The Genoa G8 Summit protests, held from July 18 to 22, 2001, were a turning point in the global justice movement. More than 200,000 people converged on the medieval port city to block the summit and challenge the concentrated power of the world’s richest nations. A gathering of the #deathcult ideology, grinding the planet into dust for profit.
For many of us, the G8 represented everything wrong with the world: an unelected body shaping economic and social policy for billions without legitimacy, accountability, or consent. We travelled to Genoa not as isolated activists but as a living ecosystem of movements, anarchists, trade unionists, farmers, climate campaigners, media collectives, migrants’ rights groups, students, pacifists, the lot. We were there to resist and to build alternatives in the cracks.
Arriving in a besieged city, Genoa a few days before the demonstrations to help set up the Media Centre, for grassroots reporting. Genoa, though, felt nothing like a holiday town. Police were everywhere. Riot vans on street corners. Helicopters thudding overhead. The convergence centre was being built on the beach; just 100 yards away from the stadium, where police forces were massing in their thousands. Walking around felt like moving inside a tightening fist.
We slept in the camper van that first night, tucked beside a half-built marquee. At dawn, we joined the organisers at the Diaz school, the building that housed both the Genoa Social Forum and the Media Centre.
We requisition two PCs from other rooms, installed video editing softwer, and turned them into the only two shared editing stations in the building. One was upgraded with a new hard drive and FireWire card for DV footage, not that it mattered, because it broke on day two and never recovered. The analogue capture system we had brought did most of the work that went online.
On one of our first reporting trips, filming outside the police barracks beside the convergence centre, we were detained by undercover cops. More arrived. Then more. Ten or twelve by the end. They demanded our tapes. I refused. They checked our documents, questioned us for hours, and released us without charge. I secretly filmed some of them; two would resurface later outside the IMC on the night of the raid.
Driving around the city to document the expanding “red zone” – the militarised area blocking off the summit – we were detained twice more. Civil rights meant nothing here. The police behaved like a sovereign power unto themselves. That Orwellian twinge – the sense that you are inside a lawless machine – grew stronger every day.
When the City Turned Red. Then one protester, Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead by police. Fear rippled across the city. The IMC became a space threaded with arguments about what to do. People drifted away, hour by hour, some deciding the risks were too great. By midnight the centre had half emptied.
Then the screams came: “THE POLICE ARE COMING!”
Looking out the window, I saw nothing at first. Panic surged anyway, people barricading doors, grabbing bags, racing up staircases. Marion moved the archive tapes to the hiding place I’d scouted earlier: the water tower on the roof.
From the rooftop I filmed carabinieri smashing into the building next door, the Diaz Pertini school, with vans and sledgehammers. Chairs were used to break windows. Tables became battering rams. It was happening fast, shockingly fast. Then I saw them entering our stairwell.
The Diaz Raid: Running for Our Lives. I headed downstairs to check if the Media Centre itself was being stormed. Turning the stairwell corner, I came face-to-face with a fully armoured carabiniere charging upward, truncheon raised, panting with adrenaline. I spun and bolted. Two flights up, shouting, “They’re in the building!” I sprinted to the roof and slipped into the tower.
Inside the darkness, I whispered for Marion. No answer. I crept through the corridor of water tanks, lit only by the IR beam from my camera. Finally a small, terrified voice: “Turn the light off.” She had hidden behind the last tank, clutching tapes and equipment.
For hours, three, maybe four, we lay silent as the helicopter’s spotlight swept the windows. Police boots thudded across the roof. Below us, the city echoed with screams, crashes, and the chanted word “ASSASSINI.”
When the helicopter finally left, we emerged. The rooftop was scattered with stunned survivors. Downstairs, the destruction was total. Computers smashed. Hard drives ripped out. Doors hanging loose. The walls of the Diaz school across the street were painted with blood. Skin and hair stuck to corners. Piles of clothing soaked red. People moving like ghosts.
The Carabinieri had left their calling card.
What happened inside that school, was not policing. It was torture, humiliation, and fascist ritual. Ninety-three sleeping demonstrators were beaten so badly that the floors resembled a slaughterhouse. People hiding under tables or sleeping in bags were clubbed unconscious. A 65-year-old woman’s arm was broken. One student needed surgery for brain bleeding. Others had their teeth kicked out. One officer cut clumps of hair from victims as trophies.
Those who survived were taken to Bolzaneto detention centre, where the abuse continued: beatings, stress positions, pepper spray, threats of rape, and forced chants of “Viva il Duce!” and “Viva Pinochet!” A systematic, organised brutality. This wasn’t loss of control, it was ideology.
Aftermath: Truth in the Ruins. The Italian state tried to bury it all. But survivors, lawyers, journalists, and prosecutors fought for years. The European Court of Human Rights eventually ruled that Italy had committed grave human rights violations. But almost none of the officers served jail time. Politicians escaped entirely.
The police weren’t out of control. They were following a logic, the logic of protecting eliteists power against democratic dissent. The logic of the #deathcult. The logic that treats people as obstacles, not citizens. Genoa showed the world what happens when movements gain too much momentum: the mask drops.
And still, in that chaos, seeds were planted – #indymedia, #OMN, the global justice movement, the early #openweb – messy, hopeful, compost for future uprisings.
This adventure started out with a peace march. The Global Walk for a Liveable World had already crossed America once – LA to New York in ’89 – while I was drifting through Santa Cruz, not quite sure where the thing would begin or end. I drove across the States instead of walking it, then flew back across the Atlantic. Found out about the second stage in the usual sideways way, a line at the bottom of one of my mum’s Ribbon leaflets.
In March ’91 I rang the organisers in the States to offer help with the UK leg, expecting to join a team. They wrote back to say that, actually, I was the team. Three weeks of phone calls, letters, searching for beds for 60–100 people, then scaling it all down to 20–30, and a week before arrival they announced only two or three walkers were coming. In the end four people appeared at the Battersea Peace Pagoda. Two weeks of trudging to Dover, then waving them off with a polite promise that I “might meet them in Berlin.” Truthfully, the earnest Californian-spiritual-self-help tone grated. They meant well. It just wasn’t my culture.
