Tag: OMN

On every measurable indicator, Bitcoin has been a failure

From the #openweb

If I look at the metric of “is the banking system gone yet?” I notice that indeed, no, Bitcoin has not made even a ding in the banking system. The same crooks are running the same old international scams, politicians are still stuffing their ill-gotten cash in offshore accounts, and Bitcoin has made no difference.

I can also look at the independent variable of “are people spending bitcoins on stuff they actually need?”, and indeed again no, nobody around here uses bitcoins, or accepts bitcoins as payment for goods or services.

The energy consumption of Bitcoin exceeds that of the Netherlands (https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons) in this Bitcoin is clearly a crime against our habitat and a crime against humanity.

Bitcoin is not a “net positive for the globe” it set out to disintermediate the banking system, it failed. What it produced was a horrendously inefficient energy-guzzling monstrosity, which only really empowers people who already had a lot of money in the economy prior to Bitcoin’s invention. The usual suspects got richer out of Bitcoin and the banking system wasn’t obsoleted by it.

So on every measurable indicator, Bitcoin has been a failure.

My thought. Bitcoin is the ‘#geekproblem solution to the worship of money, its a meto project. The #geekproblem has meany sins of which the #encryptionist project has been a destructive one for the last 10 years. It is inhuman to make mashion into gods. The smile, trust, a helping hand are the currency of life. The fundamentalist money worship of the last 40 years is going to kill billions of us #XR

We need to start to shovelling this shit, not worship it #OMN is a shovel, compost is the bases of life.

A conversation on #OMN issues around metadata

* Capitalism wants to privatise metadata to the #dotcons and the capitalist then control the government – fascism is back into fashion.

* Chinese communism, wants the state to control the metadata, so they can control capitalism, we are back to the command economy just digitised.

* Liberalism want to privatise metadata to the individual to return to a mythic free-market past, a better outcome than the first two but clearly not the one we are building with the #OMN

* What does anarchism want #OMN is an attempt to answer this last one.

https://wp.me/p9Vw7k-oA

CB. My thinking here is that Anarchism wants the social conditions for free association. The implication for metadata is autonomy over how that’s shared and used

HC. Am thinking about power. Metadata has power in aggregation so bad power is about hoarding the aggregation to use for your power agenders. Good power has to be a diffrent outcome.

CB. So fragmentation of metadata (decentralized storage and tactical use of aliases) is a way to defeat accumulation of power through accumulation of metadata. An interesting quality of power is that it is relative, rather than absolute. So an entity doesn’t have power *over* you unless it has more power to wield constructively relevant to the situation.

HC. ‎in the #OMN we are using metadata to replace the market – the only interesteing question is who has the aggregated metadata power. The capitalists, The state or the Commons – if we divide and privatise the metadata we have nothing to replace the market with. Its all about building a post capitalist economy. We need to replace the “free-market” and it’s police man with a commons and its community – the metadata replaceing the “invisible hand” with visible knowledge in commons.

CB. Here’s a thought about how a knowledge economy works that may be relevant to the metadata issue. You have transparency and trust building at the local level.

HC. We using social/tech to replace capitalism, not just do social networking the is a VERY political project that is soft/strongly ant-capitalist. Yep the #OMN is a trust based network of flows (community/subjects/people). We do need a good explanation of the political nature of the project, but also do not wont to terrify the NGO crew, tread softly. Thinking about this, we are pro “power” just wont to horizontalize it. Were meany people, asperly #geekproblem are against power and wont to minermise it (while having total power of there code).

CB. For a press release? “It’s about promoting individual and community autonomy”. For me, the #geekproblem is trying *too* hard to have a perfect system, a way that the bad thing never happens.

HC. Yes but that’s unbalanced, and rebalancing individualism/community in a world of neo-liberal individualism…

CB. That’s unrealistic. You want to make the bad things selected against statistically. Emphasizing autonomy (including community autonomy) is transient.

HC. being less human – its the blemishes were buty lie and its the users saying your code is unusable that make it better etc. if you don’t have any users you can do any code you like – almost all open-source projects are built this way.

