Tech governance projects keep missing the mark because they refuse to engage with the real, lived experiences of grassroots activists and community builders. Instead of listening, they fall back into the comfort zones of the #geekproblem: control over collaboration, certainty over-curiosity, code over community.
This is further compounded by the “professional” #NGO class of detached, branding-obsessed, and career-driven #mainstreaming. They claim to serve communities but remain disconnected from the daily struggles, uncertainty, and messiness that define grassroots organizing. These people aren’t building relationships; they’re building resumes.
If they could stop and actually listen to those of us who’ve been in the trenches, those who’ve composted decades of failures and seeded collective wins, they’d quickly see the futility of their rigid, technocratic paths. Real governance isn’t found in committee rooms or blockchains. It emerges from shared struggle, radical trust, and the mess of collaboration.
Until tech governance initiatives shift focus, from control to cooperation, from professional advancement to collective empowerment, they will continue to fail. Worse, they will undermine the communities they claim to support. And let’s be honest, it’s well past time to compost the last ten years of #encryptionist fantasy-making.
The #OGB (Open Governance Body) was created as a response to this mess. Rooted in the #4opens principles, it challenges the false promises of #blockchain and #DAOs, which replicate the worst aspects of capitalist market logic, financialization, scarcity, and the concentration of power. Tokens and ledgers are not the future of grassroots governance, they’re its co-option.
We need to actively resist these technological distractions because we know that community is not code. And governance is not a smart contract. We need paths that reflect gift economies, mutual aid, and social trust, not digital casinos. The truth is, too many #mainstreaming#NGO types are more interested in branding their codebases and instances than actually serving the messy, vibrant, collective reality of the #openweb.
That’s why we need the #OMN (Open Media Network). Because governance, media, and tech are not separate, they’re bound together. The #OMN path is about rooting our tools in real communities, building trust over time, and composting the failed hype cycles of the last decade.
If we want an #openweb that matters, we have to dig deep. Start local. Share power. And stay messy.
Horizontal people always get fucked over by vertical people. Why? Because horizontals give away power to build social fabric, while verticals hoard and concentrate power to extract and dominate. Every. Single. Time.
And the only thing that makes horizontals work is shared worldview, which we currently lack. Instead, we’ve got swarms of #stupidindividualism, where everyone thinks they’re the centre of the universe, interpreting everything as if their personal “common sense” whims are political strategy. And then, surprise! We keep getting steam rolled.
Let’s bring in the rot of #postmodernism for good measure – the #pomo guy proudly clams that “Ah, but classification requires a classifier!” This is what #postmodernism does to your brain. It unplugs you from reality while pretending it’s insight. It’s true that classifiers precede categories linguistically. But the material world precedes both. Rocks didn’t need a PhD to be granite.
This kind of derangement isn’t just stupid, it’s systemically useful to the #deathcult. Because if you believe that value only exists if humans assign it, then a tree has no value unless it can be turned into toilet paper. A whale has no value unless it can be monetized or aestheticized. Nature becomes valueless. And so it’s obliterated.
Meanwhile, people in the #fediverse are still pretending codebases matter more than people. No. The value of the Fediverse is in the humans running the instances and inhabiting them. Not the bloody Git repos. Without people, the code is just more math.
Q: People are angry about #AI scrapers and that this is exploiting everything for “free” – our art, our words, our data. But let’s be honest, we’ve spent the last 40 years gorging on “free” content online, music, games, video, writing, without paying for a thing unless forced to with a paywall. Yes. We block the ads, we hate the tracking, and we very rarely donate. So… with the idea that everything has to be paid for, are we really that different from the AI scraping machine?
A: The current “common sense” frames this as a moral issue, but it’s better seen as a systematic one. And that’s where people keep getting lost in talking about this.
We live in a society rooted in greed and extraction. That’s the baseline. It’s called capitalism, and for the last 40 years it’s been accelerated by the neoliberal #deathcult, where today “ethics” is bought in plastic tubs of organic yogurt at our local supermarket.
What grows out of this shit heap? #Stupidindividualism, people demanding everything for free while shouting about their personal rights to consume. They want to save the planet, but only with next-day delivery and zero commitment. Then you’ve got the #fashionistas – the “good people” who “perform” care while feeding the same destructive paths. It’s not irony, it’s the logic of the path we take.