Hitching to Berlin. Set off for Berlin anyway, in the middle of… whatever month it was. Hitchhiking out of London was the usual purgatory. Bus → tube → Greenwich ferry back and forth trying to find a good spot. The gale stole my new Panama hat and sent me scrambling down the Thames foreshore to find it. Eventually got a lift out to the usual hopeless nowhere on the edge of town.
Midnight ferry to Ostend. Cheap day return, slept outside under the stars remembering the S/Y Nana and the Atlantic. Wandering off the boat, slinging my bag over my shoulder, I bumped into a Turkish-Cypriot driver who offered me a ride. Ended up drinking coffee in a friend’s flat while they talked Turkish and showed each other swords. Another lift dropped me at a service station 20 miles on.
A blur of rides later I was wandering lost in a village near Arnhem, slip road off the motorway, none on. Five miles through villages and pine forest to find the on-ramp. Lift to Hanover outskirts, dusk coming in, then, while trudging up the slip road, a ride all the way to Berlin. Stopped at the old border checkpoint at sunset. Dover to Berlin in 23 hours with a single hour’s sleep: exhausted but, strangely, the best way to do it.
Berlin: Unification or Just Glue? Dropped ten miles outside the city at midnight. S-Bahn staff surly, East Berliners insecure and unhelpful. Missed one train because nobody would point at the correct platform. Finally reached central East Berlin at 2am. Wandered empty streets, waited for tourist offices to open at eight. Everything misprinted, misdirected, kaput. Eventually found the address, a big communal house in the leafy suburbs, with activists, squatters, campaign groups, home turf of sorts. The Walk had left the day before. Slept. Woke late. Looked around Berlin. Got a Polish visa. Visited an old friend. Drifted.
Into Poland with the Walk. Caught up with one of the walkers, joined for a couple of days. Trudged into a village where we lounged on the grass eating bananas and ice cream while an old woman peered suspiciously through her curtains. A drunk man on a bicycle invited me fishing.
We camped two days beside a lake: sandy beach, forest, dragonflies, lilies, beavers. No tent, so I colonised a new picnic hut with a thatched roof half a mile around the lake. On the last night there was a party across the water with East Germans, Russian soldiers’ wives, and a group of Chernobyl kids. Vodka, folk songs, Beatles tunes until late.
Too tired and drunk to walk back to the hut I slept on the beach under my banner. Half-dreaming I felt a damp snout rooting at my neck. Sat up to see a small wild boar scamper away. Lay back down. Fifteen minutes later another attempted entry into my sleeping bag. Another boar.
Poland. Frankfurt-Oder → Poland Proper, Left the walk at Frankfurt-Oder, crossed the river, no border guards, no stamp. Changed a bit of money without knowing the rate. Hitchhiked through poorer, rougher towns. One couple gave me a lift, suspicious at first. When they realised I was from England their faces lit up: they’d never met anyone from “the West.”
In Wrocław, grey, rattling trams, I wandered two hours to a youth hostel that had closed years ago, then back again to the one I’d already passed. Looked for a tent; the shops offered nothing light, small or cheap. Took the train to Kraków instead.
Kraków, one of Europe’s great fairytale cities. Old town wrapped in green parkland, the filled-in moat. Enormous square crowned by the cathedral, a stone-roofed market hall, and a tower straight out of wizards and alchemists. Sat watching the Poles watch the Hare Krishnas dance.
Day trip hitching to Auschwitz with a young Jewish American, his first time hitching. Warm, generous people en route, which helped soften the horror of the camp: the endless wooden huts, the rails, the exhibitions. Romania’s display was the clearest; Hungary’s and Czech Republic’s had aged badly.
High Tatras. Bus to Zakopane, then on to Kuźnice. Walked two hours up into alpine meadows and pine paths. Stayed two nights in a mountain lodge built of giant boulders among firs. Walked barefoot to a lake at dusk, ice water numbing, snow on the shore. Two sunsets in one day after climbing a higher ridge. Back to tea, talk, and sleep, until a bear rummaging in the firewood woke everyone.
Walked five hours across ridges to Czechoslovakia. Pure mountain beauty: bilberries, moss-padded rock, icy streams, butterflies, deer crashing through undergrowth. Border guards grumpy about my missing stamp. Gave an old woman money and postcards to post, as there was no postbox at the crossing.
Slovakia: High and Low Tatras. Hitchhiked around: one lift from an obnoxious “entrepreneur” pushing overpriced rooms. Stayed two days in a cheap tourist motel, rode a forest tram to a surprisingly modern ski resort. Bought a tent for 2,100 crowns.
A Dutch couple took me to the ice caves, then to Dedinky, a lakeside village in the Low Tatras. Stayed four days. Lost half my clothes from a washing line and had my watch stolen at a birthday party. Thunderstorms, flooded tent, dubious rum, questionable hospitality.
Gypsies offered goulash and too much alcohol. Wandering deer-stalks with my camera. A glade so full of butterflies they landed on my jacket for the salt. Tea with syrup in the pub. Eventually hitched south and the last lift to the Hungarian border was, luckily, with Neo-Nazis who didn’t speak English.
Hungary. Walked across the border. Hitched halfway to Budapest in a Trabant with a new western Polo engine. The driver was proud until a giant French Citroën swept past; then he was crushed. The west in one gesture: effortless superiority, consumer glamour.
Budapest: big, beautiful, bullet-scarred. Wandered museums, fought off born-again Christians and McDonald’s kids. Lost my passport and found it again. Ate pastries and fruit for under a pound.
Caught a train to Szolnok. Wandered markets. Watched Russian helicopters drop paratroopers in dust clouds. Hitchhiked into a storm, huge drops, lightning, no lifts. Finally pitched my tent in a hollow outside Püspökladány, mosquitoes murderous, only sweets for dinner.
Next day: a lift with a Romanian to the border. Almost into Romania proper until visas and bribes made it impossible on my dwindling cash. Lunch of salted cheese and pickled vegetables. Foul orange drink. Backtrack.
Yugoslavia Approaches: Truckers, War Talk, Rain. English truckers took me under their wing. Rumours, hatred of Yugoslav drivers, endless cynical war talk. Rain hammered down. Hail. Under-bridge shelters. A hotel full of dancing wedding guests. A lonely prostitute named Gorge offering cigarettes and small kindnes. Long night. No lifts.
