Trust matters, community matters, participation matters

Hummm this needs more thought… DRAFT

The #deathcult is selling the void, turning meaning into a market, in this post we cover the normal themes of #stupidindividualism, commodification, atomisation, trust and community.

One of the deeper tricks of the #deathcult is that it doesn’t only sell us products. It sells us back the meaning, belonging and connection that the system itself has striped away. Nietzsche’s famous declaration “God is dead.” was not simply that religion was disappearing, but that an outdated system of shared meaning and moral authority had collapsed.

For many people, that leaves a void, a longing for meaning, connection, protection and purpose, for something larger than the isolated self. And where there is longing, capitalism sees a market – consumer capitalism, the market for meaning has always promised that dissatisfaction can be solved through consumption. Buy the car, the clothes, the holiday, the experience, buy the lifestyle. But what this hides is the more profound needs of belonging, meaning, safety, trust, community – don’t fit comfortably into commodity form – more stuff does not fill the hole – so the market moves further inward.

Instead of simply selling objects, it starts selling the self with self-improvement, self-mastery, self-optimization and personal growth. Manifestation and spiritual awakening, the lie becomes: the problem is not the society you live in, the surrounding relationships, or the structures shaping your life, the problem is you. And in the mainstreaming, conveniently, there is always another influencer peddling a course, book, retreat, coach or guru available to fix you.

This is the perfect market because the product must never work, if people actually became fulfilled, the market would disappear. So people need to remain almost healed, almost whole, almost happy, almost enough – the longing itself becomes the business model – this is #stupidindividualism dressed as enlightenment.

Then we have religion reborn – the commercialised form of Western spiritualism – not community ritual, religion or spiritual practice, but the Instagram-ready world of manifestation, “high vibration”, gurus, retreats and personal enlightenment. This supposedly alternative culture simply reproduces the core values of capitalism: individualism, control, competition, self-surveillance and the hero narrative.

Our current “thinking” instead of challenging these values, we spiritualise them, you are told that your thoughts create your reality, everything happens specifically for your personal development. That success proves you are aligned, suffering means you failed to think correctly. The fantasy is that you can become the god of your own reality.

This looks like liberation, but underneath it is the same old #stupidindividualism. The individual becomes the centre of everything, society disappears, material conditions disappear, history disappears and power disappears. The outcome is you treat other people as supporting characters in your personal journey, then exploit them by turning structural problems in to personal failure.

This is where politics becomes important, if every outcome is understood as a reflection of your mindset, then structural criticism becomes difficult. Poverty? It is a mindset problem. Loneliness? Means you need to work on yourself. Abuse? A lesson the universe sent you. Illness? Your energy is wrong. Failure? You did not manifest hard enough.

The effect of this “thinking” is deeply conservative, instead of asking why people are suffering, we tell them their suffering is evidence of their own failure. Instead of rebellion, we get self-improvement. Instead of solidarity, introspection. Instead of collective action, another #SEO journal.

This is an affective #mainstreaming way of neutralising dissent because it turns social pain into private inadequacy. The death of empathy is the ugliest part of this, if someone’s suffering is something they “manifested”, then nobody has to sit with them in it. Nobody has to listen, has to ask what happened, has to offer real help. A platitude replaces solidarity “Everything happens for a reason.” “You need to forgive.” “This is a lesson.” “You attracted this into your life.”

The language sounds caring, but the practice becomes the opposite – cruelty is renamed healing, blame as wisdom, detachment is renamed enlightenment. This is simply more emotional capitalism, were the language of empathy remains everywhere, while the actual social practice of empathy disappears, but when empathy dies, connection dies with it.

Community is dangerous to power, people who gather can organise, people who form relationships can resist. People who trust each other become harder to govern through fear and isolation. The current mess does not need tanks in the streets to atomise people, it can do it culturally as when connection is labelled dependency, needing people becomes weakness and community becomes inconvenient. In our worship of the #deathcult the ideal person becomes the isolated, self-managing individual who treats every problem as something to solve alone.

At the #OMN we keep coming back to the #mainstreaming problem. Why? A system is most powerful when its values stop looking political, when they become common sense, when individualism becomes blinded freedom, competition becomes human nature, consumption becomes happiness. Self-surveillance becomes personal growth and isolation becomes independence. At this point, the system barely needs to tell people what to do, people reproduce the values themselves. They discipline themselves, blame themselves, sell the same worldview to each other. The #deathcult ideology becomes culture, becomes infrastructure.

But, the path away from this mess is simple, without followers, the hierarchy collapses, this is particularly obvious in digital culture. The supposed influencer is still dependent on likes, subscribers, sales, views and reputation. They claim independence while being embedded in the same attention economy they supposedly escaped. They are not outside the market, they are a particularly efficient product of it.

We need to remember that human beings have always created ritual, meaning, myth and shared practices. The #OMN path points in this direction, less self-obsession, more participation. Less individual optimisation, more shared action. Less influencer culture, more horizontal knowledge. Less performance, more trust. Less “fix yourself” more “build something together”.

The #openweb matters here because the structure of our technology also shapes our culture. The #dotcons push the isolated individual, your feed, brand, your followers, your engagement, your identity. The #deathcult repeatedly breaks social things into individual fragments and then sells them back to us. It breaks community and sells networking, meaning and sells lifestyle, confidence and sells self-help. It breaks connection and sells social media, belonging and sells branding.

The answer is not another product, its simply to rebuild the social fabric that commodification has been eating away. Yes, real connection is messy, solidarity is inconvenient, community involves disagreement, compromise, responsibility and mutual care. You cannot optimise it, you have to participate in it. And it is one of the reasons the #OMN keeps saying the same apparently simple thing – Trust matters. Community matters. Participation matters. The #deathcult wants you staring endlessly into yourself, the commons start when we look outward and find each other #KISS

I kind of though this was incomplete so did some reading and added this section.

Maybe focus on different paths to get a balance of good and bad…

The Chinese Cultural Revolution remains a difficult and important experiences for anyone seriously interested in emancipatory politics. It is tempting to reduce it to the normal #mainstreaming a story of authoritarianism, Mao, political violence and social chaos, but doing that misses something more useful. The Cultural Revolution was also a huge experiment in what happens when millions of people are encouraged to challenge established political power and create new forms of organisation.

Its failure raises a question that remains relevant today – how do people share real power without reproducing the behaviour of the structures we are trying to replace? – This is a central question for the #OMN path to walk from challenging power to creating alternatives.

The distinction between dismissal and pluralisation.

Dismissal is the politics of removing people, defeating factions and taking control. It is fundamentally about deciding who should have power and who should be excluded from it.

Pluralisation is different. It is about people organising themselves, experimenting with new relationships and creating institutions outside existing hierarchies.

The Cultural Revolution contained both tendencies, in its early years, independent organisations and new forms of mass political participation emerged. But these experiments became caught up in factional struggles. Groups began fighting over who would control political power rather than concentrating on what new forms of social organisation they could create.

The result was destructive, the politics of negation overwhelmed the politics of creation. This distinction matters as it is relatively easy to define what we are against. It is much harder to build something that people actually want to participate in. A movement can become good at identifying enemies while becoming progressively worse at creating alternatives.

That is one of the traps that the #OMN path is avoiding. A simple problem is that authoritarianism does not require a state, it is possible for people to reproduce authoritarian relationships among themselves. You can see this today in cancel culture, how ordinary people became involved in policing one another, enforcing political identities and attacking those considered insufficiently revolutionary.

