The #OMN and the fight against the #dotcons

The internet didn’t just accidentally become shit. Yes, the #dotcons are responsible for plenty of it: surveillance, advertising, addictive algorithms, platform lock-in, spam, fake reviews and the endless extraction of human attention. But focusing on a few companies misses the bigger story, that the mess is the outcome of decades of wider #deathcult worshipping political and economic choices.

Yes, we allowed enormous platforms to buy competitors, capture markets, privatise public communication and turn common infrastructure into private profit machines. We then acted surprised when the resulting system prioritised extraction over any public value. But the problem is bigger than Facebook, Google, Amazon or whatever company is currently being hated.

The market structure is the machine, companies are collective organisms operating within that structure. Changing one corporation without changing the conditions that produce the next one simply gives us another version of the same problem.

This is why “just leave what ever #dotcons you are addicted to” is both right and incomplete. Yes, leaving matters, attention is power, every person or community that stops feeding the toxic platforms reduces there social legitimacy. But people are not simply choosing between good and bad technology.

There are real practical issues, a local council might put essential information on Facebook. A community group might organise there. A small business might depend on Instagram. Friends and family might all be locked into Messenger or WhatsApp. The problem is therefore infrastructure.

If essential social information is available only through a private corporation, leaving that corporation becomes socially expensive. That’s exactly why we need a working, good #UX #openweb reboot. Email still works. Websites still work. RSS still works. Federated media works, community archives could work. The technology exists, what is missing is the social infrastructure connecting these things together.

We have taken a first step on this path with the #Fediverse, the second step is projects like the #OMN. A part of a broader attempt to build a post-#dotcons media infrastructure based on the #4opens – Open Data – Open Source – Open Standards – Open Process.

But still the social side matters, the technology is the tool, the bigger project is breaking corporate dependency and rebuilding collective capacity. We need media systems where communities publish without asking permission where information moves between services, where metadata remains accessible, where moderation is human and accountable, and where communities retain the ability to govern their own spaces.

But there is another danger. If the #openweb becomes flooded with conspiracy, dogmatism, tribalism and endless ideological prat fights, ordinary people will leave. They won’t necessarily leave because they disagree with us, they’ll leave because the environment becomes exhausting. And when people leave the open alternatives, they often return to the #dotcons because at least those platforms are familiar, predictable and socially populated.

That means our behaviour matters, so while building real networked alternatives, lets focus on the #opens path as security is not enough, survival is not victory. We can build technically secure systems that nobody wants to use. We can build ideologically pure communities that nobody outside the bubble can tolerate. Or we can build useful social infrastructure that helps real people communicate, organise, remember and act together. The #4opens and good #UX are therefore not a nice-to-have, they are the minimum conditions for activist technology that actually matters.

To sum up the bigger story isn’t “Facebook (or what ever #dotcon) is bad.” The bigger story is we are breaking corporate dependency, rebuilding collective infrastructure, recovering the social possibilities of the #openweb to build technology for a post-#dotcons world. And we don’t need to wait for Zuckerberg, Google, policymakers, funding bodies or standards committees to give us permission. We can start building, but as we do, we need to remember the purpose – keep the media real – build trust – balance good and harm – and don’t #KISS reproduce the culture we’re trying to escape.

Living through twenty years of #dotcons addiction

For those of us who’ve spent the last twenty years working around alternative technology, grassroots media and activism, the hardest thing to watch has been how deeply the #dotcons have become embedded in the culture. We know the problems, we’ve been talking about surveillance, extraction, algorithmic manipulation, platform lock-in and the destruction of community for years. And yet we keep going back, not because people are stupid, but because addiction is powerful – especially when the thing you’re addicted to is also where everyone else is.

This is where #mainstreaming becomes such a problem. People have been, and still are, vile in their interactions with the alternatives. Instead of helping build something different, too much energy gets spent defending the existing system, attacking people trying alternatives, or having endless prat fights about which alternative is ideologically pure enough. The result? We waste years fighting each other while the #dotcons keep growing.

Our #mainstreaming crew/friends are always pushing pointless fights over alternatives, while defending the obvious worship of the #deathcult – forty years of #neoliberal “common sense” normalised extraction, competition, growth and individual consumption as if these were laws of nature, they aren’t, they are political choices. And “common sense” built around those choices is going to take time – and a lot of messy work – to change.

That’s what we mean by composting, not throwing people away, not creating another subculture purity club. Taking the accumulated #techshit, failed projects, bad assumptions, ego battles, corporate habits and activist baggage and turning it into something useful. Because dumping Big Tech isn’t just a matter of personal politics, it isn’t even primarily about “tech sovereignty” – that is another con when sovereignty means building our own little versions of the same extractive systems. It’s about survival – Big Tech is the latest flag-bearer for our recurring worship of #deathcults.

After living through this mess, we don’t need another shiny platform, we need to recover the ability to build things together. Small-scale, federated, open, human, trust-based, with memory and governance. With communities that can survive the failure of the latest #dotcons or #fashionista platform. That’s the point of the #openweb, #FOSS, #Indymedia and projects like #OMN. Not another tech fashion, more a way out of the addiction. So, grab a shoal and compost this mess, please.