Eventually an English truck to Niš, avoiding the Croatian war zone. Dropped in a hotel in a storm that flooded the roads. More dancing, more waiting, more rain. Then stuck again, hitching useless.
Waited eight hours on a motorway. Walked off in frustration through dusty villages, sunflower fields, Soviet air bases, shepherds, rubbish dumps. Turned down buses. Took random side roads. A young man tried to help but we couldn’t communicate. Found a café owner who spoke French; they invited me to stay.
A Night in the Village. The café owner’s family fed me soup and bread and pálinka that could have cleaned engine parts. We talked in fragments of French and wild gestures. Their three kids stared at me like I was an escaped zoo animal. This was deep Yugoslavia, well off any tourist map, and I was the strange wanderer washed up by weather and bad timing.
They cleared a space for me to sleep on a narrow bed in the spare room. Old wallpaper peeling. A dog barking outside half the night. Rain on the tin roof. Perfect. Better than most hostels I’d paid for.
At dawn the café owner drove me back to the road, shook my hand with the elaborate warmth Balkan men have towards travellers, and wished me luck with the war. That was how people talked about Yugoslavia then, “the war” as if it were weather you might dodge if you timed the clouds.
Finally Moving Again. Two Orthodox priests in a green Lada dropped me near Skopje. They chain-smoked and offered philosophical commentary in a mix of Serbian, German, and what I think was half-remembered Latin. One of them insisted the devil lived in television aerials.
A trucker took me the rest of the way. The cab smelled of onions, diesel, and the sour damp of someone who slept in the cab too often. But he was kind, and he bought me a coffee from a kiosk that looked like it had been assembled from scrap during Tito’s time.
Skopje felt like a place trying to remember itself. Concrete modernist blocks, markets spilling fruit onto the pavement, the smell of grilled meat, the odd leftover fragment of Ottoman architecture poking up like a tooth. A city between eras.
I wandered the bazaar. Bought cherries so ripe they stained my fingers. Sat by the river watching young men throw themselves dramatically into the water to impress girls who pretended not to look. Same story everywhere in the world.
Spent the night on the floor of a dormitory where half the travellers were on their way to Istanbul and the other half had just escaped it.
South Again. Hitching out was slow. Eventually an Albanian family squeezed me into their car, seven people and me, limbs everywhere. They gave me boiled corn and water and argued loudly over whether I looked more like a German or a Spaniard.
Near the border, the father insisted on buying me lunch: greasy lamb tat I could not eat, tomatoes, bread like clouds. Hospitality thicker than the Balkan humidity. Crossed into Greece on foot. The border guard barely looked at my passport. I think he was half-asleep.
Northern Greece. Hitching here was easier. People were curious. Everyone wanted to talk politics, history, religion, football, and how Germany was ruining Europe. I learned quickly that agreeing with everyone was the safest option. Slept one night in an olive grove. Stars so sharp they felt like they could cut you. Woke to goats nosing the tent.
A trucker dropped me at the edge of Thessaloniki. Another city between worlds: Byzantine churches, grimy apartment blocks, and the sea shining like nothing was wrong anywhere.
End of the Road. I sat on the harbour wall watching ferries come and go. Backpack stained with rain, dust, and bad wine. Boots half-destroyed. No plan, no deadline, no proper money left. Just the quiet satisfaction of having walked, hitched, and lucked my way across a continent in a time when borders were dissolving and reforming beneath your feet.
You never really end these journeys. You just stop somewhere and breathe. The world keeps moving. You move with it.And eventually you turn the stories into compost for whatever comes next.
Towards Istanbul. From Thessaloniki, everything tilts gently downhill towards the East. The light changes. The air feels older. Even the road markings start to look like they were painted by someone who learned their craft from Byzantine mosaics.
I caught a lift with a fisherman in a battered blue pickup. Nets in the back, the faint smell of diesel and the sea following us inland. He didn’t say much, just offered me a cigarette every twenty minutes as if that were the correct dosage for crossing northern Greece. When we stopped at a roadside café he bought me a coffee strong enough to restart a small tractor. He dropped me near Kavala, waved, and disappeared in a cloud of dust and fish-scented goodwill
Sleeping Rough, Thinking Too Much. I slept that night above a rocky beach, backpack for a pillow. The Aegean murmured below, waves rolling in like slow thoughts. I remember lying there thinking how strange it was, the world felt wide open then. Borders were just lines on paper. You could hitch from Scotland to the edge of Asia with nothing but a backpack, a half-broken map, and the soft confidence that strangers would mostly help you.
Trust-based travel. Pre-#dotcons, before fear culture colonised everything. Before algorithmic sorting. Before #deathcult narratives turned everyone into either a threat or a customer. It was all human-scale. Messy. Improvised. #KISS by default.
Crossing Into Turkey. The next morning a Greek–Turkish family picked me up. They were going home after visiting relatives, the boot stuffed with gifts and olives and god-knows-what from villages along the route. Three kids in the back seat, all elbows and arguments. They fed me pastries, corrected my pronunciation, and insisted on telling me the entire family history of Thrace. At the border the father argued with the guard about paperwork, the mother handed out more pastries, and the kids tried to climb over me to see the soldiers.
And then, just like that, I was in Turkey. The Road to Istanbul. The highways were louder now, more chaotic. Traffic like a living organism. Drivers inventing new lanes, new rules, new geometries of risk. I stood at the roadside for ten minutes before a lorry screeched to a halt and the driver leaned out, waving wildly, shouting “ISTANBUL! ISTANBUL!” as if he’d been waiting specifically for me.
We barrelled westward, the cab rattling like it was held together by optimism and borrowed bolts. The driver sang folk songs, swore at traffic, and at one point produced a melon from under the seat and insisted I eat half of it.
First Sight of the City – And then – there it was. A vast sprawl of light and concrete and history piled on top of history. Istanbul doesn’t appear gradually; it erupts. One moment you’re on a motorway, the next you’re in a civilisation that has swallowed entire empires and still hasn’t finished digesting them.
The skyline hit me first: minarets, cranes, towers, domes. Old and new arguing with each other. The Bosphorus shimmering like a border between worlds.