No, I don’t want tracking ads. No, I don’t want my ideas and writing turned into #AI sludge. But I’m also not pretending this is a matter of “personal choice”, when we need to shout loudly and continually that it’s a system built to turn “creators” into social shit and call it innovation, when better to speak truth and call it compost.
We don’t fix this by feeling guilty, we fix it by building something else. That’s what #OMN is for, that’s why #4opens matter. Public media, open processes, radical trust, of native #openweb paths, not just another polished platform for exploitation with feel good #UX
It’s not about blame. It’s about digging over the rot and planting something more real #KISS
A core problem we’ve inherited from the last ten years of corporate social media, the #dotcons, is the toxic confusion of the personal and the public. Platforms like #Facebook and #Twitter blurred the lines between private conversation and public broadcasting, monetizing both as if they were the same. That mess wasn’t accidental; it was profitable.
Unfortunately, we’ve reproduced this mess on the #Fediverse without properly composting it first. What does that mean? We’ve taken this tangled, unhealthy paths and rebuilt them with new tools, many of them open-source, but we haven’t separated the core issues or composted the conceptual slate. As a result, we still see confusion around what content belongs in the public commons and what should stay private. People are still posting as if they’re in a private chat while standing on a soapbox, or trying to gatekeep public news through private group dynamics.
The reality is: we already have a clear, simple solution.
The Fediverse is public. It is for public media, public conversation, news, projects, what we want to share with the world.
Encrypted chat apps (like Signal) are for private communication, what we want to keep between individuals or trusted groups.
It’s needs to be simple #KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid, but instead, we have well-meaning but unthinking devs and users trying to remix the worst of #dotcons culture, mushing together public and private spaces, throwing moderation at everything like it’s a catch-all fix, and muddying the waters of what these networks are actually for.
This is not innovation, it’s common crap behavior inherited from systems built to manipulate, monetize, and pacify us. If we want real, trusted, meaningful media, we have to get back to basics: public news needs to be built on #4opens, and it needs to be created, distributed, and discussed in public spaces.
That’s why projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the #indymediaback reboot matter. They offer models where grassroots, trust-based publishing thrives again, outside #NGO capture and corporate enclosure.
With this change in mind, why the #Deathcult Hashtag?
People often ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult so much. It’s provocative, yes, but it’s not just for shock value. It’s a term that names the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: neoliberalism. An ideology so pervasive that most people can’t see it anymore, even while it’s actively eroding the very values they claim to hold.
You see it when a liberal proudly buys “organic” yogurt at Safeway while supporting systems that are destroying the planet. That’s not just irony, that’s the entire logic of the deathcult. It’s the normalization of destruction wrapped in “ethical” branding. And no, it’s not just the yogurt—that’s just the joke. It’s everything: our phones, our work, our schools, our activism.
If you can’t find a part of your life untouched by the deathcult, it’s because it has touched everything. That’s why the hashtag exists: to make people uncomfortable. Because without that discomfort, we won’t challenge the roots of the system we’re all still living inside.
This moment isn’t about reinventing wheels, it’s about returning to native paths. The public internet worked before. Let’s compost the #techshit, usefully separate the public from the private, and rebuild on clear, #4opens foundations.
We can do better, we already know how, let’s stop pretending we don’t.
Let’s get the shit-shoveling out of the way first. People get twitchy about the word Communism, waving their arms about “utopian” back-to-the-land communes or religious cults that gave up on society and ran off into the woods, on one side and on the other expansionist empires. That’s not what we’re talking about. Those were retreats, both dead ends. They didn’t believe the world can change, so they isolated themselves and built closed states in the shadows of the #deathcult empire we to often live in. That’s not compost, that’s too often decay.
What I would mean by Communism is radically simple: a society based on practical equality. That means everyone has what they need, and nobody gets to hoard. It’s not abstract, it’s built on what people can do and what they really need, no more and no less.
