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.
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.
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.
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.
We need to stop talking about “climate change” as though we are discussing a slightly inconvenient change in the weather. Climate change is too soft, too neutral. Climate change makes it sound as though something simply happened to us. It didn’t, we pushed this mess, we built an economic system that treats the living world as raw material, turns everything into property, pushes everything through markets and then calls the resulting destruction “growth”. The next twenty years will be the “bill” we pay for this short-sighted greed. And the really dangerous part is that we are still trying to solve the problem using the same thinking that created it.
Welcome to #climatechaos, not one dramatic event that starts on a particular day, it is chronic, it accumulates, compounds. It moves through food systems, water systems, ecosystems, economies and communities. This makes it politically difficult because there is no single moment when everyone can point at the disaster and say, there it is. Instead, the extremes get worse, harvest fails, rivers floods, insurance disappears. The food price rises, drought lasts longer and finally the ecosystem quietly collapses. But one thing that is becoming common sense is we cannot carry on pretending this is normal.
A small step is that the language matters “Global warming” sounds almost pleasant, “Climate change” sounds neutral. Climate breakdown tells us something more important, there is a direction of travel, continuing accelerating the conditions that make human and ecological life less stable. That is what the next twenty years are, yes science based global averages are useful, but the things communities actually experience are extremes – heat, flooding, drought, food insecurity and other disruptions.
Living through the consequences, will show that today’s common sense, the #neoliberal answer to #climatechaos is wonderfully convenient for the #nastyfew – you are the problem, you have the wrong car, eat the wrong food, you use too much energy and bough the wrong thing. You didn’t recycle enough, and feel guilty.
This is the #deathcult at work, the individual is made responsible for a systemic crisis while the systems generating the crisis remain untouched. The absurdity is the dumping of climate responsibility onto individuals while corporations continue selling products that cause global warming. This mess isn’t accidental – #stupidindividualism is politically useful as isolated individuals have very little power. Where communities, workers, cooperatives, movements and collective action do have power.
By now it should become a little obvious that we don’t need greener consumption, what we do need a different relationship with the living world, the current uncomfortable path. Let’s make this plan – #Climatechaos isn’t an energy problem, it isn’t just a transport problem, it isn’t just a technology problem, it is a problem with how we understand ourselves. We have built a culture around the idea that everything exists to be owned, land, water, animals, forests, minerals, knowledge, attention. Even our relationships, on the #dotcons, become a commodity.
Everything becomes something that can be extracted, then we are surprised when the living systems collapse. To start to compost this mess the next twenty years need to be more about moving from ownership to participation, from extraction to stewardship. About better balancing competition and cooperation to move from isolated individuals to resilient communities. In an economic sense from commodities to commons. And yes, it is a much bigger political project than buying an electric car.
Food is going to expose the current blinded stupidity, food is where the abstraction ends. You can argue about climate models forever, but when food becomes unreliable and expensive, everyone understands. The climate discussion points to the vulnerability of agricultural systems, including dependence on a few major crops due to growing pressure on farming from heat, drought and extreme weather.
The response cannot simply be another technological monoculture. We need real diversity, more resilient crops, local knowledge, healthy soils to grow this biodiversity. We need shorter and more resilient supply chains, community food systems. And probably a much more serious conversation about what we choose to eat and how much land and sea we devote to producing it because agriculture isn’t happening outside nature.
The next twenty years will remind us that nature is not decoration, currently we treat biodiversity as something nice to have after the economy has been sorted out. But ecosystems are part of the economy, wetlands manage water, salt marshes protect coasts, healthy soils support food, forests regulate water and store carbon. Biodiversity provides resilience, this is not romantic environmentalism, it is infrastructure.
