Tag: techshit

The work of composting the #deathcult and growing something more human

The world is such a mess, partly this is because we use fear as a motivation to grasp for control were we should be reach for competence instead. The mess this makes needs shovels to work at composting, it is what tools like the #OMN are trying to provide, but to close this circle we have to first make them, then pick them up, then use them to shovel the #techshit into compost that is in part feeding this mess.

So what is blocking this work? In part it is we use language irresponsibly, and partly that this is a class issue. Groups feed back and reinforce bad language, forming tribes, these blinded groups then ingest the sickness and poison from each other. This is the world we have created over the last 50 years, shaped by the “law of the jungle”, where people behave less like humans and more like animals.

The irony is that the people with the most agency are often the most afraid of change. This is particularly visible in the #fashionista crew, Who constantly block necessary change, making process nasty and often violent until crisis overwhelms their fear. Only then do some maybe finally use their agency to try to save the situation, late and messily, when much of the damage is to late to be avoided

Lets look at this wider, there is a bigger argument than the current chattering class noise – how the last 50 years of #neoliberal culture reshaped social behaviour, language and, most importantly, our ability to act collectively. This connects to the #geekproblem, #fluffy/#spiky divide, #NGO #mainstreaming and why rebuilding the #openweb requires changing social norms, not only writing better #FOSS software.

Over the last 50 years, #neoliberalism shaped the social environment we live in, competition, individual advancement, insecurity and the worship of markets become normalized. We have been encouraged to see ourselves as competing individuals rather than participants in shared social paths. This is not simply a communication problem, it is a class problem, a cultural problem and ultimately a problem of collective growing any agency paths. Words that should help us understand the world have become tribal signals, instead of describing reality, they mostly describe which group we belong to, who we trust and who we are supposed to oppose.

The resulting mess where groups feed back their own language, assumptions and prejudices to each other is a feedback loop few try and escape from. They form tribes that develop internal vocabularies that reinforce their versions of reality. These closed feedback loops become increasingly disconnected from any idea of the wider world. People ingest the same social sickness and then pass it around, often believing they are defending something good, this is how bad ideas become new social norms.

Language should be a tool for exploring reality, negotiating differences and developing shared understanding, instead, much of our political and technological culture uses language as a form of social sorting. Words like safe, inclusive, progressive, radical, professional, disruptive, community and innovation lose their descriptive meaning and become membership badges.

The important thing for #mainstreaming is using the approved language rather than understanding the underlying reality, a strange situation were people become skilled at talking about social change while becoming increasingly unable to participate in it. We see this across our #openweb reboot were projects spend more time managing the language around participation than actually developing meaningful participation. The #fluffy approach then blindly turns kindness into avoidance – the #spiky approach can turn honesty into aggression. Both can become self-protecting tribes rather than useful approaches to collective work.

The class problem behind the tribes is that these behaviours don’t develop in a vacuum. Different social groups experience the world differently, have different resources and face different risks. They also develop different forms of agency, some people have professional security, institutional connections and the ability to move between funded projects. Others have practical skills, lived experience and grassroots relationships but little institutional recognition or financial security. These differences shape how people behave, for example:

  • The professional #NGO layer: Often has access to funding, institutional language and organizational influence. Its poison can be turning political struggle into manageable projects, consultation and career development. Its value is organizational experience, resources and the ability to maintain long-term work.
  • The #fashionista layer: Gains influence through cultural positioning, language and social legitimacy. Its poison can be conformity, status competition and policing who belongs. Its value is cultural energy, communication and the ability to bring new people into movements.
  • The technical #geekproblem layer: Gains agency through specialist knowledge, software and infrastructure. Its poison can be control, abstraction and the assumption that technical functionality solves social problems. Its value is practical skills, maintenance and the ability to build working tools.
  • The grassroots #spiky layer: Often has direct experience of organizing, conflict and practical resistance. Its poison can be hostility, burnout and destructive internal conflict. Its value is independence, political clarity and willingness to challenge established power.
  • The grassroots #fluffy layer: Often brings care, mediation, inclusion and relationship-building. Its poison can be conflict avoidance, endless consensus-seeking and enabling existing power. Its value is trust, participation and the social glue that keeps communities together.

These are all tendencies, not fixed identities. People move between them, and most projects contain several of these cultures at once, the thing is to understand that every group brings something useful and every group can also bring something destructive, we need to understand both. #Fluffy and #spiky: Two necessary sides of collective agency – the #fluffy/#spiky divide is a useful way of understanding a recurring problem in grassroots organizing.

#Fluffy

  • Trust and relationships
  • Care and inclusion
  • Mediation and consensus
  • Social stability

Failure mode: avoiding necessary conflict.

#Spiky

  • Challenge and resistance
  • Political clarity
  • Boundaries and accountability
  • Willingness to act

Failure mode: turning every disagreement into a battle.