And this grows out of a basic truth, humans are social creatures. We exist inside society, not apart from it. So any real ethics, any workable economics, has to start there. The individual is not some walled-off unit of value, that’s the poison the #deathcult worships. And under the current system, that poison is poured into everything. It’s why we get so much waste, so much suffering, and why inequality isn’t a glitch, it’s the damn #mainstreaming path.
So let’s be honest. There are only two ways to organize society: Slavery or Equality. Everything else is a mask. What we’ve got now is, for most people, the latest version of slavery – Wage Labour – which is just chattel slavery with the branding updated, and the chains made invisible. The #nastyfew ruling class, the “worthy”, decide what’s valuable and over the long term try and squeeze the rest of us dry. These self-declared “useful” people are entirely parasitic. The only productive class is the one they exploit: the workers, the creators, the growers. The rest are just shuffling paper and shifting blame, smoke and mirrors.
Every age has dressed this up differently. Rome had chains. Feudalism had serfs. Now we have debt, wages, and endless hustle. Same shit, different form. But the composting truth, we’ve arrived at a point in history where this can break down. The system that enslaved us has finally created the possibility of liberation. That’s the dialectic, out of the rot, we can grow something living.
Communism does not need to be a dream – it can be a practical toolkit for that growth. It says:
From each according to their capacity, to each according to their need.
And when they ask, “But how will you measure someone’s need?” we answer, in a real society, people grow up inside a culture of mutual care. You stop thinking in terms of what you can grab and start thinking in terms of what you can share. The culture composts greed. The idea of stepping on someone else to get ahead just doesn’t make sense anymore.
You want doctors? You make space for people who want to heal, not for those who want a title and a paycheck. The community will support their learning because everyone benefits. A fake doctor who slides through on bullshit credentials won’t last long in a society that knows what real care looks like. The mask won’t work anymore.
Yes, we’ll still need to deal with logistics, conflict, even assholes, “communism” isn’t heaven, it’s just a #KISS honest way to live. And it can maybe handle everything the current system handles, only better. Capitalism is a hack job, it hoards, it wastes, it burns people out. A communal society builds real wealth: time, beauty, knowledge, unpolluted air, clean water, and space to actually live.
And how do we get there? Not by magic. Not by seizing the TV stations and declaring victory. The revolution is already underway. But it’s compost, not dynamite. We’re building a soil layer thick enough for life to grow.
It starts by making more communists, by spreading the seed idea, that equality isn’t just desirable, it’s necessary. It grows when workers demand not just crumbs but real power, not reforms, but transformation. First they fight for better pay, then for control, and finally they realize the masters have no magic, no divine right – just theft, backed by violence and lies.
The change won’t come as a single event. It’s a long decay and regrowth – a shift from brittle control to living interdependence. The capitalist state will still try to crush this change when the time comes, but by then, it could be too late. Its legitimacy will have rotted away. People will already be walking, building the alternative paths.
In short:
I could be a Communist because the current system is slavery with marketing.
I could be a Communist because I believe in people, not profit.
I could be a Communist because the future can be communal, or there will be no future.
From hard walls to fluffy blocks – let’s compost the negative nastiness in our progressive spaces.
A reflection on toxic communication in radical spaces, and how to build something better.
In the 20th century, much of the nastiness came from the hard vertical left. Back then, control, ideology, and vanguardism created rigid hierarchies, enforced through forceful exclusion and dogma. In the 21st century, that same exclusion comes from the “fluffy” horizontal left, the #fashionista crew wrapped in progressive aesthetics. It’s still fear and control. It’s still the same mess. And it still needs composting.
Even in spaces that claim openness and justice, we see “common sense” pushing of gatekeeping, moral absolutism. From both ends, the old vertical hardliners and the new fluffy puritans, we’re still well stuck in cycles of not hearing each other. One of the hard problems of the current left/progressive paths is this intolerance and dogmatic nastiness dressed up in fluffy cloth. Historically, from the hard vertical left, but much more common today is from our “fluffy” #fashionista “progressive” crew and their pushing of postmodernist language games as #blocking.
It’s a real and persistent issue in left/progressive paths, we do all service by worshipping a #deathcult, so people are often “wrong” as this common sense worship is the normal, not the exception. It is a cycle where gatekeeping, moral absolutism, and social exclusion dominate on every side. But when this comes from the “fluffy” or “horizontal” side, it is even harder to talk about, as it’s too often masked as care or safety, but still ends up reinforcing fear and control.
