The political power that Silicon Valley and Big Tech pushed over this election is a real #geekproblem threat, with the #dotcons leveraging technological and financial influence to shape society in ways that benefit the nasty few and undermine basic democratic paths we need to be fallowing to mediate #climatechaos
One path to balance this #mainstreaming mess making is the need for active and healthy critiques of the lack of institutional support for #openweb projects and paths that focus on humanistic alternatives to these Big Tech platforms. The problem we need to challange is that organizations theoretically supportive of democratic values, such as #NLNet and #NGI, sideline core “native” paths in tech as “too radical”, instead favouring safe narrow #geekproblem and #NGO tech paths which we know do not work. This is frustrating, and with the increasing authoritarianism spreading worldwide, it’s a part of the #deathcult we all worship.
The “geekproblem” in tech is about challenges arising from the culture and mindset within technical communities, particularly around developers and engineers. It is associated with an overemphasis on technical solutions, insularity, and a tendency to prioritize technological efficiency or novelty over broader social and ethical considerations.
Overemphasis on Technical Solutions: People involved in tech prioritize creating or improving technical features while overlooking social impacts or peoples needs. This leads to “solutionism,” where every problem is assumed to have a tech-based answer, neglecting simpler, social, or policy-based solutions.
Insularity and Group Think: The tech world is insular, with tight-knit subcultures that resist input from outside communities and dismiss perspectives that don’t align with technical paths. This leads to narrow solutions and a resistance to the needer wider perspectives, ultimately #blocking the social change and challenge we need.
Focus on Control over Collaboration: Tech communities are often defacto hierarchical, top-down in the paths of design and governance, leading to a “we know best” paths. This often alienates non-technical people and discourages cooperative and participatory input, making it hard to integrate open, community-based governance in to the narrow paths that are imposed.
Ignoring and Dismissing Social Issues: Focused on technical work overlook social issues the tech is supposed to be addressing and solving. By focusing only on engineering, they overlook who has access to the technology, who benefits from it, and what ethical implications it brings, perpetuating the disconnect between technology and the communities it made for.
Resistance to Broadening Perspective: Tech creators actively resist moving beyond their own narrow areas of expertise and interest, they block ideas and initiatives that don’t fit within their immediate understanding, inhibiting growth and the needed experimentation. This resistance limits meaningful progress, community needs, and alternative technologies.
In sum, the #geekproblem stems from a blend of narrow technical focus, resistance to diverse input, and lack of attention to social impact. Addressing it involves building more inclusive, collaborative, and socially aware tech paths that embrace #4opens broader perspectives beyond the purely technical.
In the online spaces I navigate, there’s no shortage of #fashernistas crowding the conversation, diverting focus from the native #openweb paths we urgently need to explore. They take up space and ultimately block more than they build. Then there’s the #geekproblem: while geeks get things done within narrow boundaries, they’re rigidly resistant to veering beyond their lanes, dogmatically shutting down alternatives to the world they’re so fixated on controlling. This produces a lot of #techshit, occasionally innovations, but with more that needs composting than the often limited value they create.
Then there are the workers, many of whom default to the #NGO path. Their motivations lean toward self-interest rather than collective good, masking this in liberal #mainstreaming dressed up as activism. At worst, they’re serving the #deathcult of neoliberalism; at best, they’re upholding the status quo. This chaotic mix dominates alternative culture, as it always has, and the challenge is one of balance. Right now, we have more to compost than we have to plant and build with.
What would a functioning alternative to this current mess in alt paths look like? Well we don’t have to look far as there is a long history of working alt culture, and yes I admit it “works” in messy and sometimes dysfunctional ways, but it works. What can we learn and achieve from taking this path and mating it with modern “native #openweb technology, which over the last five years has managed in part to move away from the #geekproblem with #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse.
Blending the resilience and collective spirit of historical alternative cultures with the new strengths of federated, decentralized tech solutions like ActivityPub and the Fediverse, the path we need to take:
Community-Centric Design: Historically, alternative cultures prioritize more communal, open, and egalitarian paths. The path out of this mess need to be rooted in this ethos, a new alt-tech landscape could leverage federated technology to avoid centralization and corporate control, emphasizing community ownership. The Fediverse, with its decentralized model, embodies this shift, each instance is a unique community with shared norms, which helps to protect against centralized censorship and allows diversity without imposing a single dominant path.
