We are entering a period of overlapping crises

This mess is driven by climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems, they reinforce each other. At the same time, we are seeing a feedback loop of political movements built around fear, scapegoating, hierarchy and fantasies of escape. This creates a basic question we need to focus on – how do we build the means to live through these crises together, rather than retreating into individual survival, authoritarianism or delusions of technological escape?

One of the strongest #blocks running through the current crisis is, what could call, exit culture. You can see this in the wealthy #nastyfew who push the mess attempt to buy their way out through the nasty fantasy of private security, property and technology. Some feed political movements that imagine an escape into an ethnically or culturally purified nation, the hard right. Some religious movements look towards another imagined world. Some technology #geekproblem culture imagines that humanity can escape its material limits through AI, automation, space or digital transcendence.

The world is broken, so find a way out, a dangerous stupid social response to the systemic social and ecological crisis. But any one with any sense can see there is no #stupidindividualism exit from #climatechaos. There is no technological #dotcons platform that allows us to escape social relationships. And there is no bunker large enough to protect a society from the consequences of destroying the living systems it depends upon. What is needed is we need to actively be composting this mainstreaming mess, the alternative is not to escape, it is to focus on becoming more capable of being here.

Then on the left the is a matching fantasy, we romanticism collapse, but it is not automatically progressive. It is easy to look at broken institutions and think that their collapse must create an opportunity for something better. But collapse has no political direction of its own, maybe it can produce mutual aid, solidarity and new forms of democratic organization. More likely we get authoritarianism, scapegoating, violence and stronger hierarchies.

The outcome depends partly on what people and communities are ready to do when crisis washes over them. If communities have networks (like the #OMN), relationships, communication systems, practical skills and ways of making decisions together (like the #OGB), crisis can become an opportunity to build something new. If they don’t, people are much more likely to fall back on fear and whoever appears to offer simple answers.

So preparation matters, but preparation is hopeless, if people do not pick up the tools or when it means becoming an individual survivalist. We need to balance this commons sense urge, with working collectives to create social relationships and grow ways of looking after each other. It is now 20 years past time to move for survivalism to #KISS mutual aid, we need focus on how do we make sure people can look after each other when things become difficult?

That means better late than never to building relationships before the crisis, knowing who is around us, knowing how to communicate, where resources are, how to organize. Knowing how to disagree without destroying the group, how to make decisions, share responsibility. This is grassroots working democratic resilience from the bottom up.

We need grassroots repossess to authoritarian pushing insecurity – find someone to blame – the nation against the foreigner – the majority against the minority – the “real people” against outsiders – the pure against the contaminated. The hard right are pushing belonging through this kinda blaming exclusion.

We need to work to balance this mess, we need another form of belonging, that means building coalitions capable of holding difference without turning every disagreement into another power struggle. We need to compost the false choice between local organizing and large-scale networks, we need the strong local relationships to provide the social foundation of our change and challenge.

But we also need #KISS technology as tools, #4opens flow networks to allow those communities to exchange knowledge, resources and experience without surrendering their autonomy. This is one of the reasons the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub are interesting. Federation gives us a technical path where independent communities can remain independent while still communicating with each other.

This principle can extend beyond the current #openweb reboot of the fedivers, copying #dotcons social media. We need to build projects like the #OMN based on local relationships + open networks = distributed resilience. This is a much more interesting path than simply building another or replenishing the normal centralized platforms we currently live inside. This move need to be based on technology that supports social process rather than replace it with blinded control.

We don’t need a perfect future, a lot of political narrow thinking is trapped between two fantasies. One says, the existing institutions will eventually fix themselves. The other says, the whole thing has to collapse before we can build something new. It is dangerous to accept either of these paths blindly. What we do need is to grow, trust networks, practical democratic experiments, its fine that none of these are perfect. They need to work better than the current mess, to connect people and communities, so they can step from fear to cooperation.

The current hard right is good at turning insecurity into fear, they feed from fear of migration, cultural change, technological change. Fear of economic collapse, losing status and fear of the future. But the knee jerk reactions cant be to simply tell people not to be afraid as people have real reasons to feel insecure. The better balancing is to build something that gives people something better to fall back on than fear. That means replacing fear → scapegoating → authoritarianism with crisis → cooperation → solidarity. Not in a utopian sense, but as practical path.

On the native openweb path this is the question and the bigger reason for building the #OMN. As we don’t know exactly what the next twenty or forty years will look like, we do know that the existing system is becoming increasingly unstable. We know that #climatechaos is accelerating, that #dotcons technology is concentrating power. We know that authoritarian politics is growing. And we know that simply defending the existing structures is not enough.

So rather than waiting for the next crisis to tell us what to do, we start building now. Practical grassroots paths, not as an escape route, another #closedweb platform as smoke and mirrors for another hierarchy waiting to take control. A network of people and communities that can communicate, remember, cooperate, organize and govern themselves. That is the native #openweb path to compost this mess, that is the practical meaning of the old slogan “another world is possible”.

We don’t have to wait for another world, we can start building the means for it here.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #Fediverse #ActivityPub #mutualaid #democracy #resilience #KISS

Democratic Resilience: a report back

Technology can secure the commons, it should never become a substitute for the commons

Enforcing artificial scarcity when we finally have the technology to move towards a post-scarcity world is what’s driving us towards real scarcity. And if you think artificial scarcity is bad, wait until you experience the real thing. Much of this mess is avoidable, but we keep prioritizing #nastyfew wealth and profit over building a sustainable future. We have the technological potential to do better, but we’re choosing to keep worshipping a #deathcult that protects scarcity for the few at the expense of survival for the many

In the #OMN story, #encryptionist describes the tendency to priorities technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem. It is the belief that social and political problems can primarily be solved through cryptography, protocols and mathematics, rather than through communities, relationships and accountable governance.

Encryption itself is not the problem, strong encryption is essential, private communication and secure infrastructure matters. People living under authoritarian governments, journalists protecting sources and activists defending themselves from surveillance all depend on robust cryptographic tools.

The #OMN critique is directed at #encryptionist – the narrow view that elevates technical security above every other social value. The assumption becomes – If we can encrypt everything… .we have solved the problem. But technology cannot replace trust, Encryption can prove that a message has not been altered, it cannot prove that the sender is honest. Encryption can protect communication, it cannot build community. Encryption can hide information from attackers, it cannot help people resolve disagreements, share responsibility or govern themselves.

These are social problems, they require social solutions. This is where #encryptionist thinking becomes a form of the #geekproblem. Faced with messy human questions, the instinct is to build another protocol, another identity system, another blockchain. More cryptographic layers, another clever piece of infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the harder questions remain untouched. Who controls the community? Who moderates abuse? How are decisions made? How social trust is earned? And finally how is social power distributed? These questions cannot be encrypted away.

The history of the internet is full of examples of technically elegant systems that failed because nobody wanted to use them. Perfectly secure software abandoned because there was no community around it. Projects that solved fascinating engineering problems while leaving ordinary people confused, excluded or dependent on technical specialists.

This is why #OMN puts people before protocols – the phrase #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer captures this perfectly. The purpose of technology is to strengthen human relationships, not replace them.

The #encryptionist mindset often begins from an assumption that people are the weakest part of any system. Humans make mistakes. Humans cannot be trusted. Humans introduce uncertainty. Therefore, remove humans from the process wherever possible.

The #OMN path starts somewhere different, humans are not bugs, they are the point. Technology should help people build trust – not eliminate the need for it. A healthy community is not one where nobody has to trust anyone. It is one where trust can grow because people have transparent processes, shared history and accountable relationships.

This is why #openprocess is just as important as encryption, if governance happens behind closed doors, secure communication does not create democratic accountability.

This is why #openweb native projects like #makinghistory matter. Communities need memory as much as secrecy, this is why #grassroots matters, people need relationships as much as protocols. This is why the #4opens fit together.