Feelings/facts, stupidindividualism is about peoples role in systems

Just because you feel attacked doesn’t mean someone is attacking you, sometimes that feeling is worth listening to, it may be telling you that something doesn’t fit with how you currently see the world. But a feeling is not a fact, this matters because much political discussion now begins and ends with personal reactions rather than examining the underlying structures.

Take the hashtag #stupidindividualism. Many people read it as, “You’re stupid because you’re an individual.” That isn’t what it means, the intended meaning is: The form of individualism promoted under capitalism makes us think and act in ways that become self-defeating.

The criticism is not of individuality, individuality is valuable. The criticism is of an ideology that teaches us to see every problem as personal and every solution as individual, even when the problems are obviously social, economic or ecological. This is what we mean by #stupidindividualism.

When every issue becomes “my opinion”, “my identity”, “my choice”, or “my feed”, we lose the ability to understand systems. We stop asking how institutions, technology, economics and culture shape our lives together. That isn’t stupidity as an individual trait, it’s a social condition.

The same misunderstanding appears whenever we talk about #mainstreaming or the #deathcult. When we say #mainstreaming thinking has become “insane”, I’m not saying that individual people are crazy. I’m saying that forty years of neoliberal common sense has normalised behaviours that are collectively destructive.

Endless economic growth on a finite planet, treating community as a market, replacing trust with metrics, replacing politics with branding and replacing human judgement with algorithms. These ideas have become “common sense”, yet they are driving us deeper into #climatechaos and reinforcing the #geekproblem, where technical fixes are repeatedly offered for problems that are fundamentally social.

The same pattern appears across the #Fediverse. Most people are acting in good faith, but many default to familiar #FOSS assumptions without asking deeper political questions. Most newcomers have little knowledge of the history of the #openweb, making it easier for corporate interests, NGOs and well-meaning developers to reshape the space according to the assumptions of the wider #closedweb.

Without governance that fits the culture (#OGB), fragmentation is inevitable. Without trust, federation becomes increasingly fragile – without memory, every generation repeats the same mistakes. Rebooting the #openweb isn’t primarily a technical challenge, it’s a social one. The first step is recognising that not every uncomfortable idea is a personal attack, sometimes discomfort is simply the beginning of thinking.

Breaking the circle of #stupidindividualism

Media, the deathcult and climatechaos

The current wave of wildfires across Europe is not simply a natural disaster, it is also exposing a deeper mess, the failure of our information systems. Instead of explaining why Europe is burning, significant sections of the corporate media are either ignoring #climatechaos or distracting by blaming rewilding, net-zero policies and environmental protections. Rather than confronting the #KISS scientific evidence that fossil fuel combustion is driving global heating, they redirect public anger towards the policies intended to mediate the damage.

This isn’t simply corrupt journalism, it’s a theological and political choice. The reality inversion – when forests burn, rivers dry, crops fail and people die from extreme heat, the obvious question should be – What is causing this? The scientific answer is clear, human emissions of greenhouse gases – from burning coal, oil and gas – will increase the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, droughts and wildfire conditions. This is one of the strongest areas of scientific consensus in modern research.

Yet much of the corporate press is #blocking this connection. A look through thousands of UK newspaper articles covering the June 2026 heatwave found that around three-quarters never mentioned #climatechange at all. Yes, the public was shown the symptoms while the cause was quietly edited out. This matters because information shapes action, if people don’t understand why disasters are happening, they cannot understand what needs to change.

This is manufacturing confusion – the right-wing press push reality inversion. Europe burns, the blame shifts to rewilding, the mess – heatwaves become evidence that environmental policy has gone too far, wildfires become an argument against restoring ecosystems, net-zero becomes the problem rather than one of the responses. The effect is to move negative attention away from fossil fuels and towards environmental movements. When the cause of a crisis threatens #nastyfew interests, our “journalists” redefine the problem until those interests disappear from the story. The debate becomes about forestry management, or environmental activists. Or planning regulations, migrants, or bureaucracy. Almost anything except the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

In the #OMN vocabulary this is the logic of the #deathcult – A system organised around endless growth cannot admit that endless growth is destroying the conditions that make civilisation possible. With the shift to the hard right – every crisis becomes someone else’s fault – every solution becomes economically impossible – every warning becomes political exaggeration – every disaster becomes “unexpected.” The current path survives by refusing to recognise the consequences of their own actions.

This is why “common sense” has become part of the problem. After forty years of #neoliberalism, what many people call common sense is the common sense of the market. Growth is always good, markets always know best, corporations are inevitable, consumption equals freedom and thus environmental limits are optional. But, this isn’t common sense, it’s forty years of shaping people to see the world through the eyes of only capital.

So why do we still let fossil fuel companies still shape public policy decades after the science became overwhelming? The language changes, the power structures remain. This is #mainstreaming, the appearance of addressing the problem while carefully avoiding the changes needed to solve it. The #mainstreaming problem isn’t confined to openly conservative newspapers. Much liberal media performs a softer version of the same function. Climate change is acknowledged, the latest disaster is reported, scientists are quoted. Then coverage moves on, the structural questions are rarely asked – Who profits? Who owns the media? Who funds political influence?