This creates a difficult problem for anyone pursuing decentralised or anti-authoritarian politics, simply removing the state does not automatically create freedom. Simply decentralising power does not automatically make relationships democratic. A crowd can become authoritarian, a community can become authoritarian, a movement can become authoritarian or a social-media group can become authoritarian.

Even a supposedly horizontal organisation do develop informal hierarchies, gatekeepers and systems of exclusion. This is why “power to the people” is not enough as a political programme. We also need structures that help people exercise power without turning that power into domination over others. This is what the #OGB is for and about.

The danger of dismissal has a connection with what we now call cancel culture, although the underlying behaviour is much older than social media. The important issue is not simply criticism of individuals, criticism is necessary in any functioning democratic culture. The problem is the development of an internal policing culture where belonging depends upon ideological or moral purity. People are divided into the good and the bad. Disagreement becomes evidence of corruption. Mistakes become grounds for exclusion and political differences become moral crimes, eventually the movement starts consuming its own members. This is the logic of dismissal.

And it is particularly dangerous for grassroots movements because they lack the institutional safeguards that exist, at least theoretically, within formal democratic structures. Without some way of managing disagreement, accountability and conflict, decentralisation simply produce competing factions fighting for informal control.

Creation has to be the core path, this is the most important lesson, not simply “don’t be authoritarian.” It is more positive than that. Build, build! Institutions, relationships, build commons, build democratic practices, build alternative infrastructures. Build ways for people to participate without having to surrender control to a central authority, this #KISS step changes the political question.

Instead of asking – who should control the existing system? We ask – what can we create that makes the existing system less necessary? This is a much more interesting question, that moves politics away from permanent opposition and towards experimentation. The goal is not simply to seize somebody else’s institution and run it with different people, it is to create institutions with different relationships built into them.

Then we have the old stalwart of class analysis, this is useful for understanding economic power and exploitation, but when class becomes a moral label, it becomes another mechanism of dismissal. Someone is no longer disagreed with because of what they are proposing, they are dismissed because of what category they have been placed into.

This creates a strange reversal, the people who were supposedly building a more egalitarian society can become increasingly concerned with identifying and eliminating the “wrong” people. The category becomes more important than the political project, a historical paradox that people who had been oppressed under the old system could become defenders of the new hierarchy, while people from previously privileged backgrounds could become radical opponents of bureaucratic privilege. People are more complicated than political categories that matters for any attempt to build a genuinely participatory politics.

A needed balance is that institutions matter, we should not only romanticise spontaneity. People organising themselves is important, grassroots experimentation is important, but spontaneous organisation does not automatically remain democratic. There need to be ways to deal with disputes, abuse, exclusion, manipulation and concentrations of informal power.

This does not mean rebuilding a centralised bureaucracy, more about developing lightweight (like the #4opens) democratic institutions that protect pluralism and participation. The challenge is to create enough structure to prevent domination without creating so much structure that the institution becomes another hierarchy. Yes, a difficult balance, but avoiding the problem does not make it disappear.

The #OMN project is not about building another political machine, it is to experiment with infrastructure that allows people to organise, communicate, publish, archive and make decisions while retaining meaningful control over their own participation. That means moving away from the logic of the centralised platform, instead of one organisation → one authority → one set of rules, we can explore, many participants → shared protocols → transparent processes → distributed participation.

But distributed does not mean unaccountable, the infrastructure needs mechanisms for trust, moderation, transparency, rollback, correction and disagreement. The aim is not to eliminate conflict, it is to make conflict productive rather than destructive. But openness alone is not enough, an open system can still develop closed social relationships. A technically decentralised network can still become dominated by a few people. A community project can still develop gatekeepers. So the technical architecture and the social architecture have to develop together.

This is why the #OMN path is not simply about technology, it is about learning how to build social systems that are capable of remaining open, while not repeating the politics of negation. The path is therefore be surprisingly simple, a movement cannot define itself forever by what it opposes. If all our energy goes into removing enemies, exposing bad actors, denouncing ideological impurity and winning internal arguments, we eventually become trapped in the same power logic we claim to oppose.

We need to spend more energy on creating, create spaces where people can participate, commons where people can contribute without surrendering ownership to a corporation, archives that preserve collective memory. We need media systems that don’t depend upon algorithmic gatekeepers, governance where disagreement does not become exclusion. Not only that, but we need to create institutions that can learn, this path is the difference between negation and creation.

We need a path, not a blueprint. Questions to address, problems any emancipatory movement has to confront. How do we prevent bureaucracy from becoming permanent? How do we stop decentralisation becoming factionalism? How do we deal with disagreement without turning it into moral warfare? How do we give people real power without enabling new forms of domination? How do we create democratic institutions that remain open to change?

The #OMN therefore starts from a path of creation rather than dismissal, we should not try to build a perfect system. We build systems that people can participate in, question, modify and improve. That means accepting disagreement, allowing experimentation to create mechanisms that prevent any one group from permanently capturing the commons. This path to self-government has to be learned, practised and institutionally supported.

Freedom is not created simply by removing authority, it is created by building the social relationships and institutions that allow people to exercise power together without turning that power into domination. That is a much harder project, but also the more interesting one.

The #OMN path is not about taking power – it is about building the capacity for people to share power #KISS

The #openweb and projects such as the #OMN are more than technical alternatives

Techno #feudalism is a description of the power that large #dotcons technology platforms now have over the economy and society. The comparison is with medieval feudalism. Under feudalism, land was the critical means of production and ordinary people worked land they did not own. Lords controlled access to it and extracted rents or surplus from those who depended on it.

This is relevant today were the critical bottleneck is increasingly digital capital: platforms, servers, algorithms, data, cloud infrastructure, app stores and enormous networked captured user bases. A few corporations, run by an increasingly visible #nastyfew control this infrastructure. Communities, businesses, workers and creators are dependent on platforms they do not control.

The current shift is from ownership to access, instead of owning software, music, games or other digital tools, people rent access through subscriptions and platforms. This means wealth and control accumulate with the owners of the infrastructure rather than with the people using it.

The #closedweb platform economy creates rent extraction. App stores, marketplaces, hosting platforms and gig-economy companies take a percentage from the economic activity that passes through them. Network effects make dominant platforms increasingly difficult to challenge, as we are seeing, allowing those rents to rise.

#AI is we get past the narrow use case of #LLMs could intensify this dynamic by replacing human labour with capital-intensive systems. If a few companies own the #AI infrastructure, the bargaining power of labour will fall while the power of capital owners, the #nastyfew takes over the levers of power over the #mainstreaming.

The political dimension – #dotcons don’t merely control economic infrastructure; their algorithms influence what billions of people see, discuss, believe and buy. This gives the #nastyfew platform owners an extraordinary ability to shape public discourse.

But yes, you would be right to point out this is just the normal monopoly capitalism for now, these companies still invest enormous amounts in research, infrastructure and innovation. They operate within markets and people are not legally bound to them in the way medieval serfs were bound to their lords. The system can also be understood as an intensification of monopoly capitalism and rent extraction.

For the #OMN, the strongest point is that the problem isn’t technology itself, it is concentrated ownership and control of the technological infrastructure. A simple stepping to #4opens network changes the relationship, instead of everyone being tenants on somebody else’s platform, we build infrastructure around open standards, federation, interoperability, shared ownership, participation and commons-based production.