Neither is enough on its own – without #fluffy, movements become hostile, exhausting and difficult to sustain. Without #spiky, movements become places where difficult questions are endlessly postponed and existing power is protected. To start to compost this mess we need to repair our grassroots groups so they can change the social norms to make these approaches work better together agen. Kindness must not mean avoiding accountability. Honesty must not mean abandoning care. A healthy movement needs both the ability to welcome people and the ability to challenge them.

The law of the jungle and the loss of human behaviour is another uncomfortable part of this argument. After 50 years of competitive individualism, much of our social behaviour is the law of the jungle. People become defensive, territorial, status-conscious and opportunistic. They protect their immediate position, compete for scarce resources and treat other people as threats or opportunities. This isn’t because people have somehow become less human by nature, it is because the systems we have built reward these behaviours. When insecurity becomes normal, trust becomes risky, when competition becomes normal, cooperation needs justification, when status becomes the measure of success, collective achievement becomes difficult to recognise.

We end up with groups that can talk endlessly about solidarity while behaving according to the opposite logic, this is one of the worst contradictions of the current #deathcult worship. We built social systems that undermine the very human qualities we need to change these systems.

The agency paradox: Those most able to act can become the biggest blockers is a particularly important contradiction. Some of the people with the greatest social agency are also the people most afraid of change. They have established positions, reputations, networks, professional identities and cultural influence, have learned how to operate within the existing system. They may have the resources to initiate change, but they also have the most to lose if the ground shifts beneath them, this is where the #fashernista problem becomes particularly visible.

The people who are most confident in progressive language tend to be the least willing to support actual structural change. They to often block emerging processes, challenge uncomfortable ideas, demand endless consultation and make practical experimentation socially difficult. They don’t necessarily do this consciously, as often they believe they are protecting the community, maintaining standards and preventing harm, but the outcome is the same: pre-emptive obstruction.

Then something interesting happens, as a crisis develops, the old structures begin to fail. Eventually the consequences become impossible to ignore. Suddenly, some of the same people who resisted change discover their agency. They start organizing, making decisions and taking responsibility, but by then the situation is much worse, the opportunity for gradual, thoughtful change has been lost. What could have been a manageable transition becomes a nasty and destructive crisis, the people who could have helped prevent the crisis discover their agency only when the crisis starts to threaten them directly. This is a currently a recurring failure of mainstreamed progressive culture: fear of manageable change produces the conditions for unmanageable change.

Functionality – People have different ideas about what works – this explains why arguments about functionality are often so difficult. People don’t approach a project with neutral ideas about what works, they bring their social position, experience, expectations and cultural assumptions. For one group, functionality means safety, predictability and professional standards, for another, it means speed, experimentation and getting something working. For another, it means participation, inclusion and making sure nobody is excluded, for another, it means political effectiveness and the ability to challenge established power.

These are not simply different opinions about people, software or project management, they are different ideas about how society should work. The problem comes when one group assumes its own definition of functionality is universal – this is particularly visible in the #geekproblem – the assumption that if something works technically, it must work socially, it doesn’t. A technically “perfect” platform can support terrible social relationships, a beautifully inclusive process can produce nothing useful, a politically radical project can destroy its own community through internal conflict.

We need to judge functionality across the whole system:

  • Does it work technically?
  • Does it work socially?
  • Does it support meaningful participation?
  • Does it distribute agency?
  • Can people challenge and change it?
  • Can it survive conflict, failure and changing circumstances?

This is why we need to bring in native development. As changing the social norms is needed, we cannot solve these problems simply by asking people to be nicer, more inclusive or more radical. Those often become just more tribal signals, we need different social practices. Some starting points:

  • Make disagreement normal. Conflict is not automatically a failure. The ability to disagree openly without destroying relationships is a foundation of collective work.
  • Separate criticism of ideas from attacks on people. We need to be able to say that a process is broken without turning every argument into a personality conflict.
  • Reward practical agency. Value the people who maintain, build, organise, experiment and take responsibility, not just those who are best at managing the language around projects.
  • Make power visible. Who decides? Who controls resources? Who can block progress? Who benefits from the existing arrangements?
  • Allow experimentation. Small failures are often cheaper than large, delayed failures. We need room to try different approaches without demanding institutional approval for everything.
  • Build accountability into care. Being welcoming does not mean accepting destructive behaviour. Being challenging does not mean abandoning collective responsibility.
  • Protect the commons. The people who contribute to a shared resource must have meaningful ways to influence and govern it.

The #OMN path is about this – building social technology for human agency, it is why the #OMN is not simply a software project – balanceing – growing social technology that supports different groups, different cultures and different forms of agency without allowing one group to capture the whole path or process. But as people likely reply, openness alone isn’t enough, we also do need the social practices that make openness useful.

