One thing I keep noticing around Oxford is how much academic culture is about building consensus on how to name things, rather than actually talking about the things themselves. Events become status games: establishing who has authority, who gets referenced, who belongs in the #mainstreaming hierarchy around whatever subject is being discussed. There is plenty of time spent establishing credibility, positioning and agreeing on language, but remarkably little time spent getting to grips with the actual mess we increasing face.
Of course, referencing and academic rigour have their uses. We cannot all discover everything from scratch, and taking some things on good authority is necessary. But there is a balance, at some point we need to get beyond repeating what other people have said and ask, what is your contribution? What are you actually doing with this knowledge?
This isn’t an attack on academia or academics, it’s about recognizing the limits of a culture that can become more concerned with its own status and legitimacy than with the subject it claims to be studying. Well, perhaps spending less time establishing who is allowed to talk about the problem and more time actually talking about it would be a good start. Oxford has no shortage of clever people. What we seem to lack is a culture that turns all that knowledge into collective agency and practical change. We don’t need more consensus about how to describe the mess. We need to start doing something about it.
#OMN angle is that economics became another form of chattering-class authority: a closed conversation where mathematical models and professional status gained more weight than lived experience, social relationships and the actual workings of human communities.
Modern economics has a strange problem. It has spent more than a century building an elaborate mathematical model of human behaviour, then started treating that model as if it were human nature itself. The people inside this model are called Homo economicus: perfectly rational, endlessly informed individuals who act only in their own self-interest. They have the memory of a supercomputer, the reasoning power of Einstein and the self-control of Gandhi. The problem? These people don’t exist.
Real human beings are social, emotional, cooperative, competitive, contradictory and shaped by the communities around them. We live through relationships, shared expectations, social norms and collective action. Evolution has spent millions of years shaping these behaviours. But the mainstreaming economic establishment pushed this messy reality aside because it was harder to fit into mathematics.
This is where the #chatteringclasses come in, an educated professional class builds its authority through specialist language, prestigious institutions, awards and internal agreement. The models become more important than the world they are supposed to describe. Dissent is tolerated at the edges, but the central assumptions remain protected.
Even Nobel-winning economists demonstrate that real people behave differently, the great theoretical machine carries on. What should be evidence that the model is wrong gets labelled a paradox that needs explaining away. The irony is that early economists like Adam Smith had a much richer understanding of human nature. Smith recognized that people care about reputation, fairness, social expectations and other people, not just their own monetary advantage. His invisible hand was about how social systems emerge from local interactions, not a magical proof that selfishness makes everything work.
This matters beyond economics, as it is a familiar pattern across our institutions: a professional class creates a simplified model, builds careers and authority around it, then treats the model as reality. When the real world refuses to behave, the response is to defend the model rather than learn from experience. We see the same #geekproblem in technology, the same #NGO problem in activism and the same #mainstreaming problem across pushing back grassroots movements. Process becomes paperwork, participation becomes consultation, and mathematical or professional legitimacy replaces any collective understanding.
For the #OMN, this is a central lesson. Human systems cannot be built from abstract models of isolated individuals. They grow through relationships, trust, shared practice, conflict, cooperation and the messy work of communities. We need to stop confusing the map with the territory, and stop giving the chattering classes a monopoly on describing the world. Less worship of abstract models, more attention to how people actually live, organize and work together.
That’s part of rebuilding the #openweb, not just better technology, but better ways of understanding and organizing our shared social reality. #4opens
The #OMN path is about the stories we tell to make technology acceptable, the institutions that repeat those stories, and the grassroots work left waiting while the money follows the next “miracle” story. A useful tool gets wrapped in a grand narrative, funding follows the narrative rather than community need, and the people building alternatives are pushed to the margins. When the story finally weakens, the underlying technology may remain – but the promised social transformation never arrives.
The story is always bigger than the technology, and when the story collapses, the people trying to build something useful are left to compost the mess. The AI hype is beginning to meet this reality that caught up with so many previous waves of technology. The promises were enormous: artificial general intelligence, automated abundance, the end of work as we know it, and machines that would solve the problems we have failed to solve ourselves. Trillions in investment followed the story.
But beneath the #PR claims the practical uses remain much more ordinary. Large language models (#LLM) do have useful capabilities. But they are not evidence that we have created a new form of human intelligence, nor do they justify meany of the promises made in their name. The interesting question is not whether the technology has some value, it clearly does. The question is why we keep wrapping useful tools in stories of technological salvation, and why so much of our social and political life gets pulled into those stories.
Every technology comes with a story, we have seen this cycle meany times. The #dotcons, social media promised to connect the world. #Web3 promised to decentralize it. #Blockchain promised to rebuild trust. Now #AI promises to automate intelligence itself. Each wave arrives with a familiar script, first, a genuine technical development, then a much bigger story about what it means for humanity. Blinded investors pour in money, bureaucratic businesses scramble to adopt it, governments fear being left behind, and the traditional media repeats the promise until it starts to feel like transentery common sense.
The technology becomes almost impossible to discuss outside its mythology, is how the #deathcult works, it turns a economic and political path into an inevitable dead end future. We are told to adapt, adopt and accelerate, because questioning the direction means falling behind. But as always, the question of who benefits disappears beneath the pressure to keep up. To compost this mess we need to separate what the technology can actually do from the stories being sold around it, as if we accept the industry’s framing that today’s language models are becoming digital people, even our criticism ends up strengthening that framing. The task is to compost the mythology, the failed dreams of #mainstreaming.
But we face is what happens when the story’s collapse, who pays? The AI industry sold different stories to different audiences. Consumers were promised an intelligent assistant. Businesses were promised efficiency and reduced labour costs. Governments were warned that they must join a geopolitical race. Workers were told they were participating in a historic mission. Investors were promised extraordinary returns. These stories reinforced one another. Government investment legitimized the industry. Corporate adoption made it appear inevitable. Financial speculation funded further expansion. Media attention turned uncertainty into spectacle.
And when this investment bubble deflates, the damage will not be limited to shareholders. Public resources have been committed to speculative infrastructure. Workers have lost jobs in anticipation of automation that never delivered as promised. Communities may be left with more centralized infrastructure and less control over the information systems they depend on. Yes, the technology will continue in some form, the question is more who ends up owning it, who benefits from it and who is left holding the bill.
There are are likely useful things we can do with language models. They can help people process information, translate material, assist with coding and make some technical tasks more accessible. We should assess those uses honestly, including their limitations and costs. But we do not need to pretend these tools will create a new civilization, we do not need to build our communities around corporate #dotcons products, by handing over public knowledge to private platforms to replace human judgement with automated output.
