Mainstreaming: Piracy is a symptom, not a crime

From a #mainstreaming point of view, what people call “piracy” is not a simple moral failure, it’s rather a signal of systemic #dotcons failure. Again and again, across decades, people have shown a simple truth: When access is fair, affordable, and humane, people pay. When systems become extractive, people route around them.

This is not new, not edgy, it’s basic social behaviour. Before the Internet: we had Informal commons, cassette copying, vinyl bootlegs, tape trading networks, these were not experienced as “theft” by the people who did this – they were social distribution systems, low-scale, trust-based, culturally embedded, limited by friction. They existed alongside markets, artists still toured, labels still made money, culture still flowed.

This was a pre-digital common, tolerated because it couldn’t scale enough to threaten capital. Then came the first native digital implementation. Napster originally wasn’t thought of as a crime, but was turned into a real fork in the road when Napster didn’t invent piracy, it simply removed friction and exposed the contradiction.

Napster was an early, messy, accidental example of what open distribution could have become if shaped by public-interest values rather than VC mess. What panicked the industry wasn’t copying – it was loss of control. Two paths were possible:

Adapt to abundance, treat sharing as promotion, build fair access + fair reward, except that copying is native to digital culture.

Reassert artificial scarcity, lawfare, DRM, surveillance, platform capture.

They chose the second, before they shift to the working subscription “solution” This turned into a temporary truce in the that #dotcons streaming worked, briefly, because it aligned with human behaviour: convenience, simplicity, predictable cost, “good enough” access. This reduced piracy, not because people became more ethical, but because the service stopped being so hostile. This is crucial, piracy goes down when #mainstreaming systems respect users.

Though this did not last, the pushing of the #dotcons (#enshittification) broke the social contract, now we’re seeing a piracy resurgence – due to legitimacy collapse. Platforms: fragmented access, raised prices, removed ownership, revoked sharing, erased archives and locked culture behind licences. The normal mess that you don’t own culture any more, you rent permission until it’s revoked.

People don’t won’t this enclosure of culture and memory “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing” isn’t only edgy internet logic, it’s a commons’ logic. It says: ownership has been broken, legitimacy has been lost, people are reclaiming agency informally. This is exactly how commons historically re-emerge, outside broken institutions, not through them. So from any seasonable mainstreaming view, Piracy Isn’t Anti-Artist – It’s Anti-Bullshit, a service problem, it’s what happens when distribution is controlled instead of shared.

Where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not about simply justifying piracy. It’s about removing the need for it by rebuilding: public-first distribution, shared infrastructure, local publishing, federated archives, cultural memory that can’t be revoked, trust instead of DRM, access without enclosure, communing.

Culture needs to be: easy to access, hard to erase, socially rooted, economically plural, governed in the open. When those conditions exist, piracy fades into the background, not because people are policed, but because the system stops being abusive.

Piracy Is the smoke – enclosure Is the fire – the historical arc looks like this:

informal sharing → tolerated

digital abundance → panic

platform compromise → temporary calm

enclosure + extraction → rebellion

From this view, people aren’t becoming criminals, they’re disobedient consumers because consumption has become hostile. What people need to see in this mess is that Piracy isn’t the future, it’s a warning flare. The future is rebuilding open, shared, accountable media infrastructure so that: artists are supported, culture persists, access is normal, and people don’t have to choose between legality and dignity. That’s not nostalgia, it’s the unfinished business from the original #openweb.

And yes, it needs to happen #OMN

We need to stop worshipping a #deathcult

A path to do this is to step away from the #mainstreming mess. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. The prize recognised their work on how institutions shape prosperity, most famously through their book Why Nations Fail. The timing matters, it matters a lot.

This award lands at exactly the moment we should be asking why Institutional Economics – the respectable face of #mainstreaming – has spent the last fifteen years pushing us to keep kneeling at the altar of the #deathcult of #neoliberalism.

For more than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis – a crisis that should have finished neoliberal economics for good – our liberal institutions quietly stepped in to rescue the doctrine. Not by defending it openly, but by reframing its failures. This wasn’t accidental. It’s central to the mess we’re living in now.

The 2008 crash began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and rapidly spread from finance into the real economy. It triggered the largest global contraction since World War II. Advanced economies saw GDP falls of over 10%. In the US alone, more than $16 trillion in household wealth vanished.

The shock was so extreme that Queen Elizabeth II famously asked economists at the London School of Economics why nobody had seen it coming, the profession replied that it was a “failure of the collective imagination”. That answer was revealing and evasive. Because imagination hadn’t been lacking before the crash. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, #neoliberalism dominated economics. Its core beliefs were simple, absolute, and aggressively enforced:

Markets are efficient

Deregulation increases productivity

Financial innovation reduces risk

Macroeconomic instability has been solved

These ideas were institutionalised across universities, central banks, and international organisations. Nobel Prizes were handed out to models built on perfectly rational actors and self-correcting markets. Central bankers talked confidently about a “Great Moderation”: stable inflation, steady growth, forever.

Economics became “scientific”, self-referential, and closed to challenge. This wasn’t wisdom, it was a pile of shit built on mathematical abstraction – a classic #geekproblem – detached from lived social reality. Financial fantasies were celebrated. Subprime mortgages were reframed as inclusion. Mortgage-backed securities were said to spread risk. Collateralised debt obligations were hailed as marvels of modern finance.

They were, in reality, weapons of mass financial destruction. The #deathcult was warming up. When the system collapsed, neoliberal economics should have been held to account. No theory in modern history had failed so completely, so quickly, with such devastating consequences. Instead, it reinvented itself.

The first move was redefinition. Under the Obama administration, the US abandoned laissez-faire dogma overnight. Banks were declared “systemically important”. Corporations were bailed out. Trillions were injected into markets through quantitative easing. Socialism for the rich was revealed as normal.