Finding a Corner to Exist In. I got dropped somewhere central-but-not-quite. Walked uphill, downhill, through markets selling spices and plastic toys and counterfeit jeans. Found a cheap hostel with doors that didn’t quite lock and beds that creaked ominously with every breath. I dumped my pack, went outside, sat on a low wall, and watched the city breathe. The call to prayer drifted over rooftops. Boats moved like ghosts across the water. People hurried past carrying bags, bread, gossip, whole lives.
I felt like I’d reached the edge of something – the edge of Europe, the edge of the analogue era, before everything got flattened into apps and fenced-in channels.
The Godfather films, aren’t only stories about criminals, they’re stories about the world we live in: hierarchy pretending to be community, patriarchy pretending to be protection, capitalism pretending to be freedom, politicians pretending to be legitimate, family pretending to be love. It’s the #deathcult mythos in cinematic form.
They’re parables about how hierarchy rots everything it touches. Coppola and Puzo create a world where the mafia isn’t an aberration but a mirror of #mainstreaming power: patriarchal families, capitalist accumulation, politicians in pockets, and a state captured by private interests. It’s #deathcult logic wrapped in myth.
It opens not with the fake glamour of today’s action films, with none of the politically correct obscuring, but with real working people doing real life, it’s a view outside the current post truth polished mess. It’s about what’s behind the shiny surface blindness, you watch this film today to experience filmmaking and politics, like meany older films, the pacing is slow. Our attention spans are broken, good to keep this in your mind as you learn to see anew this ethnography of a pastime.
The Corleones aren’t only monsters from the shadows; they’re the real face of American power with the mask removed. Vito Corleone is an older, more honest version of the #neoliberal billionaire who buys judges today. The story’s “crime families” are stand-ins for competing capitalist blocks. The story is a metaphor for how power protects itself, how legitimacy is a costume, and how the violence of the system, hides behind talk of “family,” “business,” “respect,” and “tradition.”
The first two films critique the world we live in, a family built on the same contradictions that tear it apart. Quotes:
“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” → the neoliberal worldview: harm without responsibility.
“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” → the essence of capitalist coercion: “choice” backed by threat.
“We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” → capitalism’s real goal: monopoly masked as freedom.
“Just when I thought I was out…” → no exit from systems built on domination.
The films are showing us the mythology of the mainstreaming #deathcult. America as Mafia, Mafia as America.
The first film opens with a small man being crushed by the system: a father whose daughter is brutalized, and the courts shrug. This is how neoliberalism works: public services are defunded, fail, people are pushed into private “solutions.” Justice outsourced to a Don is no different from healthcare outsourced to a corporation: both sell what should be a right. Vito’s “friendship” is the same as corporate “philanthropy”, a mask over structural violence.
The “family” keeps up appearances – the bourgeoisie’s favourite hobby – while patriarchal rot devours everyone inside. Connie is beaten by Carlo, but the family shrugs because patriarchal norms demand they stay out of a “private matter.” The same system that fetishizes “protecting our women” abandons them whenever protection would inconvenience male hierarchy. It’s about too much control and not enough care.
Competition, crises, violence – the capitalist cycle – it is useful to see the mythology in #KISS terms, the Five Families aren’t criminals; they’re competing capitalist firms. Their war is a stand-in for economic crises. Clemenza even says these things happen “every ten years,” which is basically the capitalist business cycle.
The Tattaglias and Barzinis pushing heroin aren’t “more evil”, they’re the next stage of capitalism’s expansion, accumulation demanding new markets. Violence is “nothing personal,” which is how every predatory corporation sees the world.
Michael, capitalism’s golden child, was meant to be “legitimate” – a senator, a governor. A respectable frontman to maintain the illusion. Instead, he becomes the perfect neoliberal mess: calm, disciplined, efficient, emotionally repressed, willing to destroy anyone to maintain order. He is the patriarchal son weaponized. The obvious patriarchy flowing through the films is a useful reminder for some and insight for meany about what happens behind closed doors in the current hard right with their calling for “family values”.
By the end of the first film, when he wipes out all rivals while standing in a church professing faith, we see the metaphor: authoritarian capitalism, patriarchal religion, and state legitimacy all fused together. He “renounces Satan” while becoming him, the system itself.
Part II, sharpens this critique. We see young Vito’s rise in a world where feudalism is giving way to capitalism, one hierarchy composting into another. He kills Don Fanucci (feudal power) so he can build Genco Olive Oil (capitalist power). Same structure, new branding.
Meanwhile, Michael, the more matured form of this system, expands the empire into Nevada, New York, Miami, Sicily, Cuba. It’s the globalisation arc. And like all global empires, it’s built on betrayal: Fredo’s betrayal (internal collapse), Kay’s rejection (patriarchal fragility exposed), Michael’s violence against his own (self-destruction inherent in all hierarchical systems). By killing Fredo “for the family,” Michael destroys the family. Capitalism works the same way: protecting profit destroys society.
And the ending is the #techcurn lesson: systems built on secrecy, power, and control always collapse inward, devouring the people they claim to protect. Michael Corleone is neoliberalism in human form. Vito is the earlier, “nicer” version of the same system. And the people around them? Compost.
The Cuba revolution is the one moment where the system cracks – the #openweb moment of the film – where people try to reclaim the commons, break the hierarchy, stop being pawns.
On the subject of filmmaking, a lot of the films’ technics now look every day, this is not because they are, they are brilliant, it’s because every film for the last 50 years has coped them and thus diluted their shine with mediacy. Open your eyes, afresh, watch the films, you are seeing the invention of cinema. When you are used to a lifetime of derivative drivel.
Let’s be clear: the internet itself isn’t the problem. We knew how to build decentralised, humane, empowering networks long before the #dotcons turned everything into a behavioural extraction machine. The original internet – messy, permissionless, #4opens by default – can’t addict you. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t optimise. It just connects.
What addicts you are, the enclosure layers built on top of the internet. The sticky walls. The velvet handcuffs. The slick, dopamine-juiced engagement loops that the #dotcons built precisely because an open commons is unprofitable to their shareholders.
The tragedy is that we’ve let that thin, commercial crust redefine what people think the internet is. And because people can’t see the difference anymore, they blame “technology” or “the internet” instead of the actual problem, #dotcons corporate capture of communications.