Non-nasty communication would be rooted in trust, a touch of humility, and most importantly shared purpose, and could look like a presumption of good intent, default to assuming people are trying, even if they fail. Then we need to replace instant cancellation with curiosity, “What do you mean by that?” or “Can we unpack that together?” in more constipated language that works for some more academic people.
Yes we do need clear boundaries without exclusion, you can say “That’s not OK here” without blocking, shaming, or exiling. Encouraging dialogue before disengagement builds stronger communities than isolation does. Then in every step visible open process (#4opens Style).
In group process, clear decision-making, open archives, transparent moderation, and rotating responsibility make space for people to learn and grow instead of fear missteps. If this goes wrong, and it will, deep listening, slow speaking. Let things sit. Respond with reflection, not reflex. Allow pauses and silences; don’t rush to dominate with the “correct” take.
In the end, it’s best to see conflict as compost, not crisis. See disagreement as a chance to grow shared understanding, hold space for messy difference rather than rushing to resolution or punishment. A part of this is inviting language, use “we,” “let’s,” and questions more than commands or declarations. Say “I’m wondering if…” instead of “You’re wrong because…”
In short and sharp, what to do when people are “wrong”, treat people as comrades, not problems is a good first step. Communication should be generative, less about winning, more about creating together. #KISS we do need to compost this nasty mess, do you need a shovel #OMN
Then OK in the end you might end up hitting each other, but this should always be long down the process path, long down. Hope this helps 😉
The worst parts of people and society – fear, greed, envy, control – are self-reinforcing. They act as feedback loops in a broken sound system: shrieking, distorting, drowning out all nuance is the signal-to-noise issue we need to mediate. The problem is that some people feed on this noise. The media amplifies it. Social networks algorithmically reward it. This cycle of breaking – where outrage breeds more outrage, where mistrust deepens isolation, and where competition crushes collaboration – is an act of destruction. It corrodes relationships, communities, and in the end our capacity to imagine a better world.
We see this every day:
Clickbait headlines that fuel division because rage gets more views than reason.
Politicians who stoke fear to gain power, scapegoating the most vulnerable.
Tech platforms that extract attention through anxiety and reward extremism.
Economic systems that pit workers against each other, just to survive.
To compost this mess, we have to do the opposite to this current “common sense”: to normalize and nourish the best parts of people and society, trust, generosity, curiosity, empathy. When these values are much more visible, practiced, and shared, people can feed on hope instead of despair. This cycle of creation builds, it doesn’t break. It connects, it doesn’t divide. Examples of composting:
Mutual aid groups during crises, where strangers organize to care for one another without waiting for permission or profit.
Community-run media that uplifts real voices, telling stories not as commodities but as threads in a shared tapestry.
Free software movements built not on scarcity and control but on abundance and sharing.
Occupy kitchens, copwatch collectives, local food co-ops, and even open-source libraries — all rooted in the principle: we are stronger together.
The problem is capitalism, in its current form, is a system founded on the worst instincts, it glorifies greed, promotes fear, breeds control, and accumulates power in the hands of the #nastyfew. It at long last now be obverse that it is a system that thrives on destruction – of nature, of community, of meaning.
In contrast, socialism and anarchism, at their best, are grounded in trust, solidarity, and hope. They offer frameworks for cooperation without coercion, for shared abundance, for bottom-up resilience. These are not utopias – they are gardens. Messy, real, and alive. They root us in better soil – the kind where the seeds of collective flourishing can actually grow.
We do need to stand, together, shovels in our hands. The world is breaking, but we are not powerless. The mess is here, let’s not run from it, let’s work to compost it. Let’s build from the rot something rich, something wild, rooted, and real.
What do we balance this with? The #OMN projects – short for Open Media Network – are not a brand, not a platform, and not a startup. They’re a loosely coordinated, commons-rooted pathway emerging from the native #openweb trajectory. They’re aimed at building a livable media ecology, that grows from open-source ethics, affinity-based social organization, and federated infrastructure rather than enclosure, extractivism and spectacle.