This should have been the moment it became obvious that #neoliberalism was never about principles. It was always about power. Markets, models, and theories were tools – not truths – used to maintain capital’s dominance over society. But what we got was the normal mess of denial, spin, and fragmentation.

Once stability returned, denial followed. Economists claimed victory. The crisis was blamed on interest rates, oil prices, China’s savings – anything except the theory itself. The line became: “The models failed to predict the crisis, but the solutions worked.” That sleight of hand kept neoliberalism alive.

Instead of lifting our heads and walking away, we fell for the smoke and mirrors. The priesthood fragmented neoliberalism into subfields, and our #fashionista classes filled the space. Game theory analysed distressed financial institutions without asking why they were distressed.
Behavioural economics blamed low-income borrowers’ “biases” while ignoring policies that made housing unaffordable. Feminist economics debated unpaid labour while leaving capital accumulation untouched.

Each critique was partial. Each acted as a distraction. None threatened the altar we were still collectively worshipping. The strongest shield, however, came from Institutional Economics – the respectable centre of #mainstreaming liberal thought.

Why, Why Nations Fail succeeds, it “common sense” argues that prosperity comes from “inclusive institutions” – markets, property rights, patents – supported by political institutions like democracy and the rule of law. “Extractive institutions”, we’re told, lead to stagnation.

This framework was easy to accept in the common-sense fog of the #fashionista class. It sounded critical while leaving capitalism intact. Weak, procedural democracy was sold as the mechanism that could tame markets.

What it ignored – completely – is that democracy inside highly unequal societies is easily captured by capital. Elections reproduce power relations far more often than they correct them. By declaring any market outcome produced through elections legitimate, the #nastyfew who this mess served grabbed and twisted “democratic” approval.

At a moment of global instability – Eurozone debt crises, austerity, mass unemployment – #mainstreaming economics offered a comforting story: the problem wasn’t capitalism, just “bad institutions”.

The reality on the ground, in Europe, austerity devastated entire societies. Greece lost over a quarter of its GDP. Youth unemployment passed 50%. Public assets were stripped. Debt increased. Today, a six-day work week is framed as “responsibility”.

In the United States, recovery was brutally unequal. Between 2009 and 2019, the top 1% captured 40% of all income growth. Asset prices exploded while wages stagnated. Private equity gutted industries. In the world of the #dotcons, gig work replaced stability. Neoliberalism didn’t retreat. It consolidated.

There was, however, a different path. China – worshipping a different cult – ignored neoliberal assumptions after 2008. Instead of monetary inflation, it pursued fiscal stimulus, infrastructure investment, R&D, and industrial policy. Growth remained high. Manufacturing expanded. Living standards improved. China became the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity more than a decade ago.

Western institutions urged “liberalisation”, framed through #mainstreaming economics. Political reform was demanded – meaning access for Western capital. China refused. When China’s property bubble burst in 2021, contagion was contained. Capital was redirected into technology and manufacturing. Industrial dominance accelerated.

This success could not be acknowledged, so institutional economics reframed it as “extractive”, unsustainable, and destined to collapse. Yet the facts contradict the story. Inequality is far higher in the US. China’s overproduction lowers global prices and stabilises living standards. Without it, global inequality would already be politically explosive.

So why are we still stuck, #Neoliberalism survives not because it works, but because it controls the story of what is possible. It offers legitimacy without transformation, democracy without redistribution, reform without power shifts.

Worse, over the last forty years it has reshaped education, work, identity, and the value of human life itself. It trained people to see themselves as assets, competitors, and risks. It normalised insecurity and abstraction. That’s why we’re facing collapse now: a system that has exhausted its social, ecological, and moral foundations.

Yes, it’s a mess, you probably need a shovel #OMN

We need to be disturbed

We live in a deathcult, what is blocking people seeing this?

In our worship of the #deathcult, if you strip away the robes, chants, and charismatic leaders, what remains is behaviour, not belief. A destructive cult is not defined by how strange it sounds, but by what it does to bodies, lives, and futures. This matters because it breaks a common illusion: cults are judged by outcomes, not vibes.

So the real question for our #mainstreaming culture is simple: does this system produce harm through deliberate collective action? If the answer is yes, then whatever it calls itself – religion, nation, corporation, ideology – it is functioning as a destructive cult. Scale does not absolve cult behaviour. One of the biggest blocks to clear thinking is the assumption that cults are small or fringe. History shows the opposite: the most destructive cults are large, normalised, institutional, and framed as “common sense”.

When harm is routinised, bureaucratised, and abstracted, people stop recognising it as cult behaviour. Violence becomes “policy”. Death becomes an “externality”. Injury becomes a “necessary sacrifice”. This is why the #deathcult framing lands so sharply – it cuts through the language that hides responsibility.

Seen this way, our current #mainstreaming clearly qualifies. It knowingly produces mass injury and death, continues despite overwhelming evidence of harm, treats that harm as acceptable or unavoidable, and disciplines or excludes those who challenge its logic. At that point, it meets the functional definition of a destructive cult.

The justification doesn’t matter – profit, security, growth, markets, “realism”, inevitability. The outcomes are the same: climate collapse, preventable poverty, war, border violence, structural neglect. All normalised. All defended. All repeated. This is not accidental; it is deliberate action within a shared belief system.

People resist this #KISS framing because calling a system a cult feels offensive. It threatens identity, exposes complicity, and removes the comfort of neutrality. So instead, people argue about tone, civility, process, or “both sides”. These debates avoid the harder question: what are we part of that is actively harming people, and why do we keep participating?

This connects directly to the #OMN project. The Open Media Network is not about labelling individuals as evil. It is about withdrawing legitimacy from systems that normalise harm, and rebuilding media and social infrastructure that makes harm visible, allows challenge without erasure, documents action rather than just opinion, and restores collective memory.