We do need to ask what tools can contribute to collective work, and what relationships must remain human, accountable and open to challenge. For #OMN, this means keeping our focus on shared media flows, grassroots publishing, archives and the commons. The work is to help communities create, discover, moderate and maintain their own information systems. On this path the #4opens offer a practical test: open data, open source, open standards and open processes. These do not magically guarantee a good outcome, but they make it easier to inspect, reuse, challenge and improve the systems we build.
The #AI story needs compost, not another hype cycle. There is a useful ecological metaphor here, composting does not mean pretending that everything discarded is worthless. It means separating what can nourish future growth from what needs to break down. The AI boom contains technical developments, useful tools, accumulated knowledge and some worthwhile experiments. It also contains inflated promises, speculative finance, extractive business models and a great deal of #techchurn.
That means, focus, shifting our attention away from chasing the next big story and towards the less glamorous work of building things people actually use. Shared infrastructure. Open processes. Community maintenance. Human trust. The ability to disagree, adapt and walk away. This work will not attract the same speculative billions. It may never produce a spectacular demonstration or a promise of god-like intelligence. Good.
We need less technological theatre and more collective capability, less dependency and more participation, less worship of the #deathcult and more practice of the #lifecult. The AI bubble will deflate, or the industry may keep finding new ways to keep the story alive. Either way, the underlying choice remains, do we build alternatives or keep chasing the next #mainstreaming day dream, or maybe better, do we practically use the wreckage of these failed promises to grow something more useful?
The #OMN path is to compost the hype, keep the useful tools, expose the power relationships and build the commons. Not one perfect platform, not one miracle technology, a living ecosystem of tools, communities and shared practices that grow beyond the control of the #dotcons.
Ten years ago, I wrote about a problem that was already undermining the #openweb, that nobody was linking to anybody, and that the incentives were all moving in the wrong direction. #Mainstreaming platforms had little reason to send people towards alternative sources, while grassroots projects were left struggling to build connections with each other. Even when people wanted to cooperate, there were plenty of reasons to avoid linking, sharing audiences or giving another project visibility.
The result was an increasingly fragmented web. Lots of websites, lots of content, lots of people doing useful work, but fewer if any meaningful connections between them. Ten years later, the technology has changed, the underlying problem has not gone away. In some ways, it has become worse, as the attention economy has eaten the #openweb. The commercial internet is built around capturing attention, the more time people spend inside a platform, the more valuable that audience becomes to its owners. External links interrupt this process, they send people somewhere else, towards another publisher, another community or another source of information.
From the perspective of the #dotcons, this is a problem to manage, as their business model rewards keeping people inside their own environments, controlling discovery and turning the activity of users into something that can be measured, monetized and sold. Likewise search engines increasingly provide answers directly, social platforms prioritize their own feeds and recommendation systems and publishers compete for visibility inside systems they do not control.
The #openweb still has hyperlinks, but the “common sense” culture surrounding them has changed. The problem is not that links have disappeared, it is that the common sense dominating online life have weak incentives to support an open, reciprocal network of independent publishers. This matters because the web was never supposed to be a collection of isolated destinations. Its strength came from the connections between them: people following sources, discovering unexpected ideas, checking evidence, finding communities and building on each other’s work. Take those connections away, and the web becomes a collection of competing islands.
We have been building better technology, but federation is not enough, over this last ten years, the #Fediverse has grown, ActivityPub has become more visible, and more websites connect with decentralized social networks. This is real progress, we now have more technical possibilities for building an alternative to the centralized paths. But there is #blocking, we to often grow federated social networks that still reproduce the habits of closed #dotcons social media.
Federation connects systems, it does not create solidarity these systems need to work. The same applies to #FOSS, open-source software. Open code is important, but it does not guarantee that projects will cooperate, share audiences or build lasting relationships. Technical openness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. This is where the #4opens become useful: open code, open data, open standards and open processes. They can be used to give us a practical foundation for cooperation, but we still have to build the culture that makes that cooperation meaningful.
The mainstreaming trap… ten years ago, I described the difficulty of getting #mainstreaming alternatives to link to each other. This underlying tension remains, grassroots projects need reach, resources and recognition, mainstream organizations have their own priorities, reputation concerns and institutional incentives. They will link externally when it serves their purposes, the problem is that those links are selective and instrumental rather than part of a wider commitment to an open information commons.
Grassroots projects end up supplying stories, ideas, research and community knowledge to organizations that gain the attention while the original producers receive little in return. This is one of the quieter forms of #mainstreaming. The grassroots become useful contributors to somebody else ‘s system without building the independent relationships needed to sustain their own. The answer to this smell is not to refuse every mainstream connection, that would be another kind of isolation. It is a balancing act, work with wider institutions when useful, but maintain independent infrastructure, reciprocal relationships and the ability to carry on without their permission. We need bridges, not gateways that leave us dependent on whoever controls the other end.
Why don’t the grassroots simply link to each other? This is where the problem becomes more uncomfortable, as it is easy to blame the #dotcons as their incentives are obvious. It is harder to look at the habits and assumptions within our own communities. Grassroots projects compete for the same funding, audiences, volunteers and recognition. People worry about sending attention elsewhere. Organizations protect their own identities, developers build separate platforms, campaigns create separate communication channels.
Sometimes this mess happens for understandable reasons. Projects have limited time and resources, trust has to be earned, not every source is reliable, and not every relationship is useful. But too often, we reproduce the same competitive logic we claim to oppose. We talk about solidarity while treating our own websites as little territories. We talk about commons while keeping our work disconnected. We talk about decentralization while building social and technical systems that make cooperation harder than it needs to be.
This is the #geekproblem in a wider social form, the assumption that if we build the right technology, the human relationships will somehow follow. They won’t – a network is made through practice, people have to link, share, maintain, argue, repair and work together. The technology should support those activities rather than pretend to replace them. The OMN is about mediating this mess by making linking part of the infrastructure – the OMN is not another social-media platform competing to own an audience. It is a network of flows, a way to connect independent publishers, community archives, grassroots news projects and other sources through shared data and open protocols.
The basic technical model is straightforward.
SUB – flow in. Nodes subscribe to RSS, ActivityPub and other feeds, collecting public information from independent sources.
Shared data objects – connect the information. Nodes maintain local copies of text and metadata, preserving links to the original sources and recording provenance.
