The expertise problem

Technical expertise matters, the problem begins when technical expertise is treated as the only legitimate way of understanding a social problem. This is the trap of technocracy: taking a useful tool for understanding parts of the world and turning it into a complete worldview. The expertise problem “We need more technical expertise in government.” But that is half the answer. The mistake is to jump from “politicians need technical expertise” to “technical experts should make decisions.” That replaces one form of stupidity with another.

A functioning society needs engineers, scientists, programmers and researchers. But it also needs historians, sociologists, artists, carers, journalists, workers, communities and ordinary users Technical knowledge is one tool in a toolbox, it is not the toolbox.

We have seen the consequences repeatedly. Politicians who barely understand how the internet works are expected to regulate it. At the same time, technology companies and technical communities assume that because they understand the machinery, they therefore understand the society surrounding it. Neither position is good enough – we need technical people involved in politics and governance, but we also need those technical people to understand that engineering is not governance.

The #geekproblem hashtag is particularly important part of the story for the #openweb. A lot of contemporary technology culture has inherited a blinded belief that social problems can be converted into technical problems: if something is messy, build a perfect system, when people disagree, write a protocol, when something is unsafe, add security. If information is difficult to manage, build an algorithm, when people behave badly, moderate them automatically. If a community is struggling, optimise the workflow. Sometimes these things are useful, but often the “technical solution” simply hides the social problem.

The problem isn’t that geeks are bad people. It is that technical culture can become too comfortable with abstraction. People become numbers, communities datasets, politics optimisation. Relationships become networks, trust becomes authentication and participation becomes a user interface. And suddenly, we have designed a technically elegant system that nobody actually wants to live inside.

This is the deeper danger of #technocracy, it is not simply about having too many computers, engineers or technical experts. It is about turning technical expertise into political authority. The idea has been around for a long time. During the crisis of the 1930s, technocratic movements argued that society could be managed by scientific and technical experts rather than through the messy processes of democratic politics. The appeal was understandable: when society is in crisis, efficiency, certainty and expertise can look much more attractive than disagreement, compromise and uncertainty.

But that is the problem – democracy is messy because society is messy. There is no technical system that can contain all the values, histories, relationships, conflicts and experiences of the people affected by a decision. The belief that a small group of people with enough information can simply calculate the correct answer is not an escape from politics, it is politics disguised as engineering.

We can see the same problem emerging in our own technology culture. Silicon Valley has presented itself as being above politics: just build the system, scale it and let the technology solve the problem. But these companies have accumulated enormous economic and political power precisely because their systems shape how people communicate, work, organise, consume information and understand the world. Technology is therefore not neutral infrastructure, who owns it matters – who controls it matters – who funds it matters – who writes the rules matters – who has the power to change those rules matters. And what happens when the system is wrong matters.

The danger becomes serious when technological power and political power start merging. A technology billionaire does not become democratically accountable simply because their company operates critical infrastructure. A powerful algorithm does not become legitimate because it is technically sophisticated. A government does not become more democratic because it uses AI. Technology can be used to amplifie power without making that power accountable.

Technologies of humility

This is where the idea of technologies of humility becomes useful: technical and policy systems need to take uncertainty, ambiguity, vulnerability and the limits of knowledge seriously. Four principles might be useful.

Framing

How are we defining the problem? Are we actually addressing the problem, or simply addressing the part that is easiest to measure? This is hugely important in #OMN development, if we define the problem as “How do we distribute content efficiently?” we will build one kind of system. If we define it as “How do communities maintain trustworthy shared media and social memory?” we build something very different. The technical architecture follows the social framing.

Vulnerability

Who gets hurt by the solution? A system can be efficient and still be destructive. Algorithms can optimise engagement while making people miserable. A moderation system can reduce abuse while silencing marginalised voices. A security system can protect one group while excluding another. We need to ask: who is missing from the path?

Distribution

Who gets the benefits? Who gets the power, the money and who carries the risks? This is one of the most important questions in technology because “innovation” is rarely distributed equally. The #dotcons have become good at extracting value from social relationships while presenting the resulting technology as neutral infrastructure, it isn’t neutral. The ownership model matters, governance matters. The #4opens matters because it tries to move these questions into the open.

Learning

What happens when we are wrong? This may be the most important principle of all, there is rarely one perfect answer to a complex social problem. We need systems that can learn, not simply systems that can scale. This is one of the reasons #OMN is interested in things like moderation, rollback, metadata, federation and open governance. A social system needs mechanisms for correction, needs to be possible to say “That didn’t work. Let’s change it.” without treating the previous decision as sacred.

We need to understand that open systems need more than code, you can have beautifully engineered open-source software running a terrible social system, a decentralised network full of authoritarian communities, transparent code supporting opaque power, and you can build technically open systems that are socially closed.

So the challenge isn’t simply – how do we make the technology open? It is, how do we make technology part of an open social process? That is a much harder question, and much more interesting and why #OMN is deliberately messy.

The #OMN approach isn’t to pretend that we can design the perfect social system in advance. It is to build enough open infrastructure for communities to experiment, disagree, adapt and learn. That means accepting that different communities will do things differently, while providing common building blocks that allow different paths to develop – different interfaces, different workflows, different communities and different forms of participation. It means designing for disagreement rather than pretending disagreement can be engineered away, a path from technical systems to social infrastructure.

Composting the current mess is where the critique of tech authoritarianism connects directly to the #geekproblem, it is the problem of expertise becoming authority without accountability. And the answer is not to remove technical people from decision-making. Quite the opposite. We need their knowledge. But we need it alongside other forms of knowledge and inside democratic, open and accountable processes.

Engineers can tell us what a system can do, but they cannot, by themselves, tell us what society should want. Programmers can design protocols, but they cannot decide what relationships a community should have. Data scientists can identify patterns, they cannot determine what those patterns mean to the people living through them. And AI can process enormous quantities of information, it still cannot replace human judgement, lived experience, disagreement and democratic legitimacy.

This is why #4opens + #OGB + #OMN + #MakingHistory belong together, attempts to build technical infrastructure that leaves room for social intelligence rather than replacing it. To repeat endlessly the path is not one perfect platform, one perfect algorithm or one perfect governance model, #KISS we need more tools, not one answer.

On this native path, mess is not necessarily a failure, it can be the space where learning, disagreement, adaptation and democracy actually happen. That is a much humbler – and potentially much more powerful – ambition.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #OGB #MakingHistory #FOSS #geekproblem #technocracy #technology #governance #commons #socialmedia #decentralisation

Trust and the trustless mess

One of the useful arguments in the debate around decentralisation, blockchain and the #openweb is also one of the simplest – We do not actually live in a trustless world, we live in a world built on different kinds of trust. This is why the Fediverse worked because it was #4opens with a good #UI.

The problem it had to overcome and still does is that much of #geekproblem pushing technology is obsessed with trying to eliminate trust rather than understanding how trust works. The idea of the “trustless” technology sounds attractive. If we cannot trust governments, corporations, banks, platforms, administrators or even other people, why not build digital systems where nobody needs to trust anybody?

