aside, we free ourselves to create paths and projects that genuinely serve communities, fostering collaboration rather than competition.
Rebooting the #openweb: Grassroots democracy must be central to this effort, with social technologies incorporating human and social needs into their design, ensuring they empower rather than alienate. The #OGB and projects like it offer a tangible path by embedding democratic processes and open collaboration into the fabric of the web.

A simple path is the on i take on this site, the invitation to “click on the hashtags and think” to challenge and break out of default paths of disengagement and passivity. The #OMN isn’t only a tech project; it’s a rallying cry for those who want to see through the mess of the #mainstreaming culture and the #deathcult of neoliberalism.

If you’re reading this and feel the pull, it’s time to act. Visit Statements of Support, sign up, and let’s compost the mess to grow a flourishing, democratic #openweb together. Don’t be shy—this is our moment. 🌱

What is the #openweb

While the commercial web is dominated by large corporations, the #dotcons are what most people are familiar with, there is another side to the internet – the #openweb. In this article, we will explore what the #openweb is and why it matters.

The #openweb refers to the part of the internet that is not owned by corporations. Unlike the commercial web, where large tech companies like #Google, #Facebook, and #Amazon dominate the landscape, the #openweb is a decentralized space where people can create, share, and access content without restrictions.

The openweb is built on #4opens standards and protocols, which means that everyone can develop software or services that work seamlessly with existing tools and platforms. One of the primary benefits of the openweb is that it fosters humane creativity. Because we can all contribute to the open web, it encourages a diverse, liberal, range of voices and perspectives. Openweb technologies like blogs, wikis, and federated social networks have enabled people to connect and collaborate, leading to the emergence of new norms and social movements.

Another important aspect of the openweb is its commitment to transparency, it is a critical tool for promoting #freespeech and #democracy. Because it is not owned by any single entity or government, the openweb is a place where people can express themselves without fear of censorship or repression.

In recent years, the openweb has come under threat from the rise of the dominating #dotcons of the commercial web and the growing power of big tech companies. The commercial web is dominated by a few large corporations that control vast amounts of user data and use it to extract profit. This has led to concerns about, social control, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech giants and their agenders.

Despite these challenges, there are many organizations and individuals working to preserve the #openweb. From #grassroots groups such as #OMN to #NGO’s like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) an international community that develops open standards for the web, while #mainstreaming organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Google funded #Mozilla Foundation are dedicated to promoting a liberal #mainstreaming open and accessible internet.

In conclusion, the openweb is a critical part of the internet that promotes, creativity and free society. It is a space where anyone can contribute and participate without restrictions, and it has played a vital role in social movements and democracy. While the openweb faces many challenges in the face of the commercial web and big tech, it is essential to work together to ensure that the internet remains an open and accessible space.