Tag: indymediaback

Talking about hope and dispair in tech

Q. A lot of evil stuff happens via the cyberweb, no doubt. But I would encourage anyone who still knows how it works not to give up on it. Instead, try to work around the BS and design systems which are resilient to adversaries. As conditions of life get harder and the oligarchy turns the screws we need channels of dissident communication, even if they are no longer mainstream ones. Even retro stuff may go under the radar.

A. This is a social tech problem, a #geekproblem and the solution is social tech that steps away from the #geekproblem we cant just keep doing the same #techshit it’s time for composting #indymediaback #OMN are example of this that are currently blocked.

Q. As far as I could understand from what you said, what would then be exactly the social related problem to solve ? Are you referring to the way spying agencies like the CIA that is dominating the hacktivist scene, are creating “trends” on how to be safe online, which have most of the time no true impact regarding the possibilities of such agencies to continue spying and having social control? So you mean it’s a matter of being good at creating counter propaganda to cancel

A. You are describing the problems, then adding a layer of self-destruction to the problem, that’s not helpful. The #openweb has been “destroyed” by some forces you name. But we have also played a role in destroying it ourselves in refection to the real problems you highlight. We have little power over the first and more power over the second. It’s hopeful to think about this #geekproblem

Q. The #openweb wasn’t destroyed exactly. If you look at the numbers of websites over time, the open web is still there, but what happened is that almost all of the attention got captured by a small number of enormous corporate sites. The corporate sites made themselves critical conduits for search and discovery of news and views, such that the notion of “web surfing” has become almost obsolete. Google search increasingly won’t show much of the open web, because it’s not within the targeted ads business model.

A. yes my point, the #openweb is under a thin veneer of corporate crap. The #fedivers is a tiny break out of this that seceded because it was “accidentally” anti #geekproblem we need to be hardcore anti #geekproblem is the is to be HOPE 🙂

Q. The success of the fediverse did have a very large element of luck to it. Before 2017 it was doing very badly, and I remember unsuccessfully trying to persuade people to try GNU Social instead of going on Facebook. Even people who hated Facebook were reluctant to try the fediverse. Also my interpretation is that ActivityPub was originally a corporate idea but that the corporates lost interest, leaving its development to a few remaining grassroots activists. If the corporates had stayed that ActivityPub would probably be something quite different.

A. Yep, gave me hope, though it’s failing now – we have to stop fucking up this grassroots tech. A start is #4opens talking about the #geekproblem and using these to start composting #techshit

Q. The fediverse isn’t failing as such, but is becoming an established technology and so is no longer shiny or something which a clueless tech journalist would want to breathlessly scribble about as a new phenomena. Like XMPP and other previous protocols it is getting into the “plateau of productivity” where it mostly “just works”. There are complaints about lack of spec development, and some of those are justified. But ActivityPub doesn’t need to do all the things, it only needs to do one job well – that of being a social network protocol.

A. yes, it’s not failing in its own terms. But it is not heading to success in the bigger picture of being a alt to the #dotcons I should know being involved for the last few years outreaching it to the #mainstreaming that understands it has a #closedweb problem. The #EU outreach is interesting in this and likely also going to fail in the wider mission. It’s hard to push #openweb in a era controlled by #stupidindividualism and capitalism/alt diesper.

Q. It depends on what the EU’s wider mission is, but I expect that it’s not really a grassroots type of mission anyway. Whatever the machinations or motives of the EU, we do need to maintain a viable space for people who actively don’t want to be stuck in the corporate hellscape. And we shouldn’t assume that the EU will continuously bankroll some projects.

A. At the #EU it’s a power politics fight between the need for #open in a organization that is all about #closed people know they need to change but are only brave to pretend to do this. Am interested if a little crack of #open might be enough to undermine the monolith. Problem is everyone is up for selling out #open to grab a bit of #closed so only weak #open PUSH is all we have, needs to be sharper and harder push. Think stake and vampire level of PUSH with a few blows of a mallet to drive the point home. #open has power over closed, just like light over darkness.

Stepping away from our tech mess – you need to compost it


It’s good that people try not to push pointless tech projects… And the majority of new tech projects are obviously pointless. To get an idea of what to push do a #4opens review and publish this, let’s build a community of useful tech together. We need to do better.

#techchurn has made so much #techshit over the last 10 years. There are piles of #mainstreaming and alt tech that needs to be composted to grow a more humane world. Focus on what we CAN change and what we do have directing (social) power over, our mess.