This is a simple mindset, instead of trusting a person, trust the mathematics, instead of trusting an institution, trust the protocol. Instead of trusting a moderator, trust the code. Instead of trusting a community, trust the ledger. It sounds wonderfully clean, but there is a problem – you cannot eliminate trust, the social truth is you can only move it somewhere else.

A #blockchain can make it difficult to alter records after they have been entered, but it cannot magically make the information entered into the system true. Someone still has to enter the information, someone has to write the software, someone has to maintain the infrastructure, someone has to interpret the results and someone has to decide what happens when reality doesn’t fit the rules. That distinction, people, is important for thinking about the future of the #openweb as the path to trustless is usually just displaced trust.

Imagine buying a digital object through a “trustless” smart contract. The theory says that you don’t need to trust the seller. The contract automatically enforces the transaction. But do you trust the person who wrote the smart contract? That the code does what you think it does? Do you understand the code well enough to audit it? Do you trust the software running on your computer? Do you trust that the thing described by the contract is actually the thing you want? Suddenly, the system isn’t trustless in any way.

On this blinded pushed #geekproblem path, you are exchanging trust in people and community for trust in software, tech infrastructure and your own technical ability. A tiny number of people are grasping for power, in this it is a “grassroots” mirroring of the current #dotcons mess. Supposedly trustless transactions always fall back on reputation, previous experience, known counterparties or the assumption that somebody will behave fairly.

And this isn’t necessarily a failure, it is a recognition of how society actually works, trust is basic infrastructure. We think of trust as something soft and personal, a handshake, reputation, knowing somebody. Being part of a community, a history with an organisation. But trust is actually a form of core social infrastructure.

When you buy something from a local shop, you don’t individually audit every component of the business. You trust the shopkeeper, the reputation of the shop, the legal framework. You trust food standards, trust that if something goes badly wrong, there are mechanisms for dealing with it. None of this means that the shop is perfectly trustworthy, it means that layers of “soft” trust, accountability and social mechanisms make cooperation possible.

The same thing happens online, we trust websites, moderators, administrators, developers. We trust maintainers, communities. They all have reputations, the interesting question here isn’t – how do we eliminate trust? It is, how do we build better systems of trust? The #geekproblem problem of pretending that trust doesn’t exist, is a fantasy of the trustless system that makes things less democratic. If trust is made invisible inside code, people lose sight of where power shapes process and actually sits. So replacing a human decision with a technical decision doesn’t remove politics, it hardens and hides it by simply hiding politics inside infrastructure.

The #geekproblem isn’t about technical people being bad or that technical knowledge isn’t relevant. Quite the opposite, complex systems need technical knowledge. The current problem comes when technical expertise becomes a substitute for social and political accountability. The system says, “The code says so.” But somebody decided what the code should say, decided what the code should not say – that is governance.

This is where the #4opens become useful.

Open Data.
Open Source.
Open Standards.
Open Process.

The point of this simple clarification of #FOSS is to make the system trustworthy enough to participate in and transparent enough that people can understand how that trust is produced. Open source allows people to inspect and modify the software. Open standards allow different systems to communicate. Open data allows information to be examined and reused. Open process makes decision-making visible. They together make trust more accountable, a much healthier goal.

On this current broken path, some people assume that decentralisation means removing trusted intermediaries. But decentralisation does not mean removing relationships, it means distributing relationships and accountability. Instead of one corporation controlling everything, you have many independent communities. Instead of one giant moderation department, you have distributed moderation, one platform deciding the rules, instead communities establish their own rules while communicating through shared standards. Instead of one central archive, many organisations hold copies and contribute metadata flows.

That is not in any way trustless, it is distributed trust, and distributed trust is much closer to how healthy communities actually operate. Reputation matters, people have always used reputation to decide whom to trust. You recommend a builder because someone you know had good experience with them, choose a restaurant because friends recommend it. You work with someone because they have a history of doing good work, participate in a community because you know the people involved.

An example of this #geekproblem in tech the last 20 years of #blockchain projects, is that they have to recreate reputation systems, off chain, to grow trusted parties because people need them to function. This shouldn’t surprise us, reputation is accumulated social knowledge, a record of relationships, it is one of the ways communities remember.

And that common sense is something that technology should help communities develop rather than trying to replace with abstract technical mechanism. This is the danger of “code is law” a seductive idea, if the rules are encoded into software, nobody can arbitrarily change them. But real life doesn’t work like software, people make mistakes, circumstances change. Sometimes the rules themselves are wrong.

A genuinely sustainable social system needs the ability to interpret, moderate, appeal, correct and change, this requires people, relationships and basic governance. It requires trust, were a completely rigid system may be technically predictable while being socially disastrous. Trust needs accountability, this is particularly important for grassroots technology. When we build alternatives to the #dotcons, we shouldn’t simply recreate their power structures with different software. We need to ask:

Who can make decisions?

Who can see what is happening?

Who can challenge a decision?

Who can correct mistakes?

Who can leave?

Who can fork the system?

Who can moderate?

Who controls the infrastructure?

Who owns the data?

These are trust questions, a trustworthy system isn’t one where nobody has power, it is one where power is visible, distributed and accountable. Trust isn’t blind faith, yes, there is a danger in romanticising trust, trust doesn’t mean blindly believing people. Good trust is built through evidence.

You trust somebody because you have a relationship with them.

You trust an organisation because it has demonstrated competence.

You trust a process because you can see how it works.

You trust a community because people hold each other accountable.

You trust software because it is open, tested and maintained.

You trust a system because there are ways to challenge it when it fails.

So the opposite of “trustless” isn’t “blind trust”, it is earned, observable, and accountable. This gives us a useful direction for the current #openweb reboot. It points to the mess we need to compost, we don’t need to recreate the fantasy of an entirely trustless internet. The commercial internet already tried extreme centralised trust – for 20 years the #dotcons became trusted intermediaries for almost everything, owning the infrastructure, controlling the algorithms, identity, data, moderation. They controlled visibility, they still control the economic relationship with users. That isn’t trustless, it is concentrated trust and concentrated power.

Trust is the missing layer, there is a tendency in narrow #geekproblem paths to think in terms of infrastructure first. Servers, protocols, APIs, encryption, algorithms. But underneath all of these sits a social question – why should anyone trust this system? And the answer cannot simply be “Because the code works.” as a system can work perfectly and still be socially terrible. The important question is whether the technology helps people create relationships that are transparent, accountable, resilient and capable of self-correction. That is a much bigger challenge than creating a trustless protocol, but it is also much more useful.

To build on a different path, we need networks where communities can trust their own infrastructure. We are already doing this on the #Fediverse, building on #ActivityPub standard that allow communities to communicate. Moderation systems where decisions are kind of visible and accountable. What is lacking is building governance that people can participate in, this is where projects such as #OMN and #OGB become interesting. There goal isn’t to make human relationships unnecessary, it is to build technical infrastructure that supports better human relationships.

From trustless to trustworthy, means accepting that trust is unavoidable and then making trust visible and accountable. It means combining open standards with open governance, decentralisation with community and recognising that humans aren’t bugs in the system – humans are the system.

