Almost everything built in today’s alt-radical tech scene is, bluntly, pointless. Despite good intentions, most of it ends up feeding the endless cycle of #fashernista churn, flashy new platforms, bleeding-edge protocols, or encrypted communication tools nobody uses, built by isolated teams disconnected from real-world needs or history. This is the #geekproblem: a culture where novelty is fetishized, and social usefulness is an afterthought, if it appears at all.

Examples:

Secure […]

Published Date 9/20/16 2:42 PM

The OMN is based on a simple understanding that the last 10 years have been wasted on #dotcons and #encryptionists delusions. In this time #NGO’s, activists and at-geeks have wasted the #openwebs potential to shift society to a more humane path.

To move beyond this decaying circle, we need to #reboot the basic infrastructure that has been allowed to decay. Early “#web02” was based on open features that crossed website boundary’s in a way unthinkable […]

A common database of media metadata exchanged by RSS in and out, using open industrial standards and neutral unbranded widgets.

Is anyone doing something like this now, and how is your project different?

There are many aggregators of news (eg http://daveriver.scripting.com/, or http://ignoregon.com) but they aggregate with whole #RSS feeds not tags, and new tag feeds cannot be created out of them. Closed-source project #vodpod works by tag only as a premium feature.

Describe the […]

There are hundreds (over the last 20 years likely thousands) of news, aggregation sites. It’s a common #dotcons model to enclose the “commons” people see free content and think I can capture that. The problem is news content looks like it’s free, but that’s because it’s “free” to spread, but it’s VERY expensive in human (and thus money) to produce the content. This side is never addressed in these failed tech projects.

We currently have #traditionalmedia all round the world pushing to be […]

A. on the subject of “security” we have a #open policy of not trusting ANY client server security at all, so this should only be done #4opens as far as possible and having limited trust in #p2p security, even though we use this, because of the insecurity of the undelighting syteams it runs on, mostly old outdated phones, built as blobs by #dotcons this simple approach gets round much of the current thinking of technical “security” ie. the is almost non at a normal use level and little real […]

The thing most liberals forget is that Americans are a notoriously politically violent bunch. From the Boston Tea Party to armed labour uprisings, from the Black Panthers to white vigilantes, from state crackdowns to citizen riots – the American story has always been soaked in political violence, the “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, all that was deliberately erased, rewritten, smoothed over, sold back as […]

Everyone knows we are in a mess, but most people are too distracted to do anything to change the current path. We’ll keep doing – scrolling, clicking, consuming – because the current mess we live in is incredibly skilled at hiding consequences.

The environmental cost is buried under greenwashing. BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” Shell sponsors art galleries. Apple makes claims about “carbon-neutral” devices—then glues batteries shut to prevent repair. Meanwhile, rare […]

We have strong passive #blocking forces stopping the real change and challenge we need before we have any hope of changing the world, thus we as a community have to change our stance towards this blocking. And the first step – the most important one – is painfully simple: Stop being a prat.

That means:

Stop pretending you don’t understand the stakes.

Stop making perfect the enemy of good.

Stop whining about how broken things are while refusing to touch the tools that exist.

Stop […]

The #OMN approach is to focus on building practical tools and solutions that are grounded in real-world experience and that can be adopted by grassroots activists and communities. The goal is to empower groups to take control of their own media and communication channels, and to build a decentralized and autonomous network that is not controlled by any centralized authority or organization.

The #4opens (Open Source, Open Data, Open process, Open “industrial” standards ) are a key […]

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework:

“Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.”

Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed […]

Our current #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t life, it’s a trap, we need a way out. In our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:

You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t own,

Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,

Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,

Pay to breathe, because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.

And if you miss a payment? Game over. That’s not a […]

DRAFT

With rebooting the #openweb we run headfirst into the #geekproblem, a recurring pattern where: Technically brilliant people build powerful tools …but those tools remain socially unusable …or solve only geek problems, not the needs of actual communities. It’s not malice, often it’s idealism, but it creates a dead-end culture of endless prototypes, abandoned standards, and empty tech demos. Meanwhile, the real-world crisis deepens.The work we need is bridges building, let’s […]