Rather than falling into the traps of heroic dev culture or platform monoculture, #OMN treats tech as an ensemble process: modular, collectively maintainable, and explicitly oriented toward mutual coordination and deliberation, not content flow or engagement metrics. It’s tech that refuses to pretend it’s neutral.
The point is not digital for digital’s sake. These networks are meant to scaffold on-the-ground, hybrid practices – to support real-world collective activity, embedded presence, and the messy, rhythmic back-and-forth of embodied organizing.
Unlike most open-source projects that depend on the labour of isolated overcommitted maintainers (and collapse when they burn out), #OMN foregrounds shared stewardship and viscous governance – avoiding the trap of what is aptly called #stupidindividualism. This is code with a metabolism, not code as artifact.
Philosophically, #OMN differs from most “tech for good” efforts by refusing to detach “technology” from semiotic infrastructure. Defaults, interfaces, metaphors, these aren’t just UI choices; they’re interpretive compressions that shape how collectives think, decide, and remember.
So the stakes are high. Latency pressures, whether social, cognitive, or computational, have to be designed for, not ignored. That means systems that scaffold deliberation, not shortcut it. That means treating the commons as composed, not given, building stacks that help ensembles hold interpretive tension instead of collapsing into fast consensus or false clarity.
In short: #OMN is infrastructure for the kind of world where #4opens matters. It’s a path to build tech that metabolizes collective meaning-making under conditions of mortal constraint. Not because it’s ideal – but because it’s necessary.
#Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic system, it’s a cult of self-enclosure. Its superpower? #stupidindividualism, turning people inward, away from shared life, into isolated fragments clicking, swiping, and scrolling through ruins. It disconnects us from collective being, and then sells the pieces back as “individual freedoms.” This isn’t an accident. It’s the plan, a trick of enclosure, take a concept of civic breakdown and turn it into a moral failing of the person, not the system. A classic #deathcult move.
Let’s call it what it is #stupidindividualism = the neoliberal condition of enclosure. A social operating system designed to lock us into self-referential survival while the commons burn.
We’ve all been forced into #stupidindividualism. The #dotcons enclose our attention. The gig economy encloses our labour. Even our friendships are enclosed in “encrypted” DMs, monetized by adtech. Public life? Gone, auctioned off to the highest bidder or locked behind paywalls.
We are encouraged to be good “idiots” in the ancient Greek sense – disengaged from collective power. This #deathcult under capitalism, is a feature, not a bug. They, the #nastyfew want “us” atomized, docile, and scrolling, not stepping away from the path to new norms. And so we rot in a swamp of aestheticized politics – “likes” over lives, vibes over values, empty radical branding over messy collective struggle.
Some symptoms of this sickness can be seen in commons destroyed: Libraries gutted, parks sold off, hospitals privatized. Nothing left to meet in. Social life enclosed: From Facebook groups to “creator economies,” all relations are branded and transactional. Fear replaces solidarity, precarity rewires our brains – everyone a competitor, every community a threat. Politics becomes content, no spaces for deliberation, only comment sections and algorithmic outrage. Under this path, “engagement” is a metric, not a practice. #stupidindividualism is the “normal” common sense path we currently walk down.
The left hasn’t escaped. We’re not immune. We’re infected. Too much of what passes for radicalism is just #stupidindividualism with better fonts. Buzzwords. Identity consumption. Internal drama cycles. Empty memes. Most leftist language itself has been enclosed into performative radicalism, saying the right things in the right tone to the right audience – but nothing changes. It’s a ritual, not resistance. Aesthetic replaces action: Solidarity becomes merch. Mutual aid becomes charity. “Revolution” becomes content marketing.
This is all the “common sense” #mainstreaming by another name. It’s simply #stupidindividualism on the left. And we can’t win if we keep playing by the #deathcult’s dogma. So how do we compost this? We grow living language from real ground. No more floating hashtags. No more semantic bubbles. Here’s the path, embed language in practice, political terms should come from mutual aid kitchens, picket lines, and assemblies – not Slack threads or Twitter feuds.
Don’t just “speak truth to power” – speak truth to each other, if we want to build a better world, we need collective life again. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s survival. We’re in a fight against a system that thrives on isolation. #Neoliberalism has turned us all into (stupid)individuals, and then blamed us for it.