Technology should therefore not be designed around the fantasy that people are unreliable components that need to be eliminated. It should be designed around the reality that people cooperate through relationships, reputation, shared history, norms, institutions and accountability. The #KISS task of the #openweb is not to eliminate these things, it is to build better versions of them, real alternative to the #dotcons – not more dead-end trustless technology.

The #OMN path is distributed trust, supported by open technology and democratic governance. And perhaps a more radical idea – rather than trying to remove trust from society, we should get much better at building it, sharing it and making it accountable #KISS.

#Trust #Trustless #OpenWeb #OMN #OGB #4opens #FOSS #Commons #Fediverse #Decentralisation #Governance #Democracy #Technology #Community

Religion, mystery and the #openweb

I am not religious, but that does not mean religion is something that can only be dismissed as irrational, stupid or obsolete. There is a useful distinction between believing in a religion and understanding the social, cultural and philosophical work that religion has historically done.

This matters for the #OMN because we are interested in how human beings make meaning, build communities and organise themselves when they don’t have complete knowledge of the world. We don’t know everything – one of the interesting things is that science and theology both eventually run into the same thing – mystery.

Science starts with observation, evidence and experiment, to builds theories from what we can discover and then changes those theories when better evidence appears. Religion starts where empirical knowledge runs out and tries to construct stories, symbols and ethical frameworks around the things we cannot yet explain.

That doesn’t mean the paths science and religion are on identical, they aren’t. A scientific theory is not the same thing as a religious myth, evidence, testing and falsifiability matter. But there is a shared human problem underneath both – we are trying to understand a world that is bigger than our ability to understand it. The problem begins when either side claims to have finally solved the mystery.

In my view It’s useful to look at religion as a social technology – for thousands of years, religion has been a kind of social technology that helped people organise communities, explain death, create rituals, transmit stories, establish ethical expectations and give people ways of dealing with uncertainty. Before modern science, medicine and large bureaucratic institutions, people had very few tools for dealing with an unpredictable world.

Storms happened.

Crops failed.

Children died.

People became sick.

Wars arrived.

People didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow, religion provide a framework for living with that uncertainty. Prayer, ritual, myth and community provide a sense of meaning when there was very little else available. Yes, that doesn’t mean the explanations were factually correct, it means they performed social functions.

And this is where the conversation becomes interesting for the #OMN – the danger is false certainty – there is a big difference between living with mystery and selling people certainty. The religious con begins when somebody says “I know exactly what God wants.”,”I know what happens after death.”, “I know the future.” or “Give me money and I can protect you from it.”

This isn’t limited to religion, modern society is full of people selling certainty – politicians, corporations, economists all sell certainty. As do most of our #dotcons technology companies which are pushing the cult of influencers trying to sell certainty. And on the other side increasingly the #geekproblem sells us the idea that every social problem can be solved with the correct application, platform or algorithm.

That #techshit is another kind of theology, the technology of certainty, a lot of contemporary technology culture is built around the assumption that uncertainty is a technical problem waiting to be eliminated. We want perfect systems, perfect moderation, perfect security, perfect prediction etc.

But human society doesn’t work like that – people are messy, cultures are messy, communities disagree, knowledge changes. Context matters, things break, and sometimes we simply don’t know. The attempt to remove all of this uncertainty produces something worse than the original problem – systems of control.

This is one reason the #openweb matters – #OPEN is about living with uncertainty – on this native path the #OMN isn’t an attempt to build a perfect system, quite the opposite. The aim is to build social and technical infrastructure that allows people to work together without requiring perfection.

The #4opens approach is useful precisely because it doesn’t require everyone to agree. It creates conditions where disagreement can remain visible and productive, this is very different from trying to create one system that finally gets everything right.

We need better stories, not final answers – human beings need stories – we need ways of explaining where we came from, where we are going and what we should care about. Religion has historically provided some of those stories, art, politics, philosophy and community life provide others. Now science is trying to provide new ones to replace the dieing religions. The mistake is thinking that one of these “correct paths” has to completely replace all the others.

The #OMN is interested in the space between – how do we build the communication systems through which communities can create, challenge, preserve and share their stories? That is what #MakingHistory is about too – history isn’t just a collection of “facts”. It is a living social process of deciding what happened, who experienced it, what mattered and what we should remember.

If we leave that process to corporations, governments, algorithms and closed platforms, we increasingly lose control of our collective memory. In this mess, there is an uncomfortable parallel between religious fundamentalism and technological fundamentalism, both can become systems of faith. Both create sacred texts, produce priesthoods, punish heresy and both can promise salvation.

The work to compost this mess, is to keep thinking, keep questioning and keep the systems open enough for other people to challenge us. That is a very #KISS principle – we don’t know everything – so build systems that allow us to learn. We need a culture of epistemic humility, an acceptance that our understanding is partial, provisional and socially constructed.

We need tools that help communities see what they know what they don’t know – what they disagree about and how their understanding changes over time. That means moving away from closed systems that manufacture certainty and toward open systems that make the process visible. That is the #openweb, and the social purpose of the #OMN.

And perhaps the most important lesson from religion, science, art and everything between them is remarkably simple “We don’t know.” so let’s build systems that help us find out, together.

#OMN #OpenWeb #4opens #MakingHistory #IndymediaBack #OGB #KISS #geekproblem #stupidindividualism #commons

The individual, is not, the starting point for the #OMN

One of the most useful ways to understand the mess we are in today is to ask a deceptively simple question – what comes first – the individual or the network? #Mainstreaming economics startes with the individual, were sociology, anthropology and related traditions start somewhere else – with relationships, institutions, communities and the social structures into which individuals are born.

This difference matters enormously, when we start thinking about technology, politics, economics and the #openweb. It is one of the reasons I keep coming back to the problem of #stupidindividualism – the point isn’t that individuals don’t exist, of course they do, the problem is treating the individual as if they exist independently of the social world that produces, supports and constrains them.

Why? we are not born as isolated economic actors, we are born helpless. Other people feed us, protect us, teach us language, teach us how to behave, introduce us to culture and eventually help us become capable of acting independently. Before there is an autonomous economic actor, there is already a network of care. That simple observation has consequences, that the network come first. that nobody invents themselves, every person was born into an existing social world, where there are families, communities, languages, institutions, infrastructures, histories and expectations already.

Even our ability to imagine ourselves as an individual depends upon other people. Language is social, knowledge is social, culture is social, markets are social and technology is social. The idea of private property depends on a society capable of recognising and enforcing it. Yet a great deal of mainstream economic thinking narrows it self to begin with the individual as though they are already standing outside society, deciding what they want and entering into relationships with other individuals through voluntary exchange. That is a very particular, narrow, way of not seeing the world, and it is not neutral, this blindness is historically produced.

One of sociology’s important contributions is to make the background visible. The individual is not simply a natural fact. The particular kind of individual we imagine ourselves to be is shaped by the social structures around us. But yes, modern societies are unusually good at producing the experience of being an isolated individual. We can move cities, change jobs, rent instead of own, interact with strangers. We can buy almost everything we need through markets, communicate with people thousands of kilometres away. We can participate in institutions without ever knowing the people who operate them.