Resilient, Messy, and Organic Growth: A #KISS lesson from traditional alternative spaces is that success doesn’t require perfect order. Alt-culture spaces thrive on a degree of chaos and adaptability, which enables rapid response to new challenges and paths. This messiness aligns with how decentralized systems function: they’re, resilient, while letting communities develop their own norms and structures while remaining connected to a larger network.
Mediating the #Geekproblem: A key challenge in the tech space is overcoming the “problem” geeks, where technical cultures focus narrowly on technical functionality at the expense of accessibility and inclusiveness. ActivityPub and Fediverse have shifted this by prioritizing people-centric design and by being open to non-technical contributions. Integrating more roles from diverse social paths—designers, community, activists—can bridge gaps between tech-focused and community-focused paths.
Using #4opens Principles: The “#4opens” is native to #FOSS philosophy—open data, open source, open process, and open standards—guide this ecosystem. By adopting transparency in governance and development, communities foster trust and accountability. This openness discourages monopolistic behavior, increases collaboration, and enables #KISS accountability.
Sustainable Engagement Over Growth: Unlike the current #dotcons model that focuses on endless growth and engagement metrics, the alternative path prioritizes quality interactions, trust-building, and meaningful contributions. This sustainable engagement path values people’s experience and community health over data extraction and advertising revenue.
Leveraging Federated Technology for Cross-Pollination: ActivityPub has shown that federated systems don’t have to be isolated silos; they can be connected in a openweb of interlinked communities. Just as historical alt-cultures drew strength from diversity and exchange, the Fediverse path allows for collaboration and cross-pollination between communities while maintaining autonomy.
By integrating these native #openweb principles, we create an alt-tech ecosystem that is democratic, inclusive, and resistant to the mess that currently plague #mainstreaming and some alt-tech paths. This hybrid path allows tech to serve communities authentically, fertilising sustainable growth and meaningful, collective agency that we need in this time to counter the mainstream mess.
Governance both horizontal, federated and #FOSS native is a hot subject at the moment. It’s a good time for people to look at this. Over the last 5 years we have been developing the outline of the native Open Governance Body (#OGB) project is an innovative approach for developing native #FOSS governance, grounded in years of on-the-ground organizing and community-oriented technology like the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub protocols. This initiative emerged from a #4opens social process, aiming to create a governance path that is genuinely open, transparent, and collaborative. The project particularly focuses on involving developers who are not only skilled technically but who also prioritize community collaboration and user experience (#UX)—a challenging yet needed requirement for success in a horizontal, scalable tech paths.
The OGB leverages ActivityPub, the protocol powering decentralized social platforms like Mastodon, to create structures that are adaptable to scale horizontally. To make this project happen, we need outreach to finding developers who can operate within a community-first structure. This means finding those with technical skill in FOSS and ActivityPub, but who are also committed to open, horizontal collaboration and can engage constructively with non-technical communities and paths. Often, highly technical projects attract developers who prefer isolated, independent work, so highlighting the collaborative nature of the OGB from the start is important.
For those interested in making a meaningful impact on #openweb governance and who can commit to community-entered development, the #OGB project is a compelling opportunity to be a part of the change and challenge we need.
Reflecting on the last 40 years, it’s clear that the on rushing path toward #climatechaos has been pushed by the entrenchment of corporate power and increasing capital-driven approach to global challenges. This era, the “neoliberal” era, normalized policies that favoured deregulation, privatization, and financialization. This didn’t just allow corporations to thrive; it redefined our social priorities, encouraging a culture of profit overshadowing community and basic environmental welfare. These #deathcult worshippers have permeated public institutions and policies, making it harder for grassroots systemic change to take root.
The liberal majority, typically positioned between activism and power, has been to side with the “#mainstreaming” paths, which, while sometimes not as overtly destructive as corporate power, clearly lack the willingness to disrupt the status quo. These liberals express concern over climate change but favour “market-friendly” reforms that repeatedly fail to challenge or change the root causes of the #climatecrisis. This creates a paradox: despite their environmental concerns, they end up blocking radical changes. On the fluffy side, movements like Extinction Rebellion (#XR) and initiatives like the Open Media Network (#OMN) highlight how pushing this middle ground to support change – not just acknowledge it – is essential for challenging entrenched powers.