PUB – flow out. Nodes publish selected information through feeds that other projects can reuse, with attribution and links back to the original material.
FAT-PING – synchronize the metadata. Participating nodes share tags, classifications and relationships, allowing communities to connect information without requiring one central authority to control the whole network.
This #KISS technical path creates the possibility of something more useful than a collection of disconnected websites.
A local news project could publish reporting that appears in a community feed. An archive could connect that reporting to historical material. Another community could add relevant location or subject tags. Different frontends could present the same information for different purposes.
The original publisher remains visible. The information becomes more useful through connection. The wider network gains value as more people participate, the objective is not to scrape everybody’s content and republish it without permission. It is to build a practical commons around open feeds, clear attribution, appropriate licensing and community control.
The technology should make it easier to send attention outwards, not capture it inwards, we need to move from reciprocal links to reciprocal infrastructure. The original proposal is simple: if linking is going to become central to the #openweb again, the grassroots have to make it happen.
We need to take that idea further – reciprocal linking should be part of a broader practice of reciprocal infrastructure. That means:
Linking to relevant work from other independent projects.
Citing original sources rather than stripping information of its provenance.
Sharing feeds and making independent publishers easier to discover.
Connecting community news with historical archives and local knowledge.
Maintaining directories and cross-project indexes.
Supporting open standards so that information can move between different systems.
Building shared infrastructure without requiring every project to surrender its independence.
This is not about #SEO of creating artificial link exchanges or rewarding websites for linking to one another. Nor is it about pretending that every source deserves equal trust. It is about recognizing that the value of an open network comes from useful connections, not isolated ownership. Trust still matters, moderation still matters, communities need to decide what they publish and which sources they rely on. But these decisions should help build better flows rather than turn every community into another closed silo.
The political choice is simple (#KISS) – we have spent years watching the commercial internet turn relationships into engagement metrics, communities into audiences and information into a resource to be enclosed. The #openweb offers another possibility, but only if we are willing to practise it. This is not about abandoning individual projects, it is about making them part of a living commons. A river does not become powerful by keeping every drop in a separate container. It becomes powerful through the connections between its springs, streams and tributaries. The same is true of the #openweb.
Ten years ago, the problem was that nobody was linking to anybody. Today, we have more technical ways to connect, but we still need the social practice that makes those connections matter. The #OMN is one path to build that practice into the infrastructure itself, not another platform, not another silo. A network of flows, built by the people who need to begin to rebuild the #openweb.
I should LINK from this post, please post URLs in the comments.
Art is individualism, a disturbing, disintegrating force. That’s where its value lies. It breaks the shared mould, unsettles common sense, and opens cracks in the world we take for granted.The trick is to compost individualism into collective creativity, not let it rot into #stupidindividualism.
Why do people nowadays defend systems that make their own lives worse? Why do movements that begin by challenging authority end up creating new authority’s? Why do communities built around freedom develop gatekeepers, purity tests and informal leaders who become impossible to question? Why do people who oppose #dotcons corporate control still spend their time copying corporate platforms, business models and organizational habits? These are not isolated contradictions, they point towards an invisible issue of how power works.
We tend to imagine oppression as something imposed from above, a ruling class, a government, a corporation or an institution that wants to control us. The solution then seems obvious: expose the injustice, remove the people responsible, and replace the system with something better. But what happens when people actively participate in reproducing the same relationships they claim to oppose?
Power does not operate through force alone, it also shapes what we want, what we admire, what we fear and what we consider normal. We become attached to the #mainstreaming because those systems also provide identity, status, security and a sense of belonging. The problem is not simply power controls us, it is that we learn to desire the very world power has built for us. This is one of the hardest lessons for grassroots paths to absorb – that the #deathcult is not something outside us. We live inside it, in the dominant logic organized around endless economic growth, competition, commodification and control, even when these undermine the ecological and social conditions on which life it self depends.
It is easy to point at the visible mess: corporate monopolies, extractive business, environmental destruction and political movements built around fear. But the #deathcult survives more because it is an economic system, pushed over us the last 50 years as a culture, a set of habits and a way of understanding ourselves. our worship is where we learned to measure success through individual achievement, compete for attention and recognition. it is were we treat relationships as opportunities for advancement and look for personal solutions to collective problems. We imagine that security comes from controlling our own little corner of the world, even when that control depends on the same blinded paths that make everyone else less secure.
We might oppose capitalism while still measuring our worth through its ideas of productivity and success, oppose authoritarianism while insisting that our own opinions should never be challenged. We talk about community while treating collective projects as platforms for personal status. The system reproduces itself through these everyday behaver, this is mess even among people who sincerely want something different. That is why changing the #nastyfew people at the top is never enough, if the common sense relationships remain unchanged, the new leadership inherits the old system and reproduce it with maybe a different vocabulary.
This is why oppression feels comfortable – people do not attach themselves to oppressive systems simply because they are foolish or malicious, the reality is more complicated. #Mainstreaming established systems offer familiar routines, clear identities and ready-made explanations for a confusing world. They tell us who belongs, who is responsible, what success looks like and where to direct our anger. A competitive society promises that individual effort will bring individual rewards, hierarchical organization promises that someone competent is in charge, rigid thinking promises certainty. A charismatic leader promises to take responsibility for decisions that would otherwise require difficult collective work, promises can be attractive, especially when people feel insecure and overwhelmed.
The catch is that the comfort comes at a very real price, individual success depends on collective failure. Certainty require silencing disagreement, strong leadership become unaccountable power and belonging can to often depend on excluding outsiders. Fear and control become self-reinforcing, as the more insecure people feel, the more attractive rigid authority becomes. The more authority concentrates, the less opportunity people have to develop the confidence and relationships needed to govern their own lives in any working grassroots paths.
This is one way authoritarianism becomes embedded in everyday life without requiring most people to openly support fascism. People oppose a particular dictator, corporation or political party while reproducing the same “common sense” habits of obedience, exclusion and domination in their own communities. The lesson from this mess is not that everyone is secretly fascist, it is that authoritarian patterns survive inside movements and institutions that sincerely oppose them.
The left is not immune, grassroots and progressive movements begin with a desire to create open and humane societys, but good intentions do not often produce good processes. A movement opposed to hierarchy can still developing invisible hierarchies that nobody is allowed to discuss. They might demand democratic participation while allowing a small group of insiders to control the agenda. Celebrate diversity while pushing blinded conformity or criticize celebrity culture while building its own #fashionista cults of personality.