Open systems create public accountability.

Encryption creates private security.

These are complementary values, not competing ones, the danger comes when security blindly becomes the only value. An obsession with technical purity can easily produce systems that ordinary people cannot understand, maintain or participate in. Complexity becomes a gatekeeper. Technical experts become the hidden authorities. Communities become dependent on those who understand the cryptography.

Ironically, systems designed to eliminate trust often end up demanding enormous trust in a small group of experts. Trust the developers, trust the protocol, trust the mathematics. Trust that someone else has implemented everything correctly. The trust never disappears, it merely becomes invisible.

The #OMN approach argues that invisible trust is more dangerous than visible trust. Better to acknowledge that communities depend on relationships and build institutions that make those relationships accountable. This is where the #Fediverse offers an interesting lesson.

Its success has come less from cryptographic innovation than from federation, shared standards and community moderation. It works because independent communities develop their own norms while remaining connected through open protocols. The technology enables the relationships, it does not replace them. The same lesson applies across the #openweb.

In the #OMN story, #encryptionist is a warning against forgetting this balance. The path is not to build a world where nobody has to trust anyone, it is to build a world where trust is deserved, distributed and supported by technology rather than replaced by it.

Technology should secure the commons, it should never become a substitute for the commons itself.

#AskQ

Pick up the shovels to start growing the commons, that’s the #OMN path

There is a temptation to see today’s hard right move as something new. Looking at this mess, the #deathcult is the name I use for the destructive logic of #neoliberal capitalism: a world where profit, growth and competition are the dominant measures of value, while human needs, shared resources and collective responsibility are pushed aside.

If we want to understand the political crisis, we need to dig beneath its surface of how social crisis becomes authoritarian politics. The hard right doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, it draws power from the insecurity, anger and social fragmentation that this system helps produce. History offers some uncomfortable lessons.

Mussolini came from the socialist movement before breaking with the left over the First World War and moving towards nationalism, political violence and authoritarianism. Early fascism combined different political currents before developing into a more defined authoritarian project. In Germany, the Nazis used the myth that internal enemies had betrayed the nation to explain defeat and social crisis. Antisemitic conspiracy theories became central to their account of national decline.

The pattern matters more than any simple comparison between past and present. A society experiences economic insecurity, political failure and declining trust. People feel betrayed, existing institutions appear unable to respond. There are often genuine grievances underneath this anger, the dangerous move comes when structural problems are turned into stories about enemies.

Economic insecurity becomes the fault of immigrants. Political failure becomes the fault of an imagined conspiracy. Cultural change becomes evidence of national decline. Complex social problems are reduced to a few people or groups who can be blamed. The system disappears from view, and the scapegoat takes its place. This is politically powerful because it gives people a clear target without requiring anyone to challenge the structures producing the crisis.

The promise to make the nation great again, authoritarian nationalism often offers a story of lost greatness and promised renewal. Mussolini drew on an idealised image of the Roman past. Nazi ideology constructed a racialised national community around ideas of ethnic purity and exclusion.

National identity itself is not the problem. People need belonging, shared history and meaningful relationships with the places where they live. The danger comes when belonging becomes exclusion. “We live here together” becomes “this is ours, and those people do not belong.” A collective need for security is turned into a demand to identify outsiders. The promise of renewal becomes permission to deny others their place in society.

This is one way the #deathcult and the hard right can reinforce each other. A society organised around competition and insecurity leaves people looking for explanations. Authoritarian nationalism offers belonging and certainty without requiring a fundamental change to the economic structures producing the insecurity. The blame moves around, the underlying system remains.

The important point is the process of #mainstreaming. In social democracy, a fringe idea becomes a campaign demand, it enters a manifesto, other parties adopt parts of it. Newspapers discuss it as common sense, eventually, the boundaries of acceptable political debate have moved. The mess is not only the most extreme position, it is the gradual normalisation of the assumptions underneath it: that particular groups are the cause of national decline, that exclusion will restore social stability, or that some people’s rights can be treated as expendable.

This is how political culture changes before a decisive break with democratic institutions ever occurs. There is an important difference between the political environment of the twentieth century and our own, as the #dotcons algorithmic control industrialize the problem. The old hard right relied on newspapers, meetings, party organisations and physical networks. Today, political messages also travel through algorithmic platforms capable of distributing them at enormous speed.

The #dotcons turn grievance into a feedback loop: anger → attention → engagement → more anger. A complicated social problem becomes a short video with a villain. A conspiracys travel faster than a careful explanation. Outrage becomes a product, and the systems distributing it have incentives to keep feeding people these digital drugs to keep people engaged.

The #dotcons commercial incentives of attention-driven systems amplify conflict, reward emotional reaction and make it harder to sustain a shared understanding of reality. That is part of the #techshit problem, were, technical systems built around commercial incentives reproduce and intensify social problems while presenting themselves as neutral tools.

The #deathcult encourages #stupidindividualism the idea that everyone is responsible for their own survival, that social problems are individual failures, and that collective solutions are either impossible or unnecessary.

History shows how political fragmentation pushes authoritarian movements. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, conflict between the left’s major parties, violence and the selling out/weakening of parliamentary government contributed to the conditions in which the Nazis gained power.

Polarization makes collective action harder when it turns differences into an existential conflicts, when movements spend all their energy fighting internally, they stop building. When every disagreement becomes betrayal, cooperation becomes impossible.

When people lose the ability to work together across differences, someone can arrive promising to settle everything through force and authority. This leaves people isolated precisely when they need one another. When the emergency becomes permanent, we cannot build an alternative society if we destroy every space in which we might cooperate.

Another historical warning concerns the politics of exception. Authoritarian movements argue that ordinary democratic processes are too weak to handle a crisis, extraordinary circumstances supposedly require extraordinary authority. An emergency like on rushing #climatechaos does not automatically produce authoritarianism, societies sometimes genuinely need exceptional measures to respond to immediate dangers.

The #deathcult thrives on the claim that there is no alternative. The hard right turns that same sense of inevitability into a demand for control. If people are persuaded that the only choices are fear or authoritarian order, the space for alternatives becomes smaller. This leads to the next stage of the #deathcult – when human beings become economically useless.

Beneath these political mechanisms sits a deeper problem, the idea that human worth depends on blinded economic usefulness. As people are encouraged to see themselves as individual economic units, competing for a place in a system that treats profit, growth and capital accumulation as its highest values. Work harder. Consume more. Compete better. Become more productive. Apologise for needing anything.

What happens when you become ill, disabled, unemployed, old, poor or simply unwilling to spend your life enriching someone else? If your value depends on your productivity, it becomes easy to treat your needs as a burden and your existence as something that must be justified. This is one of the cruellest tricks of #stupidindividualism: a structural problem becomes a personal shame.

People begin asking whether they deserve a decent life, rather than asking why the conditions for a decent life are being made conditional in the first place. At the same time, the concentration of wealth creates opportunities for a small number of #nastyfew actors to influence politics, media, infrastructure and public debate. The danger of systems that weaken accountability and treat the suffering of some people as an acceptable cost of doing business.

Homelessness, preventable illness, poverty, displacement and environmental destruction do not all arise in the same way. They do, however, show how human needs can be subordinated to other priorities. A system can destroy lives without ever officially deciding to kill anyone. The question is not only whether a class of people might directly target those they consider economically useless. It is why we tolerate arrangements that make some lives more expendable than others.

And why do we internalize that judgement, apologizing for our existence instead of challenging the system making us feel ashamed? The problem is social, not individual, as there is no individual solution to a fundamentally collective problem.

We cannot buy our way out of a crisis produced by the concentration of wealth and power. We cannot solve social isolation through endless individual self-improvement. We cannot rebuild shared reality by retreating further into personalised feeds and private bubbles. Nor can we expect a change of politicians, a new app or another set of slogans to solve the deeper problem on its own.