Let’s be clear, the opposite of #stupidindividualism is not intellect, it’s interdependence. So let’s plant words in soil again. Let’s grow meaning from shared struggle. Let’s compost the #deathcult and sprout something real. On this path, just say no to self-enclosure. No to semantic drift. No to aesthetic radicals trapped in content loops. Instead, let’s get our hands dirty.
Economics (neoliberal edition): “Humans only value things that can be measured in money.”
Sociology: “Uh… I don’t. Most people don’t. Parents raising kids, communities helping each other during disasters, activists building mutual aid networks – none of that is monetized, but it’s clearly valuable.”
Economics: “Rational agents always act in self-interest, maximizing utility through a calculated internal decision-making process.”
Psychology: “That’s… not even close. People are emotional, irrational, communal. Ever heard of trauma? Or love? Or collective identity? Most behaviour doesn’t follow game-theory dogma.”
Economics: “Ah, but the market is the ultimate form of truth. If it’s not priced, it doesn’t matter. Let us privatize clean air, forests, and even your health! Innovation!”
Ecology: “Excuse me? You’re externalizing planetary collapse for profit. See, mass extinction, soil depletion, collapsing fish stocks, #climatechaos.”
Economics: “But don’t worry, my models predict endless exponential growth! Just look at the #GDP!”
Physics: drops teacup “Growth forever? On a finite planet? That’s thermodynamically impossible. Energy in, energy out. You can’t eat quarterly profits.”
History: “And every time someone builds a system based on endless extraction and inequality – slavery, colonialism, neoliberalism – it ends in crisis, collapse, or revolution.”
Anthropology: “Plenty of human societies existed without money. Value can be social, symbolic, spiritual. You just forgot 99% of human history.”
Ethics: “You’re optimizing for profit while ignoring justice. People die because they can’t afford insulin. Billionaires hoard while others starve. This is monstrous.”
Economics (sweating): “But the stock market is doing great!”
Reality: leans in, calmly “Your model is broken. Time to compost it.”
We used to run 6 #Fediverse instances as part of the #OMN project – thousands of users across them. Admin/mod work was done by volunteers, grounded in user reports, contextual judgment, and dialogue. No hard rules. Just common sense and solidarity. It worked for 4–5 years.
Then came the #Twitter liberal influx – intolerant, entitled, and completely disconnected from #mutualaid and community care. They treated our volunteer-run platforms as if they were corporate #dotcons, shouting into the void and demanding services with no reciprocity.
We tried to bridge the gap, repeatedly. It didn’t work. It drained us. After a year running at a huge loss, we had to shut them all down. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, it’s bad. But this is a normal pattern, resources are disposed of, culture gets flattened, energy gets burned out.
Alt-tech needs some resources, yes, far less than the #mainstreaming, but not zero. More importantly, it needs a culture that doesn’t throw itself under the wheels of liberal exceptionalism. We’re now working on rebooting this, with code that’s less friendly to “common sense” liberalism and more in tune with grassroots #4opens values.
Because, let’s face it, look at most tech news today and mutter with me:
Utterly pointless. Stupidly pointless. Dangerously pointless.
Naively evil. Innocently evil. Just plain evil.
…We need to do better in alt-tech.
The #dotcons built billion-dollar platforms on amplifying the worst of human nature. It’s long past time to return to the #openweb, and compost this mess making.
From my decades of real-world experience – especially in activism – I’ve found that self-professed #Postmodernists and Western #Buddhists have been some of the most useless and damaging people I’ve worked with. Not an exaggeration: I could probably count the genuinely good ones on one hand. This isn’t bitterness. It’s about composting a mess that has rotted for too long.
Important: This isn’t a call to lurch into the collapsing right-wing #shitheap either. It’s a call to stop adding to the mess, to pick up our shovels, and to get to work clearing space for new growth. Let’s not be prats about this, thanks.
The opening moment of the workshop on Methodological Strategies for Real-Life Theorising was unintentionally profound. A story of a seagull crieing above the glass façade of the Blavatnik School of Government – a building that stands as a temple to the #deathcult that shaped our lives for the last 40 years of #neoliberal change. In hindsight, that seagull metaphor may have been the wisest participant at the event.