The OMN serves as an example of a shift from centralized, profit-driven platforms toward community-based, participatory paths. Unlike platforms that build on capital agendas, the OMN draws from grassroots energy and shared values, allowing it to organically support social goals. This shift is key: if OMN and similar #openweb initiatives grow, they’ll likely reflect their foundation – community engagement and shared purpose – versus the profit-at-all-costs paths.
While the liberal centre currently act as a buffer zone that resists necessary change, supporting projects like OMN can help reshape this middle ground by creating an accessible alternative to #mainstreaming stories and corporate lies. In this sense, belief – especially in sustainable community-driven projects – becomes a tool for social transformation. And belief is crucial; without a sense of possibility, it’s easy for people to fall into cynicism and adopt the fear-based messaging spread by right-wing agendas
The challenge is to compost the “bourgeois struggle” between conflicting nasty interests by promoting grassroots, #4opens paths and projects that focus on cooperation, transparency, and community.
There is a divide in #FOSS between #openculture and #opensource that is becoming more visible and a significant tension is growing, with each movement originating from different perspectives on sharing and collaboration, even though they overlap in the broad mission of making knowledge and technology accessible. You can see this in the AI debates and in grassroots “governance” in the #Fediverse and the issues this brings up as current examples. The differences are in focus and motivation:
Value path: Open Source focuses on the technical, structured development of software, with licences that ensure people can access, modify, and redistribute code. It tends to be practical, driven by the necessity to create robust, community-driven technology.
Open Culture, however, extends beyond software to include media, art, and knowledge. It centres around the idea that cultural paths – art, literature, music, and other media – should be accessible and adaptable by more people. It values knowledge sharing in all forms, encompassing the ethical path that information and culture should be democratized.
Legal frameworks and licences: Open Source relies on licences like GPL, Apache, and MIT licenses that set clear boundaries on how code can be used and ensure that software modifications remain open. This fosters collaboration but also keeps contributions within a strong structured framework.
Open Culture, leans on Creative Commons (CC) licences, which are more flexible in terms of content usage and address a broader range of creative and educational materials. These licences vary widely, allowing authors to shape how much or how little freedom people have to use their contributions, which can lead to different interpretations of “openness.”
#FOSS and Open Source communities are more driven by practical needs and more standardized approach to governance, which function at times as gatekeeping and can be seen as restrictive by Open Culture advocates. There’s often an emphasis on the meritocratic and structured contributions, rather than the more messy cultural paths.
Open Culture communities are more fluid, valuing inclusivity, encouraging contributions from broader groups. This can create tension with Open Source projects that prioritize hard structured paths.
Today, we see this division in action with increasing calls from the Open Culture side for a more inclusive, less restrictive approach. Open Culture argue that #FOSS and Open Source can be too rigid, excluding many types of cultural contributions and voices that don’t fit neatly into software development paths. Conversely, Open Source proponents view Open Culture as lacking in the clear boundaries that have shaped Open Source to work in structured technological development paths.
Bridging the gap: For #openweb projects, addressing this divide to respect a path for both technical standards and the inclusiveness Open Culture calls for. Projects like #OMN and #4opens navigate this divide, building on community-driven networks where technical governance is balanced with cultural openness. We push the building of tools that emphasize accessibility and collaboration – while being technically robust and community-driven to bridge the gap, aligning Open Source rigour with Open Culture’s inclusiveness.
To move forward, both communities benefit from dialogues focused on shared values, finding where their paths complement each other, but with clear strengthens and weakness to both paths. This issue is important as we confront the composting of #techshit and #dotcons and in the wider world the onrushing #climatechaos that all require technological, cultural, and social reshaping to adapt.
“We don’t need to talk about the climate, we don’t need to talk about change. What we need to talk about is power and criminality and evil.”
Lying as a tool for blocking change has become the pervasive issue, especially when people use it to protect the status quo and avoid facing uncomfortable truths. This obstructs the collective efforts needed to talk about problems like #climatechange, social inequality, and the erosion of democratic #openweb communication paths. Tackling this involves a #4opens culture where honesty and accountability are valued, while simultaneously recognizing that some of these distortions stem from deep-rooted personal, social, or economic fears.