Sometimes the problem appears as endless internal conflict, sometimes as a demand for unity that suppresses diversity of disagreement. Sometimes it appears as a professionalised activist culture in which visibility, funding and institutional access are more important than the original purpose of the work. These are different expressions of the same danger – the collective project becomes a means of reproducing the status and security of those who push the easy common sense mess.
This is where mixed metaphor of #mainstreaming becomes important. Grassroots projects do sometimes seek funding, recognition and wider influence because they need resources to survive and space to grow. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, the danger comes when adapting to the blinded common sense of established institutions that use there control to change what the project is able to do. A movement that began by building alternatives ends up competing for a place inside the system it wanted to change.
Then we have the #geekproblem building freedom with tools of control – this contradiction is particularly visible in social technology. The #openweb offers the possibility of shared infrastructure people use, adapt and maintain together. Open standards, open data and open-source software help communities escape dependence on the #dotcons. But still #blocking this path is the #geekproblem, the assumption that technical system can solve social problems without changing the relationships through which people use and govern these systems. We build software that makes certain behaviours easy and others difficult, we create interfaces that reward some forms of participation and obscure others, we choose what is measured, what can be moderated and who has permission to make changes. These choices shape the #FOSS culture that grows around the technology.
The path we need is #KISS, resistance means changing what we reward – oppressive systems survive partly because people become attached to their habits and rewards – resistance must involve more than criticism. We need to create practical alternatives that make different ways of living and working possible: rewarding cooperation rather than competition, recognizing maintenance alongside innovation, care alongside visibility, and collective achievement alongside individual contribution.
It means creating organizations where people can question decisions without being treated as enemies. It means making power visible, distributing responsibility and developing ways to correct mistakes without destroying the people who make them. It also means accepting that there is no perfect community and no final control that will eliminate conflict. People will disagree, projects will fail, some participants will behave badly, others will make mistakes while trying to do something worthwhile.
What history tells us is the working path is not in creating pure community’s free from contradiction, its is more in balancing the processes that can recognize and work through contradiction without turning every difficulty into a struggle for domination. This is the practical meaning of moving beyond #stupidindividualism, we do not abandon individual agency, we develop the collective conditions that allow the path to become something more than competition between isolated individuals.
So, what dose this means for projects like the #OMN, attempts to put this path into practice through grassroots media, shared data and federated communication. Were the starting point is that people should be able to publish, share, organize and moderate media through open processes rather than depending on a central platform to determine what is visible and who has power. Technical openness is necessary for the kind of commons we want to grow, but, yes, it is not sufficient.
The #OMN path is #KISS, shared flows of information rather than locked-in applications – content moves between communities and instances. Stories gain visibility through trust and linking. Local moderation can respond to local needs without requiring a central authority to control the network. It is an path to support a different social relationship with information, less ownership, more participation, less central control, more distributed responsibility.
As we highlight, the work is about confronting our own contradictions, were we avoid turning open standards into rigid dogma, grassroots leadership into personal empires, or collective projects into another competition for recognition. We need to build these paths that help people work together, while remaining open to criticism and change. From the #deathcult to the #lifecult, by changing the everyday practices the current system reproduces, recognizing that our desire for certainty, status and individual security sometimes pull us back towards the very systems we want to escape.
The #deathcult tells us that competition is human nature, that everything must be owned, that markets should decide what matters and that collective problems require stronger systems of control. The #lifecult begins with a different possibility, people can build trust, share resources, care for one another and create institutions that support life rather than undermine it.
Neither possibility becomes real through words alone, the difference emerges through practice. Most importantly, it means building alternatives that work well enough for people to experience the difference. That is the work of grassroots paths, it is why projects like the #OMN and communities like #Oxfordboaters could matter. And that is why we need to keep digging, composting the failures and growing something different together.
At the root of the mess we face is the worship of the #deathcult, the idea that competition, individualism, control and endless growth are simply human nature, they are not, they are systems we keep reproducing, even when it is making society unlivable.
We now have seed funding for the #OpenMediaNetwork projects. That gives us a chance to move beyond endlessly talking about the problems and start building practical tools for a different path. Were next? The #4opens gives us a basic test for the technology. The #OGB points towards grassroots governance. Together, these are part of a DIY toolkit for moving power away from the #dotcons, the #geekproblem and the #NGO mainstreaming that keep reproducing the same mess in supposedly alternative paths.
But funding is only a beginning, the real challenge is social – how do we compost the recurring cycles of paranoia, status games, dogmatic individualism of people pushing themselves towards the top? How do we build trust, shared responsibility and structures for people to work together without recreating the hierarchies we claim to be opposing?
To compost this mess, we need to look at the current arguments about the left and right paths. Yes, people understandably want to escape institutions they no longer trust, some retreat into private life, nature and their own projects, others double down on leadership and control. But walking away from society doesn’t make the wider problems disappear, replacing one set of bosses with another isn’t an alternative.
We need to think horizontally, by growing trust, keeping processes open, sharing power and making space for people to participate without demanding that they surrender their independence. So what can you do? Follow the hashtags, read the ideas, ask questions, find a part of the project you can contribute to – you don’t need to understand everything before taking this first step.
And yes, bring a shovel, social composting is messy work, we have plenty of accumulated shit to turn into something useful. A simple first test for #stupidindividualism, can you find your way into a shared project without demanding that it revolve around you? Can you help build something that benefits people beyond yourself?
If not, that’s not a reason to give up, it’s a place to start digging. The #openweb won’t rebuild itself, we need people, practical tools and grassroots structures that make cooperation possible. A little seed funding gives us a chance, the next step is building the crew to do the work to grow the commons.
At #OMN, we’re working to compost the #techdebt problem using federation and the #4opens. The idea is simple, build apps around shared data flows, not locked-in codebases. Keep the data useful across projects, while the code becomes a golden ladle in a #witchescauldron, a tool for shaping and serving the commons, not a container that owns it.
New codebase? Let the data flows move across. Less tech debt, less churn, more reuse. Build on what we have, rather than endlessly starting again.
The problem is that five years of funding have helped create a poor diversity of codebases and approaches. We need to mediate this blinded #geekproblem and grow more working grassroots paths that people can spread out across, rather than keep funneling everyone into the same few #openweb codebases.
Yes, there’s a lot of #techshit to compost. And yes, we need people with shovels to do the work of clearing the ground, reusing what’s useful, and planting seedlings along more native #openweb paths.
Less tech churn, more shared flows. Less lock-in, more commons.