The #OMN perspective is that this isn’t only a journalism problem, it’s an infrastructure problem. When a handful of corporations control the majority of communication, they also shape which stories become visible, which connections are made and which questions remain invisible. Feed this narrow mess through the #dotcons that amplify engagement rather than understanding, we get stinking mess. It is easy to understand that corporate newspapers depend upon commercial interests controlled by the #nastyfew and political institutions still focus communicate through the same commercial traditional media and #dotcons platforms, the result an information ecosystem optimised for attention and control rather than any truth.

The path we need for survival – the coming decades of #climatechaos will test every institution we have – communication systems, food systems, energy systems, governance and public trust. If our media continues to hide causes while amplifying distractions, societies will become less capable of responding when they need clear information the most. A community that cannot accurately describe its own reality cannot organise to change it to move beyond the #deathcult. The uncomfortable truth is that there is no path through the coming century while remaining politically loyal to the assumptions that created the crisis. The #deathcult has reached its limits.

The question is no longer whether that model is sustainable, it isn’t. The question is what replaces it. The #OMN answer begins with rebuilding the commons, open media, open governance, open standards, open knowledge. Communities capable of telling their own stories and acting on shared reality rather than manufactured distraction. Because if we cannot agree on what is happening, we cannot respond together.

And if we continue allowing corporate media to define reality for us, they will continue pushing the systems that are driving us deeper into #climatechaos. The future depends not only on changing our energy systems, it depends on changing the information systems that tell us what is real.

For 45 years we’ve been told that “economic efficiency” means making the rich richer and the poor poorer. By that narrow measure, the system has been a huge success. The problem is we’ve sacrificed everything else. Environmental responsibility? Ignored. Social sustainability? Undermined. Community? Hollowed out.

The result is #climatechaos, collapsing social trust, and an economy designed to extract rather than nurture. We urgently need to rebalance our priorities. The economy should serve society and the living world – not the other way around.

That work cannot wait.

The #Deathcult is a historical metaphor

History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed.

Today we face a different crisis, but one driven by the same logic. The #deathcult metaphor tells us that the right to extract, pollute, and profit need to be better balanced with the right of communities to defend the ecosystems they depend on. This isn’t currently in any real balance. Over the last forty years we’ve shifted the political centre so far toward markets and private accumulation that environmental destruction is treated as normal, while protecting the commons is portrayed as extreme.

If we continue to use our current “common sense” to “balance” destruction against survival, destruction wins. Climate breakdown isn’t negotiated with, ecosystems don’t compromise, physics doesn’t vote. The task is therefore not to seek a mythical middle ground, but to move the social balance back towards the real commons, cooperation, stewardship, and long-term thinking. Only by changing what society sees as “common sense” do we have any realistic hope of avoiding deeper ecological and social collapse.

This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN is not simply another technology project. It is an attempt to shift power away from the #dotcons and away from the #geekproblem that has dominated so much of the #openweb. Instead of platforms extracting value from people, or technical elitists deciding what everyone else needs, the path is to place power back in the hands of the people who actually create culture, knowledge, and media.

The #4opens provide the practical framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. Together they create the conditions for shared ownership, transparency, and trust rather than enclosure and extraction.

The #OGB complements this by providing grassroots governance. Rather than relying on central authorities or corporate gatekeepers, it explores ways communities can make decisions together while remaining federated and autonomous.

None of this guarantees good outcomes, technology never does. What these projects do is create the possibility for healthier social relationships. They build commons infrastructure instead of proprietary platforms, they distribute power instead of concentrating it, they make cooperation easier than enclosure. As the future is not determined by technology alone, it is determined by the values embedded in the systems we build and the communities that choose to use them.

That’s why the real struggle isn’t simply over software, t’s over the values that software embodies. #KISS reminds us to keep these solutions simple enough for ordinary people to understand, use, and shape themselves. Without that, the commons will once again be enclosed by experts, corporations, or bureaucracies, and we will repeat catastrophes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) in todays rush towards #climatechaos.

The choice is ours. The tools matter because they shape the possibilities. What we build with them remains a collective responsibility.

The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess

#OMN #4opens #OGB #openweb #FOSS

The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess

The #Deathcult is a historical metaphor

We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they’re sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn’t simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it’s understanding how they find their way back out again.

History suggests something important – entering crisis is often easier than leaving it – it’s a downhill path. For long periods, societies can appear stable. Institutions function, people get on with their lives, and conflict remains manageable, yet beneath the surface something changes.

Power concentrates.
Wealth accumulates upward.
Institutions begin serving themselves rather than the commons
Public trust erodes.

By the time these trends become obvious, society has already gathered momentum, think of it like a huge ball rolling down a steep valley, once it begins rolling, it becomes incredibly difficult to stop. This is where much of today’s #climatechaos, democratic decline and digital enclosure fit. They are symptoms of long-running structural shifts rather than isolated failures.

