For 200 years, capitalism, for the last 40 years #neoliberalism, told us that we’re isolated individuals who compete to survive. But our actual history – and our biology – say the opposite: we’re interdependent, social, and ecological beings. For almost all of this time we thrived through commons-based systems, shared forests, grazing lands, rivers, and community knowledge. Villages maintained open wells, fishermen shared tidal calendars, and guilds protected collective craft standards. Cooperation, not competition, is what allowed us to endure.

Alt tech is about rediscovering, what makes us human, the digital form of that, commoning online. Just as medieval commons were fenced off during enclosure, our early digital commons were captured by #dotcons corporate platforms. Rebuilding the #openweb is the act of reclaiming that shared ground, not nostalgia, but in the era of #climatechaos and hard right shift its #KISS survival.

What we need to compost is our own-shared memory. The commons are missing from today’s “common sense”. The idea that people can manage shared resources together has vanished from public imagination. Yet the commons is the older, more adaptive, and far more humane way of organizing.

In tech, the #Fediverse shows this in action, thousands of community run servers cooperating through a shared protocol, ActivityPub. Projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, or #Funkwhale replace enclosure with federation, showing that open paths can scale through trust rather than control. Alt tech, built on open protocols and co-governance, is simply the digital commons rebooted, a network of networks where no one owns the whole.

We need resources and focus pushed into a real grassroots path of reclaiming the means of communication, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was all ready a commons: decentralized, people-driven, and impactful. Early #Indymedia collectives covered protests outside mainstream #blocking narratives. #4opens email lists and wikis built movements across borders. Then capital pushed in, WE let the #nastyfew of #Facebook, #Google etc privatize our collective infrastructure, turning participation into surveillance and creativity into content.

Alt tech projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), Mastodon, and wider #Fediverse are attempts to rebuild what we keep forgetting, this time, protected by #4opens shield to build shared governance. This path is not a nostalgic throwback but living/acting paths for post-capitalist communication we need in this era of social backdown.

It’s not only “tech” – it’s social trust infrastructure. A common is not only software; it’s the culture of cooperation that surrounds it, shared values, mutual aid, and relational ethics, you can’t “code” trust into hardware, as the last decade of #blockchain and #AI mess proves. Smart contracts failed to make people honest; they just automated mistrust, it’s on going #geekproblem blindness we need to work to compost.

What works, the resilience, comes from people, not algorithms. Through frameworks like the #4opens: open data, open code, open standards, open process. We can build transparency and accountability into the social layer of the network. Trust is a practice, not a protocol #KISS

We need a future that’s better, not just less bad. The #deathcult story – neoliberalism’s great myth – says “there is no alternative.” Alt tech is the alternative, working proof that cooperation scales, that people build shared infrastructure without extraction and less coercion. Look at LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Linux, or the #Fediverse, all imperfect, collaborative systems built on trust, not profit. They are real-world examples of how collective will outperform the normal deadened paths of corporate hierarchy.

Alt tech gives us believable hope, which is the only real antidote to despair and apathy. The ground for grassroots power is in pushing change and challange. If the liberal state and #dotcons won’t reform, we need to be building parallel structures that work differently.
Projects like the #OGB (Open Governance Body) experiment with federated, transparent decision-making. The #OMN builds tools to connect grassroots media in trust networks, bypassing gatekeepers entirely. Together they form a scaffolding of a working commons, capable of hosting culture, not only control.

Healing the social media wound? We need to compost the lie of #dotcons which have spent the last 20 years turning us into consumers and outrage machines. The shovel we need is affinity groups rebuilding social tech around self-governance, interoperability, and trust to reclaim the human side of the internet. Imagine the world different, feeds that empower communities, not advertisers. Tools that nurture relationships, not metrics. Platforms that amplify context, not conflict.

This is the work of making the internet human again, working on the pat of alt tech matters because it’s not about gadgets; it’s about freedom, community, and survival. It’s our path to remembering that the #openweb, like the Earth itself, belongs to everyone, or it belongs to no one. And every time we build a shared tool, or hold open a door, we remind the world that cooperation is not naïve, it’s our oldest #KISS technology.

DRAFT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5nZU5cHhC4

A cross-cultural conversation on this subject

It ain't sexy, but if we want that #solarpunk future of high density, walkable, decommodified housing the city of Lakewood needs to ditch its racist, classist zoning laws that mandate sprawl.