This misframing is not an accident. It’s a political success for Silicon Valley. We do need to call out this #techshit, the compost layer we need to break down and return to the soil, but don’t mistake it for the internet. One is a commons. The other is a shopping mall with mirrors.
And this matters, because if we accept the framing that the entire internet is toxic, addictive, or inherently harmful, we give up the ground needed to fight for a public-first, #openweb future. We surrender the commons to the #dotcons by default. It’s classic #deathcult logic: destroy the shared world, declare it unfixable, then sell the gated alternative.
The #KISS path is still there, just harder to see under the sludge: simple tools, open protocols, people over platforms, and messy, real community instead of “curated engagement.” Things grow in compost. Even #techshit. Especially #techshit.
The task now is helping people tell the difference between the internet and the systems designed to trap them, and then getting them out into the open air again.
This lecture was framed as leadership in a time of economic, social, and environmental crisis. In reality, it was a performance, a ritual reaffirmation of the system that generated those crises. A talk about “leadership” steeped in the language of inevitability, technological salvation, and corporate myth-making.
The speaker, Muhtar Kent – Coca-Cola executive, delivered a brand sermon for the young acolytes of the #deathcult. Unconsciously or not, he was selling the two current hype bubbles: Quantum and AI. Both framed as paradigm shifts. But the problem with this mythology is that both are, right now, more fantasy than function.
#AI has no intelligence. None. It produces plausible text and performs statistical pattern recognition. That’s it. The current explosion of PR and funding is about destroying value, not creating it, replacing labour, creativity, and human meaning with cheap automated exhaust.
#Quantum computing, at present, has about the power of a 1990s scientific calculator at best. Much of the PR is built on pre-calculated solutions dressed up as magical quantum speed. It’s fudging. It’s lying. And yet, like AI, billions flow into the hype.
Leadership, with no connection to reality, this worship core message was simple: Leadership is a promise, and a brand is a promise kept, his talk had neither of these. A normal mess, a distillation of the managerial worldview; reality flattened into branding. Leadership becomes not action, not accountability, not ethics, but worship, corporate devotion, a smooth surface projected onto a burning world
The Q&A: Was a closed circle, the questions that followed were trapped inside the same narrow, pointless frame.
Q: How do we restore trust in institutions and politics? A: Politics is a “bad brand”. The solution, apparently, is to partner with subnational actors, mayors, governors, etc. He avoids the structural crisis entirely and reframes it as a marketing problem.
Q: Does AI in Coca-Cola advertising create value or destroy it? A: He claims it’s just applying old ideas with new tools. Again, pure branding logic.
The was more… the audience, wannabe future leaders of the global managerial class, were sycophantic, unquestioning, hungry for status. Every question was asked from inside the bubble. No challenge. No structural critique. No awareness of the real crises unfolding around us. The Audience were not people seeking truth or grappling with this crisis, they were worshippers looking for careers and job validation. Small sharks circling a bigger shark, hoping to learn how to swim with sharper teeth.
Conclusion:
Not leadership – worship. Not intelligence – PR. Not value creation – value destruction.
And the people in the room were not thinking their way out of the mess. They were rehearsing how to reproduce it as their path.
What has changed in leadership, which principles endure, and how do we respond?
The glossy rhetoric around “Quantum and AI leadership” makes it sound as if we’ve entered a new epoch where the old rules no longer hold. But strip away the hype and you find something familiar: the same elitist managerial class, still addicted to control, still mistaking centralization for competence, and still refusing to learn from the last 40 years of crisis.
What has changed is the scale and velocity of the mess they are creating. We’ve built systems we no longer understand, infrastructures too brittle to trust, and economies so captured by the #deathcult of neoliberalism that even existential threats – climate collapse, inequality, runaway tech – are treated as branding opportunities rather than calls for transformation. Leadership, as sold in these events, is a performance.
The tragedy is that the institutions talking loudest about “leading in the AI age” are the same ones least capable of doing so. They fear uncertainty, fear decentralization, fear the public. So they cling to control, and in doing so accelerate the crisis they claim to be solving.
Quantum and AI aren’t the challenge. The challenge is whether we allow the same narrow, extractive logic to shape the next era, or whether we root ourselves again in trust, openness, and the radical idea that people, not systems, are what matter.
Trump and Putin are the figureheads of the #deathcult and 3ed rate people like Staner are puppets. The #nastyfew, mostly invisible in the smoke and mirrors of #mainstreaming media, are the ones who push the “we”. And they also invest in a part of our “progressive” paths, always much less affective than they need to be, let’s look at this from the latest #AI tech the #dotcons and more importantly our own #NGO crew.
The core of the #NGO mess: they claim to represent everyone, while foreclosing every other possibility. “We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”? Meanwhile, the parasite class in tech has spent twenty years destroying the social fabric of the internet, turning everything into grift, extraction, and precarious dependence. There is every chance that this new wave of #AI/#NGO/#dotcons fusion will be just more mess for us to compost.
As I said, let’s look at these people who are in bed with the #dotcons, sucking at the teat (LINK) of the #nastyfew. It should be easy to see, at best they’re a warm blanket, precisely when we need a shovel. They always smother real change and real challenge while claiming to “scale impact.” and other buzzwords.
Working within the system and working outside it both have effects – and yes, we need to balance these paths. But let’s be honest: the “inside” path is 98% parasites, and the “outside” path is full of fashionistas hiding insider routes behind radical posturing. So the balance point isn’t where we think it is. It has to be pushed far, far back from the centre we’ve been trained to accept.
Yes, there is some value in their affective progressive-tech narratives, but it is a tiny force against the power of global capital. They love the idea of the “bridging node,” the mythical middle ground where nothing is actually bridged and nothing is actually changed. Soft, persuasive, endlessly consulting, the #NGO path is a warm blanket to snugal when you should be getting up to work. It comforts, it reassures, and it is collectively ineffective. In the end, that blanket is all they have to offer: a feeling, not a transformation.
And then there’s all the #AI, most of it #techshit witch we need to be clear, is not intelligence, just more civic control in the hands of the #nastyfew. LLMs, image recognition, all of it: tools with some utility, but zero real intelligence. What they do enable is more vertical power, refined manipulation, more subtle control, more extraction of attention, behaviour, and labour through the constantly spreading #dotcons.