CB. We have situations that are unbalanced currently, and the way to achieve balance involves building force in opposition to the current power.

HC. Autonomy comes for stable/trust based society – not from isolated (control) individuals – but yes we talk about the same thing just different processes.

CB. Yeah, I phrased our shared value “for a press release” and you said that’s “neo-liberal individualism”. Well, yeah. 😀 But it introduces the idea of community autonomy, which isn’t quite anarchy ready, either, but it’s a step towards free association and away from thinking about autonomy as strictly an individual value, which is my *estimation* of the most that words can accomplish tactically in that situation.

HC. OK “community autonomy”… am trying to expand my whole composting metaphor to cover this stuff, shovels.

CB. There’s shovels, spades, pitchforks, and dung forks. You can do everything with a shovel, but your back will thank you if you don’t. Either way, it’s the worms who do all the heavy lifting. I’ve been tackling the metadata issue with a friend doing some tech work for a Native American resistamce movement, and who’s very interested in making dirt. The most important aspect of metadata for em (pronoun) is being able to reliably communicate intent. It’s not sufficient or practical to say who should read it and who shouldn’t. There’s aspects of communicating approach to the topic and assumptions about sharing and replying that social networking, including Activity Pub, doesn’t address. These are communicated by a language like Lakota in introductions and closing on speeches, like formal practices in business correspondence.

HC. What do you think about replacing capitalisms free-market with a metadata “commons” as the free market is based on selfishness and access to exclusive knowledge, were the data commons is based on sharing the “open” knowledge for “community” ends. Both are based on “invisible hands” just one is human fucking each other over for a mythical good outcome and the other is more “democratic/diversity” that word “community autonomy” 🙂

CB. The most important aspect of metadata for em (pronoun) is being able to reliably communicate intent for both individual and social communication and trade. I do agree with that. I’m also working with some old school coop-style communists on adapting economic vocabulary to Activity Pub. It’s not sufficient or practical to say who should read it and who shouldn’t. There’s aspects of communicating approach to the topic and assumptions about sharing and replying that social networking, including Activity Pub, doesn’t address

HC. We are purposely not doing social networking for the #OMN only news and archiving as it has a much less privacy issues. News is done in the open/trust by default and sources are protected when needed. And archiving is history, you can choices to add information or not.

CB. And, assuming that you’re talking about locally generated data being propagated through networks of relationships (as opposed to being global by default), then you have a situation where parties local to one another can reliably leverage the advantages of openness, without centralized accumulations of metadata for fascists (or capital) to capture and leverage to exert control. That’s economic activity, which also has differences as well as similarities relative to OMN

HC. Its open data and open license by default so the enemy can take all the metadata by working there way into the syteam. We don’t recommend doing anything hardcore in #OMN or online in any way. The project is about assuming the world CAN change then building in that direction.

CB. But the general shape is that metadata linkage is unavoidable (geek problem), metadata accumulation is undesirable (capital), “metadata is evil” lacks necessary nuance, and communication of metadata is a necessary part of the model and likely a certain amount of verification.

HC. The whole project is built by adding a metadata tail which you can queryed to build trust and serendipity as well as organize in an affective way. You would be right to point out it has NO power to resist the repression of the state if they turn fascist. Though its is a fabulous tool set to build a tool to have power against the state if that happens. So its a race of human creativity vs the “invisible hand” backed up by police with rubber truncheons… the key word is race, if push comes to shove.

CB. Authenticity of metadata in that case is primarily establish through the trust network. It’s hard to corrupt metadata *if* you get a lot of copies distributed quickly.

HC. Metadata is going to happen no matter what you do, to think the geeks can solve this is a fantasy. The ONLY question is who controls this open/closed. Some basic certification to each addition to the tail based on user accounts. The are lots of widely used standards based ways of doing this.

CB. For the example of a state actor trying to control the narrative…. there’s maths to describe the circumstances under which that can occur. And situations where you’re distributing stories to 3 or more peers look bad for the state if they don’t shut it down in the first 2 generations.