The #OMN approach is to build networks of flows rather than centralized platforms. People and communities publish, subscribe, moderate, curate and maintain relationships with information. Trust develops through human participation rather than being imposed by a single algorithm or management structure. The #OGB work is about building the governance needed to make that shared infrastructure accountable. And #indymediaback is about recovering the grassroots publishing and organizing practices that made the native #openweb meaningful in the first place.

These projects need to work across the different social cultures, not become or be seen as another tribe defending its own assumptions. We need #fluffy people who can build trust, #spiky people who can challenge power, technical people who can maintain infrastructure and organizers who can turn shared intentions into practical action. None should dominate, all should be accountable.

The bigger change is that the last 50 years have normalized a particular kind of anti social behaviour: competitive, defensive, individualistic and increasingly disconnected from collective responsibility. To step away from this mess, we need to stop pretending that better interfaces, nicer language or another round of professional management will fix this. The problem is deeper, we need to rebuild the social norms that make collective agency possible. That means learning to recognize the different poisons circulating through our groups, understanding the useful capacities hidden inside those same groups, and finding ways to bring those capacities into productive relationships.

We need to stop rewarding people for defending their positions and start rewarding people for helping communities move forward, and most importantly, we need to stop waiting for crisis to give people permission to act. The point of grassroots organizing is to build the agency to change things before the crisis arrives, the work is of composting the #deathcult and growing something more human.

Breaking the openweb won’t stop the bad bots

It’s interesting that #mainstreaming tech makes it easy to use you, while alternative tech makes it hard to use freedom. One is built for control – and works very well at it. The other is built for freedom – but often works badly at delivering it. That’s the real #techshit problem we face, we need to make freedom easier to use than control.

The latest #fashionista panic about AI scraping is exposing a real problem with how we understand and defend the #openweb. Faced with aggressive commercial data extraction by the #dotcons and #AI industry, the response from parts of the traditional media establishment and mainstreaming policymakers is to restrict automated access, demand identification and introduce new controls over who can collect available information. This is the wrong direction.

We have a genuine problem of #dotcons extracting open flows, enormous amounts of public information, imposing costs on the people who create, host and maintain it. They take the value generated by the #openweb, feed it into proprietary systems and then build closed commercial products that bypass the original sources. This is another round of enclosure.

But shutting down the tools that make the #openweb work is not a solution, it leads to destroying the infrastructure we need to challenge this enclosure. The native #openweb depends on open flows, automated crawling, scraping, indexing, archiving and redistribution are not some new abuse of the internet. They are fundamental parts of how the native #openweb develops.

Search engines, independent journalism, public-interest research, accessibility projects, security monitoring and archives all depend on the ability to collect and process publicly available information. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved more than a trillion web pages. Investigative journalists have used automated collection to expose conflicts of interest in government. Researchers use it to examine discrimination, misinformation and corporate behaviour.

These activities need the #KISS ability to follow information across the web without asking permission from every website owner. Sometimes anonymity is needed, if a journalist, researcher or activist investigating powerful interests has to identify themselves and explain what they are looking for, the investigation itself is compromised. An #openweb cannot depend on asking permission from every gatekeeper before we see, collect, preserve and share public information.

The problem is extraction, not openness – we need to distinguish between two very different things. There is grassroots, public-interest use of automated tools to make information accessible, preserve knowledge and connect communities. Then there is the #dotcons industrial-scale commercial extraction, the gray area were they take the collective output of the openweb, concentrate it into private databases and use it to build proprietary #closedweb services. These are not the same activity.

The problem is not that information flows freely, it is that the value created by those flows is being enclosed and privately captured. Making every crawler identify itself doesn’t solve this. A commercial scraper can identify itself and still overwhelm a server with requests. Meanwhile, an independent archivist or journalist could be deterred from doing legitimate work simply because they cannot safely disclose their identity. We need to regulate harmful behaviour, not criminalize the basic mechanisms of openness.

The #geekproblem is about trying to control the mess instead of fixing it. When faced with complex social and technical problem, the instinct is to introduce another layer of technical control, identification and permission. But the native #openweb was built on a different understanding: distributed participation, open protocols, independent servers and the ability to connect information across organizational boundaries.

We should be strengthening the infrastructure that allows independent websites, archives and communities to survive. What the #OMN adds is rebuilding the commons. The answer is not to retreat into closed platforms, private APIs, permission-based networks or another generation of corporate-controlled infrastructure. We need to rebuild the shared flows, it is not about pretending that every use of public information is harmless. It is about building the social and technical capacity to distinguish useful participation from destructive extraction.