Establish clear, collective values around truthfulness: A first step is creating a culture where truth is valued, especially when it challenges the self-interested comfort of those involved. In functioning open networks, communities have shared values, that rewarding honest dialogue and penalizing deceptive behaviour which hinders constructive paths. This transparency can be incentivized by showing how it benefits collective goals over (stupid) individual agendas, aligning values to encourage honesty as a default.
Encourage critical thinking and #KISS media literacy: People lie and distort truth when they lack confidence in understanding complex topics and thus feel pressured to align with dominant easy stories. A culture of media literacy empowers people to spot misinformation, resist manipulative tactics, and feel more comfortable confronting inconvenient truths rather than ignoring or reshaping them for comfort. Equipping people with these skills means fewer incentives to hide or distort facts and paths.
Promote accountability mechanisms: When dishonesty is not held to account, it reinforces a culture where lying is acceptable. To push back at this, transparent accountability culture is helpful, especially in influential sectors such as media, politics, and social organizations. Accountability encourages people, institutions and communities to take responsibility for the information they use and host, helping to establish truthfulness as the norm rather than an exception.
Normalize difficult conversations: Lies are used as a shield to avoid uncomfortable subjects, especially in collective spaces where the potential for friction is high. Encouraging a culture of dialogue, where differing opinions are expressed without retaliation, reduces the need for deception. By creating “active zones” for conversation and providing conflict-resolution traditions, groups address the root issues without resorting to dishonesty.
Use positive reinforcement for transparency: Rather than punishing instances of dishonesty harshly, positive reinforcement can reward honest behaviour, making it a habit. When communities highlight examples where transparency led to better decisions, improved paths, and strengthened trust, it becomes a wider, easier path for more people to take. Celebrating transparency that benefits a project or a social goal helps to erode the perception that lying is needed, necessary or advantageous.
Acknowledge the root causes of lying as a defence mechanism: Often, people lie as a defence against vulnerability, fear of judgment, or loss of control. Recognizing these underlying motivations makes it easier to address them constructively rather than combatively. Providing support, whether through promoting self-awareness, emotional resilience, or ethical decision-making, reduces the pressure people feel to lie as a way of self-protection.
Build grassroots movements focused on integrity: Lastly, seeding grassroots movements that are on the #4opens path, embodying integrity, transparency, and accountability. Small, community-driven groups have the agility and cohesion to establish trust-based paths, which serve as seeds for horizontal scalable wider networks to balance the mess coming from larger, dominating #mainstreaming institutions. By showcasing effective grassroots paths, we influence larger systems and set a precedent that truth is not optional.
In a world where lying undermines genuine change, mediating its pervasive current use requires #4opens strategies that push transparency, mutual respect, and courage. Changing a culture from one where lies are tools of convenience to one where truth is a shared value is core to the change and challenge we need. This will not be easy, but when we can start to close the gap between intentions and actions. This shift of path from lying to truth is the needed #KISS to addressing the complex mess of our time, growing truth, rather than deception, feeds our paths.
Over the last few decades, the web’s evolution has been shaped by competing ideals. Early on, we witnessed the shift from the “better” #closedweb corporate controlled paths to an #openweb#DIY explosion—a time when collaborative, decentralized approaches thrived. #Mainstreaming efforts to recapture this #4opens spirit failed for years, but eventually, corporate-driven dot-coms platforms captured the majority of people. Activist voices were muffled as #dotcons pushed mainstream interests, pulling away the community-driven power the web once enabled. This phase was a bait-and-switch operation, leading to surveillance capitalism and making it harder to stand up for collective, public-first internet paths.
A key aspect here is that this decline wasn’t caused by isolated figures but by broader, recurring social forces, like #fahernistas and the #geekproblem, who fell into patterns of adopting dominant narratives by failing to recognize the alt values of “native” open tech paths. As this happened, the #NGO world came in with “nice funding,” which subtly aligned activist tech initiatives with liberal, watered-down approaches. This pushed and promoted co-option over the power of change. The result was tech stagnation, with communities gradually losing their voice and control, the mess we were in 5 years ago.