Over the last five years, the #Fediverse has been pushed down the path of copying corporate #dotcons: chasing raw user growth, building paywalled conference cultures, reproducing professional #NGO gatekeeping, and concentrating power around branded projects and scale. To balance this mess the Open Media Network (#OMN) path offers both the conceptual shovel and the practical social infrastructure to help dig the Fediverse out of this #mainstreaming trap.
The answer is not to discard the last five years or retreat into nostalgia, it is to compost our failures, break down what has gone wrong, recover the useful nutrients, and use them to grow more durable grassroots commons infrastructure. That means shifting focus away from scaling platforms and towards connecting much wider divers networks.
From platform scale to network scale – what we need to work on composting is that #mainstreaming assumes success means a recognizable brand, a convenient platform and millions of users. But grassroots power does not have to follow this corporate path – the #OMN path is to strengthen the horizontal connections between the thousands of autonomous, community-run servers that already exist across the #Fediverse.
By developing and sharing new #AP codebases, we help these communities work together more effectively, sharing news, preserving our own histories and building collective resources without surrendering local control or self-reliance. If you need a slogan, start here – Moving from Social Media to Social Infrastructure. This describes a practical progression for grassroots power:
Open media flows → shared archives → trusted flows → community organization → federated governance. We begin by working with people to publish and share their own media, to build the archives that preserve collective memory, the trusted flows that connect communities, and the organizational capacity to turn shared knowledge into active lived collective action.
The push for #mainstreaming encouraged authority to concentrate into small professional layers, institutional foundations and technical gatekeepers. Where we need more native grassroots forms of governance, that operates between autonomous communities rather than above them. The Open Web Governance Body (#OGB) is a path for this. Through mechanisms such as permissionless participation, sortition, recallable delegates and distributed decision-making, we begin building governance that connects communities without turning into another centralized institution.
The challenge is to make cooperation possible without making communities dependent, and to make collective decisions without handing control to a new professional class. In technical terms re-centring people-to-people – on this path at the heart of the #OMN is a direct challenge to the #geekproblem: the habit of trying to solve human and political problems with another technical protocol, encryption layer or app.
Technology matters, but it cannot replace human trust, shared responsibility or mutual aid. The #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process – provide a practical framework for keeping these social foundations visible and accountable. This means building technology around people and their relationships, rather than expecting people to adapt themselves to technical systems. It means recognizing that decentralization is not just about where servers sit, but about how people share power, make decisions and maintain their common resources.
The #Fediverse does not need to race to become the next corporate platform, what it needs is to recover its grassroots purpose and focus to balance growth to building on what already exists, to restart this by compost the failures of #mainstreaming, strengthen the connections between autonomous communities, build shared media and archival infrastructure, and develop federated governance that keeps power distributed.
Less branded platform growth, more network building, less blinded technical noise and more human trust. Less centralized control, more native grassroots power, that is the #OMN path towards a more durable #openweb Commons.
The tension between alternative cultures and the #mainstream is now rooted in 40 years of #neoliberalism – market logic replacing solidarity, grassroots movements being absorbed into #NGO process, and radical alternatives being forced to conform before they’re taken seriously.
This is how the system reproduces itself – block the bridges, co-opt what survives, and call the result “common sense”. Where we need bridges that connect without forcing conformity, collaboration without co-option, and grassroots alternatives that keep their radical purpose while sharing what works – less absorption, gatekeeping and more bridges.
Online and offline, we are living through an interconnected crisis of ecological breakdown, economic inequality, political disillusionment and social fragmentation that are not separate problems. They feed into each other, creating #mainstreaming paths that are increasingly unable to meet basic social and environmental needs.
The usual response to this now visible mess is to ask the same institutions that created these problems to keep managing the consequences. the chattering classes that run our governments promise new policies, corporations promise new technologies, and professional campaigners promise another round of reform. There people are inside the worship of the #deathcult, and their efforts are constrained by the paths they walk, endless growth, profit extraction, bureaucracy, electoral cycles and the concentration of #nastyfew power.
So this now visible mess, is not only a problem of individual greed or corruption, it is structural. That the #mainstreaming paths keep reproducing the problems because of the unthinking relationships remain unchanged. From common sense, and the #OMN perspective, this is where we need to change the conversation, to not keep relying on better management of #deathcult paths – we need to build the practical foundations of something different.
The old idea of #commons (a polite way of saying #communism) offers a grassroots path away from this spreading political frustration towards practical collective paths. This new path is based on older anarchist ideas, that are critical of the two dominant ways of organizing: the market and the state. Were we are told to buy what we need through commercial markets or campaign for governments to provide it. Yes, maybe both have their place, but neither gives communities any real much control over the resources and paths they need to grow.
So what is the idea of commons? let look at this, commons exists when people share responsibility for resources, establish collective “rules” and manage those resources for mutual benefit. This can mean land, housing, food, energy, knowledge, software, media or the infrastructure that connects communities. The point is that a Commons is not simply something owned collectively, it is something people actively maintain and govern together.
Examples, at a grassroots level, a community garden, a housing cooperative, a repair café, an open-source project and a grassroots media network can all be part of this path. They look different, but each creates space for people to become participants rather than remaining consumers, clients or spectators.
From a practical #DIY path we need to move past the #blocking of thinking of a utopian blueprint waiting for the right political moment. Commons already exist, our work is to strengthen them, learn from their successes and failures, and connect them, in the #OMN work using technology to widen political and economic alternatives.
It is about moving from spectators to participants, the most damaging consequences of our current blinded political culture is the loss of agency. People are repeatedly told that the important decisions are made elsewhere: by governments, corporations, financial markets, technical experts or professional #NGO organizations.
This path has lead to years of broken promises, so it is little surprise many withdraw. Some become cynical about politics; others retreat into, conspiracy, private life or the exhausting routines of survival in late stage capitalism. We can see this only as apathy, when it is a reasonable response to having little meaningful influence or power.
People need practical ways to take part in shaping their lives. Communing offers this through experience, people come together around a shared need, make decisions, distribute responsibilities, deal with disagreements and see the results of their work. They develop the skills and relationships that make further collective action possible.
This is political activity, even when nobody calls it politics – a community that takes control of its housing, food supply, energy or media infrastructure is not merely providing a service. It is changing who has power, who makes decisions and who benefits from the resources being created. The political shift is from asking those above us to solve everything towards building the collective capacity to solve more of it ourselves.