Don’t repeat the mistake – for too long, we have allowed the #dotcons to take the value of the native #openweb while selling us increasingly closed replacements. Now, faced with the consequences, some people want to restrict the openness that made the internet useful in the first place. We cannot allow the response to commercial enclosure to become another round of enclosure. The native #openweb was never perfect, it has technical debt, weak governance, funding problems and social conflicts. But it gave us something we have largely lost, the possibility of building collective power through open information flows. We need to recover that.

The answer to bad bots is not to break the web, the answer to commercial extraction is not to close public information, the answer to platform power is not another platform with more controls. The path is simple, we need to reboot the #openweb, not shut it down. That means rebuilding the grassroots communities, shared infrastructure and collective governance that allow openness to grow real social value.

https://www.techpolicy.press/breaking-the-open-web-wont-stop-the-bad-bots

#OMN: WHERE NEXT? WE HAVE SEED FUNDING, NOW COMES WORK

At the root of the mess we face is the worship of the #deathcult, the idea that competition, individualism, control and endless growth are simply human nature, they are not, they are systems we keep reproducing, even when it is making society unlivable.

We now have seed funding for the #OpenMediaNetwork projects. That gives us a chance to move beyond endlessly talking about the problems and start building practical tools for a different path. Were next? The gives us a basic test for the technology. The #OGB points towards grassroots governance. Together, these are part of a DIY toolkit for moving power away from the #dotcons, the #geekproblem and the #NGO mainstreaming that keep reproducing the same mess in supposedly alternative paths.

But funding is only a beginning, the real challenge is social – how do we compost the recurring cycles of paranoia, status games, dogmatic individualism of people pushing themselves towards the top? How do we build trust, shared responsibility and structures for people to work together without recreating the hierarchies we claim to be opposing?

To compost this mess, we need to look at the current arguments about the left and right paths. Yes, people understandably want to escape institutions they no longer trust, some retreat into private life, nature and their own projects, others double down on leadership and control. But walking away from society doesn’t make the wider problems disappear, replacing one set of bosses with another isn’t an alternative.

We need to think horizontally, by growing trust, keeping processes open, sharing power and making space for people to participate without demanding that they surrender their independence. So what can you do? Follow the hashtags, read the ideas, ask questions, find a part of the project you can contribute to – you don’t need to understand everything before taking this first step.

And yes, bring a shovel, social composting is messy work, we have plenty of accumulated shit to turn into something useful. A simple first test for #stupidindividualism, can you find your way into a shared project without demanding that it revolve around you? Can you help build something that benefits people beyond yourself?

If not, that’s not a reason to give up, it’s a place to start digging. The #openweb won’t rebuild itself, we need people, practical tools and grassroots structures that make cooperation possible. A little seed funding gives us a chance, the next step is building the crew to do the work to grow the commons.

At #OMN, we’re working to compost the #techdebt problem using federation and the . The idea is simple, build apps around shared data flows, not locked-in codebases. Keep the data useful across projects, while the code becomes a golden ladle in a #witchescauldron, a tool for shaping and serving the commons, not a container that owns it.

New codebase? Let the data flows move across. Less tech debt, less churn, more reuse. Build on what we have, rather than endlessly starting again.

Why does this matter? The #mainstreaming path, represented by projects like https://blog.joinmastodon.org/, is becoming narrow through #NGO capture and institutional funding priorities.

The problem is that five years of funding have helped create a poor diversity of codebases and approaches. We need to mediate this blinded #geekproblem and grow more working grassroots paths that people can spread out across, rather than keep funneling everyone into the same few #openweb codebases.

Yes, there’s a lot of #techshit to compost. And yes, we need people with shovels to do the work of clearing the ground, reusing what’s useful, and planting seedlings along more native #openweb paths.

Less tech churn, more shared flows. Less lock-in, more commons.

#OMN #OGB #OpenWeb #KISS #MakingHistory #indymediaback

Composting the Last Five Years of the Fediverse

The last five years have changed the #Fediverse. What started, grassroots, commons-based native path has become much more visible. More people have arrived, more organizations have become interested. There are more conferences, more funding conversations, more institutional involvement and more attempts to make the Fediverse part of the wider technology landscape.

Some of this is useful, but it also creates a question that is harder to avoid – what do we actually want to carry forward from the last five years? Perhaps the answer is not to defend everything that has happened, or to reject it all. Perhaps we need to compost it, were omposting means taking what has grown, including the dead material, separating out what is useful and allowing something new to grow from it.

Lets look at an example – the paywall is not just about the ticket – this becomes visible in arguments about conference tickets and paywalls. At one level, the argument is simple, events cost money, venues cost money, travel costs money, some people organizing events need to be paid. But that isn’t really the interesting part, the question that matters is what a paywall means inside a commons-based culture. For someone who comes from the #openweb, free software, grassroots media and other commons traditions, putting a price on entry feel wrong, not just a financial barrier.