The current openweb revival is due to protocols like #ActivityPub, coinciding with the rise of #web03, which was about re-implements #closedweb paths. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity, especially as the rotting of dotcons reveals the hollowness of centralization. While this #reboot has potential, it’s often bogged down by the same forces that hindered past movements. The #fahernistas focus on transient tech trends and individualistic coding projects that ignore the power of collective working, and the #web03 uncritical push of #encryption as a solution without a broader social strategy results in mountains of #techshit.
What works? Building from simple foundations: As digital activists and #DIY tech communities try to reboot the web, it’s essential to start with simplicity: #KISS principles (Keep It Simple, Stupid) offer a practical foundation. Instead of complex, flashy approaches, this mindset prioritizes clarity, accessibility, and collective agency. Each simple, intentional step creates a more durable basis to counter #mainstreaming forces.
What do we need: Self-organization tools within community are needed to reshape the path. Hashtags, for instance, have devolved into self-branding tools (fashernista), whereas they originally provided decentralized organizing power. Reclaiming these tools for grassroots purposes helps bring DIY activism to the forefront and build cohesive networks across digital paths.
What needs balance: The #VC poison of “nice funding” and #NGO co-option, are the big challenges facing the #openweb movement. Often, well-intentioned tech initiatives accept NGO money to sustain themselves, but this financial support is not neutral. The NGO world, embedded in liberal agendas, steers projects toward safe, palatable solutions that appeal to funders rather than fostering the radical shifts needed for real change. This sugar-coated poison draws tech initiatives away from their roots and into a cycle of compromise, weakening the collective power that grassroots projects depend on.
What can we do? As we look at ways to reignite a meaningful openweb, these lessons from history are crucial. Without seeing these patterns, we are repeating the same mistakes and allowing corporate and liberal to dictate the paths we take to build our shared digital commons. How we actually make this work is not obverse, but the current #fedivers reboot is a seed that is in the ground and growing.
I use the #4opens as a tool to do this as it’s simply #foss development with #openprocess added on, a useful tool to get past what people say their projects are about. And what they are actually about https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens we need tools like this to compost the piles of #techshit people keep creating, if we are to have soil to grow tech seeds of hope, like #Activertypub
The path is simple, who is coming down it with me and meany others?
It’s clear there are differing perspectives on whether #BlueSky, now backed by Blockchain Capital, aligns with the values of #openweb or is moving to the #dotcons path. Blockchain Capital’s focus on decentralized technologies includes investments beyond cryptocurrency, yet the question remains about how much this continuing VC involvement influences BlueSky’s direction. In the hashtag story the “#dotcons” refers to corporations profiting under a facade of openness, potentially undermining grassroots and community-led standards.
Good to understand removing posts isn’t the goal; instead, fostering, community, transparency and critical dialogue around these paths is crucial. Ensuring open communication about motivations and funding helps prevent co-option by profit-centric interests—something I am arguing the #openweb aims to avoid. Yes, not everyone agrees on this, so we need to hold a balance, where this balance is, is a consensus, we need to find if we are to hold this community together.
The core issue isn’t blockchain technology itself but its common role in enabling corporatization within decentralized tech, shifting focus from community control to venture-driven paths and how these goals align or diverge from #openweb principles shapes the ongoing debate.
OK, this is a bit off subject. So back to the actual thread: “The consensus process is about us being the community we talk about – it’s likely the only thing that can work at the moment-can we focus please.”
The focus on consensus in SocialHub is embodying the collaborative, community-driven spirit native to grassroots and openweb paths. In discussions about governance and decision-making, consensus helps ensure that the process reflects shared values rather than any single, dominant voice. It’s practical, particularly now, as it aligns with the decentralized nature of the projects within SocialHub. Staying focused on building consensus is a path to achieving functional, inclusive community, reflecting the community “ethos” rather than replicating corporate or hierarchical structures we are so used to work in.
It’s a path for us to become what we often say we want to be.
This is what I am talking about, the rest, the “subject” is food for this path.