Ultralibertarianism / Wokitarian Manifesto

Pt. 2

- Consent is defined as more than one empowered individuals agreeing to an act.
- Decisions that affect only one person should only be implemented by that one person, only towards themself. We shall call this "self-determination."
- In order to avoid tyranny, decisions that affect more than one person (aka "public policy") must be subject to, and guided by, empiricism, rationality, and the non-aggression principle. (ERNAP? lol)
- Tyranny is bad. Tyranny is any individual or a group sets public policy that interferes with everyone else's (or some else's) right to self-determination without considering the non-aggression principle.
- Tyranny can only be understood in terms of its direction of power.
- Self-determination, empowerment, or freedom/liberty is the ability to make decisions for only one's self.
- Power is the ability to make decisions that affect other people.
- Tyranny can be prevented by distributing power as equally amongst a population as possible. Power may be delegated for convenience and practical reasons, but shall remain checked and balanced via distribution and oversight at every level of governance.
- Perfect balance of power in a large enough society is (probably) not practically possible, but should be pursued as a goal. (Perfect balance of power is one way to describe anarchy.)
- Balance of power is constantly under attack by those who want more than their share of power. Balance needs to be reconsidered and corrected often.

2/

🧵

#USPol #libertarian

Ok here is a very rough draft of my upgrade to libertarianism. It needs work, but I just wanted to put it out there before it gets buried in my graveyard of lost projects. Also the name is funny but not practical, so I hope I will think of something... a little easier to type in a phone and use in a sentence.

Ultralibertarianism / Wokitarian Manifesto

Pt. 1

- Subjective reality exists, BUT—
- The only fair and just way to create policy that affects more than one person is to base it on empiricism and rationality; that is, evidence and reason.
- The nonaggression principle states that force or fraud should not be initiated. If one initiates force or fraud, one is allowing that force and fraud may be used against them by others in defense, to any degree as necessary to subdue further initiations of force or fraud.
- Initiation of force or fraud is the basis of tyranny. Defense against force and fraud is defense of liberty.
- The individual is the smallest possible unit of power which can be rationally and empirically defined.
- Individuals possess certain core "rights" which shall not be violated by other individuals, organizations, or the government. These include freedom of expression, freedom to identify, freedom of conviction, right to due process, etc.
- Individual rights must be equally applied to all, elsewise they are not rights but privileges (private laws).
- If individual rights are equally and truly protected in a society, (not just on paper but in effect), then by extension, the rights of all minority and marginalized groups will be protected.
- If minority or marginalized groups are, by evidence, NOT being protected, then individual rights are also not being protected.
- Rights shall not be violated unless said individual violates the rights of others through initiation of force or fraud.
- Then those rights shall only be impeded to the minimum extent as is necessary to prevent further violations of the rights of others.

1/

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#USPol #libertarian

BRB I'm fixing libertarianism. Got a manifesto to write.

#USPol #libertarian

Move over Ayn Rand, I'm about to drop a new political ideology.

#USPol #libertarian

Honestly? And I'm about to get real clear on this and I can't believe it's taken me this long to unpack this particular thing.

The real reason I left libertarianism — the reason underlying every single position I re-evaluated that took me further from modern libertarianism — is its racism. That's the variable that I took seriously that, using exactly the same formulas, led me to different conclusions than the current libertarian core.

It took me too long to notice that this is the difference. Like I've been saying, I can argue every single one of my current progressive stances using libertarian first principles. I said it was data, that's the difference, that I was willing to revisit the inputs and update them with real data instead of mere claims about data, and that's still true.

But what's different about the data, Greg?

*goose chases*

WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT THE DATA?

Yeah, Greg, it's racism.

Funny how the libertarian formulas still work, but when you're willing to set aside bias and look at ALL the data — say historical events that libertarians don't talk about for some reason, or statistics libertarians lie about for some reason, or are willing to champion the rights of people who libertarians dismiss for some reason — you come to different conclusions about the source of tyranny and how to fight it.

And what is that "some reason"?

It's intrinsic bias, largely racial but also based on class, gender, and ableism.

I just unpacked that stuff, is all. One might say... I'm Woke. Wokitarian. Liberwokian.

Or, borrowing from Disco Elysium's political naming conventions, I'm practicing ultralibertarianism while y'all are still playing with the Fisher Price® My First Freedom™ set.

#USPol #libertarian