From a grassroots prospective, we don’t have alternatives as they have been devoured and turned into shit by #NGO #fashernistas and social #deathcult worshipping (40 years of neoliberalism)

Thus, your/our lack of motivation, in my lifetime there were meany anarchist/ecological/socialist alternatives which kinda worked in imperfect ways.

Let’s use federated #4opens tech to reboot these from before they were killed and eaten by this mess, and innovate om this.

#4opens #OMN #indymediaback

Feeding a vampire class of #fashernistas for 20 years

When people do not understand/respect the value in keeping the fluffy/spiky debate in place you end up like this the-crypto-syllabus.com/france This is the problem, not the solution.

Worth a read to see the issue of feeding off the state and the VC poison that shapes the #fashernista ploughing over grassroots by the #deathcult These people are adding to the #techshit and shifting the focus to pointlessness, I have seen no good outcomes from their work.

But they were “our” people at one time, our old friends in activism took the heathy internal stresses that were braking projects like #indymedia to feed a #fashernista vampire class, to built careers feeding on and draining grassroots corpus for 20 years.

It’s not a good look, but people like these are the gatekeepers you talk to when you talk to “power” #indymediaback

Dogmatic liberalism and the geek

Good to look at data and metadata for what it is, social glue that holds society together.

Our #deathcult worship separates and atomise people, as does privacy and security coded by the #geekproblem

Take a moment to step back, our contemporary coding is shaping https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberalism

It’s obviously true that society/ecology is sick from this blinded worship.

From this dogmatic liberalism, one thried is our society’s moving to corporate socialism. That is “law” and norms are shaped to value a tiny number of the nastiest people at the “top”.

Data and metadata is privatised, increasingly “National socialism” is the “common sense” #mainstreaming we code for and agenst.

To address this #geekproblem some of us need to step away and code outside “liberalism” and not in reaction to fascism.

#OMN #OGB #indymediaback are #openweb native projects.

Influx of EU funding into the Fediverse – all together push through, the HARD block crumbles

Getting a good outcome is hard… And this current influx of EU funding risks doing more damage than good to the health of the #Fediverse, if it continues along its present agenda. Yes, the #Fediverse already has its own lifestyle-driven mess, but we can try to mediate the damage driven by funding first. If we succeed there, maybe the lifestyle drift can self-mediate in time.

Aiming for a better outcome, what we’re looking for is social change and challenge with less mess. This page looks at some of the best funding we’ve found http://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens/wiki/Funding-of-openweb-projects Not an attack, but opening a conversation on an obvious issue.

We can also look at funding that is being completely wasted, but that’s likely outside our influence. Lets keeping it positive (When We Can), I like to keep things positive… if possible.
But let’s be honest — a lot of people are BLOCKING, and that’s going to cause fire and a LOT of smoke. This is what real social change/challenge looks like: murky. Focus on #KISS — Keep It Simple — to see through the smoke.

Transparency matters, it’s hard to imagine how you can do a left-wing project without showing your workings:

  • Open/Trust = left
  • Fear/Control = right

That’s the core framing this page is about.

#Dotcons & poisoned agenda, Yep, the whole #dotcons side of the EU funding agenda is poison.
It only feeds the mess. And as I’ve pointed out before, most funding ends up poured straight down the drain. Sadly, that’s the default outcome.

#IndymediaBack – Learning the right lessons, one thing to keep in mind: I think we (the #Indymedia crew) learned the wrong lesson from the repression and state raids. We pushed fear/control as the solution, and this added to the #closedweb mess. But as the #Fediverse now shows, the path should have been open/trust — That’s the #openweb path we abandoned. That split ripped Indymedia apart, and we’ve been stuck in the #dotcons mess ever since.

Simplicity as Strategy, when making judgments, keep it #KISS — Simplicity is what cuts through the mess. Shovels and compost, is the #OMN approach.

Trauma, Repression & Healing, Yes, trauma is real. That’s why I lean into basic ways of looking at these things. From there, it’s up to people to build up, DIY style — a real grassroots approach.

Practical approaches, watch the film:

I made this for the legal support crew of a major campaign. The repression was ongoing and intense — But the healing came through mass participation, like walking calmly through police stop and search zones. That likely helped to mediate a lot of growing trauma.

Final thought: #Openweb – all together push through, the HARD block crumbles. We’ve got work to do. Let’s keep it grounded, open, and as clear as we can through the murk.

#indymediaback is a #openweb project of consensus based radical grassroots journalism

The#IMC project is an affinity group – so we are planing to work through consensus and diversity of strategy to move the project past where it was ripped apart by internal stresses after 10 years of running as a successfully worldwide radical grassroots media project.