For forty years, we’ve been steeped in a dominant, and largely invisible ideology I call here the #deathcult, which is a metaphor for the relentless spread of #neoliberalism that has reshaped our social, economic, and technological systems in very destructive ways. Alongside this, the rise of #dotcons (corporate, centralized tech platforms) over the past twenty years has distorted the path of the internet and #openweb, steering it away from #4opens collaboration and into monopolized, extractive business models. We’re have been living the fallout now for the last ten years: a fractured digital landscape built on artificial scarcity and closed systems of control. This article explores the roots of this ideological mess and touches on the return to community-oriented solutions, rooted in collective ideals, through projects like the #fediverse and a renewed #openweb.
Neoliberalism, is the driver of our current crisis, is anti-social at its core, cutting shared resources and social spaces in favour of so-called “efficiency” and profit, leading to what I call in the hashtag stories the #deathcult – a mindset where profit pushes over life, social well-being, and environmental health. This ideological control permeates our sense of “common sense,” bending it to fit a world where exploitation is not just tolerated but expected. With our head down worship, we’ve been pushed to accept social and environmental sacrifices as the price of “progress”, instead of recognizing them as a sign of systemic failure.
The #dotcons and digital enclosure of our commons, has changes the path of the internet, which was originally built to be an open and decentralized platform. Yet, the past two decades of “#dotcom” culture transformed it into a centralized, corporate-controlled ecosystem that discourages innovation and subverts people’s and community autonomy. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon thrive by enclosing the commons, creating walled gardens where data and attention are commodities for sale and control. This shift, which we all played a role in, has stifled alternative voices and projects, pushing out grassroots initiatives in favour of profit-driven silos.
The dotcons path exploits not just users’ data but the very concept of community, turning every interaction into controlling people for private profit. At long last, we’re now seeing a response in the form of projects like the #fediverse and #activertypub, which decentralize and reclaim digital space from these corporate giants. However, without collective action and a shared vision, this new path remains under threat of co-option from these corporate interests, with #dotcons and #VC funded #threads and #bluesky both being pushed into this “commons” we have spent years opening.
On a parallel path of the last 20 years, we have been suffering from a #geekproblem: a cultural fixation within the tech community on solving social issues through purely technical means, in ways that exclude non-technical people. Encryption, for instance, is a valuable tool for privacy but isn’t a universal solution to all social or technological issues. The “more encryption” mindset neglects the importance of building trust and understanding in online communities, focusing instead on individual security in isolation.
For example, with projects like #nostr when encryption becomes the end-all solution, we’re left with technology that is impenetrable to regular people, creating more barriers than it removes. The challenge isn’t just technical, it’s social. We need to mediate the geek-centric approach with practical, accessible solutions that empower people, not only a few tech-savvy minorities.
A basic #KISS and #nothingnew path, can help to mediate these issues, they are concepts that encourage us to revisit old, tried-and-true solutions rather than reinventing the wheel in ways that add complexity. Complexity and “innovation for innovation’s sake” leads to, too much, #techshit, overly complicated tech that serves no one but its creators. The KISS path reminds us that simplicity growes inclusivity. If we want more people to engage with the #openweb, we need to create tools that prioritize accessibility and usability over complex features. The #nothingnew philosophy supports this by encouraging us to look to the past for inspiration, reviving old ideas that worked instead of constantly chasing the latest #fashernista trends.
Hashtags are a useful tool for #DIY community organization, but in this era of #stupidindividualism, hashtags get dismissed as tools for self-expression or “fashion statements” (#fashernista). Yet, hashtags can serve a deeper purpose in organizing and connecting people around shared ideas and goals. Instead of using hashtags to show off, we can use them to build flows of mutual support and collaboration. The DIY ethos is central to this: organizing from the bottom up, using digital tools to strengthen offline communities and collective action.
Embracing collective paths, one of the main issues that fractured early movements, like #indymedia, was the inability to work collectively. The culture of individualism championed by neoliberalism crept into activist spaces, weakening them from within. Reclaiming the openweb means reclaiming collective processes, where shared resources and collaborative decision-making are balanced with individual control. We need native digital spaces where communities work together, rather than being siloed into “users” isolated by individualistic platforms.
Moving forward is now about composting the #techshit, a path to compost the tech detritus of the past two decades, the techshit accumulated through#NGO funding of misguided projects and closed systems. Just as composting turns organic waste into fertile soil, we can take the lessons of past failures to create a thriving, resilient commons reboot. By fundamentally abandoning the pursuit of artificial scarcity and focusing on shared abundance, we foster this better, more humane path.