When journalism collapses into PR and outrage, cults thrive. When media becomes operational again, cult logic weakens. The uncomfortable truth is that destructive cults are not defeated by exposing hypocrisy, debating beliefs, policing language, or demanding safety from discomfort. They are defeated by refusing participation, building parallel systems, making outcomes visible, and acting collectively outside their framing.

That is not comfortable. It is not safe. But it is how people stop being members of something that kills – and why the #deathcult framing matters.

Change and challenge

Let’s be honest about something we usually skate around. Many of our #fluffy activist friends are not fighting for change. They are fighting for equality of access to the existing system. That system is the #deathcult – growth, extraction, hierarchy, control – and most progressive mainstream activism is about making that worship fairer, nicer, more inclusive. More seats in the temple, better language on the altar, safer rituals for those already kneeling. This is not transformation, it is managed inclusion.

And yes, this work can have real, immediate value for people suffering now. That matters. But we need to stop pretending it is the same thing as change and challenge. Equality within a system is not the same as escaping the system.

Most #mainstreaming activism, accepts capitalism as inevitable, state power as the horizon, extraction as the price of living, climate collapse as something to be “managed”, this leads them to except platforms, NGOs, and institutions as arbiters of legitimacy. Then the limit is to ask politely for representation, protections, funding, visibility. This is reformist harm reduction, not the liberation we need. We need to say this out loud, more, because this “confusion” currently is #blocking real alternatives. When people who want out are constantly blindly told to slow down, be safer, be nicer, be more legible, be more fundable, the result is paralysis.

The #OMN path is not about polishing this mess, or making oppression more diverse, it’s in no way about optimising injustice. It’s about walking out of the temple, even when that feels irresponsible, unsafe, or unrealistic.

This Is where the friction comes from: pushing for messy governance and mediation instead of blocking, use-value over branding, affinity over scale, action over commentary. We are simply refusing to confuse survival within the system with escape from it. That refusal makes people uncomfortable – especially those whose activism is already recognised, funded and socially rewarded.

A simple test: Ask this of any project, campaign, or platform – Does this help people stop worshipping the #deathcult? Or does it help them worship it more safely? If the answer is the second, be honest about it, don’t lie by call it radical, don’t call it transformative, don’t call it challenge. Be honest, call it what it is, continuity, for all our sakes we need to say this clearly, even if it costs social comfort.

Because real change and challenge has always been unpopular – especially with those most invested in making the current mess feel livable.

#OMN #PROD #KISS

We need to balance this mess – a diversity of agendas ≠ winner-takes-all politics. Different projects are based on different agendas – and that diversity is not a weakness, it’s a survival trait. Winner-takes-all politics (electoral, market, platform, narrative) flattens this into a single metric of success: scale, growth, legitimacy, dominance. That logic is a social and ecological disaster, as it pushes everything toward monoculture, and monocultures always collapse.

The mistake is assuming that coordination requires uniformity – it doesn’t – what it requires is tolerance of difference plus shared boundaries. This is what “diversity of tactics” originally meant before it was watered down into a slogan. This is why: “acceptable rebels” are celebrated after they succeed, “useful weirdos” are allowed once they prove value to the system, everyone else gets disciplined, marginalised, or erased.

But what really matters is social context, not the tool. The problem now is that: individual self-destructiveness has scaled up, systems amplify harm faster than reflection, ecosystems are the casualty. This is why “just let people choose” no longer works, choice without structure leads to collapse.

In this mess, the #stupidindividualism reaction of #blocking is just displaced survival energy, blocking energy that takes up the space that needs to be filled with creativity. Blocking is not strength, it’s defensive overload.

In most cases, blocking emerges from damaged or threatened sense of self, lack of any working mediation structures leading to fear of being overwhelmed or erased. This happens when people don’t trust processes, they rely instead on hard personal boundaries, then when people don’t trust themselves, they externalise control.

#Blocking becomes a way to regain agency, stop cognitive overload, avoid unresolved conflict and preserve identity under pressure. It’s not a moral failure, as much as a systemic trauma response. But it is also creativity-killing.

Why blocking scales and creativity doesn’t. Blocking scales easily: fast, binary, emotionally satisfying, requires no social labour. Where creativity is slow: relational, risky, ambiguous and requires trust and time. So in high-stress environments, #blocking wins by default. This is why systems that rely on blocking alone cannot generate alternatives, they only fragment.

A weak sense of self? Yes, but it’s socially produced, not individual pathology, it’s produced by: platform hostility, collapse of community memory, loss of intergenerational skill transfer, constant precarity leading to only performative politics replacing any lived practice.

People are asked to be everything – safe, radical, inclusive, legible, pure – with no tools like the #OMN to manage contradiction. Blocking becomes the last remaining control lever.

In this mess, how do we communicate “diversity of tactics”? Not only as tolerance, as ideology, but more usefully as infrastructure like the #OMN projects which have soft boundaries before hard ones, based on affinity as much as agreement, you don’t need shared beliefs to work together, you need shared purpose locally.

This leads to the uncomfortable truth, that creativity doesn’t emerge from safety, it emerges from bounded risk. Too much danger = collapse. Too much safety = stagnation. What we have too much of today is safety theatre covering structural fear. The path out of this is that people need to develop a stronger, not weaker, sense of self, one that can survive disagreement without disappearing. That’s the real work.

Open Media Network, a path we forgot

The #OMN is not trying to invent the future, it’s trying to restart a social path people forgot they had. That path was never clean, it never asked permission, it never felt safe. But it was real, and that’s the only soil movements have ever grown in.