The sessions that followed offered a painful reminder of just how entrenched and constipated academic political theory can be. Many of the speakers, well-meaning, no doubt, spoke in dense, self-referential language, seemingly unaware (or uninterested) in the world burning outside. We are living through accelerating #climatechaos, surging right-wing extremism, and widespread social fragmentation. Yet here, the main concern is career-building through opaque frameworks and method fetishism. One can’t help but wonder how many in the room truly believe they are doing good?
The crisis is deeper than any single workshop. The very career paths that brought these scholars here have been shaped, filtered, and “concreted” by 30 years of neoliberal funding models. The result is a form of political theorising that appears to want to find a way out, but only by squeezing itself through the tightest gaps in the #postmodern mess. And even then, only while clutching tightly to the privileges and assumptions granted by the current paths.
Constipated Language, Abstract Struggles
Throughout the first sessions, there was a recurring sense of people talking to themselves. Even the attempts to make theory “concrete” – to move into empirical territory – felt more like power grabs than inquiry. There was talk of “transient theory,” of “mid-level normative frameworks,” of “ethnographic insights”, but very little clarity on what any of this meant in real practical or political terms.
Instead of confronting the deeply ideological assumptions embedded in liberal academia, the speakers soft-stepped around them. One could sense them trying to smuggle ideology back into a discipline that’s been left hollow. The “heroic era of theory” is dead, and what we’re left with is a ritual performance of relevance. At one point, the liberal impulse to block discomforting inputs in public policy was laid bare. This is ethics as insulation, not action. There was repeated deference to “existing norms and frameworks,” – the very architecture of the #deathcult, now warmed up and served again as policy advice.
The Seagull Still Watches
By the end of the day, some fresh air drifted in. A few scraps of cloth were handed out to the otherwise naked theorists. There was genuine engagement with normative complexity. Questions like “what is mutable?” began to shift the conversation. “Engaged political philosophy” and talk of “normative judgments” began to inch the discussion closer to the ground.
The presentation on restitution, for instance, highlighted real political dilemmas. Who decides what gets returned, and why? Is it justice, diplomacy, or geo-political calculation? One question noted that giving back looted objects is not just about ethics, it’s about giving back the values they represent. But this was quickly hedged with talk of “choice.” Liberal hedging again. No one wanted to say: yes, do it, without compromise.
Even here, markets remained the baseline. The dominant “common sense” is still economic flow. Value is defined by trade, not meaning. Discrimination itself can to easily be reframed as a market distortion, another cost to be corrected, not a systemic condition to be fought. The anti-market perspective, grounded in actual social justice, in living memory, in reparative truth, is invisible to meany people until it becomes a threat. At that point, the strategy shifts to distraction and buying off. That’s the logic of #neoliberal containment.
From Political Theory to Political Theater
What we witnessed was not just a methodological workshop, but a staged performance of institutional survival. Theories were dressed up, displayed, but never walked out into the street. Real political agency remained absent. The political philosopher, once imagined as a public actor, now hides behind peer-reviewed paywalls, while the world asks different questions entirely.
Still, by the end, perhaps there were reasons for the seagull to hold off its stone throwing – for a while. A few voices showed signs of life. A few questions struck true. But it will take more than scraps of normative cloth to cover the nakedness of political philosophy today.
The event: Many political philosophers theorise not only for the sake of pure theory, but also because they want to convince citizens and policymakers to bring about changes in the real world.