With our ongoing #openweb reboot we need a real democratic steering wheel again, actual power to change, not ONLY warm blankets and #PR funding. This is why the #OMN, the #4opens, and the slow work of composting matter. Because every other path on offer right now leads straight back to the same smothering, stagnant centre – the place where nothing grows.
This is about revolution as regeneration, not only destruction. In an era built on tech dependency, revolution isn’t only about smashing the machines, it’s about liberating them. Turning tools back into commons, not commodities. It’s composting the toxic monoculture of the #dotcons into fertile ground for the #openweb to grow again. Revolution means reclaiming agency, not blindly rejecting technology, but re-rooting it into light, human-scale, transparent, and accountable relationships.
The #openweb as infrastructure for freedom, isn’t just a technical architecture, it’s a social contract. Revolution means re-establishing that contract through the #4opens. When we build networks this way, we decentralize power, not just servers. The #KISS act of publishing, federating, and remixing information freely is itself revolutionary in a world where everything is locked behind paywalls and algorithms.
Tech as commons, not commodity, We’ve learned that “innovation” under capitalism means enclosure and surveillance. Revolution in this context looks like refusal of extraction: creating cooperative infrastructures that are not driven by profit but by maintenance, care, and shared use. Think of community built #p2p mesh networks, open hardware, peer-to-peer storage, and federated #ActivityPub publishing as revolutionary paths – not add-ons, but foundations.
Cultural and cognitive shifts, shifting the cultural narrative from “user” to participant. From “consumer” to custodian. The real struggle is against the #deathcult of endless growth and the #geekproblem of technocratic detachment. It’s about re-learning how to think together, rebuilding trust, and balancing the #fluffy (care, empathy, collaboration) and the #spiky (truth, resistance, boundaries).
Practicing digital mutual aid – sharing skills, hosting, dev, and care.
Bridging online and offline organising, connecting digital tools to local struggles for housing, food, land, and rights etc.
Above all, any real revolutionary network – like the #OMN – has to strip away the old skins of power. No hierarchies. No hidden structures. No property games. No fetishizing of tools, status, or “official” etiquette.
If we’re building something new, we can’t carry the unconshuse ghosts of the old world with us. That means not just saying we’re open, but being #4opens. Open in decisions, and open in how decisions are made. Transparent in process, not just in outcome. Coherent theory is practice, and practice is theory.
Everyday life has to reflect the world we want to grow. That means composting the commodity mindset, no trading social trust for personal gain. It means building through shared assemblies, through community, through small and self-directing circles that stay alive to change and challenge.
The structure of the #OMN should always be simple, transparent, and direct, so that anyone can walk in, understand it, and shape it. No special knowledge required, no gatekeeping. Thousands of “unprepared” people able to join, act, and make it their own. That’s what #4opens means, a living culture of clarity and participation.
Only when a movement reflects the decentralized, self-organizing community it wants to bring into being can it avoid becoming another elitist shell, another bureaucracy pretending to be radical.
When the #OMN does its work right, it doesn’t stand above the revolution, it dissolves into it, like a thread into a healing wound, leaving behind not an organization, but a living network.
That’s the path: community, openness, trust, and the messy joy of self-organization.
We’re in a mess, our worship of the #deathcult has driven emissions to another record: the world’s CO₂ levels jumped by 3.5 parts per million from 2023 to 2024 the largest single-year increase on record. Our decision to leave the #nastyfew in charge – our short-sightedness and worship of greed – has pushed the planet beyond the stable ecosystem that supported human life. We have done this for nothing, only for big numbers to go up, for nothing. The one planet we know that can support life is being burnt to a crisp for nothing.
There are two reasons. First: we’re still burning, still digging, still feeding the growth obsession. Emissions are rising – the curve is bending, but not nearly fast enough. Second: the planet’s natural buffers – forests, wetlands, oceans – are weakening. The carbon sinks are choking: less CO₂ is being absorbed and more remains suspended in the atmosphere.
The math is brutal and simple: more in, less out. The atmosphere fills faster; the climate accelerates. This isn’t a surprise – scientists warned us for decades – but the facts are stark: we’ve locked in more than 1.5°C of warming. The UN has said it plainly. In the UK, the Climate Change Committee told the government to start planning for a +2°C world. That’s not a prediction, it’s a plan for failure.
If we want credibility beyond our grassroots #DIY bubble to change and challenge a wider #mainstreaming audience, we must call out both corruption and profiteering within the so-called eco industry as well as celebrate any genuine innovation. Otherwise, billions are spent on initiatives that inflate costs while ‘eco leaders’ jet around in privilege and luxury. Tens of millions in the West are angry about this corruption and injustice. But the effect is negative, that anger is feeding a hard shift to the right which will #block any meaningful progress toward sustainability.
The problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The solutions exist and are already working in many places, but we’re not scaling them quickly enough. Renewables are expanding, but too slowly. Deforestation is slowing, but not enough to save the canopy. Methane-detection and fixes are finally being reported more widely – responses have risen from around 1% to 12% – but that’s still negligible compared with what’s required.
The story of the living world since 1970 is one of catastrophic loss: roughly 73% of wildlife populations wiped out. The curve may flatten slightly at the end, but only after the living world has been gutted. That’s not balance, that’s exhaustion.
The catastrophe we are facing is because of a tiny number of powerful actors and their enablers, pushed past tipping points in multiple systems. Warm-water corals have crossed thresholds: the ocean is too hot for recovery in many regions; collapse is now locked in. The Amazon risks drying into Savannah. Ice sheets are destabilising. Methane is beginning to be released from thawing tundra. We’ve crossed a red line.
Meanwhile, political theatre keeps serving up delays and rollbacks. A global carbon tax for shipping was scuppered by hardline actors; the Net Zero Banking Alliance collapsed under pressure. While leaders squabble, the Atlantic produced one of its strongest-ever storms for this time of year – Hurricane Melissa – supercharged by waters heated by our pollution.
For anyone paying attention, recent months have been the worst climate months on record, not only in numbers but in meaning. We’ve forced the planet into feedback loops. Scientists warned this would happen; watching it unfolds brings a new grief.