To do this we have a #nothingnew policy, beyond moving the project into modern standards #activertypub we need to reboot the project with work flows intact. Thus, we are working to this #UXhttps://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network/issues/26 and the original workflows and process.

Of course this can and will be updated as needed, but we have a “chicken and egg” issue that we need a working affinity group/s to reach consensus on where we go. The #indymediaback project is a way of bootstrapping this code/process in #4opens way.

To keep “diversity of strategy” in place, we are using the #OMN framework.

Update

What would a non #mainstreaming movement look like.

* firstly, it would have to get past meany #BLOCKS that are now common sense.

My action is to jump back in time before these blocks solidified and build up from there. Not a bad idea and will likely work if people embrace it.

* Non #mainstreaming tech is SOCIAL/community and needs to step away from the current geek agender to have real power for social change.

#OMN project, we use the #4opens to build from this.

What is the #OMN project for

The #OMN is about building #KISS bootem up trust based media networks for publishing and soughing content with enriched metadata flows. In the end you have a “stupidly simple semantic web of media object “cauldrons” and flows build up from a local level. What you/we do with this is up to the users/producers… this is held to radical politics by #PGA

Initial projects are media #indymediaback and archiving #makeinghistory with the resistances’ exhibition. There are likely lots of other things you can build as its just pipes and flows – the internet as a “open/trust” database of humane objects/people.

How this fits into traditional or Alt economics is not rarely up to us – but bounded by #4opens and #PGA so up for “connections” based on opendata flows – #RSS or #activertypub are good starts.

 

At the #OMN we have a number of #openweb tools for you to use

* A non filter bubble/not tracking search engine https://openworlds.info
* A radical (fluffy/spiky) offline/online TV project http://visionon.tv
* Social media, https://campaign.openworlds.info for fluffy and https://activism.openworlds.info for spiky.
* #indymediaback test servers https://indymedia.openworlds.info and https://indymedia.hs2rebellion.earth and https://roadstonowhere.openworlds.info for testing and use.
* A code hosting/organizing site https://unite.openworlds.info
* Funding/money https://opencollective.com/open-media-network
And we have chat/wikis, bots and other projects. The running cost of all This is currently just over £500 a year as we have upgraded the visionontv server to host lots more video.
 
Feel free to use/support the #openweb projects and get involved in running them, become a mod, its #DIY

Let’s talk about the journalism

How do we move the #indymediaback project forward.

let’s start with history. The editorial workflow of #OMN is based on #indymediaback which is based on basic grassroots journalism growing from radical anarchist traditions.

The newswire is made up of original content published to the site and aggregated flows from a trust network of #4opens sites built out of a community of interest/affinity groups.

Using the #5W and #4opens we start the step away from “post truth” by grounding this flow in a community of action bounded by physical locations.

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

The “news” value of “this happened” Who, What, When, Where, Why.

From this a feature flow is built by the core affinity group to show the #5W storeys from different views as a “consensuses” centre column articles.

These articles are then aggregated to other subject/geographic instances newswires.

In this the small streams/flows build a strong river of “social truth” that feeds into seeding a more humane world.

The wider #OMN network, using the fresh newswire and aggregated features to build wider features – these “social truth” networks links the humane world from a grounded real grassroots action/communities.

We build society from the bootem up rather than the old top down of #traditionalmedia/governances.

This itself shifts and moves solutions by aggregation and drives social economics to #4opens humane agender. In the end we play/build a new more humane/ecological world.

To move this part of the project on:

We need “news” a flow of subject/geographic 5W newswire posts on the 3 test instances – then we need to cross-link these by turning the instance based flows into feature articles.

These are aggregated across to the other instances and pushed out to the #fedivers for comments and feedback which then flows back into the #indymediaback instances to the newswire. This new flow needs to be cross-linked into articles, all linking back to the source.

From this we can flesh out the training resources and start the outreach of the project properly, build the power of different voices.

 

It’s now hard to get an easy view of the death of #indymedia

It’s now hard to get an easy view of the death of #indymedia as a lot of the most shitty behaver was taken offline as a part of the ripping that tore the project apart. For the #OMN this is a problem that we strongly need to mediate when implementing “individualistic” rights/workflows. We need to keep metadata flows intact to build trust and history. This challenge raises questions on the balance between privacy and transparency.

The were internal and external forces… I tend to concentrate on the internal as it’s the area that we actually have power/responsibility to make work. The external is a harder task that we then have to fight to challenge/change.