This creates an extraordinary experience – we can feel independent while being massively interdependent. That is one of the great illusions of modernity, that the person sitting alone in a flat, ordering food through an app and working remotely from a laptop can feel completely autonomous. But underneath that apparent autonomy is an enormous network of other people and systems: farmers, delivery workers, programmers, electricity grids, telecommunications networks, roads, warehouses, financial institutions, governments, data centres and countless forms of unpaid and paid care.

So to put this simply, the individual is not independent, the individual is networked and the current narrow economic model hides the network. Composting this mess is where the distinction between mainstream economics and sociology becomes politically important. A simplified economic model can begin with individuals who have preferences, resources and choices. They meet in markets, supply meets demand, prices coordinate activity. The model can be useful for analysing particular situations.

The problem comes when the model becomes a description of human reality itself. A market is not simply a mathematical relationship between isolated individuals, it is a social institution, requireing rules, trust, a state thatrequires infrastructure, property rights, requires enforcement, communication of shared expectations. It requires people who know how to behave within this narrow system.

In other words – the market sits inside society and society does not simply emerge from a collection of markets. This distinction becomes particularly important when discussing capitalism, it is not some natural state that appears whenever humans are allowed to trade. It is a historically, involving particular institutions, property arrangements, states, legal systems, technologies and cultural assumptions.

Once we recognise this, the supposedly inevitable starts to look contingent, and that is where sociology becomes politically interesting. The state doesn’t disappear, just because the market exists. The current story presents the market and the state as opposites:

state = control
market = freedom

But historically, the development of modern markets has depended heavily upon states, to establish property law, currencies, enforce contracts. States build infrastructure, define corporations and regulate labour. States establish borders, create legal identities, enforce debts. The market and the state are not simply opposites standing outside one another, they are entangled.

This matters because when we look at modern capitalism as though it emerged from naturally individuals making voluntary exchanges, we erase much of the infrastructure that made those exchanges possible – again, the network disappears. The problem with universalising capitalism is one of the most damaging intellectual habits, taking the economic system we happen to live inside and treating it as though it describes human economic behaviour everywhere and throughout history.

Capitalist monetary exchange becomes “the economy.”

Market behaviour becomes “human nature.”

Competition becomes inevitable.

Private ownership becomes normal.

Debt becomes morally obvious.

Money becomes something humans must always have invented because they wanted a more efficient version of barter. But history repeatedly show much greater diversity, human societies have organised production, distribution, care and exchange in many different ways. There have been gift economies, commons, reciprocity networks, redistributive systems. There is no single timeless human economy – there are economic cultures. It is our assumptions about what is “normal” are themselves historically specific.

That lesson is directly relevant to technology of the #OMN project, as technology has its own version of this problem. We often start with the assumption that the individual user is the basic unit. The user creates an account. The user chooses a platform. The user posts content. The user chooses whether to participate. The user accepts the terms. The user leaves if they don’t like it. Doses this sounds reasonable?

But yes, as we have said, its not, as it ignores the network, if all your friends are on Facebook, “just leave Facebook” isn’t an individual decision in any meaningful sense. If your local council publishes important information only through Facebook, leaving becomes a civic problem. If your community organises through WhatsApp, leaving becomes a social problem. If your employer requires a particular platform, leaving becomes an economic problem. If your political movement organises somewhere, leaving becomes a political problem.

The individual appears to have a choice, but the network determines the cost of exercising it. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current #dotcons as they don’t simply sell software to individuals, they capture networks. Network effects become political power – once enough people are locked inside a platform, the platform becomes difficult to leave. This is often described as a “network effect”, as though it were simply a technical feature, it isn’t, it is a abusive social relationship.

The value of the platform increases because other people are there, that means the individual cannot solve the problem individually. You cannot build a better social network merely by downloading better software. You need people, communities, trust, shared practices. You need governance – you need ways for information to move and institutions that can maintain the infrastructure.

This is why simply telling people to “move to Mastodon” is insufficient. The problem isn’t that Mastodon exists or doesn’t exist. The problem is social infrastructure, the #openweb is a social project, this is why we don’t see the #openweb simply as a collection of technologies. #RSS, #ActivityPub, #PeerTube, #blogs, #wikis, distributed hosting and open-source software are tools. They become socially transformative only when communities use them to create different relationships.

The technical layer matters enormously, but technology alone cannot produce a commons. A commons requires people who maintain it, and these people need to be heald tagather by norms, trust, governance. This is where the #OMN comes in – from individual users to communities, we start from a different assumption – media is a social relationship, not simply a commodity produced for individual consumers. Instead of imagining millions of isolated users consuming content through a central platform, we build networks of communities that publish, share, moderate, maintain and archive media together.

This changes the question, instead of “What does the individual user want?” we can also ask “What does this community need?” And “What relationships allow this information system to remain healthy?” And”Who maintains it?” And “Who has power?” Thus “How can that power be accountable?” That is sociology applied to technology and importently why governance becomes unavoidable. Why governance is such a big part of #OMN and #OGB. If we pretend that technology is simply a neutral tool used by independent individuals, governance becomes something we only discover later when things go wrong.

But if we recognise that technology creates social relationships, governance is there from the beginning. Every platform has governance, the question is who governs – A dictator-for-life project is governance – a developer-controlled project has governance – an NGO-funded project has governance – a corporate platform has governance so yes then a community-run project has governance. Even “no governance” is a form of governance because it usually means that whoever has the most time, technical knowledge or social power ends up making the decisions. The #OGB challenge is therefore not to eliminate governance, it is to make governance visible, participatory and appropriate to the culture of the #openweb.

This brings us back to #stupidindividualism, remmber the hashtag isn’t saying that individuals are stupid, it is pointing at what happens when individualism becomes the only permitted way of understanding social problems. If someone says “Our community has a problem.” and the response is “Are you saying I’m the problem?” the conversation has already been derailed. The same happens with technology, if we say “The structure of social media encourages dependency.” and someone responds “But I personally choose to use Facebook.” we have moved from a structural question to an individual one.

Why all this matters now – we are walking a path where many of the systems that previously appeared stable are becoming unstable. Climate disruption, political polarisation, economic insecurity, platform collapse and #enshittification. leading to the current mess of #AI generated information overload. Declining institutional trust, fragmented communities and increasing centralisation of infrastructure. The probelms cannot be solved by millions of isolated individuals making slightly better consumer choices. They require collective action, and collective capacity requires understanding how people actually relate to each other. That means #KISS moving beyond the fantasy of the autonomous individual.

On this path the #OMN isn’t trying to invent some perfect alternative society, the starting point is much simpler – build infrastructure that assumes people are social – build media flows around communities – build governance around participation and trust – build software that supports cooperation rather than only extraction – build open standards so different communities can interoperate – build archives so collective memory survives – build metadata so information can be found and connected. And finaly build moderation systems that recognise human relationships rather than reducing everything to algorithmic scoring and blocking.

