Q. I am looking for the definition of open standards, and it’s quite foggy. I found on opensource.com something useful, but it’s still a candle in the dark
A. it’s an under resourced process for the #openweb that need input. It’s at the heart of the #OMN project. How we define it at the #OMN is a standard produced with #4opens process which is a bit circler as open “industrial” standards is one of the #4opens 🙂
All “standards” are social agreements/consensuses thus they CANT BE built form #geekproblem#stupidindividualism and the #deathcult we have wasted and will waste more time if we keep pushing this shit.
The idea of the #OMN is that it does NOT host any/meany of projects it incubates rather it is the “holder” of the standards that glues the projects together. Some of these will be “standards body” some will be defacto by use and consensus. In the end we need to look beyond #nothingnew and create new standards #4opens body’s – go slow on this as concessions are hard and only worthwhile if you do the hard work to achieve them.
Q. Still trying to fix permissions issue for peertube why is there always some piddly little issue (that will likely eventually have an easy fix)
A. Over complexity is fixed by trust and #KISS the problems we face now are complexity built on top of complexity. This is largely pushed by ‘security’ which is a direct result of the failure of ‘trust’. To mediate this we need to balance this, it’s the core process of the #OMN and were the social value grows.
Our instincts are #deathcult we build tools to serve “the is no such thing as society only individuals and their families” everything to do with social tech pushes this. These “piddling little issues” are the need for TOTAL control that comes from this world view. Thinking about it, it’s a theology as ideology tend to be.
Trust or fear is left/right or open/closed or life/death. Today everything is the second… tomorrow if we are to live we need to balance the first/second.
The problem of academics covering activism, particularly within grassroots movements like #Indymedia, is the significant disconnect between academic interpretations and the realities on the ground. This gap is not a matter of perspective but represents a fundamental systematic misunderstanding of the dynamics and operational mechanisms of activist movements.
The disconnect is that academics gravitate towards more visible and vocal members of activist circles, the #fashernistas. These are, often, passionate and articulate, but are not in any way the people making the movement’s wheels turn. The core of activism, the real work, is carried out by those who are too busy to engage with academia because they are immersed in the day-to-day efforts of driving change.
The history of the Indymedia project is a case in point. Indymedia was a pioneering effort in the early 2000s to create an open publishing platform for grassroots journalists. Its story is a rich tapestry of collaboration, innovation, and relentless dedication. However, much of the academic writing on Indymedia misses the mark, focusing instead on surface-level narratives. For a deeper understanding of the Indymedia project’s history from someone who was actively involved, you can read my activism stories.
Academia push analyses that are often removed from the practical realities of activism. The theoretical frameworks and methodologies used serve more to fulfil academic desires for publication and recognition than to provide a faithful representation of activist efforts. This creates a body of work that can be described as “wish-fulfilling #fashernista wank,” offering little insight into the actual functioning of the movements they are supposed to be covering.
The consequences of this misrepresentation are significant. Historical records, influenced heavily by academic accounts, paint an inaccurate picture of how movements operated and succeeded. This not only distorts the past but also impacts future activists who look to these records for guidance and inspiration. The narratives crafted by academics sideline the contributions of the true workhorses of the movement, leading to a strongly skewed and broken understanding of what is effective in activism.
To bridge this gap, we need academics to engage more deeply with the core activists, those whose hands are dirty from the work of making change happen. This requires a shift from seeking out the most vocal and visible to those who are often unseen but indispensable. Additionally, activists themselves must recognize the importance of documenting their efforts and experiences, ensuring that future narratives reflect the true spirit and mechanics of their movements.
There is a #OMN project for this #makeinghistory, which matters as we do need more authentic dialogue between academics and activists, to build a more accurate and useful body of knowledge that actually honours and reflects the efforts of those who actually are driving change.
A Q&A on this:
Q. I wish the hacker culture connection to anarchism was more thorough and consistent. It looks a lot more like privileged fuckery and pet insurrections. It could be that the academic scene wasn’t representative of the movement as a whole
In my view, if people want the truth, a good place to start a project like this would be to look through the #indymedia email archives for an “original” anarchist workflow. I would not take much notice of the “official” history’s of indymedia as they are full of academic wank. The theoretical analysis of the time is all pushing agenders that ripped the project apart and killed it – while it is interesting to see this nasty process, but it’s much less useful as exacting history of what actually happened. The whole internal process is saved in open email lists now hosted on archive.org no other anarchist project is this well documented.
Best not to add to the activist “mannerism” in our shared history, it’s really bad all ready. That is if we are to have hope for “anarchism” fluffy and spiky playing a role in saving a humane/ecological world we need.
I have found memories of fighting the Power Politics of the “undead left” during the London Social Forum many years ago – lots of knotted strings of organic garlic around the top “taking the power table” to highlight the uncomfortable “undead left´s” grasping for power.
Then the ad hock crew taking away the top table altogether during the lunch break and arranging all the chairs in a circle. Their faces were a delight, coming back after lunch and it kinda/might have worked… but the splits of “not thought of here” took over and the undead were permissioned to take back the space at the next meeting.