So yes our path is to build the new, but understand the struggle, that meeting real needs to make the old arrangements less necessary. This is a valuable corrective to a political culture that is trapped in permanent resistance, to do more than protest against enclosure, extraction and corporate power, we need to create shared resources that people can actually use.
But we should not mistake this for the idea that politics can be avoided. The existing system does not simply disappear because we build something better. Land, housing, infrastructure and productive resources are already controlled by power if #nastyfew interests and our own common sense. Communities face legal barriers, financial pressures, unequal access to time and skills, and the constant risk that successful initiatives will be absorbed, commercialized or captured by institutions.
Building the Commons is therefore both constructive and political. We create alternatives while challenging the conditions that prevent them from flourishing. The path is not to fight every battle on the opponent’s ground, more to develop enough practical capacity, shared resources and collective confidence that we have more choices about where and how to struggle.
The Commons needs protection against capture – shared ownership does not guarantee a fair or democratic path. A blinded commons might reproduce the same inequalities it set out to overcome. A closed group can accumulate informal power, technical experts become gatekeepers, and participation reduced to approving decisions made elsewhere.
This is where governance projects like the #OGB matter, communities need transparent processes, meaningful participation, accountability, accessible conflict resolution and ways to challenge people who accumulate too much control. Responsibilities shared, decisions remain open to scrutiny, and resources be protected from being quietly transferred back into private ownership.
The same principle applies to funding, yes, grants and investment help build useful infrastructure, but they can also redirect projects towards the priorities of founders. We need ways to bring resources into community control without allowing outside money to take control of the community.
The aim is to make the Commons durable without turning it into another institution that exists primarily to sustain itself. To help with this we need to move from isolated projects to a grassroots networks. A single local project can meet a local need, a connected network of projects begin to become change and change communities.
This is the idea of an wider Commons: many #4opens independent initiatives, rooted in their own places and circumstances, sharing knowledge and resources while retaining local autonomy. We do not need every community to follow the same path. Different places have different needs, histories, cultures and resources, diversity is a strength. Some experiments will fail; others will work well enough to be adapted elsewhere. What matters is that people can learn from one another instead of repeatedly starting from scratch.
Open-source #FOSS software is part of the answer, but it is not enough. We need grassroots digital infrastructure that is open in practice: open data, open source, open standards and open processes -the #4opens – combined with trust, human moderation and community responsibility.
Technical federation, like #activitypub allows this to grow without centralization were communities share tools, infrastructure, experience and political influence without handing their decisions to a distant headquarters. This is a space where grassroots organization becomes a bigger political path. Connected together, we can become the material foundations of a different social order. The process is gradual, uneven and full of conflict. But it creates something that symbolic politics alone cannot: an expanding body of people with practical experience of doing things differently.
The #OMN projects are a direct connection to grassroots media and the #openweb. Communities need to communicate, preserve their histories, share knowledge and coordinate action. Yet much of our digital public life is controlled by the #dotcons: commercial platforms that turn participation into a resource to extract, measure and sell. With our unthinking #fashionistas even supposedly alternative spaces become dependent on centralized platforms, opaque moderation and technical gate-keeping.
The #OMN is not another social media platform. It is a path towards shared grassroots infrastructure for news, archiving and, further down the road, governance. The aim is to help communities create and manage their own media resources, while connecting their work through open networks rather than surrendering control to the normal centralized platforms.
Media is part of the political infrastructure of the Commons. If communities cannot tell their own stories, preserve their own histories or communicate beyond corporate channels, their capacity to organize is weakened. A grassroots #openweb can help make local knowledge visible, allow successful experiments to be copied and give independent initiatives ways to connect. It can help turn scattered projects into a living network without requiring them to become one large organization.
From the local to the political – the commons is not a replacement for every form of politics. We still need struggles over public policy, land, housing, workers’ rights, ecological protection and the distribution of wealth. We need to challenge the power that keeps resources enclosed and decisions out of public hands. But these struggles become stronger when they are connected to practical alternatives.
A housing campaign can do more than oppose unaffordable rents if it also helps build community-owned housing. A food campaign can do more than expose an unjust supply chain if it develops cooperative ways to grow and distribute food. A media campaign can do more than criticize corporate #dotcons and #traditionalmedia platforms if it helps build shared, community-controlled infrastructure like the #fedivers.
This is how the commons becomes part of a bigger political path, not by asking everyone to agree on one path, but by connecting the practical work people are already doing around shared needs. The work provides a meeting point between people who might disagree about theory but can cooperate around tech, housing, energy, care, media or the future of their neighbourhood. Shared practice builds relationships, and those relationships support wider political action.
Over time, these connected efforts move resources out of extractive circuits and into forms of ownership and governance that serve the people who sustain them. This is a material shift in power, not just a change in language. The work starts where we are, there is no single blueprint, central plan or perfect organization that will deliver this transformation. The commons grows through people trying things, sharing what they learn and building on one another ‘s work.
That means starting with real needs, keeping projects accessible, making decisions accountable and sharing the tools and knowledge that others can reuse. It means accepting that communities are messy, that conflict is unavoidable and that trust has to be built through practice rather than demanded as a slogan.
It also means resisting the #geekproblem, the idea that the right technical system can solve social problems. Technology supports relationships and participation, not replaces them. The same applies to political organizations, structure matters, but it needs to remain accountable to the people doing the work.
We need to move beyond the choice between endlessly criticizing the existing system and retreating into disconnected #blocking. We build practical Commons while connecting them into a wider movement to challenging the mess that keeps people powerless.
The current #mainstreaming encourages us to see ourselves as isolated individuals competing for security and influence. The commons begins somewhere else, with the recognition that much of what makes life possible is already shared, and that we can organize more of it around mutual care and collective responsibility.
This is a political choice, to shifts power from extraction towards participation, from passive consumption towards communing, and from centralized control towards connected grassroots autonomy.
For #OMN, the task is to help build the media and digital infrastructure that makes this possible, on this path we do not have to wait for permission. We do have to do the work, learn from our mistakes, protect what we build and connect with others doing the same.
Build locally, share openly, govern together, connect without centralizing is how we begin to grow a different future from the ground up.
The poison of #stupidindividualism is everywhere over the last ten years of social tech, the first thing that needs composting is treating structural criticism as only personal criticism, so instead of discussing the problem, they block the person raising the issues we need to change and challenge.
The result of avoiding shoveling this mess is the same problem, repeated across different platforms, communities and generations. We need to compost these habits, not just churn out more platforms with the same unthinking pushing of mess.