Yet despair is not a plan. The #deathcult wants us paralysed, to claim “it’s too late.” But this isn’t binary. A planet at 1.5°C is bad; at 2°C it’s worse; at 3°C it’s catastrophic. Every fraction of a degree matters. Most projections today point to a 2.5–3.0°C increase by century’s end under optimistic political assumptions. A more realistic projection, accounting for slower, fragmented action, could be 3.0–3.5°C by 2100.
From a #spiky perspective: Western electorates are increasingly choosing far-right, climate-denying parties. Growth is capitalism’s lifeblood, but it’s death for the environment. Leaving decisions that affect society to a tiny, profit-driven minority is morally unacceptable. This isn’t a technological problem we lack the tools to solve – we have the tools. Instead, a relatively tiny number of selfish actors and their fear and greed are blocking meaningful change.
From a #fluffy perspective: Individuals, billions of us, can act. Start with these everyday steps:
Eat a plant-based diet instead of meat and dairy.
Use public transport, cycling and trains instead of cars.
Buy less; choose used over new whenever possible.
Insulate homes and reduce energy consumption.
Support and use renewable energy: solar and wind.
We can’t walk away from this, the only option is challenge. Reconciling this fluffy and spiky debates is the hardest part: we must act without illusions. We may never “win” in a clean, final sense, but our actions still matter. The difference between 2°C and 3°C will cost billions of lives. The difference between despair and defiance is the grassroots #DIY future we need to seed and grow.
From the spiky side, some argue for direct action: break laws that protect destructive industries, sabotage systems that perpetuate ecological harm, or withdraw labour to halt the economy. These are radical proposals with profound ethical and practical consequences.
From the fluffy side: consider moderating those impulses. Channel energy into mass organising, nonviolent direct action, community resilience, and building alternatives that scale. We need both defiance and construction: refuse what destroys us and build what sustains us. That is how we turn grief into resolve. From the fluffy side, maybe mediate your blocking of this needed spiky path?
The old #mainstreaming was only in a limited way about freedom, so we now need to focus on more on what it was about, equality in obedience. Equality in our blinded worship of the #deathcult: growth, consumption, competition, endless mess on a dying planet.
That’s why #fashernista liberal progressivism is always a dead end problem, it plays radical, says radical, but composts nothing. At best, it sells rebellion as a lifestyle. It’s equality inside the system, not about freedom from it.
We’ve seen this play out a thousand times. Movements rise, fresh and alive, then get polished into campaigns, reports, and consultancy slides. Grassroots becomes “stakeholder.” Vision becomes “strategy.” Change becomes “branding.” All form, no compost. All language, no shared life.
Any real change, living change, means turning the dead weight of institutions, egos, and fear into fertile soil. It’s messy, collective, risky. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t chase funding and #NGO approval. It grows because it has to.
That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) path is about – composting the old #techshit, the #dotcons, and the NGO decay into something living again. Media that belongs to no one but serves everyone, built on the #4opens.
So the real question is simple. What does real change and challenge look like to you? How do we build it together, in the open, without falling back into the same polite obedience that killed everything before?
The #OMN and the #4opens aren’t abstract ideas, they’re tools for action. If we’re serious about composting the old world into something living, we need hands in the soil, not just words in the air. Here’s how people can start now, from wherever they stand:
#FOSS coding: Build the #openweb, not the #closedweb. Work on #Fediverse tools – join existing native #fashernista projects like Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, Funkwhale, or the more useful #OMN itself. Fix bugs, improve UI, write docs, or just help test and report issues.
Use the #4opens in practice: No private repos, no hoarding, public decision-making, everyone can use it. Compost old code: take abandoned projects and adapt them. Don’t build shiny new tech for ego points, fix what’s already here. If you’re practical, run small community servers: self-host media, blogs, Fedi instances. Learn how networks breathe.
Then we have social activism, keep it social, messy, and grounded. Form local affinity groups around #openweb media – film nights, repair cafés, public jams. Document everything: record protests, community stories, forgotten spaces.
The next #Indymedia starts with people saying this matters. Challenge control where you see it growing – in meetings, projects, #NGOs, progressive spaces. Ask: is this open? Who holds power here? What’s being hidden? Compost negativity: don’t waste energy on flame wars. Turn frustration into content, conversation, and code.
Avoid the #NGO trap – don’t let money dictate the mission. Use micro-funding and co-ops: OpenCollective, Liberapay, cooperative hosting. Keep the process/books open: publish budgets, donations, and decisions publicly (#4opens). Value labour differently, not everything needs to be paid. Shared work and mutual aid count as real economy.
Bridging to #NGOs and Institutions but don’t get eaten. Engage, but on your terms, use the #4opens as a boundary tool. If an #NGO don’t work openly, walk away. Offer bridges, not control. Help NGOs learn openness, federate, don’t integrate.
Bring culture into the conversation. Explain why open process and transparency are political acts, not technical choices. Stay autonomous: The moment an institution starts setting your agenda, compost it.
Build the commons, not empires. Everything we do should feed back into the collective soil. * If you build a tool, make it usable by others. * If you make media, licence it open. * If you host something, teach others how to host too.
This is how we win: not through scale, but through replication. Small, self-organizing, composting networks connected through trust. Remember, revolution isn’t about blowing up the system. It’s about composting what’s dead, sharing what’s alive, and keeping the soil open for what’s next.
The Blockchain Socialist podcast is the deluded self-destructive talking about the deluded self-destructive in tech. It’s a mirror of our time: intellectuals dissecting the ruins while still worshipping the same #deathcult gods that caused the collapse.
I am listening to an example of this Urbit – about a hardcoded, reactionary tech dream of order built on decentralization, doomed from the start. Not only because the code is bad, but because the culture is. Control disguised as liberation. Hierarchy dressed up as protocol.
This pointless conversation, like so many in the blockchain mess, shows the core #geekproblem: A culture so desperate to escape (old)capitalism that it rebuilds it, line by line, in smart contracts and hard tech algorithms. The people of the blinded tech #deathcult feed on this delusion. Which rewards cleverness over care, abstraction over community, and always, always mistakes power for freedom.