It becomes an ideological barrier as the message shift from “This is something we are building together.” towards “This is something you consume if you can afford to enter.” That distinction becomes a block, particularly when some of the people being asked to pay helped build the culture, infrastructure and ideas that made the network possible in the first place. The question therefore isn’t whether events should cost money, it is, are we paying the costs of maintaining a commons, or are we turning participation in the commons into a product? Those are not the same thing.

Let look at this shift from commons culture to event culture – over the last five years, the #Fediverse has developed an increasingly visible event culture. Conferences, workshops, panels and gatherings can be valuable, they create relationships, spread knowledge and bring people together. But there is a danger when the pay to enter events are pushed to the centre of the network. The commons starts to decay, funding resources and focus then starts to orbit around conferences rather than communities. This grows when access is controled by money, professional status, travel and institutional connections.

This doesn’t happen because somebody decides to push us into a #closedweb path, rather it is a common sense mainstreaming organic mess that happens gradually when a grassroots network becomes successful. Success brings institution thinking (#NGO), these institutions bring funding, funding feeds and creates professional roles. Professional roles push a feedback loop creating more top down organizations, these create events with paywalls.

This money creates barriers that eventually a culture that begans with people simply building things together can start looking surprisingly similar to the systems it originally wanted to move beyond. This is not necessarily corruption (though it often is when you lift the lid), it is institutional #NGO drift. Working to recognizing this mess making is part of keeping the commons alive were we need to fund and support the what can we build together? While still actively questioning who gets recognized, funded and invited? As those questions produce very different cultures. The first is about participation and making things, the second is about access to an emerging institutional path.

This is one of the tensions the Fediverse now has to work through, were the answer to this question is not simple, yes, we need to not to romanticize volunteer culture either, as volunteerism has its own exclusions, it to can depend on people having spare time, money and privilege. The point is to find ways of funding the commons without turning the commons into an industry. The last 5 years we have spent enough time trying to prove that the #Fediverse deserves to exist.

The more interesting question for the next 5 years is – What did we actually learn? What worked? What failed? Which projects created durable infrastructure? Which relationships survived? Which forms of organizing created useful results? Which created endless meetings? Which assumptions turned out to be wrong? Which things should we stop doing? And we need to do this without a paywall, to make this composting useful. So, to repeat, don’t throw away the good stuff, composting isn’t destruction, as there is a lot worth keeping.

The last five years have demonstrated the practical value of open standards, federation, independent communities, people running their own infrastructure, interoperability, grassroots paths, mutual aid, trust built through practice and the ability to leave one system without losing the network. These are not just historical curiosities, they are the useful material from which the next seeds can grow. But we have made mistakes over the last 5 years by thinking that moving forward means abandoning the culture that created the #Fediverse in the first place. And yes the is balance, equally, the mistake would be to freeze that culture in place. We maybe need to keep the principles while changing the practice, a way of looking at this is native and non-native paths

This is where the distinction between native and non-native paths becomes useful, a native path starts from the assumptions of the commons open, federated, participatory, interoperable and community-controlled. A non-native path can still use ActivityPub or Fediverse technology while importing assumptions from another world, closed access, professional gate-keeping, centralized authority, ownership, status and consumption. The technology alone doesn’t decide which path we take, #ActivityPub can carry both, as an open protocol does not nesserserly push an open culture.

This is one of the important lessons of the last five years, we need to pay attention to the social structures growing around the plumbing. What should the next five years look like? Perhaps we should balance pushing the #dotcons copying #Fediverse of five years ago. We need different streams to grow the useful material and build the next layers.

Not more copy’s of social-media platforms, not more common sense conference ecosystems, not another self selected central organization deciding what the network is. Instead open media → shared archives → trusted flows → local communities → federated governance to shape a native path much closer to the original promise of the #openweb.

Yes, the original path is good, the federated network should make it easier for communities to communicate, remember, cooperate and organize without having to surrender their autonomy. This means a renewed and a clear focus on moving from social media to social infrastructure is a useful path. As the biggest danger is that we keep reproducing the assumptions of the corporate social #closedweb while using open protocols. We don’t need to feed open infrastructure carrying closed social practices, were the technology is federated, but it feeds culture that is still centralizing.

Some of the current mess we need to compost – the protocol is open – the events tend to be pay-walled. The software is free – but the organizations are controlled by a small professional layer. The network is decentralized – the power isn’t. This is the contradiction mess we need to work on composting.

And yes, before you start kee jerk #blocking the answer isn’t purity, it is wide experimentation, meany native paths to build things, trying different organizational models that make the processes visible, we can learn from failure to keep what works. But please lets let what doesn’t work become composts. The commons needs metabolism, things grow, things fail, people leave, new people arrive. Yes, ideas become useful and then become obsolete, organizations shaped by these ideas appear and disappear. Practices get tested, some survive, some need to be broken down and returned to the soil.