We need to rebuild the social capacity to act together, that means practical communities, independent media, shared resources, public accountability and spaces where people can disagree without destroying their ability to cooperate. It means creating alternatives before a crisis forces us to act, rather than waiting for existing institutions to fail completely.

This is where the #openweb becomes important, the #OMN: news, archiving and governance. The path is news → archiving → governance. Before we can govern together, we need ways to remember together. Before we can remember together, we need trustworthy public media. And before that works, we need communities capable of disagreeing without destroying themselves.

The #OMN works towards federated media flows in which people and communities can publish, subscribe, moderate, archive and share information without handing ownership of the entire media environment to a central platform. The #4opens – open data, open source, open standards and open process – provide practical principles for examining whether this infrastructure is genuinely open and accountable.

The aim is not to pretend that technology alone will save us, it is to build tools that support collective participation rather than passive consumption, and shared resources rather than platform ownership. The same principle lies behind #OGB, the Openweb Governance Body: exploring how autonomous communities coordinate, negotiate and govern their relationships without surrendering everything to a central authority.

These projects are small parts of a much larger social challenge. But they offer a practical direction beyond simply complaining about the existing system. This is social composting: learning from the mess

We need to compost history, that does not mean romanticizing the past or pretending that every earlier movement got things right. It means treating history as material we can work with. Keep what helps us understand, expose what failed, learn from the damage. Do not repeat the structures that produced it.

The hard right thrives when people believe that the only choices are fear or control. The #deathcult thrives when people believe that there is no alternative to competition, extraction and permanent insecurity. Our task is to make other possibilities practical.

Trust instead of fear, commons instead of concentrated ownership, participation instead of spectatorship, cooperation instead of permanent culture war. Not another shiny political platform, and not another round of #techchurn. We need social infrastructure through which people can build together, maintain shared memory, challenge concentrated power and create alternatives rooted in everyday life.

The future is not predetermined, the worst outcomes are not inevitable. But ignoring the mechanisms that produce them will not make them disappear. The hard right becomes dangerous while its assumptions are becoming normal. The #deathcult becomes harder to challenge when we mistake its values for common sense.

We need to dig at the roots, not just cut back the visible growth. Pick up the shovels to start growing the commons. That’s the #OMN path.

Can the #openweb reboot scale without copying the #dotcons?

#AI mythology is currently more of the same

OK, lets not deny real risks, but also don’t accept the AI industry’s mythology as the starting point for discussing risks. The useful question is what currant AI’s actually do, who controls them, and what infrastructure and power relationships we are building around them.

AI is useful technology wrapped in a massive social, political and financial mythology. At the #OMN we are less interested in the usual argument between “AI will save humanity” and “AI will destroy humanity”. as both become noise in the current #LLM mess. To get a clearer picture we need to step back to ask a much simpler question – what does the technology actually do, and what are we building around it? Because there is a trap here.

We take an interesting piece of software, call it “AI”, then AI becomes AGI, AGI becomes superintelligence, and suddenly we are discussing machines as if they are becoming digital people. The #dotcons are happy with this story, as this story justifys gigantic data centres, enormous energy use, massive investment, extraordinary infrastructure contracts and the concentration of yet more technological power in the hands of the #nastyfew.

But there are serious questions about AI safety – autonomous weapons – cybersecurity – biological research – critical infrastructure – economic disruption – surveillance – disinformation – concentration of power. The replacement or degradation of human work. But there is a difference between looking at concrete risks and accepting a mythology about an imaginary future machine.

lets look at some of these risks: “AI will destroy humanity” argument starts somewhere like this – AI becomes more intelligent than humans – it develops goals – those goals don’t align with human interests – it becomes capable of improving itself – it gains access to infrastructure – it protects itself from being switched off – it expands its ability to act. Eventually humans become an obstacle, therefore humanity is eliminated. If we were actually building #AI not the current LLM’s that would be a possible speculative scenario.

But notice how many assumptions are packed into that chain. AI → AGI → autonomous agency → self-improvement → independent goals → infrastructure access → resistance to control → human extinction. Each arrow needs evidence, to judge this #KISS becomes useful. Don’t start with the end of the story, start with the machine in front of you. What can it actually do?

An #LLM generating confident bullshit isn’t evidence of an emerging artificial mind, a badly isolated “autonomous” system causing damage is an engineering and security problem. A corporation using dysfunctional AI to replace workers is an economic and political decision. A military using LLM’s based on the history of litterateur, feed partial data to kill people is a legal, political and military decision. A government using AI for surveillance is a governance problem. A data centre consuming enormous amounts of electricity and water is an infrastructure and ecological problem.

These things don’t require us to believe that a machine has become conscious, they require us to look at the #nastyfew are pushing over us. If we don’t look at the problems from this view we make the same mistake we have made with technology for decades, turning a social problem into a technical problem. Have you noticed that it is the priests of the #deathcult who loves AI.

But the are real problems in the #AI arms race – military competition → autonomous weapons → humans delegate decisions because machines are faster → competing systems interact → escalation/control failure → mass killing. Here extinction result from autonomous weapons, nuclear systems, biological weapons or other military infrastructure. That argument doesn’t require AGI it is simply the current mess with added tech mythology.

The #OMN critique isn’t so much about whether LLM’s are “good” or “bad” it is about the economic and social system surrounding the current #techshit paths, we already have piles of #techchurn to compost with out adding more. The #OMN doesn’t want to repeat this mess with AI, what we need is ways of keeping power visible enough that people can challenge it, for this we need to compost the mythology.

This is why the #OMN is deliberately boring compared with the AI storeys. Our focus is not technological salvation, or technological apocalypse. We need useful #KISS technology embedded in social structures where people can understand, challenge, change and, when necessary, walk away from. The mistake is always turning the tools into a mythology and then building society around the mythology. The #deathcult has had fifty years of economic “thinking” on this, look at the mess, now lift your eyes.

Let’s compost it and build something alive.

The #deathcult is selling the future as #techshit

We have done this before, we take a useful technology, wrap it in a huge financial story. We centralize it, try and monetize it to turn it into a platform. Then we pretend the social consequences were somehow an accident, it is what we are doing with LLMs. We took an interesting piece of software and started selling it as AI, then AI became AGI, became super-intelligence. This smoke and mirrors feeds the path of building gigantic data centres, burning enormous amounts of energy, raising billions, signing extraordinary infrastructure contracts and concentrating yet more power in a hands of the #nastyfew.

And now we are supposed to believe this is progress, nop, this is the normal #deathcult doing what the #deathcult does – take something useful and turn it into an extraction machine. the mess we need to compost is that “interesting software” doesn’t justify a trillion-dollar mythology – AI will transform everything – AI will replace everyone – AI will solve science – AI will destroy civilization – AI is the next industrial revolution – AI is the singularity – AI is almost AGI – AI is too dangerous to release – AI is progressing faster than anyone expected – AI will change humanity forever. Can you see the smoke and mirrors trick?

Both the utopian story and the apocalypse story sell the same thing, more #AI, more computing, more investment in data centres. More centralization of money for the companies already building the machines of control. Maybe the argument changes, the conclusion doesn’t. Pushing fear is also marketing, this is where the current AI “doom” industry pushes mess. Tell people your machine might destroy the world and you have simultaneously told them your machine is incredibly powerful. This is about grasping for the control of focus, creating scarcity, you have created fear you have created importance.

This mess is about #fashionista capture, its a old story, were you try to created a lever for governments, and the chattering classes, there servants to listen to you, for investors to keep funding you, to build even bigger machines. The apocalypse it self becomes a business model.