This is the job of the #4opens – open data, open source, open standards and open process – that are useful here because they make the infrastructure contestable. No single group gets to say “Trust us. We know what’s best.” keeping the infrastructure inside the commons wherever possible.

The most important lesson from sociology and anthropology isn’t that economists are always wrong. There are economists doing good work, and economics contains some internal diversity. The point is that no single discipline should get to define the whole of human reality. Economics is powerful at asking narrow questions. Sociology asks different questions, Anthropology asks different questions. History asks different questions, ecology asks different questions, technology asks different questions. The problem begins when one particular model becomes so powerful that its assumptions disappear from view.

That is the real danger of hegemony, you stop seeing the assumptions because everyone around you is using them. to work to compost this current mess, the #openweb is valuable because it gives us an shoval to build differently. But we won’t get anywere simply by swapping one piece of software for another, we need to challenge the deeper assumptions underneath the software. The assumption that the user is alone, that networks are collections of individuals, markets are natural, technology is neutral, that governance can be bolted on afterwards. And perhaps most importantly, the assumption that we are independent when we are actually interdependent.

Yes, the individual matters, but the individual is not the starting point, the relationship is. That is why sociology matters to the #OMN. And that is why building a genuinely social #openweb is about much more than writing better code. It is about rebuilding the networks of trust, cooperation, memory and collective power that allow people to live together in the first place.

So keep the path #KISS, technology is the tool, the social network is the foundation, the commons is the direction. Get to growing this please #OMN

An Anthropologyist view of this subject

#OMN #openweb #4opens #OGB #IndymediaBack #MakingHistory #stupidindividualism #mainstreaming #deathcult #geekproblem

The #openweb needs diversity, not monoculture

The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is useful? That difference isn’t necessarily a weakness, when we nurture this it can be our strength.

To do this we need to support, fund and actually use a wide range of #openweb technologies, as there is no single “right path” waiting to be discovered. The #openweb should be a messy ecosystem, some projects will be radical, others pragmatic by compromising with existing institutions. Some will refuse every compromise, some will be technically elegant, were others will be slightly ugly but actually useful. Some people will be idealists, some will be organisers, geeks, activists – some will be experimenters, others will be complete weirdos.

We need all of these people. Even the “sellouts” can push open technology into places that fundamentalists cannot reach. The fundamentalists can protect principles that pragmatists might otherwise throw away. The pragmatists can make things usable, while the experimenters can discover things nobody expected and the weirdos can see possibilities that the sensible people completely miss.

The problem starts when any one of these groups decides that they are the whole movement. Then diversity becomes tribalism, difference becomes factionalism and criticism attack. And eventually everyone starts spending more energy defeating people who are broadly on the same side as building the commons we actually need. We’ve seen this mess before, the history of alternative technology is full of splits between people who wanted to build practical infrastructure and people who wanted purity, between technical communities and social movements, between centralised coordination and decentralised autonomy.

The lesson shouldn’t be “pick the correct side” – it needs to be – learn how to work with difference. This is particularly important now because the #dotcons have already demonstrated what happens when a technical ecosystem becomes dominated by a few powerful platforms. Monoculture creates dependency, creates control that leads to vulnerability. The answer to this simply cannot be to build another monoculture with different branding, we need plural infrastructure, based on #KISS #openweb native standards that communicate with each other.

That is where #FOSS based on open standards and the #4opens become important, they give a common floor without demanding a common culture. We don’t need everyone to agree, but we need enough openness that different projects can coexist, exchange knowledge and build on each other’s work. This is also why projects such as #OMN, #OGB, #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory shouldn’t be understood as competing for the one correct future. They are paths, pieces of a wider ecosystem.

Buts yes the important thing is to keep the commons alive while we experiment. The value isn’t in choosing one tribe and defeating the others, value is in creating conditions where difference can coexist, challenge assumptions, learn from failure and grow something wider than any individual project. We need disagreement without fragmentation, criticism without destruction and experimentation without constant reinvention. To make this work we also need pragmatism without selling everything out.

To help compost the #geekproblem we need technology that serves the social projects rather than becoming the social project. That means supporting the native diversity, contradictions and productive tensions that make an ecosystem resilient. And yes, you are right there are to meany people being prats currently on this subject.

Please try not to be one, thanks.

#openweb #OMN #4opens #Fediverse #FOSS #IndymediaBack #OGB #MakingHistory #DIY #commons

This summer #climatechaos

This summer, heat, fires, the soon to come winter floods and insurance withdrawals will make #climatechaos harder to treat as something happening somewhere else. For years, climate breakdown was framed as an activist issue, something discussed by environmental groups while mainstream politics carried on with business as usual. That is changing, people are experiencing the consequences: extreme heat, flooding, damaged homes, rising insurance costs, failing infrastructure and growing uncertainty about what the next few years will look like. The #climatecrisis is moving into everyday life, so how do we live through what is already locked in?

Once the consequences of a warmer world are being experienced everywhere, adaptation becomes an unavoidable path. That means practical changes will finally start to happen such as resilient building standards, flood planning, water management, food systems, energy resilience, heat protection and changes to where and how we build.

But there is a danger in treating adaptation as purely a technical problem, we might redesign buildings, strengthen flood defences, change planning regulations. We can develop better warning systems – but who controls these systems? Who decides what gets protected? Who gets information when something goes wrong? Who maintains the infrastructure? Who remembers what happened last time? And who gets left behind? These are social and political questions.

The missing infrastructure is where the #OMN native path becomes important. Surviving #climatechaos isn’t only about physical infrastructure, it is also about information infrastructure and community infrastructure. During crisis, people need reliable information to know what is happening locally, they need to know who needs help, to know which transport links are closed, where resources are available, what services are operating and what communities are doing. They need ways to communicate when normal paths fail.

And afterwards, they need a record of what happened, this is why the #openweb matters, a resilient society cannot depend entirely on #closedweb privately owned platforms whose responsibility is to the current #nastyfew shareholders and advertisers. It is basic that the #dotcons are not resilience infrastructure – Facebook, Google, X, TikTok and the other #dotcons distribute information, and misinformation very quickly, but speed isn’t the same thing as resilience.

These current #closedweb digital systems are designed around control, engagement, advertising, data extraction and platform addiction. They are dangerous to use when important information will disappear into algorithmic feeds. It should be becoming obverse that communities cannot keep being dependent on proprietary services, as accounts can be suspended, interfaces can change, companies can change their business models, services will disappear.

And the information itself is often difficult to preserve, connect or reuse outside these #closedweb platforms. That is a terrible foundation for a society increasingly dealing with environmental disruption. This is why the #OMN focuses on the #deathcult story, in part to highlight it isn’t simply a collection of bad corporations. The current mess is about the way of organising society around short-term extraction, profit before resilience, growth before sustainability, competition before cooperation. Private ownership comes before the commons, and immediate financial returns are prioritised over the ability of communities to survive any long-term disruption.

In this mess, climate adaptation within this risks becoming another market, those who can afford resilience buy it, those who can’t are left exposed. Insurance withdraws from risky areas, property values become tied to climate risk. Private companies decide which infrastructure is commercially viable, the result is adaptation as another form of inequality.