That is what social composting means, not being afraid of the failures and contradictions of the last five years. They are part of the material we have to work with, the question is whether we can turn that experience into something more useful. The aim isn’t to reject institutions, funding or professional work. It is to #KISS keep asking who is this infrastructure for? Who can participate? Who controls it? What remains open? And the biggest question – does this strengthen the commons, or does it slowly turn the commons into another market?

For the #OMN, this is an important distinction as we don’t need another project that simply adds another social timeline to the #Fediverse. We need to explore what happens when federated technology is used for media, archives, trust and eventually governance. That means building from the things that have already proved useful while questioning the assumptions that came with the current #mainstreaming of the Fediverse, don’t overcomplicate what already works, build on it.

It’s interesting to see that the #mainstreaming is moving onto subjects that many of us native to the #openweb have been talking about for the last 20 years. The problem is that when our ideas finally become fashionable, they arrive with a rush of #fashionista baggage – followed by the #geekproblem reaction of trying to solve things with another layer of #techshit.

So maybe now is the time to get the shovels out, the #OMN is one of those shovels. We need to compost the onrushing mess rather than let it become another 20-year cycle of #techcurn, fashion and reinvention.

Take the useful ideas, break down the bad habits, keep the #openweb roots. Build something that the next generation doesn’t have to spend another twenty years digging its way out of.

#OMN #Fediverse #openweb #ActivityPub #commons #KISS

When mainstreaming colonize the things that work

In alt-culture paths we have meany problems, one of them is the #mainstreaming “colonize” what works, absorbing popular, fringe, and grassroots ideas, stripping them of their radical core, and adapting them to serve the common sense #deathcult paths. Let’s look at an example of this sewage pipeline:

  • Organic success, a movement, phrase, or subculture gains organic traction because it effectively speaks to real-world anxieties, desires, or truths (e.g., environmentalism, civil rights language, or anti-establishment rhetoric).
  • The “invasion” of language, institutions, corporate entities, or dominant political figures notice the strategic effectiveness of this concept, they “colonize” it by adopting its language, framing, and aesthetics to appeal to the public.
  • Dilution and diffusion, absorbed into the mainstream, the original, transformative power of the idea is neutralized, restructured to reinforce existing power systems rather than challenge them.

An example we can look at here is the story of Burning Man that holds a warning for the #Fediverse and the wider #openweb reboot. That #techshit success can becomes the process that destroys the thing that made our reboot worth doing in the first place.

Burning Man was born from Rainbow Gathering traditions, from this native path, culture of participation, self-reliance, gifting and collective effort, people didn’t only turn up to consume an experience; they made things #DIY, built spaces, shared skills and invited strangers to join in. The organizations came later, as a way to describe and pass on the culture that had grown organically from the grassroots.

But as Burning Man became successful, those principles became easier to package, sell and perform. Participation become an identity rather than a practice, so self-reliance could become an expensive aesthetic. Then community could become an institution, with the living culture buried beneath branding, bureaucracy and the drug feed path of commercial convenience.

The danger isn’t as simply as outsiders arrived or money entered the picture. It was that the culture became capable of reproducing the appearance of its values without requiring people to practise them. You could buy your way into the experience without developing the skills, relationships and responsibilities that had made it meaningful in the first place.

This is the trap of mainstreaming that the #Fediverse is now walking into it with its eyes closed. We keep hearing from our current self appointed “leadership crew” that the answer to the Fediverse’s problems is to grow, attract mainstream users, become more familiar and make ourselves acceptable to the platforms and institutions we’re supposedly trying to move beyond. On this path growth is treated as success in itself, familiarity becomes the measure of progress. The harder questions about power, ownership, participation and community are pushed aside, ignored and then repressed.

But who is this mainstreaming actually for? What are we trying to grow, and what are we prepared to lose along the way? The #Fediverse like rainbow gathering and its bastard sibling burning man grew from a different set of possibilities: decentralized communication, community-run servers, open protocols and the ability to build social spaces outside corporate control. Its value isn’t simply that it offers another place to post, it is that people participate in building and governing the spaces through which their communication flows.

Yet the blind pushing from the current #mainstreaming crew risks turning those possibilities into the normal consumer path. Instead of growing communities capable of running their own infrastructure, we concentrate on attracting users. Instead of strengthening collective responsibility, we make everything more convenient and expect somebody else to handle the difficult parts. Instead of building shared power, we copy the familiar platform model and hope a nicer technical foundation will somehow produce a different outcome.

This is where the #geekproblem comes in. Technical people become so focused on adoption, interfaces, scale and implementation that they lose sight of the social purpose of the technology. They build systems that make participation look easy, while doing little to help people become more capable participants. The result is a growing network with increasingly passive users and increasingly concentrated and blinded influence.