That makes the #openweb and projects such as the #OMN more than technical alternatives. They become part of the struggle over whether the digital world develops into a feudalistic landscape of platform landlords and digital tenants, or remains a genuinely distributed native #openweb commons.

In that sense, #4opens is an economic and political argument as much as a technical one: keep the infrastructure open enough that nobody can permanently own the flows through which everyone else has to live and communicate.

It’s a #KISS project.

Institution create the behaviour they claim merely to measure – Economics → institutions → behaviour → the #deathcult

One of the meany problems with modern capitalism is not simply that some corporations are greedy. It is that we have built institutions around the assumption that people are greedy, and then wondered why they behave that way.

Since the 1970s, #neoclassical economics became dominant in business schools and corporate thinking. An older social democratic idea of the manager as a professional with responsibilities to workers, customers, communities and society was displaced by a #geekproblem model of management built around financial incentives, shareholder value and measurable returns.

This became part of what is commonly called #neoliberalism. At the #OMN we polemically and, we argue, factually call the resulting social system the #deathcult: a system that places financial accumulation, competition and individual economic interest above the social relationships and ecological systems that actually make society, and life possible.

The darkness at the centre of this system is the idea of #Homoeconomicus – the simplified economic human who is assumed to rationally pursue personal advantage and maximise material rewards. Applied to the corporation, the logic becomes straightforward, managers cannot be trusted to act in the interests of shareholders because they have interests of their own, so we need incentives.

Give managers shares and stock options. Tie their bonuses to share prices. Measure everything. Monitor everything. Make individual financial reward correspond with corporate financial performance. This became part of the intellectual foundation for shareholder value.

The corporation increasingly stopped being understood as a social institution with multiple responsibilities and became something closer to a machine for maximising financial returns. Workers become costs, communities externalities, nature becomes a resource, customers markets. Managers become agents, shareholders become the priority. And success becomes a number.

The problem is that people aren’t actually like this – the fascinating thing is that the economic model is a very dangerous description of how humans actually behave. Research from behavioural economics and even game theory has repeatedly demonstrated that people are motivated by much more than financial self-interest.

People care about: honesty, fairness, trust, reciprocity, reputation, pride in their work, belonging and professional responsibility. People will often sacrifice financial rewards in order to behave in ways they consider right, cooperate when they trust each other, reward cooperation and punish behaviour they believe is unfair – sometimes even when doing so costs them something.

This matters enormously for how we organise institutions – if people are capable of cooperation, trust and reciprocity, then building institutions on the assumption that everybody is fundamentally selfish can actually make society more selfish, a institutional feedback loop

This is the real problem, a narrow and blinded theory about human behaviour becomes institutional reality. We start by saying: People are selfish, so we design institutions around that assumption. We create bonuses, stock options, surveillance, competition.

Then people learn that these are the behaviours that matter, cooperation becomes secondary, professional pride becomes secondary, community responsibility becomes secondary. Trust becomes something that needs to be managed rather than something that can be built.

People adapt to the system, and then we look at the resulting behaviour and say: “See? People really are selfish.” it is the trap we have all walked into. Assume people are selfish → build institutions around selfishness → reward selfish behaviour → weaken trust and professional norms → observe selfish behaviour → conclude that the original assumption was correct.

The institution has created the behaviour it claims merely to measure, is the #mainstreaming problem. Once a particular model becomes normal, it stops looking like ideology, it becomes common sense. Eventually, people forget that things could have been organised differently.

This is one of the most powerful things institutions do: they turn particular assumptions about human beings into apparently neutral systems. The system then reinforces those assumptions is how ideology becomes infrastructure.

This argument is more subtle, and more important. A narrow economic model has had enormous influence over how corporations understand management, incentives and organisational success. It helped legitimise corporate culture with its head bowed down worshipping a #deathcult.

And once that becomes the default, even people who personally reject the model have to bow there heads or be banished. To let the light into this mess, the path itself has to change, from extraction to participation. This connects directly to the #OMN projects.

We need to stop designing social systems around the assumption that people are isolated individuals competing for maximum personal advantage. Humans are social, we build relationships, we cooperate, create communities, develop shared norms. We care about reputation, we care about doing a good job, care about whether other people treat us fairly.

This is also why the #OMN puts so much emphasis on trust, participation, commons and the #4opens. As the alternative to the #deathcult isn’t simply a nicer version of the same system, it is a different understanding of what people are. Instead of designing systems to control selfish individuals, we need to #KISS design systems that enable cooperation between social beings.

Instead of endless surveillance, build trust, of individual competition, build participation.
Instead of extracting value from communities, build commons, recognise them as contributors.
Instead of measuring everything through financial value, recognise social and ecological value.

The path isn’t simply “How do we make selfish people behave better?” the bigger question is “Why are we building institutions that require people to behave selfishly in the first place?” That is the question we need to ask of corporations, business schools, governments, NGOs and our own activist institutions. Because when a system repeatedly produces the behaviour it claims is simply human nature, perhaps the problem isn’t human nature, perhaps the problem is the system.

Our institutions are not neutral observers; they actively shape human nature. The path away from this mess is simple and native to the #openweb, compost the #deathcult, build the commons.

The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from this mess

#OMN #4opens #openweb #commons #neoliberalism #neoclassicaleconomics #HomoEconomicus #mainstreaming #capitalism #community #trust #participation

The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from this mess

We need to stop talking about “climate change” as though we are discussing a slightly inconvenient change in the weather. Climate change is too soft, too neutral. Climate change makes it sound as though something simply happened to us. It didn’t, we pushed this mess, we built an economic system that treats the living world as raw material, turns everything into property, pushes everything through markets and then calls the resulting destruction “growth”. The next twenty years will be the “bill” we pay for this short-sighted greed. And the really dangerous part is that we are still trying to solve the problem using the same thinking that created it.

Welcome to #climatechaos, not one dramatic event that starts on a particular day, it is chronic, it accumulates, compounds. It moves through food systems, water systems, ecosystems, economies and communities. This makes it politically difficult because there is no single moment when everyone can point at the disaster and say, there it is. Instead, the extremes get worse, harvest fails, rivers floods, insurance disappears. The food price rises, drought lasts longer and finally the ecosystem quietly collapses. But one thing that is becoming common sense is we cannot carry on pretending this is normal.

A small step is that the language matters “Global warming” sounds almost pleasant, “Climate change” sounds neutral. Climate breakdown tells us something more important, there is a direction of travel, continuing accelerating the conditions that make human and ecological life less stable. That is what the next twenty years are, yes science based global averages are useful, but the things communities actually experience are extremes – heat, flooding, drought, food insecurity and other disruptions.

Living through the consequences, will show that today’s common sense, the #neoliberal answer to #climatechaos is wonderfully convenient for the #nastyfew – you are the problem, you have the wrong car, eat the wrong food, you use too much energy and bough the wrong thing. You didn’t recycle enough, and feel guilty.

This is the #deathcult at work, the individual is made responsible for a systemic crisis while the systems generating the crisis remain untouched. The absurdity is the dumping of climate responsibility onto individuals while corporations continue selling products that cause global warming. This mess isn’t accidental – #stupidindividualism is politically useful as isolated individuals have very little power. Where communities, workers, cooperatives, movements and collective action do have power.