And then comes the techno-fix – whenever capitalism encounters a problem caused by technology, extraction and industrial growth, it offers us more technology. So next we get geoengineering, perhaps we can reflect sunlight, perhaps we can manipulate the atmosphere, perhaps we can capture carbon, perhaps artificial intelligence will optimise everything. Or perhaps some billionaire will save the planet. This is the reheated #mainstreaming#geekproblem version of climate politics, the problem is that the blinded underlying assumption, the system is fine, we just need a better machine.
But, unspoken is more mess we then need to compost – Who gets to control the thermostat? Who decides? Who is accountable? Who gets protected? Who gets sacrificed? These are not engineering questions, they are political questions, the next twenty years will be a democratic test of where the climate crisis becomes bigger than climate policy. We are going to have to make real choices about where should people live, what happens to communities that cannot be protected? Who pays? Who decides? What technologies are acceptable? And from a deep green prospective what land is for humans? What land is for the rest of life?
There are no purely technical answers, science can tell us what is happening, it tells us what happens if emissions continue. But science cannot decide what kind of society we want, that is politics, at best it is democracy. And at worst it is where the #mainstreaming agenda becomes dangerous as #climatechaos doesn’t care about our current political comfort zones. To find a path through this mess, we have created, we need resilience, not reassurance
Doom on its own is useless, but pretending everything will be fine is worse, people need real information about what is happening? What are the risks? What can we do? What can our community do to prepare, to organise? This is why #KISS communication needs to become local and participatory.
The example of community-based #OMN like projects matter – people come together, learn what is happening and then discuss what they can do locally. The process itself builds resilience, this should be obvious. A community is more resilient when it knows how to communicate, when it can share information. More resilient when it trusts people, when it has local knowledge and more resilient when it has shared infrastructure to remember what happened last time.
That is why media matters – the rebooted #openweb becomes climate infrastructure – where the #climatecrisis connects directly to the #OMN. We need an information infrastructure that belongs to communities rather than corporations, so communities can continue to document what happens to them. Because when the next flood comes, the official report six months later isn’t enough. The native #openweb can be part of the infrastructure of climate resilience that is if we stop treating it as another marketplace for attention.
The #OMN is native to this kind of future, it’s not a climate project in the narrow sense. But the underlying problem is the same – how do we build systems that support collective intelligence rather than extracting it? How do we allow people to publish, share, moderate, correct and preserve information without handing control to a handful of #closedweb platforms?
How do we create the trust we need without building more centralised authority? How do we make community knowledge persistent? How do we build infrastructure that can survive the failures of individualist #dotcons platforms? These questions become much more important as #climatechaos increases. Because resilience requires distributed systems, but not just technically distributed systems, we also need socially distributed systems.
The mainstream will always tell us – now is not the time, too radical, too expensive, too difficult, too political for people to accept, or the market isn’t ready, the technology isn’t ready. We have had 20 years of stalling change and challenge: we need more evidence, consultation or another #fashionista report. The #KISS answer is simple, NO, we have had decades, the next twenty years we either build resilience or discover how truly fragile we really are.
On a thin but needed positive note, the #climatecrisis is already producing the conditions for change, the question is whether that change is democratic or authoritarian. And in a narrow sense of our #openweb culture, whether it breaks the monopoly of the #geekproblem or gives it more power. It’s a simple choice of do we compost the old system or let it push us aside.
To not simply be pushed aside we need political movements capable of defending life in its widest sense, yes, the next twenty years will not be comfortable. There will be disruption, loss, conflict and there will be failures. But the future is not simply something that happens to us, it is something we organise. So please stop asking “How do I, personally, save the planet?” and ask “What can we build together that makes a different future possible?” in short get off your knees from worshipping the #deathcult, and stop waiting for the #mainstreaming agenda to save us.
In internet culture, stop handing every problem to the #geekproblem.
Light green environmentalism stop turning climate action into consumer guilt.
In economics stop treating nature as an externality.
In fashion, stop treating people as consumers.
To compost current mainstreaming mess, we need to start treating people as participants to rebuild the commons and infrastructure of trust. In short, we need people to #makinghistory, by getting the bloody shovels out. The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from it.