Why this has to happen now? Because the ground we’re standing on is collapsing. The #dotcons are rotting – hollowed out into surveillance, manipulation, and rent extraction. Journalism has collapsed into PR cycles, outrage farming, and access journalism. Activism is trapped in performative loops that generate visibility but not power.

#climatechaos doesn’t wait for governance frameworks, steering committees, or another round of funding calls. And more bluntly: the knowledge is dying with the people who lived it. If this knowledge isn’t re-embedded in practice now, it doesn’t get “preserved”. It becomes an archive, not a lineage. Archives don’t fight back, lineages do.

Why everything feels so hard? The feeling of complexity isn’t because the work is impossible. It exists because people are traumatised by collapse, capture, and betrayal. Projects were taken over, movements were professionalised, trust was burned and replaced with process. You don’t argue people out of that, you outgrow it by example. Working systems dissolve fear faster than any explanation ever could.

This will never be mainstream – stop wanting it to be, accept this early and everything gets easier. The goal is not millions of users. The goal is hundreds of nodes that matter. If it works, it spreads sideways: by imitation, by reuse, by adaptation, that’s how #Indymedia spread, that’s how it will happen again – if it’s allowed to stay messy. #Mainstreaming is how movements die politely.

Reboot action media, not commentary, this is where most #Fediverse projects go wrong. #Indymedia worked because: it covered what people were doing, it was embedded in movements, it was operational, not opinion-driven – Action reports. Situation updates. Logistics. Reflection after action. Signal is useful under pressure. Noise is everything else.

Make mediation visible again – #Blocking culture killed community memory, bring back: named metaphors, public-but-careful conflict summaries, rollback instead of deletion, context instead of erasure. This does not mean tolerating abuse, it means treating conflict as social material, not contamination. Movements grow by composting tension, not pretending it isn’t there.

Cultural infrastructure, not nostalgia. Plumbing, not a platform. The #OMN is not: a solution, a network to “join”, a replacement for anything. It is: pipes, flows, tools for people already doing work. Examples:

“You’re documenting housing struggles? Here’s a way to syndicate without selling your soul.”

“You’re organising climate actions? Here’s a way to publish without an algorithm.”

“You’re running a local media collective? Here’s a way to connect without central control.”

People don’t trust platforms, they trust tools that work.

The reboot principle is affinity before scale. Action before legitimacy. Use before platform. This is how #Indymedia worked before it forgot itself. A practical path to rebooting a community of action. Start with a small, visible “We”. Not an open call, not a mailing list, a named affinity cluster of people with shared history and aligned instincts, 5–15 people, is ideal. People who ship things, who argue honestly, who don’t need brand permission to act. This group is not representative, it’s responsible. Their job is not to speak for anyone, it’s to do visible work others can plug into.

Final note. This isn’t about being radical for style points, it’s about being adequate to the moment. The tools already exist, the knowledge already exists, the need is obvious. What’s missing is the courage to stop waiting for permission and start rebuilding the paths that once carried real power.

That’s what the #OMN is for.

Safety-absolutism is quietly killing change and challenge

Venezuela – Loot, not legitimacy

A #mainstreaming view of this mess

Venezuela has oil, a lot of it. And in a collapsing global system, access to energy is power – not in the abstract, but in the most brutally material sense. When growth stalls, debt grows, and #climatechaos tightens the margins, oil stops being a commodity and becomes leverage. Control over it is no longer about markets; it’s about survival for #blinded states and profit for capital.

What the United States offers in this context is not persuasion or principle, it is a deal. Side with us, and you get a cut. Corporations get extraction contracts, infrastructure rebuilds, and long-term revenue streams. Political elitists get stability, recognition, and protection from consequences. Regional allies get leverage in their own power games. Everyone involved understands what is happening. No one at the top is confused. The humanitarian language is not meant to convince – it’s meant to lubricate the transaction.

A simple way of looking at this is as an easy to see shift from neo-imperialism back to straight forward imperialism. This is how late-stage capitalism, when the liberal democratic facing is striped bare, operates. It no longer expands by building new worlds or any possibility of shared futures. It expands by stripping assets, hollowing out states, and converting crisis into opportunity. When growth fails, extraction replaces development. When consent fails, coercion replaces politics, when legitimacy collapses, force and incentives do the work.

Trump didn’t invent this model, he just dropped the pretence. He said the quiet part out loud, tore away the diplomatic language, and treated empire like a property deal. That shocked people who still believed in the performance of norms. But the system has not changed, the Biden administration didn’t reverse this trajectory – they polished it – restoring the language of values, process, and responsibility while keeping the mess running underneath.

Different language, same mess. This is where #mainstreaming progressive critique went wrong for over a decade. It focused on hypocrisy, on broken norms, on credibility and decorum. But that’s a category error. Those critiques assume a system that actorly cares about legitimacy.

You can’t shame a system that no longer pretends to need moral authority.
You can’t expose corruption when corruption is the operating model.
You can’t “hold accountable” a machine that has already priced in outrage as background noise

This isn’t about Trump, it’s not about one administration, or even one country. In the era of #climatecahos it’s about a global order that replaces politics with managed extraction and calls it stability. A system where decisions are only pantomime debated in public, but executed through sanctions, proxy conflicts, financial pressure, and media narratives to prepare the ground.

Seen this way, the war on Venezuela is not a lie to be debunked. It’s a bribe to be refused. And refusal doesn’t work as an individual moral stance. It only works collectively – outside the institutions that profit from the lie, outside the platforms that normalise it, outside the careers built on managing its mess.

That’s the hard part, the work. And that’s why projects like #OMN matter, not to perfect critique, but to build the social and media infrastructure that makes refusal possible at scale.