By now it should become a little obvious that we don’t need greener consumption, what we do need a different relationship with the living world, the current uncomfortable path. Let’s make this plan – #Climatechaos isn’t an energy problem, it isn’t just a transport problem, it isn’t just a technology problem, it is a problem with how we understand ourselves. We have built a culture around the idea that everything exists to be owned, land, water, animals, forests, minerals, knowledge, attention. Even our relationships, on the #dotcons, become a commodity.

Everything becomes something that can be extracted, then we are surprised when the living systems collapse. To start to compost this mess the next twenty years need to be more about moving from ownership to participation, from extraction to stewardship. About better balancing competition and cooperation to move from isolated individuals to resilient communities. In an economic sense from commodities to commons. And yes, it is a much bigger political project than buying an electric car.

Food is going to expose the current blinded stupidity, food is where the abstraction ends. You can argue about climate models forever, but when food becomes unreliable and expensive, everyone understands. The climate discussion points to the vulnerability of agricultural systems, including dependence on a few major crops due to growing pressure on farming from heat, drought and extreme weather.

The response cannot simply be another technological monoculture. We need real diversity, more resilient crops, local knowledge, healthy soils to grow this biodiversity. We need shorter and more resilient supply chains, community food systems. And probably a much more serious conversation about what we choose to eat and how much land and sea we devote to producing it because agriculture isn’t happening outside nature.

The next twenty years will remind us that nature is not decoration, currently we treat biodiversity as something nice to have after the economy has been sorted out. But ecosystems are part of the economy, wetlands manage water, salt marshes protect coasts, healthy soils support food, forests regulate water and store carbon. Biodiversity provides resilience, this is not romantic environmentalism, it is infrastructure.

And then comes the techno-fix – whenever capitalism encounters a problem caused by technology, extraction and industrial growth, it offers us more technology. So next we get geoengineering, perhaps we can reflect sunlight, perhaps we can manipulate the atmosphere, perhaps we can capture carbon, perhaps artificial intelligence will optimise everything. Or perhaps some billionaire will save the planet. This is the reheated #mainstreaming #geekproblem version of climate politics, the problem is that the blinded underlying assumption, the system is fine, we just need a better machine.

But, unspoken is more mess we then need to compost – Who gets to control the thermostat? Who decides? Who is accountable? Who gets protected? Who gets sacrificed? These are not engineering questions, they are political questions, the next twenty years will be a democratic test of where the climate crisis becomes bigger than climate policy. We are going to have to make real choices about where should people live, what happens to communities that cannot be protected? Who pays? Who decides? What technologies are acceptable? And from a deep green prospective what land is for humans? What land is for the rest of life?

There are no purely technical answers, science can tell us what is happening, it tells us what happens if emissions continue. But science cannot decide what kind of society we want, that is politics, at best it is democracy. And at worst it is where the #mainstreaming agenda becomes dangerous as #climatechaos doesn’t care about our current political comfort zones. To find a path through this mess, we have created, we need resilience, not reassurance

Doom on its own is useless, but pretending everything will be fine is worse, people need real information about what is happening? What are the risks? What can we do? What can our community do to prepare, to organise? This is why #KISS communication needs to become local and participatory.

The example of community-based #OMN like projects matter – people come together, learn what is happening and then discuss what they can do locally. The process itself builds resilience, this should be obvious. A community is more resilient when it knows how to communicate, when it can share information. More resilient when it trusts people, when it has local knowledge and more resilient when it has shared infrastructure to remember what happened last time.

That is why media matters – the rebooted #openweb becomes climate infrastructure – where the #climatecrisis connects directly to the #OMN. We need an information infrastructure that belongs to communities rather than corporations, so communities can continue to document what happens to them. Because when the next flood comes, the official report six months later isn’t enough. The native #openweb can be part of the infrastructure of climate resilience that is if we stop treating it as another marketplace for attention.

The #OMN is native to this kind of future, it’s not a climate project in the narrow sense. But the underlying problem is the same – how do we build systems that support collective intelligence rather than extracting it? How do we allow people to publish, share, moderate, correct and preserve information without handing control to a handful of #closedweb platforms?

How do we create the trust we need without building more centralised authority? How do we make community knowledge persistent? How do we build infrastructure that can survive the failures of individualist #dotcons platforms? These questions become much more important as #climatechaos increases. Because resilience requires distributed systems, but not just technically distributed systems, we also need socially distributed systems.

The mainstream will always tell us – now is not the time, too radical, too expensive, too difficult, too political for people to accept, or the market isn’t ready, the technology isn’t ready. We have had 20 years of stalling change and challenge: we need more evidence, consultation or another #fashionista report. The #KISS answer is simple, NO, we have had decades, the next twenty years we either build resilience or discover how truly fragile we really are.

On a thin but needed positive note, the #climatecrisis is already producing the conditions for change, the question is whether that change is democratic or authoritarian. And in a narrow sense of our #openweb culture, whether it breaks the monopoly of the #geekproblem or gives it more power. It’s a simple choice of do we compost the old system or let it push us aside.

To not simply be pushed aside we need political movements capable of defending life in its widest sense, yes, the next twenty years will not be comfortable. There will be disruption, loss, conflict and there will be failures. But the future is not simply something that happens to us, it is something we organise. So please stop asking “How do I, personally, save the planet?” and ask “What can we build together that makes a different future possible?” in short get off your knees from worshipping the #deathcult, and stop waiting for the #mainstreaming agenda to save us.

In internet culture, stop handing every problem to the #geekproblem.

Light green environmentalism stop turning climate action into consumer guilt.

In economics stop treating nature as an externality.

In fashion, stop treating people as consumers.

To compost current mainstreaming mess, we need to start treating people as participants to rebuild the commons and infrastructure of trust. In short, we need people to #makinghistory, by getting the bloody shovels out. The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from it.

#climatechaos #climatebreakdown #deathcult #mainstreaming #geekproblem #commons #openweb #4opens #OMN #MakingHistory #resilience

Update: I just read this you should too https://hamishcampbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/National_security_assessment_-_global_biodiversity_loss__ecosystem_collapse_and_national_security.pdf

Rethinking commons

We currently have deeply embedded idea that objects have to be owned by an individual, as we are taught to think in terms of possession, this is mine, that is yours. We measure security through what we own, status through what we accumulate, and value through what we can control. This feels like common sense because it is invisibly embedded in modern Western culture. But it isn’t the only way to understand value, in the #openweb paths what if we thought less about ownership and more about flows?

The Clod and the Pebble

By William Blake

“Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sung a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle’s feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another’s loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

Let’s think about a river – a river doesn’t belong to the individual drops of water moving through it. A drop of rain becomes a stream, the stream becomes a river, and the river eventually becomes part of the sea. Water moves through different places and forms, continually changing while remaining part of the larger flow.

So who owns the river? Who owns the sea? The question starts to look strange, perhaps our social systems could work differently? From possessions to participation – ownership tends to turn things into possessions: something I control, something I can exclude you from, something whose value is measured by what I have. Commons work differently:

The value comes from being part of the flow – contributing, using, sharing, remixing, maintaining and passing things on.

The important thing isn’t possessing the resource. It is having a meaningful relationship with it and with the people around it.

People get their value not from owning the thing, but from their place in the relationships and flows around it.

This changes the question, instead of what do I own? We begin asking what am I part of? And then what do I contribute to it? That a very different way of thinking about social value, the individual as a drop in the flow

This doesn’t mean that individuals disappear, quite the opposite. The individual still matters, but their importance isn’t defined primarily through isolated ownership. A person might be a spring, feeding something larger, a stream, connecting different communities. They might be a drop of rain, arriving briefly but contributing something necessary to the wider system. They might be part of several flows at once, their value comes from these relationships.