If we want a real alternative, it won’t come from this technocratic dystopias or tokenized cooperation. It will come from composting this mess, from projects grounded in the #4opens, from the living soil of the #openweb, from people who choose the path of trust over control.
Listen to this chattering on the dark enlightenment if you must, but listen as you’d watch decay: as part of the cycle. The old world breaking down so something new can grow.
#FOSS and open source is always political. Let’s say that out loud, because it’s easy to forget. The very idea of open collaboration, of sharing code, ideas, and stories freely, was never a neutral stance. It was, and remains, a radical act of refusal. Refusal to privatize creativity. Refusal to turn cooperation into competition. Refusal to let the #deathcult of neoliberalism define what freedom means.
From the early days of free software and the #4opens, to the #openweb and #Indymedia, the roots of our digital commons grew from solidarity. People gave their labour not for profit or prestige, but because they believed we’d all be better off together, if we stopped rewriting the same bits of code in isolation and started building commons instead of empires.
That’s not apolitical – that’s revolutionary. But over time, the #dotcons wrapped this labour in corporate branding, turning our shared tools into their private profit. They renamed exploitation “innovation.” They turned our commons into capital. The result? A generation of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, and fear of change.
People see their talent, their work, their lives wasted, buried under managerial control, compliance, and hierarchy. This is not just a technical story; it’s a moral one. We need to work to stop this “common sense” apathetic path of waste. The #deathcult is the slow deletion of memory, looking back:
Think of #Indymedia – once a global blaze of collaborative media freedom, later smothered by internal bureaucracy and external hostility.
Think of #visionOntv’s attempt to reboot on #PeerTube – an echo of that radical history, only to see ten years of grassroots video quietly unfunded, deleted, shadowbanned, “de-prioritized.”
Bureaucrats, NGOs, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash. That’s what the suffocation of freedom looks like today, not yet jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory. The #deathcult doesn’t need to crush rebellion outright; it just needs to keep people afraid. It thrives on fear and hierarchy – the illusion that safety comes from control.
They call it “stability.” But as Ursula K. Le Guin warned in The Dispossessed, obedience doesn’t create stability – it creates death. The capitalist world of Urras ran on obedience. The anarchist world of Anarres survived on trust and mutual responsibility. We face that same choice today, every day: control or change, Urras or Anarres, death or life.
The path we need to take is composting the #closedweb. The natural world already knows what we’ve forgotten: compost happens.
When something dies, it breaks down. From that decay, new life takes root.
The same is true of culture and technology. The #closedweb and #dotcons are already rotting, bloated with ads, surveillance, and fear. For 20 years, they’ve trapped our creativity and turned every act of sharing into data extraction. We don’t need more “innovation” in this rot. We need composting.
That’s what the #OMN – the Open Media Network – is for. To take what’s broken and turn it back into living soil. A simple, federated network built on the #4opens – open data, open process, open code, open standards – to grow grassroots media ecology. Not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons. Because revolution is not only destruction – it’s also renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living can grow.
Choosing life, choosing change. Stands for the living side of that choice – open, messy, collective, and grounded. It can’t offer safety or stability. It can push growth, courage over comfort, collaboration over control.
As Le Guin wrote:
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.”
Let’s be it, compost the dead systems and make space for what’s next, act on remembrance, rebellion, and renewal please.
You don’t get transformative change by building according to the incentives of the dominant system. A post inspired by rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as part of the Utopia Reading Group in #Oxford
“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Most people choose the easy path: they find a nice, safe hierarchy and settle in. They obey the rules, repeat the slogans, and mistake obedience for belonging. They stop thinking for themselves. They stop changing.
But change is freedom. Change is life.
Le Guin’s The Dispossessed captures the tension perfectly – between the anarchic, cooperative world of Anarres and the closed, hierarchical planet of Urras. It’s not only a science-fiction metaphor; it’s the current mirror of the #openweb we refuse to look into. The “open” world we imagine is already all around us, fragile, fragile seedlings buried beneath layers of control, ego, and fear.
This is the mess we need to compost, we see it every day. Talented people watching their work and lives being wasted. Good minds submitting to stupid ones. Strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change.
Looking back at web history, think of how #Indymedia burned bright for a moment, then was strangled by internal control and external hostility. Think of how the second reboot – visionOntv on PeerTube – tried to keep that radical history alive, only to collapse again under neglect, lack of support, and the dominance of #dotcons platforms. Ten years of grassroots videos deleted, shadowbanned, or “de-prioritized.” That’s oftern what the suffocation of freedom looks like, not jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory.
Everywhere, the potential for something living and new gets buried under the weight of control. When a grassroots project loses its edge because it’s easier to fit into “funding priorities.” When energy turns to exhaustion, creativity to compliance, rebellion to report-writing. This is the logic of the #deathcult – the slow suffocation of change.
The #deathcult thrives on fear and hierarchy, the illusion that safety comes from control. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that the system teaches them not to. Managers, bureaucrats, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash.
The banality of obedience. Le Guin warned us that the danger of obedience is not stability, it’s death. Urras, the rich capitalist world, runs on obedience. Anarres, the poor anarchist moon, survives on mutual responsibility.
You can’t get transformative change by operating according to the incentives of that system. That’s why NGO culture and corporate-funded “innovation” projects always fail the real test. They replicate the very control structures they claim to challenge.
The composting of culture, the natural world understands what our institutions forget: compost happens whether you want it to or not. What’s dead breaks down, and from that decay, new life takes root.
The same is true for culture and technology. The #dotcons and #closedweb platforms trap creativity and channel it into profit. They turn every act of sharing into data extraction, every connection into surveillance. They turn good minds into “content” and living movements into metrics.
We don’t need more “innovation” within this rot, we need composting. That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) is for, taking what’s broken and turning it back into living soil. A simple, federated network built on the #4opens to grow real, grassroots media again, not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons.
Revolution is not destruction; it’s renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living may grow. Revolution is our obligation, our hope of evolution.
Choosing life over control, to choose change is to choose life. To cling to control is to choose decay. The #OMN is one path to life, open, messy, collective. The alternative is more of what we already have: talent wasted, good minds ground down, courage strangled.
Le Guin’s lesson still stands: “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.”
Let’s be that change. Let’s compost the dead systems, and make space for what’s next.