The lesson from Burning Man isn’t that growth is always bad, or that institutions and infrastructure are unnecessary. The same culture that produced commercial spectacle also produced genuine solidarity and practical action, including volunteers helping communities recover after Hurricane Katrina. The gift and its shadow grew from the same source.

The question is what our success makes possible – and what it allows us to avoid. A principle is a map, not the territory. Saying we believe in decentralization doesn’t make us decentralized in practice. Saying we support the commons doesn’t mean we share responsibility. Calling something participatory doesn’t mean people have any meaningful influence over it. We have to look at what our structures actually do.

This is why the #OMN project matter in practical sense, not only as culture. We need practical tools for grassroots news, shared archives and community media, built around open flows, reusable data and human trust. We need infrastructure that helps people and communities make things together, rather than another platform designed to turn them into an audience. We need to grow the capacity to participate, not just the number of accounts.

#Mainstreaming should 90% mean taking the values of the #openweb out into the wider world – not reshaping the #openweb until it fits the expectations of the mainstream. If growth requires us to abandon the practices that make the network different, then we need to ask what, exactly, we are growing.

The test isn’t whether our projects become bigger, more polished or more familiar. It’s whether people gain more ability to act, organize, share and govern together. It’s whether the structures serve the communities, or the communities end up serving the structures. Less performance, more participation – Less passive consumption, more shared capacity – Less chasing growth for its own sake, more building things that work.

Keep the tools simple, the flows open and power close to the people doing the work. That’s how we grow the #lifecult instead of reproducing the #deathcult in a new technical wrapper, it’s how we compost the #techshit and build an #openweb worth having. The test isn’t what our projects say they stand for, it’s what people become able to do through them.

#OMN #Indymedia #Fediverse #openweb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#AI mythology is currently more of the same

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s compost it and build something alive.

The #deathcult is selling the future as #techshit

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web 1.0.

Web 2.0.

Crypto.

Blockchain.

NFTs.

Metaverse.

Web3.

DAOs.

Now AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#NLnet we are still waiting for an opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#KISS

Bunker as a metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

  • One response is – How do we protect everyone and make the system more resilient?
  • The other is – How do I make sure I am on the inside when it collapses?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A #mainstreaming view of this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t be a duck
Which Nature Are We Growing?

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

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

Morality.

The #openweb is #4opens, where dues this place the current #AI path?

To understand and walk this, lets look at an example of the mess we need to compost – by lifting the lid on the current #AI noise. The problem, isn’t simply whether #AI is intelligent; it is who controls the infrastructure, what incentives drive it, and whether technology serves people or turns people into components of the machine. When can see this we might be able to see, thus act on the #OMN trajectory: technology → power → participation → open infrastructure → commons, let try and get past the #fashionista mess of whether #AI is or isn’t “really intelligent.” as this is a lot of #mainstreaming noise.

AI is going to take all our jobs.
AI is going to transform everything.
AI is going to become conscious.
AI is going to kill us.
AI is going to save us.

Some of these claims might be true, some are noise and others certainly nonsense. The more useful questions are simpler – Who controls the technology, what are they trying to achieve, and who gets to decide how it is used? This is where the #OMN view of technology starts, don’t believe the hype – but don’t ignore the technology.

One of the problems we need to mediate, is, we should be careful about criticizing AI by repeating the claims made by the #dotcons (AI companies). If a company tells us its system is basically becoming a digital human, and we respond by saying “yes, but this digital human is dangerous”, we have already accepted their framing, we are helping improve there profits and power by repeating there story.

The same thing happens with the last generation of #dotcons, #Facebook told us its algorithm understands us, #Google tells us its systems are intelligent, #AI companies tell us their models are reasoning. Most of this is smoke and mirrors that we should be ignoring if we actually wont to see anything real.

This next #dotcons #AI boom involves enormous amounts of investment in computing infrastructure, data centres, chips and energy. The companies involved are under pressure to keep growing because the financial system only rewards growth. This produces a dangerous feedback loop, a company needs to keep growing as investors expect growth, the company therefore needs a new story about future growth, the technology becomes that story. The investment creates infrastructure, the infrastructure creates pressure to find uses for it, the uses become evidence that the technology is inevitable. Then more investment follows, it isn’t only a conspiracy, it is a #KISS system of incentives.

The better approach for us is to look underneath the noise. Q. What does the system actually do? What infrastructure does it require? Who pays for it? Who owns it? Who benefits? What happens when it fails? What happens to the workers? What happens to the users? What happens to the communities around it? All are more interesting than arguing about whether a snake oil chatbot is “really thinking”.