That doesn’t mean the risks aren’t real, #AI implementations can create real security, economic, social and political problems. But we need to separate those problems from the mythology. A badly isolated autonomous coding system is an engineering and security failure, it doesn’t mean the machine has “woken up”. An LLM producing confident bullshit isn’t evidence of an emerging artificial mind, it is an LLM producing confident bullshit. And a company repeatedly telling us that its next model might be AGI doesn’t make AGI a meaningful scientific milestone.

Sometimes #KISS is the radical answer, please look at what the machine actually does, not what the marketing department says it might eventually do. We have already seen this mess play through.

Web 1.0.

Web 2.0.

Crypto.

Blockchain.

NFTs.

Metaverse.

Web3.

DAOs.

Now AI.

Every few years Silicon Valley discovers the next thing that will “transform” nothing. The technology changes, were the investment logic barely does. Hype → investment → infrastructure → more hype → bigger investment → pressure to monetize, it is #techchurn.

Except now the machines require gigantic amounts of physical infrastructure and enormous financial commitments. This is the bit that gets hidden behind the shiny chatbot interface, LLM’s isn’t floating in the cloud, it is powered by somebody else’s warehouse, somebody else’s electricity bill and somebody else’s infrastructure. The supposedly weightless future has a very large material footprint.

The #deathcult loves this machine – but something deeper is happening here – the #deathcult has spent fifty years teaching us to worship – growth – efficiency – scale – competition – automation – consumption – financialization – individualism – technology. The AI industry is the last-ist gasp at pushing the mythology – more computing, more scale, more automation, more investment, growth, more efficiency. And because this machine is called “intelligent”, we are encouraged to bow down even further. The machine knows, the machine decides, the machine optimizes, the machine will solve all our knee ach problems. Meanwhile, the #nastyfew who own and direct the machine accumulate power.

Its a part of the #geekproblem were technical people make things work, this has real value, but technical expertise is one tool, not the toolbox. You cannot engineer your way out of social problems, or code trust. You cannot automate democracy. You cannot solve inequality with a better interface. You cannot fix the political economy of capitalism by making the algorithms slightly cleverer. And you certainly cannot hand over social decisions to machines because the humans have become inconvenient to a few nasty people.

This is the same blindness we have been suffering from for decades, if the problem is difficult, make it technical. But then “common sense” technical people become the gatekeepers, becomes the institution, becomes infrastructure. Then fingers in ears, nobody remembers that the original decision was political, as the power disappears into code – #AI becomes just more #dotcons.

To balance this mess, by composting, we need to open our eyes to the history of the #openweb. The original web was built messy on #4opens standards. hyperlinks, RSS to grow small websites were people published, people connected built by people making their own tools. Then Web 2.0 arrived, the UX got better, the platforms got bigger, the money arrived and the web became #dotcons.

Blindly, repeating this same mistake with the dotcons LLM’s in the era of #climatechaos is stupidity. Its a big mistake to be building another generation of giant closed systems of control. At best we should be asking – what would an open AI infrastructure look like? What data? What standards? What ownership? What governance? What accountability? What local control? What human oversight? What right to challenge? What right to rollback? What happens when the system is wrong? Who gets to decide? These are political questions.

That is backwards, technology is a tool for people, and yet here we are. agen we are generating the problem to feed the machine built to solve the problem, peak #techshit. So what do we do? We don’t have time for another #fashionista moral panic please. Not “ban everything”, not “AI will save us”, not “AI will kill us”. Not another fucking blinded conference where everybody agrees that governance is important and then goes home and builds the same centralized paths.

What we do need is to compost is this mess, take the useful technology, the useful research, the open models to build automation that actually gives people more time and power. Knowledge is always useful, but please throw the mythology onto the compost heap, the fake AGI worship, the #nastyfew billionaire saviour stories, the singularity smoke. We cant survive the endless-growth assumptions, of the #closedweb platforms, the surveillance economy, we need to compost this social #techshit.

Composting this is why the #openweb is a tool that still matters, not because openness is fashionable, or that another technical architecture will magically save us. It matters because power has to be distributed somewhere. Open data – Open source – Open standards – Open process – The #4opens. To make this tool work we need to grow the path of human moderation, community trust, distributed infrastructure and shared public knowledge.

The #OMN has practical projects for this path – archives with #makeinghistory – news with #indymediaback and eventually governance with #OGB. A practical #KISS path that understands that we need useful technology, to help communities organize, remember, communicate and act. We need infrastructure that belongs to the people using it, And the community to use this “shovel” to stop worshipping the mythology of the #deathcult machines and start rebuilding the commons.

Yes, this is a first small step in the path we need, not a dogmatic answer to everything. We clearly do not need more blinded technological salvation story’s. What we do need is a practical path to build news, archiving and eventually governance around open flows, trust and participation rather than surveillance, extraction and platform ownership.

The #deathcult has had fifty years, look at the mess, now lift your eyes and let’s start composting.

As the worshipping the #deathcult for the last 50 years becomes harder to hide, the lies are more naked. The lie of endless growth, trickle-down wealth, technological salvation and individual freedom are running into the material reality they created. The mess can no no longer be hidden in the abstract.

#Climatechaos, inequality, war, social fragmentation, political decay. #techshit. The question now is impossible to keep ignoring, not whether the system has problems, it is whether we can see the problems clearly to stop worshipping the mess that created them.

This is where we need social composting. Turn the pile. Expose the assumptions. Keep what is useful. Let the dead ideas rot down. Then grow something alive.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #deathcult #lifecult #techshit #techchurn #dotcons #geekproblem #AI #LLM #commons #compost #KISS

If we fund only the technical layer, we shouldn’t be surprised when the social layer remains broken

The problem with #openweb funding isn’t simply rejection, waiting for decisions, or whether one particular project gets funded. The problem is #KISS structural, after 30+ years working through grassroots projects, funded and unfunded, there is a repeated pattern that is easy to see – useful social and grassroots technology gets filtered through a narrow technical understanding of what counts as a “good” #openweb project.

This is the #geekproblem, not moral judgement of individuals – it isn’t about individual geeks being bad people. Many people working in open technology have good intentions and genuinely care about the commons. The problem is what happens when a technical culture becomes the dominant way of seeing the problem, the technology gets analysed, the code gets analysed, the architecture gets analysed, but the social system the technology is supposed to serve is almost invisible.

So the question we need to keep asking is can open technology funding engage with the social problem that are embedded in the technical problem? Because if a grassroots project has to become sufficiently, bland, polished, technically framed and institutionally legible before the funding system can in anyway understand it, then we’ve already created a barrier between the funding system and the communities it is supposed to support.

And this isn’t solved by simply hiring better grant writers or getting an AI to produce better applications, that is simply #KISS making the filtering system better at filtering. We need to ask whether the frame itself is too narrow, as the #openweb isn’t just software, it is people, communities, trust, media, governance, culture and the social relationships around the technology.

If we fund only the technical layer, we shouldn’t be surprised when the social layer remains broken. This is why #OMN keeps coming back to the #4opens, grassroots participation and trust, we need to move beyond the #geekproblem without powerlessly pushing to throwing the geeks out. We need the technical knowledge and the social knowledge, to compost this mess rather than simply building another layer of #techshit on top of it.

#NLnet we are still waiting for an opportunity

How do we describe the problem and how we organize ourselves to deal with it? For the #fashionistas, the point is that language isn’t just decoration. A #hashtag is a way of framing attention. If you call someone “evil”, “dangerous” or “nasty”, you may simply reinforce their preferred identity, yes, we’re tough, we’re feared, we’re fighting the enemy. You’ve accepted their frame.

“Weird” works differently because it pokes at their claim to represent normality. It reverses the us versus them story: hang on, perhaps the strange behaviour is coming from you. But this is where the #OMN/#KISS point comes in. Calling the #nastyfew “nasty” isn’t really about persuading the #nastyfew. It’s about helping us recognize the pattern.