This challenges the idea that independence means standing completely outside everyone else. We need to challenge the #stupidindividualism “common sense” by pushing into view the obvious idea that we are already dependent on enormous networks of other people, infrastructure, knowledge and nature. To make it more obvious that the fantasy of the completely independent individual is impossible to sustain. We are social beings living inside flows of resources, information, culture, care and knowledge.

The question is whether our infrastructure can recognise this reality, that there is a problem with ownership as the default, yes, ownership has useful functions. It can provide security, responsibility and autonomy. But when ownership becomes the dominant way we understand everything it creates problems – Knowledge becomes intellectual property – Culture becomes content to be monetised – Relationships become networks to be harvested – Personal expression becomes data – Communities become audiences – Attention becomes a commodity. And infrastructure becomes something controlled by whoever owns the platform.

The result is the mess we live in today, a society organised around accumulation and exclusion, the more you own, the more power you have to control access for everyone else. This is particularly obvious online as the #dotcons have built enormous “value” networks around ownership and control. They accumulate our data, relationships, attention and cultural production inside privately controlled infrastructures for private ends.

The #openweb is very different, a flow, this is why the idea of the commons matters so much – people publish, others discover, people remix, others contribute, communities archive, others build upon the archives. Ideas move between projects, software is forked, knowledge is shared, tools are adapted. The value comes from the movement. This is different from the current #mainstreaming model, where the aim is to capture the flow and turn it into an enclosed private power tool. The platform wants to become the river owner, the commons ask, why does anybody need to own the river?

There is another useful shift here, from ownership to stewardship. If something is part of commons, somebody still needs to look after it. In the #openweb servers need maintaining, archives need preserving, software needs updating, communities need moderation, standards need developing. The answer isn’t that nobody is responsible, it is that responsibility doesn’t have to mean absolute ownership, a person or group can care for something without possessing it absolutely.

That creates a different relationship with resources, you become a participant and steward rather than simply an owner. The question shifts to what can I contribute to keeping this flow healthy? Rather than, how much of this can I capture for myself? Trust becomes important, #commons cannot function through ownership and contracts, they depend on relationships. People need to trust that others will contribute, trust that resources will not simply be captured, trust the governance process so that disagreements can be resolved. They need to trust that people will maintain the basic infrastructure.

This doesn’t mean blind trust, it means building distributed, accountable trust through participation, reputation, open processes and shared responsibility. The flow is maintained because people have reasons to maintain it. Less ownership does not mean less value, there is a fear that if we reduce ownership, we somehow reduce motivation. But this assumes that people are motivated primarily by possession. They aren’t – people are motivated by belonging, recognition, creativity, curiosity, relationships, contribution, usefulness and the satisfaction of making something work.

A relevant example is that open-source developers contribute to projects they don’t individually own, people contribute to Wikipedia without owning the articles, communities maintain shared spaces without individually owning every part of them. Artists build on other people’s work, researchers build on generations of shared knowledge. Parents and communities care for things whose benefits extend far beyond themselves.

These are all forms of value created through participation in a flow. But what should be common sense is still alien too Western common sense “thinking” – so, yes, the common’s path can feel strange because much of Western economic and political thinking is organised around individual property. We are taught to ask – Who owns it? Who paid for it? Who controls it? Who gets the profit? The commons ask different questions – Who participates? Who contributes? Who benefits? Who maintains it? How does it circulate? How do we keep the flow healthy? That is not simply a change in terminology, it is a different social logic.

And thus the challenge of the #openweb, to build the next generation of digital infrastructure that carries this flow. Or we can continue building platforms where people accumulate followers, data, status and ownership. Or native infrastructures where value comes from participation, trust, contribution and circulation.

The #4opens are useful here because Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process all help keep the flow open. They make it harder for one actor to capture the entire system. They allow people to contribute, allow others to build upon that contribution, allow communities to maintain their own parts of the infrastructure.

This is also part of the reason projects such as #OMN matter, the point isn’t to build another platform. It is to build infrastructure that allows media, knowledge, trust and community activity to flow between people and communities without being captured by one owner. From “mine” to “ours” Perhaps the deepest change is cultural, to move from: Mine → yours towards: Ours → flowing through us

That doesn’t mean abolishing personal possessions, more it’s about focusing on recognising that many of the things that create the value in our lives don’t work like possessions in the first place. Knowledge grows when shared, culture grows when remixed, relationships grow through participation, communities grow through contribution, the web grows through links and flows.

A river remains a river because the water moves – the challenge is to build social systems that understand this. We don’t need everybody to own a piece of everything, we need people to become meaningful within the flows that sustain them. A spring doesn’t need to own the river, a stream doesn’t need to own the valley, a drop of rain doesn’t need to own the sea. In social terms they contribute to the flow, and the social flow gives us meaning and value in return.

Less ownership. More participation.
Less accumulation. More circulation.
Less control. More stewardship.
Less isolation. More belonging.
Less platform capture. More commons.

That is the direction the #openweb needs to be moving in.

The language around #climatechaos is changing

For years, climate breakdown was treated as distant, a problem for activists, scientists, future generations or places somewhere else. That blinded view is now harder to sustain. Heat, fires, floods, crop failures, infrastructure disruption, rising insurance costs and the growing difficulty of simply keeping homes and communities safe are making climate disruption part of our everyday life.

As we are talking about tech on this site – the important question for the #OMN is therefore not only how do we stop climate change? It is also – how do we build the social infrastructure needed to live through the disruption that is already here? This is where the climate conversation needs to become broader, and treat adaptation not surrendering, due to the fear that talking about adaptation means giving up on mitigation, it doesn’t.

We still need fundamental social change to reduce emissions, change energy systems and challenge the economic structures pushing us to ecological destruction. But we also need to mediate the very real mess and disruption is already here, we need to be honest about that. A community facing repeated flooding needs flood planning, when homes become dangerously hot, people need cooling, insulation and better housing. When extreme weather repeatedly disrupts transport, energy or communications, communities need resilient alternatives, insurance companies withdraw from areas they consider too risky, it is basic that communities also need better ways of thinking about collective risk and resilience.

These are not future problems, they are now simply ordinary infrastructure questions. And this infrastructure is never only physical, we also need social infrastructure too. This is needed to grow climate resilience, information resilience, on this path we need native #openweb systems where communities can publish what is happening, preserve local knowledge, compare experiences, challenge bad information, coordinate responses and maintain collective memory. That is very different from the current model of social media, where information is filtered and controlled through commercial algorithms, engagement incentives and platform ownership.

The #climatecrisis is already difficult enough – we don’t need our communication systems making it harder. Thus, the climate crisis is also a media crisis: When a flood happens, what matters? People need to know where the water is. They need to know which roads are closed, where vulnerable people are, which services are operating. They need to know what happened last time to know who they can trust.

And afterwards, someone needs to record what actually happened, this last part is particularly important. Without good local records, every disaster becomes an isolated event. Communities repeatedly rediscover the same problems because institutional memory disappears. This is one reason the #OMN #makinghistory matters, the idea is simple: communities should create living, collaborative records of what is happening around them. Not just journalism in the traditional sense, but a shared memory infrastructure. Stories, events, places, people, evidence, changes and responses connected over time to give communities something valuable during #climatechaos – memory.