Compost personalizing everything, social problems need collective thinking, not endless status battles. Compost #blocking as the default as blocking has a place, especially for safety, but if every disagreement ends in exclusion, we never learn how to work through differences.
Compost #feudal governance as the #geekproblem keeps rebuilding systems where a few owners, admins and were the normal technical gatekeepers hold the power. That’s simply not the social infrastructure we need for the change we need.
Compost #techchurn, as new #mainstreaming platforms won’t fix old social habits, if we keep reproducing the same processes, we keep getting the same outcomes.
We need to move towards balancing governance: open processes, shared responsibility, community memory, trust and ways to disagree without destroying our ability to work together.
The #openweb should help us build that capacity, not just give us more places to fight or hide.
We face very real challenges, including the struggle to keep a habitable planet over the next 50 years. We cannot afford to keep wasting our collective energy on social patterns that go nowhere.
Everyone blocks, the question is: what value does your blocking create, and what does it destroy? Is it protecting people, or avoiding the harder work of building something better?
Let’s get the shovels out, what habits, tools and governance processes do we need to compost, and what should grow in their place?
The last five years have changed the #Fediverse. What started, grassroots, commons-based native path has become much more visible. More people have arrived, more organizations have become interested. There are more conferences, more funding conversations, more institutional involvement and more attempts to make the Fediverse part of the wider technology landscape.
Some of this is useful, but it also creates a question that is harder to avoid – what do we actually want to carry forward from the last five years? Perhaps the answer is not to defend everything that has happened, or to reject it all. Perhaps we need to compost it, were omposting means taking what has grown, including the dead material, separating out what is useful and allowing something new to grow from it.
Lets look at an example – the paywall is not just about the ticket – this becomes visible in arguments about conference tickets and paywalls. At one level, the argument is simple, events cost money, venues cost money, travel costs money, some people organizing events need to be paid. But that isn’t really the interesting part, the question that matters is what a paywall means inside a commons-based culture. For someone who comes from the #openweb, free software, grassroots media and other commons traditions, putting a price on entry feel wrong, not just a financial barrier.
It becomes an ideological barrier as the message shift from “This is something we are building together.” towards “This is something you consume if you can afford to enter.” That distinction becomes a block, particularly when some of the people being asked to pay helped build the culture, infrastructure and ideas that made the network possible in the first place. The question therefore isn’t whether events should cost money, it is, are we paying the costs of maintaining a commons, or are we turning participation in the commons into a product? Those are not the same thing.
Let look at this shift from commons culture to event culture – over the last five years, the #Fediverse has developed an increasingly visible event culture. Conferences, workshops, panels and gatherings can be valuable, they create relationships, spread knowledge and bring people together. But there is a danger when the pay to enter events are pushed to the centre of the network. The commons starts to decay, funding resources and focus then starts to orbit around conferences rather than communities. This grows when access is controled by money, professional status, travel and institutional connections.
This doesn’t happen because somebody decides to push us into a #closedweb path, rather it is a common sense mainstreaming organic mess that happens gradually when a grassroots network becomes successful. Success brings institution thinking (#NGO), these institutions bring funding, funding feeds and creates professional roles. Professional roles push a feedback loop creating more top down organizations, these create events with paywalls.
This money creates barriers that eventually a culture that begans with people simply building things together can start looking surprisingly similar to the systems it originally wanted to move beyond. This is not necessarily corruption (though it often is when you lift the lid), it is institutional #NGO drift. Working to recognizing this mess making is part of keeping the commons alive were we need to fund and support the what can we build together? While still actively questioning who gets recognized, funded and invited? As those questions produce very different cultures. The first is about participation and making things, the second is about access to an emerging institutional path.
This is one of the tensions the Fediverse now has to work through, were the answer to this question is not simple, yes, we need to not to romanticize volunteer culture either, as volunteerism has its own exclusions, it to can depend on people having spare time, money and privilege. The point is to find ways of funding the commons without turning the commons into an industry. The last 5 years we have spent enough time trying to prove that the #Fediverse deserves to exist.
The more interesting question for the next 5 years is – What did we actually learn? What worked? What failed? Which projects created durable infrastructure? Which relationships survived? Which forms of organizing created useful results? Which created endless meetings? Which assumptions turned out to be wrong? Which things should we stop doing? And we need to do this without a paywall, to make this composting useful. So, to repeat, don’t throw away the good stuff, composting isn’t destruction, as there is a lot worth keeping.
The last five years have demonstrated the practical value of open standards, federation, independent communities, people running their own infrastructure, interoperability, grassroots paths, mutual aid, trust built through practice and the ability to leave one system without losing the network. These are not just historical curiosities, they are the useful material from which the next seeds can grow. But we have made mistakes over the last 5 years by thinking that moving forward means abandoning the culture that created the #Fediverse in the first place. And yes the is balance, equally, the mistake would be to freeze that culture in place. We maybe need to keep the principles while changing the practice, a way of looking at this is native and non-native paths
This is where the distinction between native and non-native paths becomes useful, a native path starts from the assumptions of the commons open, federated, participatory, interoperable and community-controlled. A non-native path can still use ActivityPub or Fediverse technology while importing assumptions from another world, closed access, professional gate-keeping, centralized authority, ownership, status and consumption. The technology alone doesn’t decide which path we take, #ActivityPub can carry both, as an open protocol does not nesserserly push an open culture.
This is one of the important lessons of the last five years, we need to pay attention to the social structures growing around the plumbing. What should the next five years look like? Perhaps we should balance pushing the #dotcons copying #Fediverse of five years ago. We need different streams to grow the useful material and build the next layers.
Not more copy’s of social-media platforms, not more common sense conference ecosystems, not another self selected central organization deciding what the network is. Instead open media → shared archives → trusted flows → local communities → federated governance to shape a native path much closer to the original promise of the #openweb.
Yes, the original path is good, the federated network should make it easier for communities to communicate, remember, cooperate and organize without having to surrender their autonomy. This means a renewed and a clear focus on moving from social media to social infrastructure is a useful path. As the biggest danger is that we keep reproducing the assumptions of the corporate social #closedweb while using open protocols. We don’t need to feed open infrastructure carrying closed social practices, were the technology is federated, but it feeds culture that is still centralizing.
Some of the current mess we need to compost – the protocol is open – the events tend to be pay-walled. The software is free – but the organizations are controlled by a small professional layer. The network is decentralized – the power isn’t. This is the contradiction mess we need to work on composting.