We need language that lets ordinary people point at a structural problem without having to become political theorists, join a faction or spend three hours arguing about ideology. That’s what an affective hashtag can do – #nastyfew = focus. Not “these people are monsters and we must destroy them” more “there is a small concentration of people pushing harmful behaviour and power – let’s recognize the pattern, stop pretending it is normal, and organize our way around the problems they are creating.”

The important bit is US, the understanding that the #nastyfew become more powerful when we give them our attention, fear, division and energy. If we can name the pattern as an abstract, keep our heads, and build better path, their power becomes much less interesting.

This is why #OMN is interested in media flows rather than personality cults, so we don’t spend all day fighting the person. We look at the flow:

Who is amplifying what?
Who benefits?
What behaviour is being normalized?
Where is trust being built or destroyed?
What can we change locally?

The #geekproblem to often wants to solve this with another closed path, the #fashernistas want another clever narrative, but the #nastyfew want us fighting each other, its in the name. Maybe the simpler answer is to name the pattern, focus our attention, build the alternative, and stop feeding the circus.

#KISS

Bunker as a metaphor

There is something revealing about the way powerful people talk about our future, when they imagine crisis, they imagine their escape. A luxury bunker, fortress border, a private city, a rocket or an #AI cloud. A place for the self chosen few to survive while everyone else is left outside to die.

This is the “logic” of the #deathcult we all worship, if the world is breaking, protect yourself rather than repair the world. It should be obverse to us that this is is not really any actual plan for the future, its just more head down worship, an admission that this class have stopped believing in any thing at all.

But, yes they hid this, they still tend to tell a story, the shiny version of this story is always the same, out of catastrophe comes a golden city, the old world burns, the rubble is cleared, and the self selecting few build something beautiful on top of it.

We have heard this story for thousands of years, apocalypse, judgement, Armageddon, collapse, then purification for paradise for the few survivors. The modern retelling simply replaces heaven with a billionaire bunker, an exclusive smart city, an AI utopia or a colony on Mars, different technology, same path.

On this #mainstreaming path some people, who we call the #nastyfew in the #OMN hashtag story, deserve to survive the mess they created. But what is not told in this simply story is that the bunker is hard right politics – #climatechaos, pandemics, resource conflicts, economic insecurity and technological disruption are real problems. But there are two very different ways to respond to systemic crisis.

One response is – How do we protect everyone and make the system more resilient?

The other is – How do I make sure I am on the inside when it collapses?

The second path is not surprisingly increasingly visible in #nastyfew billionaire culture, authoritarian politics and in the #dotcons industry we all spend way to much time inside.

in this modern story, the bunker is not just a building underground, it is a political metaphor, fortress borders are bunkers, private security is a bunker, gated communities are bunkers, #closedweb platforms are bunkers. What matters for us in #FOSS is monopolized infrastructure is a bunker. Even the fantasy of escaping humanity through #AI or space is another bunker, an attempt to leave the shared social and ecological world rather than compost our dysfunctional relationship with it.

This path is the opposite of the #openweb,it is were the #deathcult turns fear into control. The right-wing answer to social crisis is always built around fear – Fear of outsiders, fear of immigrants, fear of social change, fear of losing status, fear of disorder, fear of the future. But, then comes the golden lie, the promise, we will protect you, but this protection soon becomes control. The anger that should be directed toward concentrated wealth and political power gets redirected sideways and downwards toward other ordinary people.

The poor become the problem, migrants become the problem, minorities become the problem, the left becomes the problem. The messy complexity of society is reduced to enemies, it is an old political trick that the #blinded technological #closedweb makes much more powerful. Today’s authoritarian politics doesn’t arrive wearing an old-fashioned uniform. the phone in our pocket, influencers, algorithms, targeted advertising, surveillance systems, AI-generated propaganda and permanently monetised outrage. The infrastructure of the #dotcons is a bunker.

But what we focus on the #OMN path is there is alternative, this alternative isn’t pretending that everything is fine, not another shiny utopia, and it certainly isn’t waiting for some perfect political party, perfect technology or perfect leader to save us. The alternative is much more boring – Build things that work, trust, commons, local resilience. Create media systems where communities can see and understand what is happening. Focus more on building technologies that people can actually control by #KISS keeping the infrastructure understandable so participation is possible. Create spaces where people can disagree without immediately becoming enemies. That sounds much less exciting than an AI god or a $50 million survival bunker, good, what we need to do as the #DIY grassroots is move from bunkers to bridges

The important question is not, who gets into the bunker? The question is, what are we building outside it? Because humans have already built an enormous number of bunkers, political bunkers, economic bunkers, cultural bunkers, technological bunkers, information bunkers. We don’t need more, we need bridges, and bridges are fundamentally different from bunkers.

A bunker protects something by excluding people, a bridge creates value by connecting people. That is the deeper #openweb possibility – not a technological escape from society, but technology that helps society organize itself. Not centralized control, but distributed participation, not ownership of everything, but stewardship of shared resources, not fear as the organizing principle, but trust. Not “how do I survive when everything collapses?” but “How do we make collapse less likely, and life better, together?”

Its about composting the apocalypse – the world really is messy, but fear doesn’t have to become a bunker, it can become a reason to organize. This is where social composting matters, take the accumulated waste of the last decades — #neoliberalism, authoritarianism, #techshit, platform capitalism, political tribalism, broken institutions and the endless fear machine. Don’t pretend it isn’t there, don’t worship it or spend your entire life fighting it head-on. Compost it, break it down, learn from it, keep what is useful, let the dead parts become soil to then grow something different.

The #deathcult says the future belongs to the #nastyfew who can buy their way out, the #lifecult says the future belongs to those who can build relationships strong enough to stay. The choice isn’t really between apocalypse and utopia, it is between bunkering down or building commons. The planet doesn’t need another billionaire bunker, it needs people willing to pick up shovels.

A #mainstreaming view of this

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #lifecult #deathcult #dotcons #socialcomposting #KISS

Why “common sense” is a cage – we don’t have to worship this mess

The problem of #dotcons is attention capture, its why #digitaldetox is a part of the #OMN toolbox. So lets look at why we need to act on the digital drug problem. The everyday digital drug fix starts with a notification, you pick up your phone because you get a notification. You unlock it, check the notification. Then maybe you look at one thing, then another, then another and suddenly an hour have disappeared.

You didn’t decide to spend the next hour staring at short videos selected by a #dotcons in the service of the #nastyfew. You didn’t sit down and make a conscious choice to enter the endless scroll, you just responded to a notification. Swipe – maybe this one is rubbish – swipe – that’s funny – swipe – boring – swipe – interesting – swipe – somebody attractive, and on it goes. This is the basic addiction of the #dotcons: turning our attention into a reaction rather than a choice. The important thing isn’t that one particular video is good or bad, the problem is loss of focus.

Every notification creates another injection, every swipe gives the algorithm a signal about what keeps you looking. The drug learns what holds you there, while you gradually lose track of why you picked up the phone in the first place. This isn’t communication in any real way, it’s an attention stealing machine and the more time we spend looking at it, the more normal the behaviour becomes. This is why #DigitalDetox project isn’t about telling people to “use their phones less”, its an AA meeting, we need to understand the drug is difficult to stop.

The phone isn’t the problem – digitaldetox is about #KISS technology to help people have more focus to participate in their communities. This mess we need to composting is social, the technology is a part, and yes the is piles of #techshit but under this surface is blinded ideology – the business model and the social architecture we think of as common sense.

The question is what infrastructure we build around those addictive behaviours, it is the problem with #mainstreaming, that it rarely looks like control from the inside the trap, it looks like common sense. People are presented with acceptable ideas, organizations, technologies and ways of working. Then, because everybody around them makings the same choices, those choices are “natural” – “This is just how things are done.”