HC. Then as you say use this “trust network” to quray the tail. For example how meany people do i know who trust this adition to the tail. You can do the same to get an idea if the tail is trusted over all ect. But the question has to be asked who let the state actor into the trust network… they lose lots of trust (links/flows) etc then rerun the query and you are back to trust. Its all lossy, but this is a how trust works. In this we get away from the #geekproblem ideas of trust.

CB. For the state to suppress a story, they need to identify the source then trace known associates (metadata) to shut down those repeating it. If police don’t discover the story until there are 10+ stations replicating it, that’s not likely to happen.

HC. The network is built up of trusted actors – how dose the state have a voice inside this grassroots level project.

CB. So policing involvement *after* the story breaks is unlikely to be effective in suppression, which is what you want

HC. Yep you are talking strong AI based state manipulations- we don’t have a defence against that.

CB. You actually have the best defence possible.

HC. Yep it will spread widely across the bottom in uncontrollably directions after the first few jumps the is practically no censorship with out visible repression then non effective then as it will bubble back up from the darkweb.

CB. Even if police infiltrate a peer to an activist cell, they still don’t necessarily have enough knowledge to prevent replication through other peers.

HC. But they can pre-empt and kick you door down based on metadata… will happen. We have sudo-anonimerty to mediate this issue. Somebody would have to trust your account with no tail… then the police kick there door down…. Notice the us an escalating level of door kicking.

CB. Takes time to knock down doors, even electronically. With every door they knock down, there’s 3 times as many doors as there were before – potentially. Then you’re crossing lines in jurisdictions and there’s no putting a cork in that

HC. In this it will be censorship resistant. But we make no #geekproblem lies that the “security of the network” will protect you. But you can protect yourself by sudo anonymity and the use of tor. And whispering in the forest to your friends to share the content from the sudo anonymous account. In this way we move security from hard to soft. From #encryptionists to social trust.

CB. Right. Making the network less efficient by routing it over Tor or otherwise requiring cryptography defeats the plan.

HC. Yep, this removes the tail so no trust, no community, no social change. But how to persuade paranoid activists and control freak geeks that having your door kicked sown is socially useful 😉 Also the is no way to root the media objects, no need for federation, no need for community. With one to one encryption you just have isolated individuals and no media

CB. Crypto solutions are fine for first hop in highly sensitive situations, but once you hit a peer that’s outside of your opsec control, infosec is a moot point and you need to go for speed.

HC. Mixed with trust.

CB. I may have overstated “speed”, but yeah. Reasonable assumptions of trust. You only need absolute assurances in specific situations (that you are better off trying to avoid)

HC. With the #OMN we do both the open and the closed path. But we change the balance to 80% open and 20% closed. Yep, best whisper in the forest, second best use the p2p encryption tools in the 20%

CB. That’s a ratio that pops up a lot in various contexts and I agree with it here.

What does anarchism want #4opens #OMN is an attempt to find an answer

 Q. “We’re supposed to think of #metadata as less than #data, but it isn’t: often it is more. . .#govts that want to control their people & crush #dissent want #metadata.” #privacy #Whatsapp #BigTech

This is an interesting point, but it only makes sense if you see people as isolated individuals and the being no such thing as society. No alternative to the capitalistic free markets and no hope of changing the death spiral we are on – you might be right. BUT this is a deeply reactionary #deathcult point of view and need to be called out as such – LOUDLY.

For the last 10 years we have had a movement to banish metadata on one side and to hoard it on the other. To banish our humanity or to control our humanity. Nowhere is the celebration of humanity to be found… it’s pastime to put our feet back onto the ground and think about this for a moment. Metadata, data about data is what gives humanity its power in both an individualist sense and at a social scale.

One thing we know for sure is that ideas about privacy change, in the feudal era the village priest know everything and policed everyone, the king had sex in front of the counters to prove his line etc. The current capitalist idea of privacy which we all internalise is set to change, what it becomes we do not know.