You would be right we already have more information than ever, the problem is that information is fragmented into disconnected #closedweb platforms. One person posts on Facebook, someone else posts on X, another publishes a video on YouTube. A council puts an announcement somewhere else, a local activist keeps information on a personal website were a journalist publishes an article that disappears behind a paywall.

Then the flooding comes, and suddenly nobody has a reliable picture of what happened. This is the #datasoup problem. The answer isn’t simply more information, we need better ways of connecting information while keeping its provenance, context and history. This is why open standards matter – #RSS, #ActivityPub, open metadata, decentralised publishing, archives and interoperable tools are not just technical preferences, they are pieces of a social resilience infrastructure. The #4opens is a useful starting point: Open Data. Open Source. Open Standards. Open Process. These matter because climate resilience cannot depend entirely on proprietary systems controlled by a few companies.

We shouldn’t respond to the crisis by creating another centralised technological solution and declaring it the answer. This is not about building one perfect system, there is another lesson here – climate chaos is too complicated for that. Different communities have different needs, the important thing is that these systems connect and remain open. We already have a path for this – the #openweb is already a diverse ecosystem rather than another platform monopoly. This is why the #OMN approach is deliberately practical and pluralistic, we don’t need technological purity, we need useful tools that work together and remain in the commons.

Yes, finally the wider #mainstreaming is noticing the physical problem. Heatwaves are no longer exceptional, flooding is no longer unimaginable, insurance withdrawal will become a political issue. Food and energy security need to become part of everyday political discussion. The mainstream is beginning to understand the hard infrastructure problem, but the social infrastructure problem remains much less visible.

We need to build paths through this before we need them – The worst time to discover that your community has no communication infrastructure is during a disaster. The worst time to discover that nobody knows what happened during the previous flood is during the next flood. The worst time to discover that all your community information lives on somebody else’s platform is when that platform changes its access rules or goes away.

Resilience therefore means building before the emergency, but not another giant centralised project, more lots of small interconnected pieces. Open tools, local archives, community websites, federated publishing sharing metadata based on open standards. Then the social side is people who know how to maintain servers, know how to tell stories, how to moderate and systems that allow all those pieces to connect, as climate resilience is also social resilience.

The deeper point is that climate chaos exposes the weakness of the current #dotcons social model. A society organised around individual consumption, competition, private ownership and short-term profit is poorly equipped for long-term collective disruption. The response has to move in the opposite direction: balancing individualism towards community; from enclosure towards commons; from proprietary platforms towards open infrastructure; from disposable information towards collective memory and from centralised control towards distributed resilience.

Technology cannot solve #climatechaos, but the wrong technology can make it much worse, while the right kind of technology can help communities organise, remember, communicate and cooperate. That is the space we are interested in with the #OMN to build the open social infrastructure underneath society – infrastructure that can survive the platforms, the political fashions and hopefully some of the climate disruption coming our way.

The climate crisis is not only asking whether we can build stronger walls, better drains and cooler buildings, it is asking whether we can become better at being a society. That is where the #openweb has a role – you need a shovel #OMN

#OMN #MakingHistory #climatechaos #openweb #4opens #IndymediaBack #OGB #resilience #commons #federation #community #climateadaptation

The Politics of Ignorance

The individual, is not, the starting point for the #OMN

One of the most useful ways to understand the mess we are in today is to ask a deceptively simple question – what comes first – the individual or the network? #Mainstreaming economics startes with the individual, were sociology, anthropology and related traditions start somewhere else – with relationships, institutions, communities and the social structures into which individuals are born.

This difference matters enormously, when we start thinking about technology, politics, economics and the #openweb. It is one of the reasons I keep coming back to the problem of #stupidindividualism – the point isn’t that individuals don’t exist, of course they do, the problem is treating the individual as if they exist independently of the social world that produces, supports and constrains them.

Why? we are not born as isolated economic actors, we are born helpless. Other people feed us, protect us, teach us language, teach us how to behave, introduce us to culture and eventually help us become capable of acting independently. Before there is an autonomous economic actor, there is already a network of care. That simple observation has consequences, that the network come first. that nobody invents themselves, every person was born into an existing social world, where there are families, communities, languages, institutions, infrastructures, histories and expectations already.

Even our ability to imagine ourselves as an individual depends upon other people. Language is social, knowledge is social, culture is social, markets are social and technology is social. The idea of private property depends on a society capable of recognising and enforcing it. Yet a great deal of mainstream economic thinking narrows it self to begin with the individual as though they are already standing outside society, deciding what they want and entering into relationships with other individuals through voluntary exchange. That is a very particular, narrow, way of not seeing the world, and it is not neutral, this blindness is historically produced.

One of sociology’s important contributions is to make the background visible. The individual is not simply a natural fact. The particular kind of individual we imagine ourselves to be is shaped by the social structures around us. But yes, modern societies are unusually good at producing the experience of being an isolated individual. We can move cities, change jobs, rent instead of own, interact with strangers. We can buy almost everything we need through markets, communicate with people thousands of kilometres away. We can participate in institutions without ever knowing the people who operate them.

This creates an extraordinary experience – we can feel independent while being massively interdependent. That is one of the great illusions of modernity, that the person sitting alone in a flat, ordering food through an app and working remotely from a laptop can feel completely autonomous. But underneath that apparent autonomy is an enormous network of other people and systems: farmers, delivery workers, programmers, electricity grids, telecommunications networks, roads, warehouses, financial institutions, governments, data centres and countless forms of unpaid and paid care.

So to put this simply, the individual is not independent, the individual is networked and the current narrow economic model hides the network. Composting this mess is where the distinction between mainstream economics and sociology becomes politically important. A simplified economic model can begin with individuals who have preferences, resources and choices. They meet in markets, supply meets demand, prices coordinate activity. The model can be useful for analysing particular situations.

The problem comes when the model becomes a description of human reality itself. A market is not simply a mathematical relationship between isolated individuals, it is a social institution, requireing rules, trust, a state thatrequires infrastructure, property rights, requires enforcement, communication of shared expectations. It requires people who know how to behave within this narrow system.

In other words – the market sits inside society and society does not simply emerge from a collection of markets. This distinction becomes particularly important when discussing capitalism, it is not some natural state that appears whenever humans are allowed to trade. It is a historically, involving particular institutions, property arrangements, states, legal systems, technologies and cultural assumptions.

Once we recognise this, the supposedly inevitable starts to look contingent, and that is where sociology becomes politically interesting. The state doesn’t disappear, just because the market exists. The current story presents the market and the state as opposites:

state = control
market = freedom

But historically, the development of modern markets has depended heavily upon states, to establish property law, currencies, enforce contracts. States build infrastructure, define corporations and regulate labour. States establish borders, create legal identities, enforce debts. The market and the state are not simply opposites standing outside one another, they are entangled.

This matters because when we look at modern capitalism as though it emerged from naturally individuals making voluntary exchanges, we erase much of the infrastructure that made those exchanges possible – again, the network disappears. The problem with universalising capitalism is one of the most damaging intellectual habits, taking the economic system we happen to live inside and treating it as though it describes human economic behaviour everywhere and throughout history.

Capitalist monetary exchange becomes “the economy.”

Market behaviour becomes “human nature.”

Competition becomes inevitable.

Private ownership becomes normal.

Debt becomes morally obvious.

Money becomes something humans must always have invented because they wanted a more efficient version of barter. But history repeatedly show much greater diversity, human societies have organised production, distribution, care and exchange in many different ways. There have been gift economies, commons, reciprocity networks, redistributive systems. There is no single timeless human economy – there are economic cultures. It is our assumptions about what is “normal” are themselves historically specific.