To understand this recurring mess, it’s useful to think about this is as a wealth pump. Healthy societies circulate resources, were unhealthy societies increasingly extract resources from ordinary people while concentrating wealth and decision-making power into ever smaller circles. Eventually this creates reinforcing problems – the growing insecurity for everyone else, competition between increasingly numerous elitists leads to weakening of public institutions, eventually the system becomes unstable. This describes much of the last forty years of #neoliberalism just as well as many earlier historical periods.

In #OMN language, this is one way of describing the growth of the #deathcult. Technology follows politics, so the same process appears online. The early #openweb distributed power, the #dotcons recentralised it. Open participation became algorithmic engagement, communities became audiences, citizens became products. This wasn’t a simple a technical change, it’s the same mess of concentration of power occurring throughout the wider society. Technology amplified existing political and economic trends, crisis created the possibility.

The encouraging part of history is that outcomes are not predetermined, although the path into crisis is narrow, the path out is surprisingly open. Once institutions begin failing, many futures become possible. Some societies descend into violence, some replace one ruling group with another while changing very little. A few manage genuine reform, the difference comes from organised social movements that are able not merely to seize attention, but to rebuild institutions capable of creating trust again. This matters as moments of instability are also moments when relatively small interventions can have disproportionately large effects.

This is where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not a project to seize power. It is a project to rebuild commons infrastructure. Instead of reinforcing extraction, it strengthens trust. Instead of creating new gatekeepers, it distributes responsibility. Instead of proprietary platforms, it builds open processes. Instead of replacing one monopoly with another, it supports federation and shared ownership.

This is why the #4opens matter, not as ideological slogans, they’re much more useful as practical safeguards against rebuilding the same systems that created today’s crisis. Trying to engineer perfect systems produces new failures, complex societies never become tidy, so the useful goal is not perfection. Rather to create institutions capable of learning, adapting and redistributing power before crises become catastrophic. This is why #OMN emphasises mediation over control, commons over ownership, participation over spectatorship to push trust over extraction.

Building the next commons matters – if we accept that we’re living through a period of structural instability, then waiting for institutions to solve it is unlikely to succeed, the work we need belongs to communities.

Building archives.

Building media.

Building governance.

Building trust.

We can play a part in this by building technologies that reinforce this path rather than undermine it as history suggests that societies emerge from crises when they reverse the flows of concentrated power to begin rebuilding the commons, that’s the path #OMN is on.

All startups are expressions of the #deathcult, every #VC is, in effect, a bishop preaching endless growth, extraction and enclosure. This isn’t innovation. It’s a business model accelerating social breakdown, deepening inequality, and feeding the #climatechaos that will displace billions and cost millions of lives over the coming century. If you’re serious about activism, stop feeding the machine. Put your energy into building the #openweb commons instead.

The whole value system behind startups and #VC is the problem, not the solution. The #KISS truth is simple: endless growth, extraction and enclosure cannot solve the crises they create. They are accelerating today’s breakdown and shaping tomorrow’s catastrophes. We don’t need more investment in the #deathcult. We need investment in the digital commons, the #openweb, and the #4opens.

#OMN #4opens #OpenWeb #Fediverse #Commons #DigitalCommons #Governance #MakingHistory #ClimateChaos #TechForGood #Oxfordboaters

Why #FOSS matters socially

The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality.

This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) matters. The “free” in #FOSS is about freedom, the freedom to use, study, modify and share the tools that shape our lives. Those freedoms create something much more important than software, they create #4opens social power. Open code means community accountability.

Instead of trusting #closedweb corporations, we can build “native” trust through transparency. That changes how communities work as closed platforms create consumers, open projects create participants. The community doesn’t just use the infrastructure, it becomes in part responsible for maintaining it. We can exit to a more #DIY path, were anyone can inspect, improve, challenge and adapt to disparate community needs.

This isn’t always the fastest path as open collaboration is often messy. Consensus takes time, criticism can be uncomfortable. But these are social strengths, not weaknesses. Diverse communities find problems earlier, reduce hidden bias and create paths and systems that are more resilient because they are shared.

The #OMN approach builds on this real world path and body of ideas. That technology can strengthen communities rather than replacing them, code can support human trust rather than algorithms deciding everything. Infrastructure should belong to the commons rather than becoming another private enclosure.

Today’s #closedweb social media platforms are digital landlords. Yes you may build a following, create value and invest years of work, but you’re still a tenant. The rules can change overnight, your reach can disappear, your community can be fragmented at the click of a button.

The #openweb offers another path were we have control of identity and content to connect through open protocols instead of closed silos. We need this more than ever to building communities that can survive the failure – or hostility – of any single platform.

We can’t keep repeating the same mess, this composting matters even more in the age of #AI. If the software, models and infrastructure are closed, then a handful of companies determine how knowledge is created, filtered and shared. If they are open, communities can inspect them, improve them and govern them together.

The future isn’t simply open source software, it’s open source society. That means investing back into the commons we depend on. Maintaining infrastructure, supporting contributors, building institutions that outlast individuals. Planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.

That’s what #OMN is about. Not simply writing better code, but helping build a better social fabric for the #openweb. Because freedom isn’t something technology gives us, it’s something communities build together.