The American hard right is not a movement – It’s a mess

Climatechaos and the hard right is a cycle of collapse

Belief in technical decentralisation

This space has a long history. The #fediverse grew out of the “cats” of libertarianism and, to a lesser extent, anarchism – notably without the (O). That lineage mattered. It shaped the instincts of the space: suspicion of central authority, an emphasis on autonomy, and a belief that technical decentralisation could substitute for social and political process.

I wrote this a few years ago.

Today the landscape has shifted. This #openweb space is increasingly layered with #NGO capture and thick #mainstreaming noise. Yet it remains fundamentally #native. That contradiction is where the real work now lies.

So the question is not whether the #fediverse is “good” or “bad”. The question is how we rebalance it so it becomes effective for real change and challenge. This is where #4opens matters – taking #FOSS out of narrow tech culture and back into society as a lived, social process.

We also need to be honest about failure. In the struggle between open and closed, we didn’t just lose because they won. We lost because we failed. And this matters, because we have power over our own failures. Over theirs, we mostly have liberal wish-fulfilment.

That distinction is crucial.

If you are genuinely interested in social change, there is one thing you should not do:
do not push #mainstreaming agendas.

This is where the Fediverse is badly out of balance. The flows are soaked through with #deathcult assumptions, even when wrapped in progressive language. These agendas reproduce the system while pretending to soften it. They are driven by careerism, respectability politics, and status-chasing – not transformation.

What the #fediverse does not need is more branding, more respectability, more #NGO frameworks, or more “safe” narratives. That path leads to capture, stagnation, and eventual irrelevance. What we actually need are real alternatives: grounded social process, not just protocol purity; governance that emerges from use, not authority; democratic mediation, not aristocratic coders; trust built through practice, not #blocking policy documents.

What the world actually looks like

To be clear, #NGO occupation rarely looks like a hostile takeover. It arrives wearing the language of care, safety, professionalism, and responsibility. For many involved, the problem is not intention, it is structural effect.

A recurring pattern appears: governance without mandate. Foundations and NGOs emerge claiming to “represent the Fediverse” while having no meaningful user representation at all. Boards dominated by a small, self-referencing mix of developers, funders, and institutional figures. Decisions made behind closed doors, then presented as consensus.

This is the classic NGO move: speaking for communities rather than being accountable to them. Native, messy, grassroots portrayal is replaced with advisory councils and codes of conduct written by people who do not do the day-to-day social work of maintaining messy communities.

Then comes funding-driven agenda setting. Once grant money enters, priorities shift. Work that is legible to funders gets done; work that is socially necessary but messy gets sidelined. Success is measured in reports, visibility, and institutional recognition. Use-value is replaced by funding-value. Common-sense problems are reframed as opportunities to be sold to institutions rather than grown with communities.

This produces policy-first, people-second thinking: universal moderation frameworks, platform-wide “best practices”, compliance language imported from reactions to corporate platforms. All of this ignores the Fediverse’s actual strength – that it is contextual, local, and plural.

What works for a medium-sized EU instance does not work for a radical activist server, a queer safe space, or a small-language community. One-size-fits-all governance is a centralising instinct wearing decentralised branding.

Conflict is then sanitised rather than mediated. Conflict is treated as reputational risk, not as a normal and necessary part of social life. The response becomes pre-emptive rules, rigid enforcement, avoidance of political disagreement – in #OMN languae, #blocking.

But grassroots communities are not products. Conflict does not disappear when it is hidden; it reappears as burnout, factionalism, and quiet exits. This is one of the main drivers of the long-term churn that drains focus and energy from the #openweb.

Meanwhile, the space is distracted by attempts to brand the Fediverse for mainstream acceptability: “safe for brands”, “ready for institutions”, “just like Twitter, but nicer”. This strips away its radical roots while offering none of the resources of corporate platforms – the worst of both worlds.

Finally, depoliticisation is smuggled in under the banner of neutrality. Calls for “apolitical” spaces function in practice as quiet enforcement of liberal norms, exclusion of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and system-critical voices, and privileging those already comfortable within the mainstream. Neutrality is not neutral. It is a political choice that favours the status quo – the #deathcult dressed up as common sense.

This kind of behaver is inevitable, so the question is not if we ban it, but much more how we balance this with healthy grassroots structure. The way out of this is not less politics. It is better, more grounded politics: rooted in lived use, open process, and the messy reality of collective life.

Get off your knees.

Why “messy” matters explicit, social, and unavoidable. The word “messy” matters, a lot. It’s not a weakness, it’s the core requirement of any humane alternative social technological project. If what we build only works when everything is clean, controlled, and predictable, then it will collapse the moment real people start using it.

Real life is messy, communities are messy, power is messy, conflict is messy. If our tools and processes can’t survive that, then they aren’t tools for liberation – they’re toys for ideal conditions that don’t exist. This is where most alt-tech keeps failing.

We keep trying to build hard systems that assume away social complexity. Perfect protocols, elegant abstractions, clean governance models. But this obsession with cleanliness produces brittle systems that shatter under any stress. Anything that requires everyone to behave “correctly” in order to function is already authoritarian by design.

That’s why messy-first thinking is not optional – it’s the way out. Most “hard code” is actually #techshit from the moment it’s written, not an insult, it’s compost. The uncomfortable truth is the value of software is not only in the code, it’s in the social use around this code. Documentation, shared norms, trust, mediation, onboarding, storytelling, conflict resolution, continuity – this is where value lives. Code is one needed layer of that social substrate. Without the substrate, the code is dead on arrival.

This is where the #geekproblem bites hardest. The value that actually matters – social use – is invisible to many of the people writing the code. So they optimise for what they can see: features, refactors, rewrites, new projects. The result is more churn, more fragmentation, and ever-growing piles of decaying #techshit. From the inside, it feels like progress. From the outside, it’s entropy.