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.
For 50 years we have worshipped the #deathcult – endless growth, extraction, competition and individualism – and now we are living with the damage that this has done to our society and the living world.
The current hard shift to the right won’t fix any of this, it simply empowers the #nastyfew to surf the apocalypse while more and more of us are left fighting over the scraps.
Blind hatred and political ignorance are not solutions. Neither is pretending that the past 50 years of “common sense” somehow didn’t happen.
So what do we do? We compost the mess, we take the broken assumptions, failed systems, #techshit, tribalism and accumulated political baggage and turn them into something useful.
Apathy is boring, get on with doing something useful please. That’s part of what #OMN is, not a shiny platform, nor another ideological club. It’s made as a shovel for digging through the mess and help build the grassroots #openweb infrastructure we need for a different future.
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.
The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content.
Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs.
The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the #deathcult, where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking (and acting on) questions the tech industry never asks.
This is where the #OMN approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems.
This mess is a part of our long-standing #geekproblem, that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless #techchurn: one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power.
We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these #techshit outcomes. The #4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the #nastyfew.
That’s the work of the #openweb, and the path of #OMN.
What part can you play? The #openweb is one place to start, keep it simple (#KISS), build commons, compost the mess. The political centre created this mess. Four decades of neoliberal “common sense” deepened inequality, weakened democracy, privatised public goods, and pushed us beyond ecological limits. Yet much of the centre still offers only more of the same: better management of the #deathcult rather than a path beyond it.
That leaves a dangerous vacuum. If progressive movements cannot offer practical alternatives, the far right will continue to grow by presenting itself as the only force willing to confront the crisis. Their answers are built on fear, exclusion and authoritarianism – but they resonate because they acknowledge that the old system is failing, while the centre too often pretends it can be repaired.
Simply defending the status quo is not enough. Nor is retreating into abstract radicalism disconnected from everyday life. We need practical, grassroots alternatives that people can participate in and build themselves.
This same pattern appears in technology. Our #geekproblem isn’t primarily bad code – it’s a culture of arrogance and ignorance. Technical communities often reproduce the assumptions of the wider society without questioning them. They celebrate disruption while recreating centralisation. They mistake individual freedom for collective liberation, reproducing #stupidindividualism while unconsciously serving the logic of the #deathcult.
This isn’t usually malicious. It’s a feedback loop. The culture produces the technology, and the technology reinforces the culture. The answer isn’t to reject technology. It’s to mediate it socially.
Open Process ensures communities – not just developers or investors – shape the progress.
We need to use this to composting 40 Years of “Common Sense”, For the last 40 years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what passes for “common sense” in #mainstreaming society. Their influence runs so deep that many assumptions now feel natural rather than ideological. When these assumptions are challenged, people react defensively, not because they’re bad people, but because their worldview feels under attack.
This isn’t just a mainstream problem. Activist spaces reproduce the same patterns. The result is endless circular arguments, performative politics, and fragmentation rather than solidarity. Our task isn’t simply to oppose this culture, it’s to mediate it, to compost the mess rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Composting means taking the waste of the last forty years – failed assumptions, captured institutions, #techchurn, #fashionista politics, and individualism – and turning it into fertile ground for something better.
The worrying trend is that the grassroots signal is being submerged beneath an echo chamber of #mainstreaming voices. On many #fashionista threads, noise overwhelms practical action. We spend time performing politics rather than building the infrastructure movements need. That requires empathy, patience, and practical organising. It means creating spaces where people can step outside inherited “common sense” without feeling they have to defend it. It means building working alternatives instead of only criticising broken systems.
The answer isn’t to shout louder, it’s to build better spaces, better tools, and better processes. The signal-to-noise ratio can change again, but only if we do the patient work of mediation, trust-building and commons creation – The work of #OMN.