And this is an important #OMN lesson – technology does not exist outside society – the code is one layer, underneath the code are ownership, money, labour, institutions, energy, law, culture and power, when we get distracted and ignore those lower layers we don’t understand the technology at all. When this happens the mess we constantly have to compost is that this pushing of #techchurn isn’t innovation. We’ve seen this before, #web02 was going to transform everything, then crypto, NFTs. Then the metaverse, and then whatever the next shiny thing was.

Each wave arrived with claims about revolutionary transformation, yes some of the technologies were useful, but the investment system doesn’t reward usefulness, it rewards growth stories. This produces #techchurn, endless technological change driven partly by the need to find the next thing to invest in, rather than by any clearly identified social need. This is not new, we have been pushing this kinda mess since the industrial revolution.

So, how can we compost this mainstreaming mess, one path we tried and it kinda worked in the 20 century was socialism, or in the western guise social democracy. This is a different politics from simply saying “technology bad”. That older question takes us directly into territory were there is another mythology we need to challenge – Markets don’t produce good technology, the idea that if a technology is useful, the market will automatically discover the best version of it. History doesn’t support this well, this is why the #openweb matters. A genuinely open network gives people alternative paths. Open standards reduce #dotcons lock-in. Open source makes systems modifiable. Open data makes information reusable. Open process makes power visible.

The fourth one of these is especially important, so that the social consequences of technology aren’t hidden inside the code. We can find them hidden inside the process, who funded the project? Who decided the priorities? Who was consulted? Who wasn’t? Who owns the infrastructure? Who gets to change it? Who carries the social and ecological risk? Who gets the benefit? If those questions aren’t visible, the technology is normally reproducing the same old power structures, we need to compost.

This mess is not only to be found in technological we can use the to look and judge social paths. The same thing happens with markets, with bureaucracies, algorithms. The system follows its incentives, consequences emerge from the interaction between the system and the world. This is the reason #KISS matters, don’t invent unnecessary mythology when a simpler explanation works.

Open source is a social technology, one of the strengths of #FOSS is that people can inspect the system. That doesn’t magically make it secure, but it creates a culture in which claims can be challenged, problems exposed and were people can build alternatives. The current #mainstreaming path is not this, its repeating trust us:

Trust the company.

Trust the algorithm.

Trust the secret model.

Trust the security team.

Trust the executives.

Trust the experts.

Trust the investor story.

That is the kind of technological hierarchy that the native #openweb paths needs to challenging with a shovel. Native paths, need native technologies, with community participation, not #dotcons or #geekproblem technologies of obedience. Our path is about composting the layer of abstraction between people and reality – technology can make people more capable or it can make people more manageable, this simply understanding is what makes #OMN a shovel.

The #OMN isn’t trying to build another AI-powered social media platform or creating a better algorithm, it isn’t trying to replace one technological priesthood with another, the #OMN is much more basic.

News.
Archiving.
And eventually, down the road, governance.

The idea is to build infrastructure where people participate in the flows of information rather than being only consumers. Events come into the network – People and communities add context – Stories connect and organize those events – Objects move between nodes – Metadata gets added and corrected – Different communities can see different things – Useful information can spread – Useless information is allowed to decay.

And, nobody has to maintain one giant master database containing the “correct” version of reality. This is a what we call a #datasoup, messy, living, federated information environment. And that mess isn’t weakness, it becomes the very resilience we need. Distributed systems need distributed understanding.

The #OMN path is deliberately different from the dominant AI model, were the dominant model says: collect everything → centralize it → train the model → produce the answer. The #OMN is closer to: collect from many places → connect → tag → contextualize → challenge → correct → archive → feed back into the network.

As I keep saying, this is not an attempt to create a perfect database, it is an attempt to create flows of trust. The network flows become the process of understanding. That is why federation matters, open process matters, why human moderation matters. It is why disagreement matters, and why we don’t need another central algorithm deciding what everybody should see.

In our current economics: People are inputs, workers are costs. Communities become markets. Attention becomes a resource. Knowledge becomes training data. Care becomes an inefficiency. That should reveal to you the common sense #deathcult mess we need to compost. That is the #OMN path, technology is a tool, the question that matters is who holds it, who maintains it, who benefits from it, and what kind of society it helps us to build.

Care is missing in the current mess, in a better world, a worker cares about the person using the product, a journalist cares whether the information is true, a nurse cares whether the patient gets better, a programmer cares whether the software actually works, a community cares whether its infrastructure remains useful after the funding runs out. This is difficult to understand for only automated paths because care isn’t an optimization problem, it is a social relationship.

The future doesn’t need more technological priests, it needs people able to pick up the tools, understand how they work, challenge the assumptions behind them and use them together.

That is the #openweb path, that is .

A more progressive liberal view of this same #AI mess

#OMN #openweb #FOSS #AI #automation #techchurn #techshit #dotcons #geekproblem #commons #KISS