A #mainstreaming video looking at this.

The current common sense of #neoliberal worldview replaces trust with greed as the social motivator. The problem is that every successful society is built on trust. When you undermine trust, you build a #deathcult. Climate breakdown, inequality, social isolation and failing public institutions are not accidents – they’re the predictable outcomes.

When people recognise the problem, ask them what the solution is. Most will instinctively reach for the same neoliberal “common sense” that created the crisis. That’s the moment to gently point out that those ideas are part of the #deathcult, not a way out.

The alternative starts with rebuilding trust, commons and community, #FOSS needs to become a core to this.

Why Stories Matter on the #OMN

Facts matter, technology matters, governance matters. But people rarely change because they read theory, a specification or a list of features. People change because of stories, this is why storytelling is central to the #OMN path. A story gives people somewhere to stand, it connects ideas to lived experience.

Instead of explaining the #4opens as an abstract framework, tell the story of a community escaping a #dotcons platform by building trust on the #openweb. Instead of arguing about governance, tell the story of how a group solved a conflict through #OpenProcess. Instead of listing technical features, tell the story of someone who regained control of their community tech after years of platform lock-in.

Stories carry values, the last forty years of #mainstreaming have been held together by stories about competition, consumption and individual success. These stories have normalised the #deathcult, making extraction and enclosure feel like “common sense.” We now need better stories about cooperation instead of competition, commons balancing ownership, about trust instead of surveillance. Stories about building rather than consuming.

The #Fediverse itself is a story, an accidental reboot of the #openweb that proves another internet is possible. It isn’t perfect, but it demonstrates that people can build social infrastructure without billionaires directing the conversation.

The challenge is that the academics or the #geekproblem tell stories only to other, academics or geeks, technical and academic paths are important, but they don’t inspire people to act, so we need stories that people can understand:

A neighbourhood rebuilding local media.
Boaters organising to defend the waterways as a commons.
Communities escaping the #dotcons.
Volunteers composting #techchurn into useful tools.
Ordinary people discovering that they can build infrastructure together.

These stories become shared memory, shared memory becomes culture, culture shapes “common sense.” and changing common sense is how lasting social change happens. So don’t just build software or academic theory, tell stories that help people imagine themselves as part of a healthier #openweb.

#OMN #FOSS #openweb #4opens #ActivityPub #Fediverse #commons #DIY #makinghistory

Our failure to mediate the mess

The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #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, 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 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, 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: 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 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.

That’s the work of the #openweb, and the path of #OMN.

Techno feudalism what changes

What part can you play? The #openweb is one place to start, keep it simple (#KISS), build commons, compost the mess. The political centre created this mess. Four decades of neoliberal “common sense” deepened inequality, weakened democracy, privatised public goods, and pushed us beyond ecological limits. Yet much of the centre still offers only more of the same: better management of the #deathcult rather than a path beyond it.

That leaves a dangerous vacuum. If progressive movements cannot offer practical alternatives, the far right will continue to grow by presenting itself as the only force willing to confront the crisis. Their answers are built on fear, exclusion and authoritarianism – but they resonate because they acknowledge that the old system is failing, while the centre too often pretends it can be repaired.

Simply defending the status quo is not enough. Nor is retreating into abstract radicalism disconnected from everyday life. We need practical, grassroots alternatives that people can participate in and build themselves.

This same pattern appears in technology. Our #geekproblem isn’t primarily bad code – it’s a culture of arrogance and ignorance. Technical communities often reproduce the assumptions of the wider society without questioning them. They celebrate disruption while recreating centralisation. They mistake individual freedom for collective liberation, reproducing #stupidindividualism while unconsciously serving the logic of the #deathcult.

This isn’t usually malicious. It’s a feedback loop. The culture produces the technology, and the technology reinforces the culture. The answer isn’t to reject technology. It’s to mediate it socially.

The #4opens offer a simple path:

Open Data keeps knowledge in the commons.
Open Source keeps tools accountable.
Open Standards prevent enclosure.
Open Process ensures communities – not just developers or investors – shape the progress.

We need to use this to composting 40 Years of “Common Sense”, For the last 40 years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what passes for “common sense” in #mainstreaming society. Their influence runs so deep that many assumptions now feel natural rather than ideological. When these assumptions are challenged, people react defensively, not because they’re bad people, but because their worldview feels under attack.

This isn’t just a mainstream problem. Activist spaces reproduce the same patterns. The result is endless circular arguments, performative politics, and fragmentation rather than solidarity. Our task isn’t simply to oppose this culture, it’s to mediate it, to compost the mess rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Composting means taking the waste of the last forty years – failed assumptions, captured institutions, #techchurn, #fashionista politics, and individualism – and turning it into fertile ground for something better.

The worrying trend is that the grassroots signal is being submerged beneath an echo chamber of #mainstreaming voices. On many #fashionista threads, noise overwhelms practical action. We spend time performing politics rather than building the infrastructure movements need. That requires empathy, patience, and practical organising. It means creating spaces where people can step outside inherited “common sense” without feeling they have to defend it. It means building working alternatives instead of only criticising broken systems.