There’s a common understanding that we’re living inside a new digital world, that feels like enclosure, where people are “controlled” by platforms they can’t easily leave, where behaviour is shaped at scale, and where #AI intensifies this mess. That’s why #fashernista terms like #technofeudalism are being used to argue that we’ve moved beyond capitalism into something different – a system based not primarily on profit, but on rent extraction through “cloud capital.” In this narrow framing:
Capitalism = wage labour, markets, profit from production
Technofeudalism = platform power, behavioural capture, rent from digital dependency
The “cloud lords” (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple etc.) operate their digital fiefdoms, making us the “cloud serfs” by producing data and metadata for free. This generating value through participation while feeding tech that learn from us and reshape our behaviour. Even businesses and workers are pulled in, sellers depend on Amazon marketplaces, workers are managed through platform systems and, as the #EU is finding, entire infrastructures depend on AWS-style cloud provision.
From this narrowing view, capitalism starts to look secondary to rent extraction. But is this actually a new economic system? The argument soon starts to break down as critics point out that many of these dynamics are not historically new: supermarkets already control supply chains and choice, advertising has shaped desire for decades, monopolies are standard capitalist patterns and enclosure of markets predates the internet by centuries.
Even “lock-in” effects (like Amazon Prime convenience or #dotcons platform dependency) can be explained through normal capitalist mechanisms: convenience, pricing, network effects, and infrastructure dominance. From this step back view, what we’re seeing is not a new epoch, but late-stage capitalism with intensified digital tools, not a structural break.
The more grounded #OMN suggests something different, the change is not mystical “cloud feudalism”, but that data and metadata has become a primary economic resource. We now live in systems where behaviour is continuously captured as data, that data to be aggregated, sold, and operationalised, then feedback loops reshape what people do next and participation itself becomes productive labour. This shifts relationships, not only worker vs capitalist, not just consumer vs market, but user-as-infrastructure. Yes, people are no longer only buying and selling inside systems, they are constituting the system itself through participation. That is a shift in how production works, even if it doesn’t replace capitalism as the structure, it is reshaping it.
The infrastructural question? Where the #technofeudal framing becomes useful is infrastructure. The real power isn’t only in apps or interfaces, it is in “cloud” hosting (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), database and compute control and the resulting dependency of entire industries on a few providers. This is less “digital shopkeeping” and more systemic dependency at the infrastructure layer. At that level, switching costs are enormous, entire economies are built on top of systems owned by a handful of #nastyfew actors. Yes, this is a real enclosure of the commons, not of in the old sense land, but of the new digital reality.
Where this leaves us? The danger is less about whether we label this “capitalism” or “technofeudalism”, more, it’s the simple assumption that the system is stable. In reality, we have capitalist dynamics operating the data-driven extraction layered on top of this older mess, with infrastructure consolidation amplifying both. Not a clean break – more a messy transition stage.
From an #OMN perspective, the useful question is not the label, it is where is agency located? Who controls infrastructure? How is knowledge produced and shared? What forms of network are open vs enclosed? Because whether we call it capitalism or #technofeudalism, the political problem is the same that control is concentrating, while participation is being harvested. And that is the mess we need to compost, not the theoretical naming of it.
A red warning for extreme heat has been issued across parts of the UK this week, including London. For people this heatwave across Europe feels frightening, not because of the temperatures themselves, but of what they imply. Nights stay hot, bodies don’t recover, systems don’t cool down. The baseline is shifting. The question that keeps coming up is simple and unavoidable – if this is what it’s like now, what is it like in 10, 20, 30 years? The answer is not uncertain, it is more heat, more extremes, more instability. There is no “new normal” coming, there is only escalating #climatechaos.
A #deathcult sect for the last 40 years was not built to survive itself, we are seeing this now, the infrastructure is failing. Hospitals, transport systems, housing, food networks – all were built for a climate that no longer exists. Even basic adaptation like cooling is uneven, fragile, and socially unequal. Some workplaces fail under heat stress. Some people have no protection at all. And crucially, we are still not adapting at the scale required.