That lesson is directly relevant to technology of the #OMN project, as technology has its own version of this problem. We often start with the assumption that the individual user is the basic unit. The user creates an account. The user chooses a platform. The user posts content. The user chooses whether to participate. The user accepts the terms. The user leaves if they don’t like it. Doses this sounds reasonable?

But yes, as we have said, its not, as it ignores the network, if all your friends are on Facebook, “just leave Facebook” isn’t an individual decision in any meaningful sense. If your local council publishes important information only through Facebook, leaving becomes a civic problem. If your community organises through WhatsApp, leaving becomes a social problem. If your employer requires a particular platform, leaving becomes an economic problem. If your political movement organises somewhere, leaving becomes a political problem.

The individual appears to have a choice, but the network determines the cost of exercising it. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current #dotcons as they don’t simply sell software to individuals, they capture networks. Network effects become political power – once enough people are locked inside a platform, the platform becomes difficult to leave. This is often described as a “network effect”, as though it were simply a technical feature, it isn’t, it is a abusive social relationship.

The value of the platform increases because other people are there, that means the individual cannot solve the problem individually. You cannot build a better social network merely by downloading better software. You need people, communities, trust, shared practices. You need governance – you need ways for information to move and institutions that can maintain the infrastructure.

This is why simply telling people to “move to Mastodon” is insufficient. The problem isn’t that Mastodon exists or doesn’t exist. The problem is social infrastructure, the #openweb is a social project, this is why we don’t see the #openweb simply as a collection of technologies. #RSS, #ActivityPub, #PeerTube, #blogs, #wikis, distributed hosting and open-source software are tools. They become socially transformative only when communities use them to create different relationships.

The technical layer matters enormously, but technology alone cannot produce a commons. A commons requires people who maintain it, and these people need to be heald tagather by norms, trust, governance. This is where the #OMN comes in – from individual users to communities, we start from a different assumption – media is a social relationship, not simply a commodity produced for individual consumers. Instead of imagining millions of isolated users consuming content through a central platform, we build networks of communities that publish, share, moderate, maintain and archive media together.

This changes the question, instead of “What does the individual user want?” we can also ask “What does this community need?” And “What relationships allow this information system to remain healthy?” And”Who maintains it?” And “Who has power?” Thus “How can that power be accountable?” That is sociology applied to technology and importently why governance becomes unavoidable. Why governance is such a big part of #OMN and #OGB. If we pretend that technology is simply a neutral tool used by independent individuals, governance becomes something we only discover later when things go wrong.

But if we recognise that technology creates social relationships, governance is there from the beginning. Every platform has governance, the question is who governs – A dictator-for-life project is governance – a developer-controlled project has governance – an NGO-funded project has governance – a corporate platform has governance so yes then a community-run project has governance. Even “no governance” is a form of governance because it usually means that whoever has the most time, technical knowledge or social power ends up making the decisions. The #OGB challenge is therefore not to eliminate governance, it is to make governance visible, participatory and appropriate to the culture of the #openweb.

This brings us back to #stupidindividualism, remmber the hashtag isn’t saying that individuals are stupid, it is pointing at what happens when individualism becomes the only permitted way of understanding social problems. If someone says “Our community has a problem.” and the response is “Are you saying I’m the problem?” the conversation has already been derailed. The same happens with technology, if we say “The structure of social media encourages dependency.” and someone responds “But I personally choose to use Facebook.” we have moved from a structural question to an individual one.

Why all this matters now – we are walking a path where many of the systems that previously appeared stable are becoming unstable. Climate disruption, political polarisation, economic insecurity, platform collapse and #enshittification. leading to the current mess of #AI generated information overload. Declining institutional trust, fragmented communities and increasing centralisation of infrastructure. The probelms cannot be solved by millions of isolated individuals making slightly better consumer choices. They require collective action, and collective capacity requires understanding how people actually relate to each other. That means #KISS moving beyond the fantasy of the autonomous individual.

On this path the #OMN isn’t trying to invent some perfect alternative society, the starting point is much simpler – build infrastructure that assumes people are social – build media flows around communities – build governance around participation and trust – build software that supports cooperation rather than only extraction – build open standards so different communities can interoperate – build archives so collective memory survives – build metadata so information can be found and connected. And finaly build moderation systems that recognise human relationships rather than reducing everything to algorithmic scoring and blocking.

This is the job of the #4opens – open data, open source, open standards and open process – that are useful here because they make the infrastructure contestable. No single group gets to say “Trust us. We know what’s best.” keeping the infrastructure inside the commons wherever possible.

The most important lesson from sociology and anthropology isn’t that economists are always wrong. There are economists doing good work, and economics contains some internal diversity. The point is that no single discipline should get to define the whole of human reality. Economics is powerful at asking narrow questions. Sociology asks different questions, Anthropology asks different questions. History asks different questions, ecology asks different questions, technology asks different questions. The problem begins when one particular model becomes so powerful that its assumptions disappear from view.

That is the real danger of hegemony, you stop seeing the assumptions because everyone around you is using them. to work to compost this current mess, the #openweb is valuable because it gives us an shoval to build differently. But we won’t get anywere simply by swapping one piece of software for another, we need to challenge the deeper assumptions underneath the software. The assumption that the user is alone, that networks are collections of individuals, markets are natural, technology is neutral, that governance can be bolted on afterwards. And perhaps most importantly, the assumption that we are independent when we are actually interdependent.

Yes, the individual matters, but the individual is not the starting point, the relationship is. That is why sociology matters to the #OMN. And that is why building a genuinely social #openweb is about much more than writing better code. It is about rebuilding the networks of trust, cooperation, memory and collective power that allow people to live together in the first place.

So keep the path #KISS, technology is the tool, the social network is the foundation, the commons is the direction. Get to growing this please #OMN

An Anthropologyist view of this subject

#OMN #openweb #4opens #OGB #IndymediaBack #MakingHistory #stupidindividualism #mainstreaming #deathcult #geekproblem

Public conversation about public problems

Our current working models of “governance” in #opensource are mostly:

Monarchy – the dictator for life.
Aristocracy – the devs.
Oligarchy – NGOs/funders.
And way out on the edge: Democracy – the users.

We need better governance native to the #openweb. Let’s look at this at a more personal level before the normal wider social view. Yes, in #FOSS development the devs doing the work deserve respect, and #OMN isn’t arguing that users should simply demand things from volunteers.

The point about “aristocracy” is about more where decision-making power sits, less whether devs are privileged people or whether their work has value. If the people who write and maintain the code also decide what the project is, what gets built, what gets rejected and how the project develops, then you have a governance structure where technical expertise becomes political authority.

Hope am clear, that isn’t a criticism of individual developers, it’s a structural observation. The #OMN approach is to separate doing the work from owning the direction. Developers are essential participants, but so are users, moderators, communities and other contributors. Different kinds of knowledge need different kinds of power.

The challenge is building governance where devs don’t get bossed around by users, users don’t get bossed around by devs, funders don’t get to buy the direction, and nobody gets to become the permanent ruler.

That’s what the #OGB work is trying to explore: governance native to the #openweb, based on trust, transparency, participation and voluntary cooperation. This alternative isn’t “users rule”, it’s shared power with different roles.