But that “common sense” has a history. – for forty years, a mixture of #neoliberalism, #postmodernism, professionalisation and institutional culture has created a particular political and technological environment, that tells us that change should happen through recognized organizations, recognized experts, recognized funding structures and recognized channels.

Alternative paths are not forbidden, they are simply made difficult to see, and when people have spent decades inside this environment, asking them to look outside it can produce strong negative reaction. Then the problem is not simply bad people, it is tempting to describe this as a problem of individual personalities. Someone is arrogant, someone is ideological, someone is a gatekeeper, someone is “woke”, someone is a bureaucrat. But that misses the deeper problem, that people are shaped by the systems they live inside.

If your professional environment rewards certain ideas and punishes others, eventually you learn what can safely be said, learn which projects look fundable, learn which language gets accepted. You learn which organizations are considered legitimate. You also learn which people are worth listening to, its a #KISS social filter. The result is not only a conspiracy, it is something mundane and, more difficult to challenge, a culture reproducing itself. The people keep selecting things that make sense in the current #mainstreaming paths, and become evidence that the current #techshit mess is right all along.

This is one of the traps of #mainstreaming – its the grassroots problem we need to compost – grassroots projects come from somewhere completely different, they are messy, experimental and don’t always have professional language. They are built by people who see a #DIY problem and start doing something about it. That is where interesting alternatives begin, when these projects enter the mainstream funding and organizational environment, something bad happens. The project is asked to translate itself, then translate itself again to fit into a recognized category, demonstrate impact, scalability, governance, sustainability etc.

Then comes the compleat #block, it has to demonstrate that it already looks like something the funder understands, by the end, the thing being funded is very different from the thing that originally mattered. This fuck-up is not always malicious, it’s a structural problem of mainstreaming trying to make the unfamiliar familiar, and in doing so, it removes the qualities that made the grassroots project interesting in the first place. When we try and compost this #mainstreaming mess, people become defensive. When you challenge somebody’s “common sense”, you are not challenging an opinion, you may end up challenging their social position, their professional identity and their understanding of how the world works. That feels threatening, so its normal that the response is defensive.

Instead of asking “Could this alternative actually work?” the conversation becomes “Why aren’t you doing this properly?” Then comes the familiar #blocking “Use the proper channels.”“Talk to the right people.” “Get the stakeholders together.” “Build consensus.” “Follow the process.” “That’s not how things work.” And sometimes these are perfectly reasonable suggestions, but sometimes “proper process” is simply #blocking, ensuring that nothing outside the existing system can ever become legitimate.

The #OMN is built from a different starting point, it does not share any assumption that the existing institutions can solve the problems. It starts with people, communities, media and flows to build useful things the people can use, avoiding technical complexity to make participation is possible. We need these native technology’s as tech has its own version of the problem, the #geekproblem that assumes, if something is technically possible, the technical architecture should determine how people behave. This is the way power accumulates around administrators, developers, institutions and large communities, it is social. Thus, simply making something “open source” does not automatically make it socially open.

It is why #4opens matters, open data, open source, open standards and open processes are not the whole answer, but they can create space for communities to make their answers. Mediation rather than control, the answer to messy human behaviour is not more control. The #OMN is closer to a river than a filing cabinet, objects flow, people contribute to the flow, communities filter and shape the flow. Different places can create different views of the same underlying information. Some things become trusted – some things remain uncertain. Some things disappear from a particular view without pretending that they have magically ceased to exist everywhere.

This is a very different idea of network governance, its organic, its about composting the mess. The #openweb has accumulated decades of corporate platforms, closed APIs, surveillance economics, status games, technological churn, institutional habits and ideological baggage. There is a huge pile of shit, the answer is not to pretend otherwise, we compost it, take what is useful, break down what is harmful. Reuse existing tools, keep the lessons, discard the assumptions to help grow something new from what remains.

That is a more practical form of radicalism than simply traditional #fashionista left declaring that everything has to be destroyed and rebuilt from zero. It is also why #KISS matters, keep it simple, make the useful thing work. The real challenge to compost is cultural, the barrier to alternative technology is often not technology it self, it is the problem of common sense imagination. People need to imagine that things could work differently, then after this grassroots paths need space to experiment, to grow, before they are forced into the current #mainstreaming.

Funders like #NLnet need to recognize that something can be valuable before it has already become institutionally respectable. And #mainstreaming organizations need to understand that they are not the source of innovation, as to often they are the last people to notice this, that does not mean abandoning them, but it means not making them the only path.

So the question becomes, how can we convince them to build real alternatives, we can just to spend another twenty years trying to convince a closed system that it should become open. The path out of this mess is simple build something open, don’t waist to much time and focus explaining to institutions why grassroots communities deserve infrastructure. And don’t wait for “the right people” to give permission, start with the people who are already doing the work.

The important shift is from permission to participation, from ownership to commons, from control to mediation, from platforms to flows. From mainstreaming the grassroots into existing institutions to letting grassroots practice grow outward into the wider culture. The existing “common sense” can be composted, it is not inevitable, it is simply what has grown around us, to become a mess. We don’t have to worship the mess, we can pick up a shovel, turn the pile, let it breathe and grow something better from it.

Which Nature Are We Growing?

There is such a thing as reality, and humans have an intrinsically limited idea of what it actually is. All human thought and culture are created by humans. In that process, there is a strong tendency for our ideas to become religion, things we believe to be true rather than things we keep testing.

The West developed a useful hack to try to escape this trap. Religions are built around truth. Science is built around doubt. Make an observation. Test it. Try to prove yourself wrong. Keep the results. Let someone else test them. This simple hack has worked VERY well – for good and for evil. Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. That’s the next problem.

Morality.

People moved right becouse the #deathcult pushing of insecurity and distrust has been uncomposted for 50 years

Currently we are to stuck in the liberal response to the current hard rightward shift, as they treat it like a fixed demographic fact. “Those people won’t move.” “Those voters are lost.” “Reform has captured them.” then comes more polling, messaging, focus groups, electoral strategy and process. This is the #geekproblem applied to blinded #fashernist liberal politics: treating a living social system like a technical problem that can be managed from above. But people don’t live inside polling data, they live in communities, institutions, workplaces, families, streets, media systems and increasingly broken #dotcons digital spaces.

And when this #mainstreaming stops giving people security, meaning or trust, something will fill the gap. If government doesn’t deliver, people look elsewhere, institutions aren’t trusted, people look for identity, communities are fragmented, people look for tribes. If #mainstreaming politics can’t offer a believable future, people reach for something that feels solid now. That is why sectarian identity becomes attractive in an age of inchoate policy, captured institutions and bad-faith politics.

At least identity feels tangible, I know who I am, who they are, and I know who is to blame. It is a crude form of social infrastructure, but it is still infrastructure. And this is where the liberal framing goes wrong, the “rightward shift” isn’t some mysterious virus that has infected society, it is a feeding on the very probels our 40 years of worshiping a neo-liberal #deathcult has produced, on broken social trust, insecurity, precarity, housing insecurity, broken public services and loss of community that leads directly to political powerlessness.

And the constant experience of being told that everything is improving while your lived experience says otherwise. You don’t compost that with better messaging, you don’t shoval it with another consultation, you don’t defeat it by telling people they are stupid, racist, backward or “misinformed”. You certainly don’t challange it by becoming better at managing the same broken system.

You change the conditions that produce the politics, this is where the #OMN way of thinking matters. Start with the social infrastructure, build trust, participation to grow commons with space for paths where people see the evidence, challenge it, add context and correct mistakes. Build spaces where people do things together rather than simply consuming politics through algorithmic feeds.