The answer isn’t to shout louder, it’s to build better spaces, better tools, and better processes. The signal-to-noise ratio can change again, but only if we do the patient work of mediation, trust-building and commons creation – The work of #OMN.

The hidden costs of worshipping the #deathcult

One of the successes of neoliberal capitalism has been convincing us that we’re paying less while actually paying more. They promise lower taxes, then they privatise the services, health insurance becomes a private tax, car finance becomes a transport tax, rent becomes a housing tax, student debt becomes an education tax. The electricity surcharge for AI data centres becomes another hidden tax.

You voted to reduce taxes, but all that happened was public taxes became private payments to corporations. A vote for “tax cuts” too becomes a vote for hidden taxes. The same trick plays out across the digital world. We’re encouraged to embrace platforms and AI systems that consume enormous amounts of energy, degrade the quality of public knowledge, undermine independent publishing, harvest our personal data, and concentrate even more power in the hands of a handful of tech oligarchs.

We’re told this is innovation, but it’s mostly enclosure. The latest scandals around Elon Musk and his political networks aren’t the real story. They’re symptoms of a deeper problem. Billionaires don’t simply own companies, they increasingly shape media, public debate, infrastructure and politics itself.

This is what the #deathcult looks like in practice: private wealth buying public power. One path we can take is not simply replacing one billionaire with another or one political party with another, it’s rebuilding the commons. Public goods instead of private monopolies, community media instead of billionaire media, the #openweb instead of the #dotcons and economic democracy instead of oligarchy.

That’s why #OMN exists – not simply to criticise the mess, but to build practical alternatives to mediate the mess as the next crisis arrives.

Why we use the #deathcult hashtag

Why we use the #deathcult hashtag

People sometimes ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult. It isn’t just a provocative label, it is to name the dominant political and economic logic that has shaped the last forty years. By #deathcult, I mean the era of #neoliberalism: a system that treats endless economic growth, privatisation and competition as unquestionable “common sense,” even when the consequences are ecological collapse, growing inequality and social breakdown.

I call it a cult because, like any successful ideology, it becomes difficult to see from the inside. Its assumptions become so normal that alternatives appear impossible. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There Is No Alternative,” sums this up perfectly. The “death” part has become harder to ignore, due to movements like #XR (Extinction Rebellion), the reality of #climatechaos has entered mainstream discussion. We can now see that continuing on our current path means ecological collapse, mass displacement and the deaths of millions – and displacement of billions – of people over the coming century.

Of course, neoliberalism is not something entirely new. It is an extreme form of capitalism, and history has seen similar periods before. One example is Britain’s response to the Irish Potato Famine, where market ideology took precedence over human need, contributing to mass starvation, displacement and suffering.

After the Second World War, many countries moved towards forms of social democracy. Capitalism was softened by stronger public services, labour rights and welfare systems. These reforms were far from perfect, but they recognised that completely unrestrained markets created instability and injustice. In part this “liberal golden” era was held in place by there being an alternative of soviet communism.

From the late 1970s onwards, much of that understanding was forgotten. Deregulation, privatisation and financialisation became the dominant ideology once again. Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders represent attempts to move back towards that earlier social democratic settlement. Though this compromise path of social democracy is not a final answer, as it still operates within capitalism, but it is certainly preferable to the #neoliberal model that currently dominates. As radicals, though, we should aim higher. We need to build systems based on commons, cooperation, ecological responsibility and democratic participation, not simply manage capitalism more fairly.

This is where #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. The problems we face are not only economic, they are also about communication. Today’s digital infrastructure is dominated by #dotcons: corporate platforms that monetise attention, shape public debate and concentrate power. Facebook, Google, Apple, X and similar platforms have become essential infrastructure while remaining accountable only to capital rather than communities.

The answer isn’t simply better regulation, it’s rebuilding the #openweb. Like the #Fediverse, the #OMN is one small contribution towards this path: creating media and communication infrastructure based on the #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process – so communities can shape their own communication instead of renting it from billion-dollar corporations.

People also ask why I use so many hashtags, the answer is simple, the web is made from links. Hashtags are one of the few linking technologies that work across platforms. They allow conversations to escape individual silos and become discoverable across the wider web. They are not meant to replace ideas; they are signposts pointing towards larger conversations that matter. Yes, they can look cryptic, but every shared language starts somewhere. If we never create language for new problems, we remain only trapped inside the vocabulary of the systems we’re trying to change and challenge.

Changing language doesn’t change the world by itself, but it can change how we think about the world, and changing the conversation is often the first step towards changing society itself. That’s why I still use #deathcult, not as an insult, but as a way of naming a system whose destructive logic has become so familiar that people struggle to imagine anything different. The challenge now is not simply to criticise that system, it is to build practical alternatives.

One thing has shifted over the last few years: it’s becoming #mainstreaming to recognise that #neoliberalism is a #deathcult. Composting this mess is the path of #OMN, the #openweb, and the #4opens.

For those who like to believe in social democracy, this isn’t an argument against the gains it has won. Strong public services, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and democratic institutions have all made life better for millions. They matter, and they are worth defending.