The UK Climate Change Committee has already said it clearly, adaptation is too slow, stalled, or moving in the wrong direction. That is not a warning about the future, it is a #KISS description of failure in the present. The denial loop over the last 20 years is why we are in such a mess, the pattern is now obvious:
Scientists warn
Media briefly reports
Heat passes
Politics resets to “normal”
Nothing changes
This cycle repeats while emissions continue and global temperatures rise toward 2–3°C and beyond this century. But bland media coverage hides the issues of extremes – heatwaves, floods, droughts, system shocks. And those are already exceeding earlier projections in many regions. Timid climate models underestimating reality due to feedback loops, jet stream disruption, aerosol reduction effects, and regional amplification. We are not just entering a warmer world, we are entering a more unstable one.
Knock-on effects are the real ongoing crisis, the danger is not only heat, it is cascading system failure:
food production under stress
rising prices and political instability
insurance withdrawal from entire regions
economic shocks from simultaneous disasters
infrastructure collapse under compounding extremes
This will obviously trigger the most severe global financial instability in modern history. And then there are the wildcard risks – #WAMOC weakening or collapse, Amazon dieback leading to abrupt regional climate shifts. It is not just science fiction, they are known systemic risks inside a destabilising ecological earth system.
One thing we need to talk about and be more clear on is #climatechaos is #classwar. This mess is not experienced equally, the rich (most of the #nastyfew) up to a point when they die of old age can adapt individually, with industrial air conditioning, private infrastructure, relocation options to second homes in safer climates. While everyone else absorbs the breakdown of overheated housing, unsafe work conditions, failing public services and the resulting rising costs of survival.
This is why #climatechaos is also a strong class issue, the crisis is not just physical, it is political due to the visible distribution of risk and protection. After ten years of warnings, many of us were already naming this:
At the time it was still framed as prediction, now it is reality. The uncomfortable truth is not that we were wrong, it is that nothing meaningful was done at scale. One thing we have learned, that we understand more clearly now is it is not an information problem, it’s a systems’ problem.
Extraction-based economies cannot easily respond to limits
Attention-based media cannot communicate slow crisis
Electoral politics cannot act on long time horizons
So the system produces delay, distraction, and denial even as conditions worsen. There is a strong role of the #dotcons in this mess as the big social media platforms have intensify this failure. They spent the last ten year optimise for outrage, fragmentation, consumption and finally forgetting. Crisis becomes a series of disconnected moments rather than a shared progressive long-term struggle. Each event resets attention to zero, memory does not accumulate. This is not an accident – it is structural.
Why #4opens matters now, becomes more important, not less, this is not the normal #mainstreaming liberal ideology. It is #KISS basic resilience infrastructure, as surviving #climatechaos requires collective intelligence that can persist across time, crises, and institutional failure, we need tecnolagy like the #OMN that can help medate this:
Closed systems concentrate control.
Open systems distribute survival capacity.
But under all this the missing layer is meaning, one of the biggest underestimates from the last decade is psychological – people are not only resisting facts, they are defending meaning – belief in control, belief in technological rescue, belief in stability returning. But these #mainstreaming stories no longer match reality, but this denial persists, not because people don’t know, but because they cannot yet replace the blinded liberal stories. This is where change actually happens,not just information, but shared meaning and practice.
What changes now? Ten years ago the message was, stop feeding the system causing the crisis, now the message is build the systems that can survive what is already here. That means:
The point is not purity of language, its growing commons of action and hashtags are a tool for this.
As we see today, we are not approaching #climatechaos, we are inside it. The urgent question now is whether we can build systems – social, technical, and cultural – that can function while it unfolds or we keep letting things fail.
That is the #OMN challenge, and it is already overdue.
Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.
The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.
The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.
So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.
But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.
The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.
The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.
The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.
The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.
The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”
The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.
The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.
The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.
From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.
But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.
The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.
Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.
The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.
The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.
If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.