To compost this mess we need #KISS social adaptation too – The alternative isn’t to reject technology – It is to change what technology is for. The #4opens provide a useful starting point: Open Data – Open Source – Open Standards – Open Process. These principles make it easier for communities to share information, build on each other’s work and maintain infrastructure without being locked into one corporation. The #openweb gives us the technical culture for this, #Federation allows different communities to remain independent while still communicating. Open standards allow systems to interoperate. Open data allows information to remain useful beyond one platform. And open process allows communities to understand and participate in decisions affecting them.

There is another important piece: memory, when a flood happens, people document it. When a heatwave hits, people record what happened, when infrastructure fails, somebody usually knows why. But much of this grassroots knowledge disappears into #dotcons social-media feeds. A few years later, we start again from scratch. This is why #openweb projects such as #MakingHistory matter. We need living community archives that connect events, places, people, media and responses over time. The archive becomes part of resilience, knowing what happened last time helps communities prepare for the next time.

Moving beyond the current #NGO pointlessness – we need to grow projects like the OMN as shovels, to clear the #techshit mess to grow grassroots infrastructure for publishing, sharing, moderating and preserving information. But yes, the technology is only part of it, the deeper goal is to help communities build trusted information networks that are not dependent on the current #dotcons. A resilient media system should allow people to – publish locally – discover relevant information –
share between communities – moderate collectively – preserve important records – correct mistakes – maintain metadata – and keep historical context. This becomes especially important when normal systems are under pressure as the #mainstreaming is only seeing half the problem. But yes, the mainstream conversation is beginning to understand climate adaptation matters, but adaptation cannot be reduced to flood barriers, new building codes or air-conditioning.

We also need to ask whether the social systems surrounding those technologies are resilient. Can communities cooperate? Can people trust the information they receive? Can knowledge move between organisations? Can local experience become shared knowledge? Can communities govern their own infrastructure? Can we preserve memory? These questions are still largely outside the mainstream climate conversation. They shouldn’t be, the next wave of #climatechaos will test not only our physical infrastructure but our social infrastructure. The challenge is therefore twofold – build the physical systems that help us survive the changing climate – build the open, collective information systems that help communities understand and organise that survival.

The first is increasingly #mainstreaming, the second is where the #openweb, #4opens, #OMN, #OGB and #MakingHistory have something important to contribute. We do need #KISS more resilient communities, and resilient communities need infrastructure they can actually trust and control.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #MakingHistory #OGB #IndymediaBack #climatechaos #deathcult #dotcons #resilience

The #OMN and the fight against the #dotcons

The internet didn’t just accidentally become shit. Yes, the #dotcons are responsible for plenty of it: surveillance, advertising, addictive algorithms, platform lock-in, spam, fake reviews and the endless extraction of human attention. But focusing on a few companies misses the bigger story, that the mess is the outcome of decades of wider #deathcult worshipping political and economic choices.

Yes, we allowed enormous platforms to buy competitors, capture markets, privatise public communication and turn common infrastructure into private profit machines. We then acted surprised when the resulting system prioritised extraction over any public value. But the problem is bigger than Facebook, Google, Amazon or whatever company is currently being hated.

The market structure is the machine, companies are collective organisms operating within that structure. Changing one corporation without changing the conditions that produce the next one simply gives us another version of the same problem.

This is why “just leave what ever #dotcons you are addicted to” is both right and incomplete. Yes, leaving matters, attention is power, every person or community that stops feeding the toxic platforms reduces there social legitimacy. But people are not simply choosing between good and bad technology.

There are real practical issues, a local council might put essential information on Facebook. A community group might organise there. A small business might depend on Instagram. Friends and family might all be locked into Messenger or WhatsApp. The problem is therefore infrastructure.

If essential social information is available only through a private corporation, leaving that corporation becomes socially expensive. That’s exactly why we need a working, good #UX #openweb reboot. Email still works. Websites still work. RSS still works. Federated media works, community archives could work. The technology exists, what is missing is the social infrastructure connecting these things together.

We have taken a first step on this path with the #Fediverse, the second step is projects like the #OMN. A part of a broader attempt to build a post-#dotcons media infrastructure based on the #4opens – Open Data – Open Source – Open Standards – Open Process.

But still the social side matters, the technology is the tool, the bigger project is breaking corporate dependency and rebuilding collective capacity. We need media systems where communities publish without asking permission where information moves between services, where metadata remains accessible, where moderation is human and accountable, and where communities retain the ability to govern their own spaces.

But there is another danger. If the #openweb becomes flooded with conspiracy, dogmatism, tribalism and endless ideological prat fights, ordinary people will leave. They won’t necessarily leave because they disagree with us, they’ll leave because the environment becomes exhausting. And when people leave the open alternatives, they often return to the #dotcons because at least those platforms are familiar, predictable and socially populated.

That means our behaviour matters, so while building real networked alternatives, lets focus on the #opens path as security is not enough, survival is not victory. We can build technically secure systems that nobody wants to use. We can build ideologically pure communities that nobody outside the bubble can tolerate. Or we can build useful social infrastructure that helps real people communicate, organise, remember and act together. The #4opens and good #UX are therefore not a nice-to-have, they are the minimum conditions for activist technology that actually matters.

To sum up the bigger story isn’t “Facebook (or what ever #dotcon) is bad.” The bigger story is we are breaking corporate dependency, rebuilding collective infrastructure, recovering the social possibilities of the #openweb to build technology for a post-#dotcons world. And we don’t need to wait for Zuckerberg, Google, policymakers, funding bodies or standards committees to give us permission. We can start building, but as we do, we need to remember the purpose – keep the media real – build trust – balance good and harm – and don’t #KISS reproduce the culture we’re trying to escape.

Media, the deathcult and climatechaos

The current wave of wildfires across Europe is not simply a natural disaster, it is also exposing a deeper mess, the failure of our information systems. Instead of explaining why Europe is burning, significant sections of the corporate media are either ignoring #climatechaos or distracting by blaming rewilding, net-zero policies and environmental protections. Rather than confronting the #KISS scientific evidence that fossil fuel combustion is driving global heating, they redirect public anger towards the policies intended to mediate the damage.

This isn’t simply corrupt journalism, it’s a theological and political choice. The reality inversion – when forests burn, rivers dry, crops fail and people die from extreme heat, the obvious question should be – What is causing this? The scientific answer is clear, human emissions of greenhouse gases – from burning coal, oil and gas – will increase the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, droughts and wildfire conditions. This is one of the strongest areas of scientific consensus in modern research.

Yet much of the corporate press is #blocking this connection. A look through thousands of UK newspaper articles covering the June 2026 heatwave found that around three-quarters never mentioned #climatechange at all. Yes, the public was shown the symptoms while the cause was quietly edited out. This matters because information shapes action, if people don’t understand why disasters are happening, they cannot understand what needs to change.