But we should also recognise their limits. As long as investment and production remain under the control of capital, democracy stops at the workplace door. We get to vote for governments, but rarely over what our economies produce, how resources are used, or whose needs come first.

The next step is not simply kinder capitalism, but extending democratic principles into the economy itself. Building commons, cooperatives, public ownership where appropriate, community governance, and digital infrastructure that people collectively control. That’s the direction #OMN points towards: not replacing one elitist crew with another, but growing the practical foundations of economic democracy from the grassroots up.

#KISS

Which Nature Are We Growing?

Today I was half joke about ducks and geese, but there’s something underneath the joke if you lift the lid. After Darwin, many nineteenth-century elitists became fascinated with cataloguing nature. Too often, though, they also saw their own society reflected back at them. Hierarchy, competition, borders and domination weren’t simply political arrangements any more, they were presented as “natural laws”. Social Darwinism grew out of this way of thinking, using selective readings of nature to justify existing inequalities.

Later, ethologists like Konrad Lorenz studied geese, ducks and other animals, revealing fascinating patterns of territoriality, dominance and aggression. The science itself mattered, but the mistake came when people stretched those observations into a claim about human society that this is simply how we are.

You still hear versions of that today. “People are naturally selfish.” “You’ll never stop conflict.” “Communities always need strong leaders.” “It’s just human nature.” But humans aren’t geese, we’re also the species that build commons, mutual aid societies, libraries, volunteer lifeboats, free software, neighbourhood kitchens and countless forms of cooperation that don’t depend on domination. Human nature has always contained both competition and cooperation. The interesting question isn’t which one is “real”, it’s which one our culture encourages.

The #Oxfordboater community is a good example. Every year people help each other through floods, lend tools, tow broken boats, share batteries, pass on local knowledge, watch each other’s moorings and organise collective responses when outside pressure builds. None of that is compulsory, nobody invoices for it. Most of it happens because trust has been built over years. That is one expression of human nature.

But there is another, were every disagreement becomes a territorial dispute, generator hours, mooring space, who arrived first, who “belongs”, who gets to speak for the community, who broke an unwritten rule. None of these conflicts appear from nowhere, they’re amplified by the social environment we create. If every discussion becomes about winning, then people start behaving as though they live in a world where winning is the only thing that matters. The behaviour becomes self-reinforcing, like the geese.

One thing i have learned from practical paths is that infrastructure grows behaviour – this is one reason #OMN spends so much time talking about infrastructure. Not just technical infrastructure but social infrastructure. The customs, stories, shared memory and open processes that quietly shape how people behave. For boaters the old 8.00am-to-8.00pm running generator convention wasn’t simply about engines, it is social infrastructure to reduced conflict before conflict starts. The same is true of slowing down past moored boats, helping someone through a lock, sharing local knowledge with newcomers. These customs don’t eliminate disagreement, they make disagreement survivable. Without them, every generation starts again from zero.

The stories we tell matter – The #deathcult tells us competition is inevitable, that everyone is looking after themselves, that cooperation is naïve, that markets and hierarchy reflect reality. The #openweb and commons stories starts somewhere else, trust can be cultivated, commons can be built, communities can organise themselves. But none of these are guaranteed, they all require maintenance, just like our boats.

Looking out your window it should become obvious to you, we are not ducks, so a real question becomes how do we compost conflict – the challenge here isn’t eliminating disagreement – it is learning how to compost the mess disagreement leaves, like duck shit on our bordering planks. Taking the inevitable friction, the different lifestyles, the competing needs, and turn them into something that strengthens the community instead of poisoning it.

This path means remembering why customs evolved, it means asking not just “What works for me?” but “What helps us keep living together five years from now?” Because that’s ultimately what community is, not the absence of conflict, it is the ability to survive it without becoming geese 🙂

The main character of this post, presiding the ducks: “Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the Nazi regime. In his application for party membership he wrote, “I’m able to say that my whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the National Socialists.” His publications during that time led in later years to allegations that his scientific work had been contaminated by Nazi sympathies. His published writing during the Nazi period included support for Nazi ideas of “racial hygiene” couched in pseudoscientific metaphors.”

The subject of this post was an actual Nazi. Lorenz, becomes interesting not because he tells us what human nature is, but because he raises questions of how instincts interact with social infrastructure. If humans possess capacities for both competition and cooperation, then the important question becomes – which behaviours do our grassroots social structures and #mainstreaming institutions encourage?

Neoliberal culture rewards competition, extraction and individual greed.

Commons-based societies reward trust, reciprocity and mutual aid.

Human nature contains the potential for both. The infrastructure we build – technical, social and cultural – helps determine which paths become dominant. That’s why debates about boater culture, the #openweb, the commons and grassroots governance are ultimately debates about which version of human nature we want to cultivate, rather than which one is supposedly “natural.” This mess is the “common sense” we need to work to compost – just look at the ducks – to understand why.

#Oxfordboaters: The use of online plebiscites without deliberation is a prat move. Blocking democratic #4opens working-group structures creates this mess in the first place, another prat move. Then diluting the CoC (a terrible name, by the way) leaves us with a “victory” that’s shallow and probably temporary, yet another prat move.