This is why #4opens is such a sharp tool if we use it. Not just open source code, but open process, open governance, open data, open participation. That means valuing outreach, long-running social threads, and shared ownership as much as clever technical solutions. If a project can’t explain itself in plain language, can’t survive disagreement, can’t onboard non-experts, and can’t evolve without a small priesthood of maintainers, then it’s already failing – no matter how elegant the code is.

So the question of value isn’t “how clever is the system?” It’s: who can use it, who can shape it, and who can carry it forward when things get messy? We need a diversity of tools and cultures that can live in the mud, absorb conflict, and keep going anyway. Mess isn’t the problem, mess is the medium.

A mainstream example of (stupid) individualism

Have you noticed how, over the last few decades, many sentences are repeated so often they start to become “common sense”? “You need to love yourself” is one of these, it sounds harmless, kind, even progressive. But this sentence didn’t only reshape how we feel about ourselves – it reshapes how the economy works. This is a story about how “self-esteem” become an engine of #stupidindividualism, that helped produce the explosion of inequality and mess we now live inside.

Today, self-esteem is treated as a universal good. The cure for anxiety, failure, loneliness, precarity. If you’re struggling, the message is simple: look inward. Fix yourself. Believe harder. And that’s the trick, this isn’t about telling people to hate themselves. It’s about noticing that something deeply political has been smuggled into something that looks purely personal.

For most of human history, self-esteem wasn’t a virtue, it was a vice. Across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, pride was seen as dangerous. The seed of arrogance, ignorance, suffering. Fulfilment came from humility, mutual obligation, and limits, not self-celebration. The very idea of “loving yourself” would have sounded morally wrong, not empowering. So how did pride get rebranded as progress?

In part this is a #geekproblem, in an industrialising world obsessed with measurement: output per worker, profit per hour, value per share. Humans were no longer judged by moral contribution, but by performance, self-esteem quietly became an economic variable.

Drum roll – we had the #neoliberal turn – market ideology glorifies selfishness, despises solidarity, and frames empathy as weakness. This mess was used to increase the push for common sense #mainstreaming heroes to be lone geniuses, the media meme helped to drive the invisible destruction of any shared social structures. Then helped to obfuscate when western economies dismantling welfare states, deregulating markets, outsourcing industrial labour and rebranding citizens as entrepreneurs of the self. This was not a coincidence.

With this ideological turn, structural problems were redefined as personal psychological failures. If you’re poor, anxious, unemployed – the problem isn’t the system – it’s your mindset. This become self-esteem as labour discipline. As blue-collar work paths closed and white-collar “service” work expanded, confidence became currency, not skill, care or competence.

To day in the daily grind, work rewards presentation, persuasion, and performance. Self-esteem became professional armour. Bragging outperformed quiet skill. Selling yourself matters more than doing the work. This is where #stupidindividualism hardens:

Success looks personal

Failure looks personal

Solidarity disappears

Power becomes invisible

Outside the office – consumerism becomes about buying self-worth. Advertising doesn’t sell products. It sells reassurance. A handbag isn’t a bag, a car isn’t transport, a platform isn’t communication. They’re proof that you matter, until the next upgrade. Self-esteem – the kind that depends on validation, status, and visibility – is never satisfied, which makes it incredibly profitable. Self-esteem becomes something you only can rent from the market.

Then we have the rule of the #nastyfew, the #CEO as narcissist-priest. Research shows corporate leadership selects for narcissistic traits: grandiosity, risk-taking, obsession with image, contempt for limits. These “leaders” chase metrics that look like success – stock price, media praise, personal compensation – while hollowing out organisations and communities we need to live and push the change and challenge we need in the era of #climatchaos and social break down. In this mess, confidence replaces accountability, performance replaces reality. Collapse soon follows.

In this mess, the easy to understand #KISS lie is that the quiet violence of the self-esteem ideology tells people to solve systemic harm as only personal feelings. It tells us to love ourselves inside conditions designed to grind us down. This is why self-esteem culture is the drug feeding us precarious work, algorithmic management, influencer economies and endless competition. It makes people blame themselves instead of the structures exploiting them.

What we can do – the #OMN hashtag story names this as #stupidindividualism: Radical inwardness paired with radical powerlessness, emotional self-management instead of collective change, narcissism dressed up as empowerment. That self-esteem like this is divorced from community, becomes a control system.

So, to say again, get off your knees, we don’t need more self-love slogans, we need shared power where native paths are about confidence that does not come from mainstreaming affirmations, rather from shared competence, mutual aid and belonging.

The project we need, the #OMN is not about polishing the self, instead it is a path to rebuild the commons which “self-esteem” was used to dismantle. So please stop worshipping yourself, start standing with others, this is how we compost this mess.

An example of the mess from #deathcult centrism

Don’t worry too much, the corporate world has solutions, we look here at #ESG which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Its advocates say that if companies disclose enough data about their environmental and social behaviour, “good” corporate conduct will be rewarded by investors with higher share prices.

Let’s really look at #ESG, for what they are, #greenwash, a system of delay, distraction, and capture – on this #deatcult path this it is not a mistake, it is a function. The green halo on the same old shit, #mainstreaming sustainability has always been a corporate scam. Much less “green transition” more global polycrisis. Climate breakdown, ecological collapse, rising inequality – all accelerating.

The market, once again, is meant to save us. So what happened next was predictable. A sewage flow of private ESG frameworks spread across the corporate world. None issued by public bodies. None democratically accountable. All vague, inconsistent, and easily gamed. Companies can score highly on ESG while: Exploiting workers, running unsafe workplaces, destroying ecosystems and locking in fossil fuel dependency

How? It’s the normal mainstream economics, counting the wrong things. Employee cycling schemes, wellbeing surveys, diversity, trivial “green” initiatives. Meanwhile, any real structural harm is ignored. Companies can claim to be “100% renewable” by buying Renewable Energy Certificates (#REC) – while still running entirely on fossil-fuel electricity. This #greenwash is not broken – It’s working, but the grassroots question is for whom? It is not environmentalism, to see it clearly, it’s risk management for capital.