This is manufacturing confusion – the right-wing press push reality inversion. Europe burns, the blame shifts to rewilding, the mess – heatwaves become evidence that environmental policy has gone too far, wildfires become an argument against restoring ecosystems, net-zero becomes the problem rather than one of the responses. The effect is to move negative attention away from fossil fuels and towards environmental movements. When the cause of a crisis threatens #nastyfew interests, our “journalists” redefine the problem until those interests disappear from the story. The debate becomes about forestry management, or environmental activists. Or planning regulations, migrants, or bureaucracy. Almost anything except the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

In the #OMN vocabulary this is the logic of the #deathcult – A system organised around endless growth cannot admit that endless growth is destroying the conditions that make civilisation possible. With the shift to the hard right – every crisis becomes someone else’s fault – every solution becomes economically impossible – every warning becomes political exaggeration – every disaster becomes “unexpected.” The current path survives by refusing to recognise the consequences of their own actions.

This is why “common sense” has become part of the problem. After forty years of #neoliberalism, what many people call common sense is the common sense of the market. Growth is always good, markets always know best, corporations are inevitable, consumption equals freedom and thus environmental limits are optional. But, this isn’t common sense, it’s forty years of shaping people to see the world through the eyes of only capital.

So why do we still let fossil fuel companies still shape public policy decades after the science became overwhelming? The language changes, the power structures remain. This is #mainstreaming, the appearance of addressing the problem while carefully avoiding the changes needed to solve it. The #mainstreaming problem isn’t confined to openly conservative newspapers. Much liberal media performs a softer version of the same function. Climate change is acknowledged, the latest disaster is reported, scientists are quoted. Then coverage moves on, the structural questions are rarely asked – Who profits? Who owns the media? Who funds political influence?

The #OMN perspective is that this isn’t only a journalism problem, it’s an infrastructure problem. When a handful of corporations control the majority of communication, they also shape which stories become visible, which connections are made and which questions remain invisible. Feed this narrow mess through the #dotcons that amplify engagement rather than understanding, we get stinking mess. It is easy to understand that corporate newspapers depend upon commercial interests controlled by the #nastyfew and political institutions still focus communicate through the same commercial traditional media and #dotcons platforms, the result an information ecosystem optimised for attention and control rather than any truth.

The path we need for survival – the coming decades of #climatechaos will test every institution we have – communication systems, food systems, energy systems, governance and public trust. If our media continues to hide causes while amplifying distractions, societies will become less capable of responding when they need clear information the most. A community that cannot accurately describe its own reality cannot organise to change it to move beyond the #deathcult. The uncomfortable truth is that there is no path through the coming century while remaining politically loyal to the assumptions that created the crisis. The #deathcult has reached its limits.

The question is no longer whether that model is sustainable, it isn’t. The question is what replaces it. The #OMN answer begins with rebuilding the commons, open media, open governance, open standards, open knowledge. Communities capable of telling their own stories and acting on shared reality rather than manufactured distraction. Because if we cannot agree on what is happening, we cannot respond together.

And if we continue allowing corporate media to define reality for us, they will continue pushing the systems that are driving us deeper into #climatechaos. The future depends not only on changing our energy systems, it depends on changing the information systems that tell us what is real.

For 45 years we’ve been told that “economic efficiency” means making the rich richer and the poor poorer. By that narrow measure, the system has been a huge success. The problem is we’ve sacrificed everything else. Environmental responsibility? Ignored. Social sustainability? Undermined. Community? Hollowed out.

The result is #climatechaos, collapsing social trust, and an economy designed to extract rather than nurture. We urgently need to rebalance our priorities. The economy should serve society and the living world – not the other way around.

That work cannot wait.

How liberal media tries to “fix” liberal media

The current mess in media isn’t that journalism has become biased, its always been, the problem is that the “progressive” #mainstreaming institutions trying to solve the crisis are still inside the assumptions that created it. Take the current liberal darling project Ground News, their promise is attractive: escape your filter bubble, compare left and right, become a more informed citizen. But notice the framing, the solution to broken media is… another layer of liberal media infrastructure.

This is a classic liberal response, instead of questioning the structure, it tries to manage the symptoms. The wrong question is “How do we balance left and right?” where it’s better to ask “Who owns the infrastructure? Who controls trust? Who decides what is visible?” These are very different questions. Political bias matters, but ownership, funding, moderation and publishing infrastructure matter far more. They shape what can be said long before anyone labels an article “left” or “right”.

Modern liberal media believes enough transparency, enough fact-checking and enough algorithmic tuning can repair journalism. But every new layer simply becomes another institution requiring trust.

Who rates the raters?

Who moderates the moderators?

Who audits the algorithms?

The answer is usually another professional organisation, another foundation, another for profit corporation, or another “independent” expert group. This creates an endless chain of powerless power rather than building any genuine public trust, it’s the false centre. One #KISS thing we need to understand is that political “centrism” is not a neutral place, it is constructed. On a surface layer – when publications owned by billionaires are labelled “centre”, while grassroots or socialist publications are labelled “left”, the scale itself quietly normalises existing power. This isn’t necessarily a conspiracy, it is simply what happens when institutions built inside capitalism reproduce capitalist assumptions.

The #OpenMediaNetwork starts somewhere else – instead of trying to create perfect neutrality, it creates open process. The #4opens don’t solve bias or decide truth to determine who is correct, they simply make the process visible. This doesn’t eliminate conflict, instead it makes conflict transparent. People can inspect decisions, challenge moderation, fork communities, preserve history and build alternative trust networks. The goal isn’t perfect objectivity, it is accountable process, that in the end trust comes from communities

Liberal media imagines trust that comes from old (and by now well captured) institutions – where the #OMN argues that trust emerges from communities that can see how decisions are made, that trust is built through transparent moderation, open metadata, public discussion, versioned history actively used for federation instead of monopoly. This native path is closer to how the early #openweb worked, and how projects like #Indymedia succeeded before platforms enclosed this public conversation flow.

Ones you take this #KISS path the problem isn’t simply media bias it’s about ownership of traditional media itself. As long as publishing, discovery, moderation and archives remain controlled by institutions whose survival depends on existing power structures, every attempt to “fix” journalism will reproduce those same structures. This is the root problem when liberal media keeps trying to repair liberal media.

The #OMN starts somewhere different – building commons instead of platforms, process instead of authority and trust instead of branding. Yes, that won’t magically solve media bias, but what it can do is balance the current mess by creating open space where communities can solve these problems together. That is a much stronger foundation than asking another algorithm to tell us which billionaire newspaper is slightly more “centre” than another.

A deeper dive into composting this mess

#OMN #openweb #4opens #Indymedia #MakingHistory #DIY #Fediverse #dotcons

The #Deathcult is a historical metaphor

History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed.

Today we face a different crisis, but one driven by the same logic. The #deathcult metaphor tells us that the right to extract, pollute, and profit need to be better balanced with the right of communities to defend the ecosystems they depend on. This isn’t currently in any real balance. Over the last forty years we’ve shifted the political centre so far toward markets and private accumulation that environmental destruction is treated as normal, while protecting the commons is portrayed as extreme.