Can you see the pattern? Given the people we’re all working with, perhaps this really is the best we could achieve. Fair enough. But I probably won’t be here when the same people have to go through exactly the same arguments again in a few years. The point, being prats has consequences, we either compost today’s conflicts into something that lasts, or we leave the same mess for the next people to inherit.

In the end, we are all the ones who have to live with those consequences.

Stupid Individualism: How We End Up Fighting Over Nothing

We are living through a dangerous moment

Let’s look at a #fluffy positive view of the path we need to be on. We are living through a dangerous moment, the systems around us are failing, but the dominant response is still denial at worst or to try to repair the existing structures that created the crisis at best. But, the problem is not one bad policy, one bad company, or one bad government. The problem is a whole way of organising society around extraction, scale, speed and distance.

A system that measures success through endless economic growth has turned the living world into a resource pool, nature becomes something to consume, our communities become markets. People become workers and consumers to turn relationships into transactions. This is the logic of the #deathcult – the belief that there is no alternative to the endless expansion of production, consumption and competition.

But there are very different stories, for most of human history, people lived through relationships with place, community and the natural world. When knowledge was rooted in local experience, skills grew through connection, culture evolved through diversity. The problem is not that humans are incapable of living differently. The problem is that we built systems that separate us from the consequences of our actions. A global supply chain moves food thousands of miles while hiding the real costs. A corporation extracting value from a place without being accountable to the people who live there. A financial system creates wealth for a few while pushing the damage onto everyone else.

The result is not just ecological damage, it is cultural damage to the shared humanist knowledge, ecology, stories and local power. The process that creates monoculture in culture and thinking, when everything becomes standardised, the same products, platforms, economic assumptions, the same idea that progress means becoming more disconnected. This is where the old path of humanism and resulting localisation becomes important. Localisation is not about retreating from the world, it is not about small communities ignoring global problems. It is about rebuilding the connections that make society healthy, creating economies where people can see the impact of their choices.

This is where the #OMN story connects, the Open Media Network is not just about publishing tools, it is about rebuilding the missing social layer. The #openweb originally grew from the idea that people could connect, collaborate and create outside centralised control. It was messy, diverse and alive, in till the #closedweb enclosed this with #dotcons platforms designed around attention extraction, surveillance and profit.

The work of composting this mess is not simply building another platform, it is more about rebuilding culture. We need “native” networks that support local voices to connect #4opens globally to bridge a diversity of communities, ideas and ways of living. Not one giant system trying to manage everyone, we need a garden, not a factory. The challenge is that technical decentralisation on its own is not enough, a network can be decentralised and still reproduce the same problems. We need decentralised power, not just decentralised technology.

The exciting thing is that this is already happening, across the world people are rebuilding commons, the #Fediverse, creating alternative economies, restoring ecosystems and forming communities of resistance and care both online and offline. These stories rarely appear in the mainstream because the #mainstreaming is built around crisis, competition and spectacle. But underneath the noise, seeds are growing. This is why we need to stop only fighting the broken system to also grow alternatives.

The #OMN value is simple:

Create the compost where new ideas can grow.

Support the people already doing the work.

Build tools that strengthen communities instead of replacing them.

Move from consumers back into participants.

From isolated individuals back into connected communities.

A movement is not created by everyone agreeing on one answer, a movement grows through many different experiments, connected by shared values. The future is not something we wait for, it is something we build. A flourishing society will not come from making the current system more efficient. It will come from growing something different.

But we also need to be honest about the scale of the challenge. The #deathcult does not simply disappear because we build nicer alternatives. It has power, institutions, money, media, infrastructure and the ability to absorb, dilute and sell back every challenge. This is where many #fluffy movements fail, they mistake visibility for power, mistake inclusion in existing systems for change. They mistake being allowed a seat at the table, for changing who owns the table.

The current system is very good at taking the language of resistance and turning it into another product. It can sell sustainability while accelerating extraction, sell community while building more isolation, sell “open” while creating new forms of enclosure.

This is why the #spiky #OMN is not about creating another nice corner inside the existing mess, the path is not to make the #dotcons slightly less harmful. This path is to grow a tech native humanistic network, an alternative that can change and challenge, culturally, socially and practically. Because the battle is not only over technology or economics, it is over imagination. For decades, we have been trained to believe there is no alternative. That large-scale capitalistic paths are inevitable, humans are just consumers, that communities are outdated, that efficiency matters more than resilience.

The deepest enclosure is of our minds, to break this we need both the fluffy and the spiky path. The fluffy grows gardens, relationships and commons. The spiky challenges the structures that keep the garden fenced in. Without the fluffy, to easily resistance becomes empty anger. Without the spiky, alternatives become harmless hobbies that the system can ignore. We need both, people building the new while also questioning the old.

Because the future will not be gifted to us by governments, corporations or platforms, it will be built by people organising together. The question is not whether change is possible, it is whether we organise enough, quickly enough, to make the possible real. Now we need the compost, the networks and the collective effort to help change and challenge grow.