The ESF movement faded and now is a shadow – no alt was built.
The use of cultural myths and traditions will mediate and disempower “power politics” but it’s a chicken and an egg to get these embedded in groups that are already ensnared in “power politics”.
The rainbow gatherings used to work this way till they were “disrupted” by the digital shift and capture by the #dotcons now the gatherings themselves are broken due in part by being organized through #failbook
The #OMN could fail from the same issue. The myths and traditions are in place PGA and #4opens. But the project does not have deep roots to weather the inrush of success. And on the other hand will likely not last the slow growth needed for the roots to dig deep.
In activism when you have a shitty stinky process situation due to control freekery. You have two options:
Open
Closed
If its a open process project, the closing things down and hiding the crapness/mess will not help at all. The stink will leak out of every bit of the project from relations of core personals to the compromises involved in every piece of design/interaction during the project. This “low” misama might not to be immediately visible but it will cling to everything the project touches.
Open projects become dysfunctional when controlled by closed process, this is a feedback loop that this dysfunction is solved by more closed working/thinking till you are running a closed project.
If it’s a closed to start with then kick the people out – information can be controlled – power kept – and agendas pushed through till the funding runs out or people lose wider goodwill. Opening up a closed project without a revolutionary explosion is nearly impossible – all the repressed and hidden crapness that is needed to keep a closed project going will feed on itself when let loose.
Almost all NGO and activist groups are a mixture of open/closed.
The NGO´s falsify openness in consultations and meaningless focus groups. But always work closed at the core to continue funding and careers of the benefiting group – those who control the closed – not the community the NGO is setup to serve.
Activist by their nature tend to start out open then grow closed as they grow bigger – it’s a human scale thing. Interestingly affinity group organizing is trust based and another subject.
Hopefully we get an idea for the “dogma” of open and the clear rejection of “closed”.
Almost everything built in alt-radical tech ends up feeding pointless #fashernista churn. New platforms, new protocols, new branding, new codebases tend to be endless motion with very little grounding in actual social need. People mistake novelty for progress, and the result is a constant cycle of abandoned projects, burnt-out developers, and fragmented communities.
That’s one of the reasons why #indymediaback matters. It is not another pointless radical tech project chasing fashion. It grows from the #nothingnew path, building around things that already worked socially, culturally, and politically before the current mess swallowed the #openweb.
The point of #nothingnew is not nostalgia, it’s mediation. Instead of endlessly reinventing tools and social structures, we look at existing working practices and compost the failures while keeping the value that already exists, we build from continuity rather than disruption.
For the first 5 years of the #fediverse, this often means creating #openweb replacements for existing #dotcons platforms. That has value, people need usable alternatives to corporate systems, but simply copying the logic of the dotcons into federated code has real limits.
Code is never neutral, all code carries embedded assumptions, social relations, and ideology. When we directly replicate #dotcons platforms, we import the values of the #deathcult along with the interface design. Metrics, branding, influence economies, performative identities, engagement addiction, soft/hard hierarchies – all this gets reproduced inside supposedly “alternative” spaces.
This is where the problem needs mediating rather than denying. The path of #indymediaback is different because it starts from an existing radical social process, not from abstract tech blindness. #indymedia already had working publishing flows, distributed trust networks, collective moderation practices, and real-world activist communities. The technology existed to support those social relations, not replace them.
That means the real value of #indymediaback is not primarily the tech stack, even though the tech matters. The value is in rebuilding the social continuity that made the original project meaningful. Without that grounding, you likely just produce another empty platform that disappears into the pile of forgotten radical tech experiments.
Food for thought: the #geekproblem is often not actually interested in the #openweb as a human value network. Instead, parts of geek culture feed parasitically off the current mess – thriving on fragmentation, novelty churn, status games, and technical abstraction disconnected from lived social reality.
Feeding off the collapse of the #openweb while calling it innovation is still bowing down to the #deathcult. Seen this way, the need for change becomes clearer, that we need active mediation, not passive drift. Both carrot and stick. Support grounded projects that grow from real communities, and challenge the pointless churn that keeps draining energy away from building durable alternatives.
The #OMN is one attempt at this – a shovel for composting the inhuman mess, so something living can grow from it.
We have a #activertypub codebase ready for testing, we have two campanes that asked for instances. We have stable hosting paid up for the next few years.
What we don’t have is any on the ground outreach/training/networking due the covide shutdown. We have limited tech dev needed to update the code from user feedback as a part of the roll out.
With this level of commitment we would be in danger of taking focus away from their current #dotcons outreach and taking up energy rather than helping with good outcomes for the campanes.
Just about all tech and political projects are pointless “A river that needs crossing political and tech – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over complexity”
A solution to this churning is “nothing new” as most of the issues we face have already been solved or at least mediated. #nothingnew and #4opens is a way of stepping away from the current tech mess. The politics is a bit more complex.