One fluffy/spiky path to fixing this is composting the consultancies who market themselves as climate saviours while simultaneously advising coal, oil, and gas firms on “upstream optimisation” – which is consultant-speak for extract more, faster.

There is a lot to compost, our “progressive” institutions are captured, The UN climate summits (#COPs) are crawling with these consultants. At COP28, the talks were presided over by the head of a state oil company. McKinsey, a big consultancy company, “advised” the process – while simultaneously serving the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers. This isn’t failure, it’s corruption, regulatory capture in public view.

Then we have the “investment”, magical thinking for grown adults. Carbon offsets are sold as a way to “neutralise” emissions. When in practice few if any reduce emissions, what they do is allow corporations to continue polluting while outsourcing guilt. And yes – the same eco parasites, consultancies, helped design the metrics that made this scam possible.

All the mess is a delay infrastructure that does not exist to solve climate change. It exists to slow real regulation, displace political action, convert existential crisis into financial products and keep power exactly where it is. This is why projects like #ESG are voluntary, private, fragmented, and endlessly technical. Complexity is not a bug – it’s the shield.

So back to the subject of this site – what #OMN calls signal – is grassroots journalism that does not only ask: “How can companies do better?” But focus on: Who benefits? Who decides? Who profits from delay? Who pays the price, and what power structures remain untouched?

And the answer to this is not complex, it’s the mess we live in. Which can be #KISS solved by breaking the power of the institutions that caused it. The example we talk about here #ESG is capitalism blessing itself in public. A ritual, a distraction, The priesthood of consultants chanting metrics while the planet burns.

To put this simply, if “sustainability” is filtered through profit first, it is not sustainability, it’s more lies we are being asked to kneel before, more #deathcult we all need to stop worshipping. So get up, pick up a shovel, there’s a lot of composting to do.

#OMN #deathcult #ESG #greenwashing #signal2noise #nothingnew

A mainstream question, what happened?

People keep asking the same question, because daily life keeps getting harder: Why is everything so expensive? Why is everyone so stressed? Why does it feel like the economy is rigged?

The short answer is – it is – The longer answer matters, because this didn’t happen by accident. For most of human history, wealth inequality was brutal. A tiny elitist crew owned almost everything, and most people lived short, precarious lives. That only changed briefly, and recently.

The Post-war exception (1945–1975). After World War II, something unusual happened. Governments become in part democratic, and with the balance of the Cold War, remembered what economic collapse leads to: fascism, war, and social breakdown. So they built a tightly regulated global economic system designed to keep things boringly stable. This was the Bretton Woods system.

Currencies were fixed. Banks were regulated. Capital was controlled. Unions were strong. Taxes on the rich were high – often 90%+ on top incomes and inheritances. And this worked from 1945 to the early 1970s. Wages rose with productivity, housing was affordable, one income could support a family, inequality fell, a broad middle class emerged. This wasn’t the “free market”. It was the opposite. It was embedded liberalism – markets contained by society, not the other way around.

The Crisis of the 1970s was when the system hit its limits. The US stopped running trade surpluses. The #coldwar drained resources, oil shocks sent inflation soaring. The Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1971. By the mid-1970s, the global economy was in stagflation: high inflation, high unemployment, low growth. For ordinary people, life got harder. For the #nastyfew elitists, something else happened. Their share of national income – quietly shrinking since the 1940s – suddenly mattered again. When growth slowed, they could no longer tolerate workers getting a larger slice of the pie.

This was the moment they chose #neoliberal counter-revolution, this wasn’t spontaneous, it was planned. Corporations funded think tanks, media narratives were reshaped, universities were targeted. Politics was captured from the inside. Business needed to seize cultural, political, and ideological power.

Thatcher, Reagan wasn’t neutral “economic science”, they were populist #classwar. Labour lost bargaining power, capital regained it. The tools of the post-war order were put to use – The IMF used debt crises to force austerity and privatization on the Global South, whole countries were stripped of economic sovereignty, poverty and inequality exploded. This was accumulation by dispossession – old colonial extraction, updated for financial capitalism.

Thatcher and Reagan:

Broke unions through force and law

Slashed taxes on the rich

Deregulated finance

Privatized public assets

Redefined government as the enemy

From this point on, productivity rose, but wages stopped. The new normal is ownership over work, it’s the world we live in now.

Housing treated as an investment, not a home

Wages stagnating while CEO pay explodes

Finance dominating the real economy

Debt disciplining both workers and nations

“Market logic” replacing democracy

This is not failure, it is success, for the people who pushed it. We now have 40 years of #mainstreaming to shift and compost.

Theological thinking disguised as economics

Why this matters for us, and why the #OMN projects matter for you. Media matters, #mainstreaming journalism, always reports within this system. It speaks truth from power – explaining, managing, normalising. What we need is grassroots journalism that speaks truth to power. We need more signal, and less noise in our own media. This signal asks: Who benefits? Who decides? Who pays? What was deliberately dismantled? What can be rebuilt – differently?

The native #openweb #OMN path is not about fixing the worship of the market. It’s about walking out of the temple. This economy was designed. That means it can be redesigned. But not by begging. Not by rearranging seats, and not by pretending this mess is accidental.

So if you want to help make one of this missing piler of society work, then #KISS get up, pick up a shovel, start composting the shite pile. That’s where new growth comes from.

