# Our failure to mediate the mess > Source: > Published: 2026-07-12 08:54:04+00:00 The current [#AI](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/ai/) boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in [#mainstreaming](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/mainstreaming/) terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content. Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs. The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the [#deathcult](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/deathcult/), where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking (and acting on) questions the tech industry never asks. This is where the [#OMN](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/omn/) approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems. This mess is a part of our long-standing [#geekproblem](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/geekproblem/), that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless [#techchurn](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/techchurn/): one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power. We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these [#techshit](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/techshit/) outcomes. The #4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the [#nastyfew](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/nastyfew/). That’s the work of the [#openweb](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/openweb/), and the path of [#OMN](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/omn/).