One of the reasons the technology world is in such a mess is the chronic failure to fund the social side of the #openweb. Where funding does exist, it is too often captured by parasitic NGOs that absorb resources while delivering little meaningful change. At the same time, most technical funding is narrowly aimed at “functional” coding, reinforcing the #geekproblem by never moving beyond basic infrastructure or questioning what that infrastructure is for.
This leaves a growing pile of #techshit for others to deal with. People with shovels do the cleanup work – maintaining communities, mediating conflict, building trust, and keeping projects alive – but almost no one funds them. The uncomfortable question remains: who pays for the work that actually makes technology socially usable?
Technology now underpins nearly every aspect of daily life: communication, education, work, culture, and care. Yet many of the systems we rely on are failing, not because they are poorly engineered, but because they are built on the wrong foundations.
Most dominant software today is built on a logic of control. Developers focus on regulating user behaviour: what people see, how they interact, how long they stay, and how value is extracted from them. But functional societies are not built on control, they are built on trust. This trust enables cooperation, shared responsibility, and collective problem-solving.
The commercial tech model systematically undermines this. #Dotcons produce systems people do not trust, run by institutions they do not trust, for goals that are openly extractive. The result is alienation, social fragmentation, and an accelerating ecological and social breakdown. This is not an accidental side effect – it is the predictable outcome of designing systems around domination rather than care.
The problem is compounded by the tech sector’s inability to communicate beyond its own narrow culture. Developers trained within the #geekproblem are trapped in there narrow vision, jargon, abstraction, and technical obsession. They struggle to explain why their systems exist, who they serve, or how they fit into broader social realities. This gap between technical capability and social meaning is where many projects quietly fail.
One obvious response is to fund the social layer of technology: the human work of governance, community, usability, mediation, and trust-building. When this layer is healthy, technical systems become resilient and meaningful. When it is neglected, even the best code rots.
Yet very few institutions fund this work. What funding does exist is often routed through NGOs that neither understand the technical realities nor care about building long-term trust. These organisations specialise in reports, branding, and “stakeholder engagement,” not in maintaining living systems. The result is more process, more abstraction, and more #techshit.
If we continue like this, we will keep feeding the same mess. What’s needed is funding that supports both technical competence and social intelligence. We need to invest in projects that integrate open code with open governance, technical infrastructure with human care. Initiatives like the #OMN and the #4opens matter because they centre communication, cooperation, and trust, the things that actually make technology usable in the real world.
The solution to the #geekproblem is not more control, better metrics, or smarter algorithms. It is the recognition that good societies are built on social trust, and that our technologies must reflect that reality. Until we start funding the social foundations of the #openweb, we will keep rebuilding the same broken systems and wondering why they fail.