Theological thinking disguised as economics

In the traditional media and our social reflection of this – “Belief in markets”, is theological thinking disguised as economics. The market is a god, and economists its priesthood. Modern economic discourse treats “the Market” as: omniscient (“the market knows best”), omnipotent (“there is no alternative”), morally authoritative (“price signals reveal truth”), beyond democratic challenge (“don’t interfere, or you’ll anger it”)

It should be easy to understand this isn’t analysis, it’s faith. When something goes wrong, the response isn’t accountability, it’s ritual: austerity, deregulation, labour discipline, “tightening belts”. This working class suffering becomes a necessary sacrifice to restore god’s favor. That’s why at the #OMN we called it the #deathcult – normal people are expected to suffer and die, quietly, so the economic system can live.

Priests, temples, and worshippers, religions have hierarchy, in this mainstream one: Central bankers are high priests, rating agencies are oracles, think tanks are seminaries, media pundits are evangelists, platforms are temples, metrics are scripture. It’s all theological thinking all the way down, surface disguised as economics

The closer you are to god (capital, liquidity, investment flows), the more authority you’re granted. Those far away – workers, communities, the climate – are treated as abstractions, “externalities”. And, like all priesthoods, our elitists claim neutrality while enforcing doctrine.

Heresy is not allowed, questioning the market is treated at best as: naive, dangerous, emotional, “anti-growth”, “anti-business”, “unrealistic”. This mirrors religious heresy exactly. Then we have the last 40 years of #posttruth, once belief replaces evidence, language becomes performative, words are used to signal loyalty, not to describe reality.

This matters for the #openweb and #OMN as the current path, the #dotcons are the digital expression of this religion, encoding market theology into infrastructure with engagement replaces meaning, growth replaces health, metrics replace judgment, extraction replaces relationship. This is why reform inside platforms fails, you’re not tweaking a tool, you’re challenging a faith system.

The #openweb threatens this religion because it decentralises authority, reintroduces human judgment, values trust over metrics, treats technology as means, not destiny. That’s apostasy and why “fairer worship” isn’t liberation, it’s at most progressive #mainstreaming that wants more inclusive access to the temple, fairer distribution of sacrifices, representation among the priests. That has real short-term value, yes, but it never questions the altar itself.

The #OMN position is different, it focused on stand up, walking out, building something else. So what would a post-religious economics look like? Signal thinking, not worship, markets as tools, not gods, economics as a social science, not divine law. Values decided democratically, not revealed by price. Survival and care as nonnegotiable, growth as optional, not sacred. This aligns directly with our insistence on balancing social value and personal value.

This framing cuts through the mess, calling it religion, we break the spell. People can see faith masquerading as fact, priests masquerading as experts, sacrifice masquerading as necessity, they can no longer pretend this is “just how the world works”. That’s why this language, hashtag story matters. It’s not rhetorical excess – it’s diagnosis. And diagnosis is the first step to composting the #deathcult and planting something that can actually keep people alive.

The shite pile: why almost everything is noise

The shite pile: why almost everything is noise

Most mainstream journalism is not about public truth, it’s about platform survival. This shite pile is why almost everything is noise, what gets called “news” today, when It’s not straight up propaganda is shaped by: attention metrics, outrage cycles, advertiser safety, institutional access, career risk management.

That’s why it feels so empty, even when it’s “factually” correct. The framing is already captured, journalism inside the logic of the #deathcult, wearing progressive, neutral, or technocratic costumes. So yes: most #mainstreaming news is noise, not because it’s all fake, but because it is: structurally irrelevant to challenge lived power, allergic to root causes, incapable of imagining alternatives, It’s mess because it job is to explain the world in ways that prevent change.

Signal vs noise is a useful distinction, signal isn’t “better facts” its orientation. Noise at best tells you a narrow view of what happened today, who said what in this narrow view, which team is winning in this view, how to feel about this. Signal doesn’t chase this novelty, it tracks patterns, power, and consequence.

What would “signal journalism” actually look like? Practically and philosophically, signal journalism would start from social need, not market demand, not “what will people click?” but “what do people need to know to act together?” Signal helps you understand, why things keep happening, who benefits structurally, what capacities are being destroyed or built, where collective agency still exists.

It’s thus explicitly about power, not pretending neutrality where none exists, rather about who is protected and who is exposed. It doesn’t confuse balance with truth, it treats people as participants, not audiences

Traditional media and #dotcons journalism assumes: speaker → audience → consumption.

Signal journalism assumes: participants → shared inquiry → shared action.

Today, too much journalism is caught in this trap. Precarious journalists + algorithmic discipline = fear-driven reporting. When private greed meets public need, this is the path of corruption. Working journalism is supposed to be: a public good, a memory system, a mediation layer for democracy. But the current mess is optimized for: extraction, surveillance, behavioural control, brand safety. So even “good” journalism becomes structurally conservative. This is why reform inside the same platforms fails.

This is where projects like the #OMN matters: shared media, shared process, shared memory. “The capitalism of digital platforms makes labour discipline more rigid… subordinate and precarious at the same time.” The constant “now now now” is a discipline mechanism, its fake urgency.

Signal journalism asks:

what is structurally urgent?

what is manufactured urgency?

what requires patience and continuity?

Why this is an #OMN problem (and opportunity). The OMN was never about “better content”, it is about changing the conditions under which content exists. This is signal journalism: federated publishing, shared archives, transparent process, local grounding, slow trust-building. In other words: social infrastructure first, content second.

On this path #Indymedia worked not because it was perfect, but because it was situated, collective, and accountable to real communities, not metrics.

The hard part – Signal is harder than noise because: it doesn’t flatter identities, it doesn’t reward instant reaction, it often feels boring at first, it requires shared effort over time. Where noise feels alive… If we want journalism that matters, we have to build the soil it can grow in. That’s the #OMN path: less spectacle, more process, less worship, more walking out of the temple.

Pick up the shovel, please.

The #OMN is a simple project