A good (non-neutral) write up of the #death of #indymedia https://sheffield.indymedia.org.uk/2011/04/478397.html

The start of the end for #indymedia with the project splitting into open/closed and the growing intolerances on both sides https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/02/391384.html

How do movement die. Some #indymedia crew trying to unblock the ossification and growing open/closed conflict https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/nottinghamshire/2008/02/391385.html

We need to not repeat this mess for the #indymediaback project.

What should #indymediaback look like?

For some of my views from living/working through this mess

http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/2020/03/17/a-look-at-the-internal-mess-of-the-uk-indymedia-project/

http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/2013/03/28/a-brief-history-of-activism/

History’s of #indymedia are full of academic wank

The Problem of Academics Covering Activism, in activism, particularly within grassroots movements like #Indymedia, there is a significant disconnect between academic interpretations and the realities on the ground. This gap is not a matter of perspective but represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics and operational mechanisms of activist movements.

The disconnect, academics gravitate towards more visible and vocal members of activist circles, the #fashernistas. These are, often passionate and articulate, but are not the ones making the movement’s wheels turn. The core of activism, the real work, is carried out by those who are too busy to engage with academia because they are immersed in the day-to-day efforts of driving change.

The history of the Indymedia project is a case in point. Indymedia was a pioneering effort in the early 2000s to create an open publishing platform for grassroots journalists. Its story is a rich tapestry of collaboration, innovation, and relentless dedication. However, much of the academic writing on Indymedia misses the mark, focusing instead on surface-level narratives. For a deeper understanding of the Indymedia project’s history from someone who was actively involved, you can read my activism stories.

Academia push analyses that are often removed from the practical realities of activism. The theoretical frameworks and methodologies used serve more to fulfil academic desires for publication and recognition than to provide a faithful representation of activist efforts. This creates a body of work that can be described as “wish-fulfilling #fashernista wank,” offering little insight into the actual functioning of movements.

Consequences of this misrepresentation are significant. Historical records, influenced heavily by academic accounts, paint an inaccurate picture of how movements operated and succeeded. This not only distorts the past but also impacts future activists who look to these records for guidance and inspiration. The narratives crafted by academics sideline the contributions of the true workhorses of the movement, leading to a skewed and broken understanding of what is effective in activism.

To bridge this gap, we need academics to engage more deeply with the core activists, those whose hands are dirty from the work of making change happen. This requires a shift from seeking out the most vocal and visible to those who are often unseen but indispensable. Additionally, activists themselves must recognize the importance of documenting their efforts and experiences, ensuring that future narratives reflect the true spirit and mechanics of their movements. The is a project for this #makeinghistory, we do need more authentic dialogue between academics and activists, to build a more accurate and useful body of knowledge that actually honours and reflects the efforts of those driving change.

Q. I wish the hacker culture connection to anarchism was more thorough and consistent. It looks a lot more like privileged fuckery and pet insurrections. It could be that the academic scene wasn’t representative of the movement as a whole

A. I would largely ignore most existing academic history of anachronism and tech as it is extreme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannerism

In my view, a good place to start a project like this would be to look through the #indymedia email archives for an “original” anarchist workflow. I would not take much notice of the “official” history’s of indymedia as they are full of academic wank. The theoretical analysis of the time is all pushing agenders that ripped the project apart and killed it – these are interesting to see this process, but much less useful as exacting history of what actually happened. The who internal process is saved in open email lists now hosted on archive.org no other anarchist project is this well documented.

Best not to add to the activist “mannerism” in our history, it’s very bad all ready, if we are to have hope for “anarchism” fluffy and spiky playing a role in saving a humane/ecological world.

#indymediaback

Churning of pointless tech projects

Almost everything made in alt-radical tech is obviously pointless and only feeds #fahernista churn.
Why #indymediaback is not a pointless radical tech project.
#nothingnew mediates the churning of pointless tech projects by building things that already work.
In the #fedivers we use this tradition to replace existing #dotcons projects as new #openweb projects
This replicating the #dotcons with #openweb versions has its limits. All code is “ideology” so bringing in the #deathcult to the #openweb by direct copying has its own issues to work through.
We mediate this problem by recreating a widely used radical tech project #indymedia with good existing workflow and embedded in wide radical social networks/agreements.
The value balance in #indymediaback is not in the tech though that is needed. It’s in the #nothingnew social side of the project, without this continuity we have a pointless tech project.

Food for thought.

The #geekproblem is not actually interested in the #openweb as a human value network. Instead, they often feed off the current mess in different unhealthy ways. Feeding off the dying #openweb is bowing down to the #deathcult

Looked at it this way the need for change becomes more obvuse and active carrot and stick work important.

The #OMN is a shovel to compost this inhuman mess.