For this to work, we need to address the #geekproblem by placeing as much value on social solutions as we do on technical ones, to create tech that supports community needs rather than hindering them. This path values process over product, relationships over transactions, and social well-being over profit.
Ultimately, the choice is clear: continue worshipping at the altar of the #deathcult, or support the “native” path with the openweb. The former is the path we are on now, of escalating, isolation, environmental destruction, and social disintegration, while the latter offers a chance at connection, collaboration, and resilience. This path won’t be easy, but it’s worth the effort to avoid being subsumed by the dominant, #deathcult story we repeat to oftern to ourselves.
As we work to reboot old systems and build better ones, let’s ask ourselves: What are we helping to reboot today? By choosing collective action over individualism, KISS over complexity, and cooperation over control, we can step away from the current mess and plant the seeds for hope and survival.
Lift your head, dirty your hands we have a world to plant
I understand people’s frustration. We’ve been working for decades at the forefront of social and environmental activism, particularly in the realm of tech, aiming to create change through initiatives like the #4opens and the #OMN. It’s clear that we’re addressing serious, fundamental issues—especially around how the #openweb has been captured by corporate interests with people’s use of the #dotcons.
People might misunderstand the path as less serious because they don’t grasp the depth of the critique or are overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues. They may also be caught up in their own perspectives, pushing back against ideas that challenge their comfort zones and #blinded entrenched interests.
We’re offering a radical, long-term solution to counter the #deathcult of neoliberalism and the pushing of environmental collapse, yet people all too often mix up urgency and extremism. The good faith we’re extending in these discussions—despite resistance—shows we are dedication to finding real, grounded solutions, instead of surface-level fixes.
Maybe framing the conversation with clearer, step-by-step plans for practical actions might help open a few people’s eyes from their self-inflicted blindness to see the gravity of the situation without dismissing it as “too radical” or “not serious.” We are, after all, pushing for both radical and liberal coalitions to confront the massive issues of #climatechaos, #openweb, and our very real lack of collective future.
As ever, stay strong, it’s through persistence and clarity that we’ll navigate past the mess-making and onto the real work that so urgently needs doing.
In an anarchist society, like some parts of the #openweb the absence of centralized authority doesn’t mean the absence of accountability or rules. Instead, decisions on conflict resolution, like, linking across project boundaries, handling personal property disputes or ecological damage, are based on deliberation and consensus among affected parties. This path avoids rigid, one-size-fits-all solutions, allowing for nuanced, context-specific responses.
Forcing compliance, like much “common sense” #geekproblem thinking often dose is much like mandatory therapy, it creates resentment rather than sustainable paths. Instead, fostering social creativity and tapping into the fundamental needs and motivations of people leads to healthier communities. Arbitration paths are based on resolution that focus on reparation and preventing future harm without the imposition of external standards.
While anarchism acknowledges that some people might be unreachable, it emphasizes that the solution lies in direct engagement and community-led problem-solving rather than rigid legal paths. In essence, the focus is on repairing damage and creating pathways for rehabilitation rather than punishment.
Managing common assets and navigating conflict are crucial to these paths, highlighting a balance between freedom and responsibility, where nothing is prohibited, yet nothing is inherently permitted without collective agreement. The process might not be tidy, but it offers a human approach to ethics and justice.
Large parts of our #openweb could be on this path, more than they are now, and yes this is a balance.
Communities don’t adopt digital technologies—they adopt #KISS tools. People don’t think about TCP/IP or HTTP when browsing the web, or SMTP when sending emails. Similarly, they don’t think about #ActivityPub when using the #Fediverse. They interact with intuitive tools that simplify these layers.
One of the toughest challenges in grassroots #DIY tech is creating #FOSS tools that align with #4opens standards while offering good #UX. This isn’t just a technical issue; it’s a deeply social and political one.
The ongoing difficulty in having this conversation within #openweb and #FOSS spaces is part of the wider mess we’re in. We need to work collectively to compost this mess, what we can call the #geekproblem.
SocialHub has often tried to bridge this conversation, but there have been failures along the way. How can we do better moving forward?