With this in mind lets talk about the wider issue, a reminder: when I talk about the internet and society, I am not necessarily talking about you, I am talking about groups, cultures, classes, institutions and patterns of behaviour that you might be part of. You can recognise yourself in a critique without the critique being a personal attack – Simple – Take the useful bit and move on.

What is interesting – and a pretty good example of #stupidindividualism – is how difficult this has become. We increasingly seem to believe that we are not allowed to talk about groups any more. Everything has to be reduced to the individual “Are you saying I’m stupid?” “Are you attacking me?”
“Who exactly are you talking about?” This makes it difficult to discuss social patterns, and that matters because many of the problems we face are not individual problems. They are produced by relationships between people, institutions, technologies and economic systems.

If we cannot talk about groups, we cannot talk properly about the #geekproblem, #mainstreaming, the #dotcons, #NGOs and funders, tech communities, activist cultures, class interests, institutional power, #neoliberalism or the wider #deathcult culture. We end up privatising a public conversation.

This is one of the things that makes #dotcons-style social media so destructive, as everything becomes personalised, emotional and reactive when structural criticism gets turned into interpersonal conflict. But a feeling is not a fact, a feeling attacked does not necessarily mean someone is attacking you. Sometimes it means that something has made you uncomfortable, or challenged a worldview you have become accustomed to.

That discomfort can actually be useful as the point isn’t to find individuals to blame, the point is to understand the systems and cultures we are collectively caught inside. We need to get beyond the #neoliberal #TINA – There Is No Alternative – thinking that reduces everything to individual choice and responsibility. We need to be able to say – This is a group pattern, a cultural pattern, a class interest, an institutional problem. It’s about how power reproduces itself, then we can actually talk about what to do about it. That is the conversation we need to reclaim: public, collective and capable of naming the structures that shape our lives.

Remember none of this is about personal attacks, not tribal prat fights, not individualised outrage. It’s a public conversation about public problems.

#stupidindividualism #mainstreaming #openweb #4opens #OMN #deathcult

This summer #climatechaos

This summer, heat, fires, the soon to come winter floods and insurance withdrawals will make #climatechaos harder to treat as something happening somewhere else. For years, climate breakdown was framed as an activist issue, something discussed by environmental groups while mainstream politics carried on with business as usual. That is changing, people are experiencing the consequences: extreme heat, flooding, damaged homes, rising insurance costs, failing infrastructure and growing uncertainty about what the next few years will look like. The #climatecrisis is moving into everyday life, so how do we live through what is already locked in?

Once the consequences of a warmer world are being experienced everywhere, adaptation becomes an unavoidable path. That means practical changes will finally start to happen such as resilient building standards, flood planning, water management, food systems, energy resilience, heat protection and changes to where and how we build.

But there is a danger in treating adaptation as purely a technical problem, we might redesign buildings, strengthen flood defences, change planning regulations. We can develop better warning systems – but who controls these systems? Who decides what gets protected? Who gets information when something goes wrong? Who maintains the infrastructure? Who remembers what happened last time? And who gets left behind? These are social and political questions.

The missing infrastructure is where the #OMN native path becomes important. Surviving #climatechaos isn’t only about physical infrastructure, it is also about information infrastructure and community infrastructure. During crisis, people need reliable information to know what is happening locally, they need to know who needs help, to know which transport links are closed, where resources are available, what services are operating and what communities are doing. They need ways to communicate when normal paths fail.

And afterwards, they need a record of what happened, this is why the #openweb matters, a resilient society cannot depend entirely on #closedweb privately owned platforms whose responsibility is to the current #nastyfew shareholders and advertisers. It is basic that the #dotcons are not resilience infrastructure – Facebook, Google, X, TikTok and the other #dotcons distribute information, and misinformation very quickly, but speed isn’t the same thing as resilience.

These current #closedweb digital systems are designed around control, engagement, advertising, data extraction and platform addiction. They are dangerous to use when important information will disappear into algorithmic feeds. It should be becoming obverse that communities cannot keep being dependent on proprietary services, as accounts can be suspended, interfaces can change, companies can change their business models, services will disappear.

And the information itself is often difficult to preserve, connect or reuse outside these #closedweb platforms. That is a terrible foundation for a society increasingly dealing with environmental disruption. This is why the #OMN focuses on the #deathcult story, in part to highlight it isn’t simply a collection of bad corporations. The current mess is about the way of organising society around short-term extraction, profit before resilience, growth before sustainability, competition before cooperation. Private ownership comes before the commons, and immediate financial returns are prioritised over the ability of communities to survive any long-term disruption.

In this mess, climate adaptation within this risks becoming another market, those who can afford resilience buy it, those who can’t are left exposed. Insurance withdraws from risky areas, property values become tied to climate risk. Private companies decide which infrastructure is commercially viable, the result is adaptation as another form of inequality.

To compost this mess we need #KISS social adaptation too – The alternative isn’t to reject technology – It is to change what technology is for. The #4opens provide a useful starting point: Open Data – Open Source – Open Standards – Open Process. These principles make it easier for communities to share information, build on each other’s work and maintain infrastructure without being locked into one corporation. The #openweb gives us the technical culture for this, #Federation allows different communities to remain independent while still communicating. Open standards allow systems to interoperate. Open data allows information to remain useful beyond one platform. And open process allows communities to understand and participate in decisions affecting them.

There is another important piece: memory, when a flood happens, people document it. When a heatwave hits, people record what happened, when infrastructure fails, somebody usually knows why. But much of this grassroots knowledge disappears into #dotcons social-media feeds. A few years later, we start again from scratch. This is why #openweb projects such as #MakingHistory matter. We need living community archives that connect events, places, people, media and responses over time. The archive becomes part of resilience, knowing what happened last time helps communities prepare for the next time.

Moving beyond the current #NGO pointlessness – we need to grow projects like the OMN as shovels, to clear the #techshit mess to grow grassroots infrastructure for publishing, sharing, moderating and preserving information. But yes, the technology is only part of it, the deeper goal is to help communities build trusted information networks that are not dependent on the current #dotcons. A resilient media system should allow people to – publish locally – discover relevant information –
share between communities – moderate collectively – preserve important records – correct mistakes – maintain metadata – and keep historical context. This becomes especially important when normal systems are under pressure as the #mainstreaming is only seeing half the problem. But yes, the mainstream conversation is beginning to understand climate adaptation matters, but adaptation cannot be reduced to flood barriers, new building codes or air-conditioning.

We also need to ask whether the social systems surrounding those technologies are resilient. Can communities cooperate? Can people trust the information they receive? Can knowledge move between organisations? Can local experience become shared knowledge? Can communities govern their own infrastructure? Can we preserve memory? These questions are still largely outside the mainstream climate conversation. They shouldn’t be, the next wave of #climatechaos will test not only our physical infrastructure but our social infrastructure. The challenge is therefore twofold – build the physical systems that help us survive the changing climate – build the open, collective information systems that help communities understand and organise that survival.

The first is increasingly #mainstreaming, the second is where the #openweb, #4opens, #OMN, #OGB and #MakingHistory have something important to contribute. We do need #KISS more resilient communities, and resilient communities need infrastructure they can actually trust and control.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #MakingHistory #OGB #IndymediaBack #climatechaos #deathcult #dotcons #resilience

Living through twenty years of #dotcons addiction

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

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

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

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

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

Feelings/facts, stupidindividualism is about peoples role in systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking the circle of #stupidindividualism

Media, the deathcult and climatechaos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That work cannot wait.