That is how trust grows, from paths where the #4opens is more than a technical checklist. Because open process lets people see how power actually works, it turns politics from something done to people into something people can participate in. Communities become visible without first getting permission from the #mainstreaming machine. Where trust is something built through participation rather than handed down by an authority. Where disagreement isn’t automatically treated as failure. Where mistakes can be corrected rather than silently buried. Where history isn’t constantly erased by the next algorithmic cycle.

You don’t solve the rightward shift by endlessly talking about the rightward shift, you rebalence the social conditions underneath it. The right-wing understands something that much of the liberal centre has forgotten – people need belonging. The nasty mess we currently need to compost is allowing belonging to grow from fear, exclusion and enemies. Make people safer, communities stronger, open up space were people can build together.

Because trust is built through doing things together – that is the native #openweb path. We need to compost what the right feeds on: division, so the alternative has to grow from trust. That’s not electoral strategy, its #KISS growing social infrastructure.

The problem isn’t that humans are stupid, maybe its more that we’re just good at organising stupidity. The planet isn’t dying because it hates us, the planet will be fine. It’s the humans who are having the difficult bit, the economic system says: BUY MORE SHIT. Religion says: TRUST THE INVISIBLE AUTHORITY. Politics says: PICK A TEAM. The #dotcons say: KEEP SCROLLING. And the #geekproblem says: DON’T WORRY, WE CAN ENGINEER OUR WAY OUT OF IT.

We’ve pushed a #nastyfew class to avoid any responsibility, and then people on there knes eyes closed wonder why nothing changes. Maybe the useful position is to step back from the social and ecoloical mess long enough to actually we are creating it. Not abandon people, not give up on society, but stop pretending the existing path is working.

The #OMN starts from that uncomfortable place. News. Memory. Trust. Participation. Eventually governance. Not another shiny platform, another central authority. A bit of infrastructure for people to see what is happening, connect it, challenge it, remember it and build something better together.

The planet doesn’t need saving from humans, humans need saving from the #deathcults we so easely worship. And maybe the first step is getting off our knes opening our eyes and looking around at the mess we need to compost.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #FOSS #dotcons #geekproblem #deathcult #KISS

To compost the #dotcons, the #openweb needs more people with shovels

Yes, the #web02 revolution was a con, it always was. The problem is now most people have spent years pretending that the dominant technology companies were somehow neutral actors – clever companies making useful tools, occasionally getting a little too powerful, occasionally needing a bit of regulation. But now this comforting chattering class story is harder to maintain, as the long “invisible” problem has finally reached the #mainstream, the act of stepping over the smoke and mirrors can now be seen in books such as Gil Durán – that the Silicon Valley billionaire class has developed an explicitly anti-democratic political worldview, and it has accumulated enough money, technology and institutional influence to start acting on it.

The book Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy describes a political culture that did not suddenly appear with Trump. It has roots going back decades: hostility to government, hostility to taxation, extreme individualism, the fantasy of “exit”, private jurisdictions, network states, crypto-utopianism and the idea that technological elitists should be able to operate outside democratic constraints. This view of #geekpoblem history matters because if we treat what is happening now as simply another Trump-era political crisis, we shovel the wrong shit onto the compost heap.

This mess we need to compost is the blinded politics of our technology classes. The con was always bigger than the platform, #dotcons were never simply websites, there “value” comes from when they became infrastructure for social life. #Failbook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, X and the rest were built to control people, they “business modal” inserted themselves between people and their ability to communicate, organise, publish, buy, work and increasingly understand the world.

The con, the clever trick was that they appeared to be giving us something, free publishing, free communication, free social networks, search, storage and entertainment. But the real business model was the capture of the flows, our relationships became data, our attention a commodity, communities became markets, conversations became #LLM training material. Now that our social lives are increasingly controlled as behavioural prediction systems, and the more dependent we became, the more control and thus power accumulated on the other side of the interface.

This is why calling the #dotcons simply “social media companies” is too small a description. They became private governance systems, to make rules, decide visibility and control infrastructure. They moderate speech, shape markets, influence elections. They lobby governments to corrupt political control. And now some of the #nastfew openly talk about replacing democratic institutions with technological and corporate control. The con was never about advertising, it was about power.

Seeing the path underneath the technology is of the useful things, connecting today’s behaviour with 20th century ideas. The Silicon Valley ideology did not begin with artificial intelligence, it developed through decades of worshipping the #deathcult of libertarian and anti-government thinking. Books such as The Sovereign Individual became influential within the elitist chatting classes. Figures such as Peter Thiel pushed ideas, and funding at technology, sovereignty, crypto, private jurisdictions and “exit”.

The basic #nastyfew fantasy is consistent – when the government gets in the way, leave, if democracy is inefficient, replace it. When taxation is inconvenient, move somewhere else. If regulation applies to everyone, build somewhere it doesn’t. If nation states are obsolete, create new digital or corporate forms of sovereignty. It sounds futuristic, but underneath the science-fiction language is something ancient. A #nastyfew group of extremely wealthy people deciding that ordinary democratic accountability should no longer apply to them. This is simply oligarchy updated with #postmodern branding, and then came the #AI boom, that accelerates and intensified the #techshit class mess.

We should not need to talk about how the technology itself is not the enemy, the current #openweb reboot clearly shows it is not. So what is, a very normal story, the worship of the #deathcult, our political and economic structure around the #dotcons, and the #geekproblem that breeds this is the problem.

With #climatechaos visible all around us, we are still being told that all this #techshit is necessary because someone in Silicon Valley has decided that the future requires it. This now easy to see mess is why resistance to data centres, surveillance systems, crypto schemes and companies such as Palantir can become broader than narrow traditional left politics. People are now starting to experience #nastyfew billionaire power physically in the growing social mess. The abstract becomes concrete, the cloud a building, the algorithm becomes distracting fluff, the #dotcons platforms are revealed as workplaces when the billionaire becomes the person deciding what happens in your town.

The #OMN more profound question is increasingly about who gets to control infrastructure and who gets to participate in deciding how it is used. That is a democratic question, and it should also be a #openweb question. This is where the current reboot comes in to balance the mess. The #NGO, civil society answer cannot simply be to keep regulating the #dotcons harder while continuing to depend on them for everything. Yes, regulation matters, taxation matters, breaking up monopolies matters and basic democratic accountability matters.

But we also need alternatives; otherwise we remain trapped inside #nastfew controlled infrastructure. This balancing is why we can’t keep fucking up our #openweb reboot. We need to #KISS take the useful lessons from the early web – openness, decentralisation, interoperability, user control and federation – and combine them with the better UX lessons we learned from Web 2.0.

We need to build this alt path on the current #Fediverse, based on exiting reboot #4opens paths like #ActivityPub and #RSS. What we don’t need is more of what current takes the vast majority of #openweb funding and coding focus. Not another collection of #VC startups, any more “ethical” billionaire-funded platforms – not another centralised service waiting to become the next #dotcons.

We need something structurally different, we need practical shovels to composting the #dotcons. This is where I use the word compost deliberately, we cannot simply pretend the last 30 years didn’t happen, there is an enormous pile of #techshit. Some of it is bad technology, much is bad governance. Some is exploitative economics, surveillance, addiction. In our heads we need to compost venture-capital paths, empty innovation language and the stink of #NGO and institutional capture.

Some of the simple #geekproblem is just plain bad social thinking dressed up as technical expertise. But there is likely useful material in the pile too, the #web02 #dotcons did teach us things – They showed us that people want easy-to-use communication tools – the importance of good #UX, we need to take what is useful and use this to expose what is toxic. To understand how it happened, learn from the failures. Then we need to translate this understanding into action to break the concentrations of power, to open space to grow something different.

The #geekproblem is part of this, another uncomfortable layer. The alternative technology world has not always been good at avoiding the same mistakes, the #geekproblem is real. Too often we build technology according to what technically clever people think is interesting rather than what communities actually need. We confuse technical complexity with progress, confuse innovation with usefulness, technical decentralisation with democracy. And often we recreate the same power structures inside #FOSS that we were supposedly trying to escape.