What is the free-market? it’s a signalling device based on knowledge of metadata. For people who know little about the “free-market” is a flow of horde metadata as is “money”. In meany ways you are made up of metadata, the words that come out of your mouth are the made up names of things, likely the “things” are made up from words handed down through the ages. When you look at it all HUMAN civilization is a flow of metadata.

If we are to have meaningful social change – let’s look at anarchism as an example. How will we replace the “free-market” where will the signals come from to distribute the goods in complex society? And yes we might end up with “simple society” by killing billions of people from #climatechaos that’s true, but that’s a different subject.

Q. Metadata is the currency of surveillance capitalism. Traded as behavioural futures, and used by the military to perform situational spectroscopy upon whole nations. We can try to minimize metadata, but it’s always a tricky problem. When we generate metadata we hand cash to the likes of Google, who call it “behavioural surplus”. And to shadier organisations to use it for disruption and control. In the past there were entire academic conferences about using social media metadata to prevent “contagion” – by which they meant social movements opposing autocratic governments.

Am not in any way disagreeing with the above, I am pointing out that it is actually not the agender you think it is… raising the question of which side are you on. If nothing changes then you are right, but if nothing changes we end up with billions of people dyeing from #climatechaos and the state control/fascism that comes with this. As I outline this is a #geekproblem world view that of only thinking of tech and not social – hope I can help to balance this.

This is a #geekproblem

We HAVE TO CHANGE we can’t keep doing this same old shit. Privatizing metadata for a tiny number of geeks is not a social change project. Cant put this any simpler.

Q. This goes back over a decade to the “Freedom in the cloud” talk. What if internet users were to run their own services, and keep the logs (metadata) ? Simply moving the logs from Goog and Zuck to the users would be one of the biggest improvements to the internet. It would pull the rug out from under their business model.

That’s the plan with the #OMN and we go further (but only if the users/producers flick the switches) we have an expanding metadata commons that has two powers – one negative in that it destroys the business model of late capitalism one positive that it expands commons that gives us growing space for creativity and expression.

Summing up the choice we face:

* Capitalism wants to privatise metadata to the capitalists #dotcons and the capitalist then control the government – fascism is back into fashion.

* Chinese communism, wants the state to control the metadata so they can control capitalism, we are back to the command economy on steroids.

* Liberalism want to privatise metadata to the individual to return to a mythic free-market past.

* What does anarchism want #4opens #OMN is an attempt to answer this last one.

To recap I understand our current push for privacy from the #dotcons BUT am asking what are we to replace this with? The closing/privatizing of metadata to individuals ” is a deeply reactionary #deathcult point of view and need to be called out as such – LOUDLY!”

Ideas?

The senate “insurrection” and the media

We are seeing a stinking mess of shit posting from the left and the right on the role of tech big and small in the senate “insurrection” . The voice of the centre right #traditionalmedia will push us back to the #dotcons gatekeepers they have started to criticized over the last 10 years.

The opening we have is this mess is, light, transparency building trust. What we do not have is darkness building fear as an option. In the battle of open/closed the sides to fight on are far from obvious on the surface – we have a tool the to lift the lid, and we have a shovel to shift the shit to the compost heap #OMN

We need you, the crew, to build this out to change the world for the better.

https://unite.openworlds.info/explore/organizations

The #openweb is a space for both progressives and reactionary groups

One thing we need to address now in a constructive way is that the right-wing has been better about co-operating around #openweb media than the left-wing for the last 10 years. We have been worse than useless on simple things like linking between radical media projects. The few successfully left media groups have abandoned alt tech solutions and built careers inside the #dotcons

Where we progressives have seceded, in terms of #openweb, has been outside politics and more in lifestyle subcultures with mastodon and the fedivers, these tools have been political natural and focused on privacy. We start to see the use of these tools for radical and progressive agenders with #visionontv and #indymediaback with the radical anarchism of #kolektiva and the #openweb framework of #OMN

With the #mainstreaming move away from the #dotcons we will see more activity in this area from both progressives and reactionary groups – make your voice heard – its pastime for you to #stepback to the #openweb

https://activism.openworlds.info

Seeing were the problem is and acting on it.