If we continue to use our current “common sense” to “balance” destruction against survival, destruction wins. Climate breakdown isn’t negotiated with, ecosystems don’t compromise, physics doesn’t vote. The task is therefore not to seek a mythical middle ground, but to move the social balance back towards the real commons, cooperation, stewardship, and long-term thinking. Only by changing what society sees as “common sense” do we have any realistic hope of avoiding deeper ecological and social collapse.

This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN is not simply another technology project. It is an attempt to shift power away from the #dotcons and away from the #geekproblem that has dominated so much of the #openweb. Instead of platforms extracting value from people, or technical elitists deciding what everyone else needs, the path is to place power back in the hands of the people who actually create culture, knowledge, and media.

The #4opens provide the practical framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. Together they create the conditions for shared ownership, transparency, and trust rather than enclosure and extraction.

The #OGB complements this by providing grassroots governance. Rather than relying on central authorities or corporate gatekeepers, it explores ways communities can make decisions together while remaining federated and autonomous.

None of this guarantees good outcomes, technology never does. What these projects do is create the possibility for healthier social relationships. They build commons infrastructure instead of proprietary platforms, they distribute power instead of concentrating it, they make cooperation easier than enclosure. As the future is not determined by technology alone, it is determined by the values embedded in the systems we build and the communities that choose to use them.

That’s why the real struggle isn’t simply over software, t’s over the values that software embodies. #KISS reminds us to keep these solutions simple enough for ordinary people to understand, use, and shape themselves. Without that, the commons will once again be enclosed by experts, corporations, or bureaucracies, and we will repeat catastrophes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) in todays rush towards #climatechaos.

The choice is ours. The tools matter because they shape the possibilities. What we build with them remains a collective responsibility.

The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess

#OMN #4opens #OGB #openweb #FOSS

The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess

The #Deathcult is a historical metaphor

We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they’re sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn’t simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it’s understanding how they find their way back out again.

History suggests something important – entering crisis is often easier than leaving it – it’s a downhill path. For long periods, societies can appear stable. Institutions function, people get on with their lives, and conflict remains manageable, yet beneath the surface something changes.

Power concentrates.
Wealth accumulates upward.
Institutions begin serving themselves rather than the commons
Public trust erodes.

By the time these trends become obvious, society has already gathered momentum, think of it like a huge ball rolling down a steep valley, once it begins rolling, it becomes incredibly difficult to stop. This is where much of today’s #climatechaos, democratic decline and digital enclosure fit. They are symptoms of long-running structural shifts rather than isolated failures.

To understand this recurring mess, it’s useful to think about this is as a wealth pump. Healthy societies circulate resources, were unhealthy societies increasingly extract resources from ordinary people while concentrating wealth and decision-making power into ever smaller circles. Eventually this creates reinforcing problems – the growing insecurity for everyone else, competition between increasingly numerous elitists leads to weakening of public institutions, eventually the system becomes unstable. This describes much of the last forty years of #neoliberalism just as well as many earlier historical periods.

In #OMN language, this is one way of describing the growth of the #deathcult. Technology follows politics, so the same process appears online. The early #openweb distributed power, the #dotcons recentralised it. Open participation became algorithmic engagement, communities became audiences, citizens became products. This wasn’t a simple a technical change, it’s the same mess of concentration of power occurring throughout the wider society. Technology amplified existing political and economic trends, crisis created the possibility.

The encouraging part of history is that outcomes are not predetermined, although the path into crisis is narrow, the path out is surprisingly open. Once institutions begin failing, many futures become possible. Some societies descend into violence, some replace one ruling group with another while changing very little. A few manage genuine reform, the difference comes from organised social movements that are able not merely to seize attention, but to rebuild institutions capable of creating trust again. This matters as moments of instability are also moments when relatively small interventions can have disproportionately large effects.

This is where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not a project to seize power. It is a project to rebuild commons infrastructure. Instead of reinforcing extraction, it strengthens trust. Instead of creating new gatekeepers, it distributes responsibility. Instead of proprietary platforms, it builds open processes. Instead of replacing one monopoly with another, it supports federation and shared ownership.

This is why the #4opens matter, not as ideological slogans, they’re much more useful as practical safeguards against rebuilding the same systems that created today’s crisis. Trying to engineer perfect systems produces new failures, complex societies never become tidy, so the useful goal is not perfection. Rather to create institutions capable of learning, adapting and redistributing power before crises become catastrophic. This is why #OMN emphasises mediation over control, commons over ownership, participation over spectatorship to push trust over extraction.

Building the next commons matters – if we accept that we’re living through a period of structural instability, then waiting for institutions to solve it is unlikely to succeed, the work we need belongs to communities.

Building archives.

Building media.

Building governance.

Building trust.

We can play a part in this by building technologies that reinforce this path rather than undermine it as history suggests that societies emerge from crises when they reverse the flows of concentrated power to begin rebuilding the commons, that’s the path #OMN is on.

All startups are expressions of the #deathcult, every #VC is, in effect, a bishop preaching endless growth, extraction and enclosure. This isn’t innovation. It’s a business model accelerating social breakdown, deepening inequality, and feeding the #climatechaos that will displace billions and cost millions of lives over the coming century. If you’re serious about activism, stop feeding the machine. Put your energy into building the #openweb commons instead.

The whole value system behind startups and #VC is the problem, not the solution. The #KISS truth is simple: endless growth, extraction and enclosure cannot solve the crises they create. They are accelerating today’s breakdown and shaping tomorrow’s catastrophes. We don’t need more investment in the #deathcult. We need investment in the digital commons, the #openweb, and the #4opens.

#OMN #4opens #OpenWeb #Fediverse #Commons #DigitalCommons #Governance #MakingHistory #ClimateChaos #TechForGood #Oxfordboaters

Make the #4opens fashionable

The crisis of the #openweb isn’t just coming from the #dotcons. It’s also coming from us. Our #mainstreaming #fashionistas are dangerously consumptive, forever chasing the next platform, the next funding round, the next shiny self abstraction. Meanwhile, our alternative #fashionistas mirror exactly the same behaviour, endlessly reinventing tools that never escape their own echo chambers.

Both paths produce the same result: more #TechShit, more #TechChurn, less social value. We don’t need another clever framework, another protocol that nobody uses, or another startup pretending to be commons. What we do need is to change and challenge the social norms that reward novelty over usefulness to make the #4opens fashionable.

Reward open data instead of data hoarding.
Reward open process instead of closed decision-making.
Reward open standards instead of lock-in.
Reward open source instead of proprietary dependency.

And yes, this isn’t about technology, it’s about culture. As Oscar Wilde observed in The Critic as Artist:

“We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”

In the current churning mess, that feels even more true today. We are producing more code, more platforms, more content and more noise than ever before, while creating less shared understanding and fewer if any useful durable institutions, structures or networks.

The answer isn’t to work harder. It’s to work differently. The #OMN is a path to do that by stopping repeating the same mistakes by compost the failures of the last forty years, and rebuild the #openweb on social foundations that people can actually live with. If we can’t make this shift, we’ll simply keep rebuilding the same broken systems with newer code.

#OMN #4opens #openweb #TechShit #TechChurn #KISS #NothingNew