The resulting technically elegant social mess, is a strange imitation of the #dotcons: technically open underneath, but socially closed around the people who understand the machinery. This mess is then feed into the funding problem, where the #fashernistas enter the pile.

With the current #openweb reboot, alternative technology is increasingly surrounded by funding ecosystems that reward fashionable language, impressive demos, grant-friendly projects and institutional credibility. The grassroots people actually doing the work can become secondary, the people who understand the community get pushed aside by people who understand the funding application. The messy project gets replaced by the polished project, the difficult social question becomes a technical deliverable, and the result is another layer of #techshit.

This is not inevitable, but we need an open process capable of exposing it, that is the reason the #4opens matters – Open data – Open source – Open standards – Open process. The fourth one is particularly important, if the process is visible, we can see who is making decisions, how money is moving, whose ideas are being prioritised and where the projects are about grafting. We can challenge it before the pile gets too big, we need to compost the #techshit at source.

To grow anything in the current mess, we need infrastructure that ordinary communities can understand, use, modify, share and govern. We need technology that supports participation rather than extracting it, systems where disagreement, correction, rollback and learning are normal. We need tools that help communities build memory rather than constantly throwing yesterday into the algorithmic landfill.

So we know what we need, we know what we need to compost. The chattering classes are finally waking up, we have the interesting thing, that some of the people who have spent years talking about “innovation” and “the future” are finally starting to notice what has been happening. The warning signs are no longer hidden, #nastyfew political power is visible as is the social and ecological damage.

The question is no longer whether there is a problem, it is becoming what we do about it. And this is where I worry about the next stage because every time the mainstream finally notices a grassroots problem, the #fashernistas arrive. They package it, brand it, secure the funding to create the conference to build their careers. This simply “common sense” behaver stinks and is going to kill and displace billions of people.

And somehow, after all that activity, the people who were actually doing the work are still standing outside the room, we have seen this cycle for decades, we cannot afford to repeat it here. So shovel harder, the #openweb reboot has a job to do, we don’t have the time to create another fashionable technological sector. We don’t need another class of sellout experts to compete to become another set of gatekeepers. And definitely not to reproduce the #dotcons with a nicer logo and some open-source code.

We need to shovel hard, turn over the #dotcons, expose the blinded ideology, compost the bad economics, the #geekproblem and the corrupt grant culture. We need to compost our own #fashernista performance. To balance this we have to keep the useful technology, the useful knowledge, the communities and most importantly keep the history. Then use all of that compost to grow something genuinely different.

The old web was open enough to give us a glimpse of what was possible, #web02 captured that openness and turned it into private infrastructure. Now we have a chance to take the useful parts back, not by going backwards, but by putting people and communities back into the centre of the flow.

The #deathcult worshippers have spent decades building an escape route from simple democratic accountability. Our path is not to follow them on this fantasy, it is rather to build a better path in the other direction. The #dotcons are a huge pile of compost, the question is whether we are willing to pick up the shovels.

The #openweb and projects such as the #OMN are more than technical alternatives

Techno #feudalism is a description of the power that large #dotcons technology platforms now have over the economy and society. The comparison is with medieval feudalism. Under feudalism, land was the critical means of production and ordinary people worked land they did not own. Lords controlled access to it and extracted rents or surplus from those who depended on it.

This is relevant today were the critical bottleneck is increasingly digital capital: platforms, servers, algorithms, data, cloud infrastructure, app stores and enormous networked captured user bases. A few corporations, run by an increasingly visible #nastyfew control this infrastructure. Communities, businesses, workers and creators are dependent on platforms they do not control.

The current shift is from ownership to access, instead of owning software, music, games or other digital tools, people rent access through subscriptions and platforms. This means wealth and control accumulate with the owners of the infrastructure rather than with the people using it.

The #closedweb platform economy creates rent extraction. App stores, marketplaces, hosting platforms and gig-economy companies take a percentage from the economic activity that passes through them. Network effects make dominant platforms increasingly difficult to challenge, as we are seeing, allowing those rents to rise.

#AI is we get past the narrow use case of #LLMs could intensify this dynamic by replacing human labour with capital-intensive systems. If a few companies own the #AI infrastructure, the bargaining power of labour will fall while the power of capital owners, the #nastyfew takes over the levers of power over the #mainstreaming.

The political dimension – #dotcons don’t merely control economic infrastructure; their algorithms influence what billions of people see, discuss, believe and buy. This gives the #nastyfew platform owners an extraordinary ability to shape public discourse.

But yes, you would be right to point out this is just the normal monopoly capitalism for now, these companies still invest enormous amounts in research, infrastructure and innovation. They operate within markets and people are not legally bound to them in the way medieval serfs were bound to their lords. The system can also be understood as an intensification of monopoly capitalism and rent extraction.

For the #OMN, the strongest point is that the problem isn’t technology itself, it is concentrated ownership and control of the technological infrastructure. A simple stepping to #4opens network changes the relationship, instead of everyone being tenants on somebody else’s platform, we build infrastructure around open standards, federation, interoperability, shared ownership, participation and commons-based production.

That makes the #openweb and projects such as the #OMN more than technical alternatives. They become part of the struggle over whether the digital world develops into a feudalistic landscape of platform landlords and digital tenants, or remains a genuinely distributed native #openweb commons.

In that sense, #4opens is an economic and political argument as much as a technical one: keep the infrastructure open enough that nobody can permanently own the flows through which everyone else has to live and communicate.

It’s a #KISS project.

There is a wide gap between the people who talk about changing society and the people who actually have to live in the current mess

The #fashionista left problem isn’t simply “bad messaging”, but the loss of relationships, class politics and ordinary participation. This left path is #blocking, leading to a serious problem, that there is a growing gap between the people who talk about changing society and the people who actually have to live with the consequences of the society we have.

A lot of contemporary so-called left politics has become a culture of credentials, language, status and moral performance. Political activity becomes a test of whether you know the correct vocabulary, have read the correct theory and can demonstrate the correct politics. Meanwhile, people are dealing with rent, wages, insecure work, debt, housing, transport, healthcare and the basic struggle to get through the week.

This isn’t an argument that cultural or identity issues don’t matter, they do. But when cultural politics displaces material politics, something fundamental has gone wrong. And the answer isn’t to assume that working-class people are stupid, ignorant or simply “brainwashed” by the right. That attitude is itself a form of class contempt.

People have reasons for being angry, they have experiences, relationships, communities. They have knowledge that doesn’t come with a university certificate. The right has become good at recognising that anger and offering people belonging, even while offering economic policies that ultimately benefit only the #nastyfew billionaires and capital.

The mess in the left too often does the opposite, it offers people a lecture about why their existing culture, language or opinions are wrong before it offers them any meaningful collective power. That is backwards, politics begins with people working together around things that materially improve their lives. Better wages, housing, shorter working weeks, strong unions, public services to grow more time and power for ordinary people.

The left is supposed to be about, build solidarity through doing things together. You don’t need everyone to agree about everything before they can work together. In fact, demanding ideological agreement before allowing participation is one of the fastest ways to destroy a mass movement.

This is where I think the #OMN approach matters as a practical way to step away from this current blocking of left paths. #KISS we need less political performance and more participation, less gatekeeping and more open infrastructure, less obsession with who has the correct politics and more ability for different people to contribute, argue, cooperate and build something together.

The goal isn’t to make everyone think the same, it is to build enough trust and shared power that ordinary people can actually change the conditions they live in. That’s the old left and in today’s mess, a much more difficult politics, but it is also a much more democratic one.

#OMN #4opens #openweb #commons #workingclass #solidarity #democracy #politics #class