Such policy-oriented research often draws on interdisciplinary methods, integrating empirical insights and normative and conceptual arguments. This, however, raises methodological challenges of its own. For example, how to deal with the fact that the social sciences are fragmented and different disciplines work with different paradigms and methodologies? How can philosophers, who bring their own normative assumptions openly to the table, deal with the – sometimes implicit – normativity that is also inherent in many other lines of research? What level of abstraction of normative arguments, eg basic normative theories or mid-level overlapping principles, should philosophers draw on when discussing with policymakers? And how to deal with the fact that in the current political climate in many countries, distrust towards “experts” also extends to philosophers? Workshop agenda
Day 1: Thursday 24 April 2025
Methodological Strategies for real-life theorising
Chair: Jonathan Wolff, Blavatinik School of Government
Liron Lavi, Bar-Ilan University and Nahshon Perez, Bar-Ilan University: Conceptual Concretization in Empirically Informed Political Theory: What Makes a Concept Applicable
Carmen E Pavel, King’s College London: Mid-Level Theories of Justice and Public Policy
Kian Mintz Woo, University College, Cork: Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy
Theorising between values and cases
Chair: Daniel Halliday, University of Melbourne
Rouven Symank, Free University, Berlin: Integrating Ethnography with Political Theory in Policy-Oriented Research: Challenges and Insights from Cultural Restitution Debates
Florence Adams, University of Cambridge: Discrimination as an Object of Social Science
Erika Brandl, University of Bergen: Measuring the justice of architectural development policies:debates on temporal scopes and indicators in the Hillevåg plan
My notes on this event:
The seagull is perhaps a good metaphor for nature fighting back against the last 40 years of human #deathcult culture that this building is temple of.
The language is constipated, a growing feeling that these people are pissing funding and focus against the wall while the world burns from #climatechaos and hard right social breakdown.
I wonder how many people here think they are doing good?
The problem on this career path is that it has been shaped by #neoliberalism for the last 20 years, funding and status have both been ground through this mess, and now reflect it.
After the first session I feel they are trying to squeeze themself out of this post modernist mess. By going back to basics, but it’s so constipated it’s hard to see if there is any value in this.
Looking at them talk and answer questions, you can feel them being lost. It still feels like they are talking to themselves.
A power grab, by making theory concrete, to build empirical research. They dodge this by saying the theory is transient.
If this is a bios? They fix this by making the bios visible. They find this question hard to answer as its a root issue.
They are “soft” sneaking ideology back into the current dead Political Science and theory world they work in.
The heroic era of theory is challenged for making public policy. They argue that we should start from the existing norms and frameworks. This from the #deathcult we get wormed up #deathcult worship as policy. Mess. Of course liberal rights have priority in the end, “we must also include institutional facts”.
The seagulls at the start of this event might be the wisest one here. The rest have no cloths, and the language is so constipated that the smell is likely off putting for any real outreach that they need in the scrabbling for coverings to continue their careers.
The liberals start to talk about #blocking the inputs that make them uncomfortable. In ethical public policy making.
From a working insider view, the people doing this don’t have the skills or knowledge if we focus on philosophy and theory only.
Good question, what is given, what is mutable is very mutable. So the Liberal “common sense” is likely a strong #blocking on the path of the change we need.
“Engaged political philosophy” “normative judgments” as we go on they start to be more relevant. “where there is convergence and divergence”
The event starts naked and smelly but as it goes on the air clears at times and some scraps of cloth are provided.
Relevant information that is easily excessable,
The power in a committee is the appointment of the people sitting on the committee rather than the committee process it self. The answer to this is hesitant and bluff, and distaste to cover this.
A chair or witness roll is different in committees.
Why restitution, why now.
Liberal Justice
Reperatition is politics, not just ethical, geo politics and funding, based on former colonist will, is a tool for “ethical diplomacy”
Can any of these be seen as a reason not to do it. Don’t have an answer. Normative lessons.
When we give back objects that we value from our looting, we are giving back our values. We still chose.
My parents work is displayed in our #mainstreaming institutions, but these institutions are not interested in the objects, as they do not fit into there existing story’s and category. Subject archives will take them. But this is still shaping history.
Markets as the dominant “common sense” everything is economic flows. Value is defined by this.
Discrimination is contested with the hard shift to the right #DUI
Distortion in the market, function efficiently.
Discrimination is about greed, American greed, a moral dilemma. Liberal but not to liberal. Talk about the market path, let the market do its thing.
Markets aligned characteristics, money the logic of the #deathcult
As my work is anti market they can’t see any value, so put no resources and focus on the path in till it becomes a threat then distraction and buying off become the difficult paths.
Trump now is turning this neoliberalism around as discrimination. What is this, discrimination against nation states, rather than economics/market.
At the end the might be reasons for the seagull to hold off the stone throwing for a while.