What is not pointless is an interesting challenge for tech and politics. To start this conversation, you HAVE to use the #4opens to remove 99.9% of the #dotcons#NGO and #fashernista fluff.
The is NO conversation before you do this. When this is done you need to look at the #geekproblem, which is both a curse and a delight.
The #OMN is built from the experience of 30 years of working at the coal face of grassroots media and tech, its a path people can take to start the composting.
A. we all worship the #deathcult (neo-liberalism) in polatics, economics, most of the food we eat, our jobs and social lives are all mediated/mostly created by this invisible world-view. In progressive terms #mainstreaming is pushing this agender to build carriears and social structures to further the personal #stupidindividualism created by the #deathcult we live in. This is a circle that is going to kill and displace billions of people over the next 100 years from #climatechaos and the social feedback loop of political #fascism
#stupidindividualism is created by the social disintegration of the last 40 years of neo-liberalism, fascism is an outcome of this.
Examples from the UK groups @NovaraMedia while producing fab content its all distributed through the #dotcons and in the end they aspire to be the new @guardian to take the role of #traditionalmedia This is fair anufe but the wider “we” need to balance this with #grassroots media which is a non #mainstreaming mission.
I played a role in training thousands of grassroots “journalists” over the last 25 years at #undercurrents, #indymedia, #visionontv and now #OMN the majority that are still creating media went onto build there carriears in the mainstream and #NGO sectors few stayed in non #mainstreaming production missions. Cant blame them for this, though no alts were sustained from this which was why we did the training.
In each case grassroots/alt structures were devoured by the #deathcult pushing the need for mainstreaming survival – cant blame people for this.
BUT we need a working alternative if we are going to change the world that does not kill and displace billions of people over the next 100 years #XR
learning for expirence the #OMN is a political/tech tool to mediate this issue.
I think it is time to talk about giving up our desire for total control and moving to thinking about the world as flows rather than static. Our illusionary “static” individualism is a mental illness that makes us powerless to resist the displacement and death of billions of us over the next 100 years due to fascism/ #climatechaos forcefully rebalancing the human/natural world.
Static view is “individualism” its all about you as a selfish mythical island.
Flow view is “social” is all about you embedded in the flow of social/ecological realty.
You need “power” to urgently rebalance these views, social tech is a good step to this “power”. The #OMN project is a clever useful humane project to push balance back into the current #deathcult flow. For the religious crew this is a #lifecult for the humanistic its just the right thing to do.
With the#OMN building progressive alt tech we cannot repeat the behaver of the #dotcons as it’s a different environment, we need different amenders.
“The security context is the relationships between a security referent and its environment. From this perspective, security and insecurity depend first on whether the environment is beneficial or hostile to the referent, and also how capable is the referent of responding to its/their environment in order to survive and thrive.”
Approaches to security are subject of debate.
For example, some argue that security depends on developing protective and coercive capabilities in order to protect the security referent in a hostile environment (and potentially to project that power into its environment, and dominate it to the point of supremacy). The #geekproblem strives for this outcome without putting it into words.
The #OMN argue that security depends principally on building the conditions in which equitable relationships can develop, partly by reducing antagonism between actors, ensuring that fundamental needs can be met, and also that differences of interest can be negotiated effectively.
Some traditional view of security
* Access control – the selective restriction of access to a place or other resource.
* Authorization – the function of specifying access rights/privileges to resources related to information security and computer security in general and to access control in particular.
* Countermeasure – a means of preventing an act or system from having its intended effect.
* Defense in depth – a school of thought holding that a wider range of security measures will enhance security.
* Identity management – enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times and for the right reasons.
* Resilience – the degree to which a person, community, nation or system is able to resist adverse external forces.
* Risk – a possible event which could lead to damage, harm, or loss.
* Security management – identification of an organization’s assets (including people, buildings, machines, systems and information assets), followed by the development, documentation, and implementation of policies and procedures for protecting these assets.
* Threat – a potential source of harm.
* Vulnerability – the degree to which something may be changed (usually in an unwanted manner) by external forces.
If we are building projects for progressive ends, we need to balance the conservatism in these ideas with #4opens approaches, this is a little understood simple path.
The #OMN is based on “nothing new” as a core project process. Though we do describe things in different ways than they are normally described, we use everyday metaphors for the language of computing and coding where necessary, we use nature metaphors where possible.
We have lived in a deeply damaging era for the last 40 years in economics we have neo-liberalism (metaphor #deathcult) in thinking and education post-modernism these two have created many bad effects (metaphors #geekproblem#encryptionist#stupidindividualism#dotcons#fashernista etc) that have shaped how people act and think, we have internalised these post-truth into normal everyday worldviews. These are going to undermine our cultures, society, and most impotently destroy our ecology (metaphor #XR)
We change the language to brake out of this “normal” world-view to build an opening for people to see a different view (also am dyslexic and can only think by making up ideas so its a good fit for me). The current “normal” thinking and expressions are too damaged to be of much use in real social change.
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.