What we are pushing at the #OMN is x10 to hard for normal people to use. When we outreach meany people come aboard to try and push onto the project 10x harder to use tools than what we push – this is the #geekproblem expecting people to user tools that are x100 times harder to use than the tools the #dotcons offer them for “free”

This destructive behaver has to stop.To have hope of a #openweb reboot., lets try and be human as we have piles of shit to shovel all ready without adding more.

We need more crew to make this rollout work

If you would like to help with moving away from this current world/media mess please create an account: https://unite.openworlds.info this is the organizing space, yes this is to complex and needs to be made simpler and more #KISS but for now it’s what we have and works fine. Have a read through the issues and wikis on each #openweb project.
Then we need constant (polite) feedback on this thread to make the current site more useable for normal people https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/epicyon/issues/17
We have a public chat room here where you can get to know the crew and talk about the projects. Yes we know its complex, but agen it does work – here is a “easy” link for android phones https://conversations.im/j/indymediaback@conference.chat.openworlds.info or you will have to be geeky/ask for help and work it out from here: indymediaback@conference.chat.openworlds.info for other platforms.
Sorry about this it’s the #geekproblem that we are working to mediate and with your participation we CAN build useable tools.
If you feel you cannot help with tech/user side then you can support the core project with money here https://opencollective.com or if you don’t have money (we all understand) turn up and make tea at your local protest camp to talk about the #indymediaback #OMN project.
Let’s take a step way from this mess, pickup shovels #OMN and compost this shit pile https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/indymedia-reboot/issues/15

The current mess and the media

You all built the #dotcons that gave him the power… phww… please try to do better next #indymediaback

Q. The far right have mastered the internet for recruitment and disinformation, the rest of us are barely in the game, would a completely regulation free internet not benefit them and lead to fascism? If so, how should regulation work to stop them?

A. that’s a good question, that the is no easy answer too. Most liberal regulation of the internet are clearly disastrous so this is a bad direction to push. This leaves us only one option to do a better job ourselves. This is currently the only real option we have available #indymediaback #omn

Of course, we have to shovel a pile of post-modern, liberal careerist shit out the way to make room for this radical/ progressive #openweb media. I look around and mostly see “our” media adding to the stinking shit pile we need to compost. Our first step is away from our own mess #OMN

Q. Lies travel faster than the truth, the far right understand that and exploit it without conscience. Without moderation, I cannot see how to combat it

A. Pessimism travels faster than optimism, but only optimism has any hope of creating the change we need. Feed the problem or solve the problem, the is no “third way”

We need more crew to make this rollout work https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/indymedia-reboot/issues/15

The nutters in “power” need challenging, where is this challenge coming from?

What we are seeing here is an absolute failure of our liberals. In both America with the right-wing nutters and British virus plague.

The nutters in “power” need challenging, where is this challenge coming from?

The right and the centre are useless for any nice outcome. The left are missing as an option. The is a pile of social shit, we need shovels and compost heaps to clear this mess #OMN

 

Next step in the #OMN

The majority of #mainstreaming #openweb tech projects have the assumption that human nature is a fixed thing and that every project has to be built in reaction to the 40 years of neo-liberal #deathcult that we all live in now as this is the “only” human nature visible. They completely miss/ignorer the social nature of people in groups in this look back at the 20th century, and we have clearly different views of human nature as examples to build society. Call it social democracy, call it communism, call it what you like. We DO NOT have to build tools in relation to the #deathcult, and we clearly should not base “hope” on tools that are built in this relation.

Mastodon, activertypub and the fedivers took a small #stepaway from this mess. The #OMN takes the next step away. For the rest #compost and #shovels come to mind.

The #OMN is a simple #KISS social tech project.

All these projects work off the same core code/workflow of tagging and editing metadata.

#Indymediaback is the news part of the project. This is to grow journalism from the grassroots and to make our news mainstream.

#Makinghistory – is the archiving project. This is to preserve and grow our history from the grassroots and make our history mainstream.

#Friendsandfamily – is the social networking project. For family/affernerty groups to move away from the mainstream #dotcons and to nourish the grassroots.

All the projects are and federated.