And yes, before you start kee jerk #blocking the answer isn’t purity, it is wide experimentation, meany native paths to build things, trying different organizational models that make the processes visible, we can learn from failure to keep what works. But please lets let what doesn’t work become composts. The commons needs metabolism, things grow, things fail, people leave, new people arrive. Yes, ideas become useful and then become obsolete, organizations shaped by these ideas appear and disappear. Practices get tested, some survive, some need to be broken down and returned to the soil.
That is what social composting means, not being afraid of the failures and contradictions of the last five years. They are part of the material we have to work with, the question is whether we can turn that experience into something more useful. The aim isn’t to reject institutions, funding or professional work. It is to #KISS keep asking who is this infrastructure for? Who can participate? Who controls it? What remains open? And the biggest question – does this strengthen the commons, or does it slowly turn the commons into another market?
For the #OMN, this is an important distinction as we don’t need another project that simply adds another social timeline to the #Fediverse. We need to explore what happens when federated technology is used for media, archives, trust and eventually governance. That means building from the things that have already proved useful while questioning the assumptions that came with the current #mainstreaming of the Fediverse, don’t overcomplicate what already works, build on it.
It’s interesting to see that the #mainstreaming is moving onto subjects that many of us native to the #openweb have been talking about for the last 20 years. The problem is that when our ideas finally become fashionable, they arrive with a rush of #fashionista baggage – followed by the #geekproblem reaction of trying to solve things with another layer of #techshit.
So maybe now is the time to get the shovels out, the #OMN is one of those shovels. We need to compost the onrushing mess rather than let it become another 20-year cycle of #techcurn, fashion and reinvention.
Take the useful ideas, break down the bad habits, keep the #openweb roots. Build something that the next generation doesn’t have to spend another twenty years digging its way out of.
I went to the #Oxford event tonight with a slightly awkward position in mind. Before going, I wrote that the #mainstreaming people would probably be idealistic about cynical politics, while I was going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My aim wasn’t to pick a fight. I wanted to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build a bridge between idealism and the messy reality of power.
The event was “Democratic Resilience: What Do We Need to Know?”, a panel at the Blavatnik School of Government looking at how democratic institutions might respond to democratic backsliding. The panel brought together a selection of the political and intellectual chattering classes: senior figures from politics, academia, law, international institutions and civil society. The question was how governments, civil society, universities, businesses and international organizations can make democracy more resilient.
It was an important question, but as the evening went on, I increasingly felt that my cynicism had won. I wasn’t given the opportunity to ask what I thought was the uncomfortable horizontal question: With the hard shift to the right, accelerating #climatechaos, and the clear failure of the liberal class over the last 50 years, are the institutions they are trying to save actually fit for purpose? If we are facing the next forty years of serious systemic social and ecological backdown, we may need something closer to wartime socialist planning simply to hold our societies and civilization together.
So the question I did not put to the room was simple: Are the institutions you are focusing on actually capable of doing that job? Or are we watching the last gasps of a fading political and intellectual chattering class?
That is why my cynicism kicks in. One speaker talked about progressive #mainstreaming, but the solution still sounded bureaucratic and top-down. Another perspective came from a legal and institutional tradition that was confident in the existing structures. There was always a blinded sense of trying to protect the system without asking whether the system itself needs fundamental change.
There was some discussion of horizontal organization, grassroots capacity, open infrastructure, local participation. These are important ideas, and I was glad they were being discussed. But the final answer was always focused on using these approaches as tools to get people back into the institutions and forms of power they were assumed, by the people in the room, to belong in.
Looking at the last 50 years, I think there is a much more basic question, is that still useful? Perhaps the problem is not that people have lost access to power, perhaps some of the structures being pushed at events like this are parts of the problem. That we may need to grow new forms of resilience from the bottom up, real native horizontal organization, grassroots capacity as ways of rebuilding social capacity outside the increasingly brittle institutions these people fixate on.
That is one of the reasons I keep coming back to on the #openweb and projects like the #OMN. Were the point is to give people better tools to build the capacity for communities to organize, communicate, cooperate and govern themselves in different ways. Tonight reinforced my feeling that we need both idealism and cynicism to move away from the path this room sees as normal.
Keep the idealism about what society could become and keep the cynicism about institutions, power, and the assumption that existing structures will somehow fix themselves. The useful question that was not space to ask was: What kinds of institutions and social structures do we actually need for the next forty years – and are we building them yet?
That is the uncomfortable conversation I think we need to have.
On a positive note on shoveling this kinda mess, we need to see the difference between power struggle politics and organizing. Power struggle politics can keep going forever, even if you win, the same struggle comes back because the underlying structures haven’t changed. That is part of the 20th-century political legacy we need to move beyond.
Good organizing doesn’t mean having no conflict, every real group has disagreements, arguments and difficult personalities. The important question is, does the conflict stop the work from growing? Some of the best movements have had serious internal disagreements and still managed to be productive. The problem is when conflict becomes the work – when energy goes into controlling each other instead of building something together.
This is also where good open technology can help. Used well, transparency makes patterns of behaviour visible instead of hiding them inside closed meetings and informal power structures. So the goal isn’t a conflict-free movement, it is where conflict doesn’t consume the capacity to act.
That feels like a very 21st-century organizing problem.
Update: My report back from the Oxford discussion on “Democratic Resilience” left me thinking about a basic problem. They talked about grassroots capacity, horizontal organization and open infrastructure, but mostly as ways of getting people back into existing institutions.
I think we need to turn that around, when the existing institutions are becoming increasingly brittle, and have helped produce many of the problems we now face, why are we still treating them as the destination?
We need to build new capacity from the bottom up, recognizing that there are already different paths developing: institutional, grassroots, #openweb, #FOSS, federated and community-based. They don’t all have to become the same thing, the goal should be mutual recognition and practical bridges between them.
So democratic resilience is more about balancing protecting the institutions we already have and having the courage to build the ones we are going to need.
Marketisation, competition and individual success replace solidarity and collective provision.
Institutional capture, grassroots movements are professionalized, defanged and absorbed into #NGO processes.
Conformity as the price of influence, alternatives must become respectable, fundable and manageable before the mainstream will listen.
The closing of alternatives, radical projects are blocked, marginalized or stripped of their political purpose.
Manufactured common sense, this whole process is presented as realism – as if there is no alternative to the system producing the mess.
Going to an Oxford event tonight where the #mainstreaming people will be idealistic about cynical politics – while I’m going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My mission is to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build bridges across that gap. There is a useful conversation between idealism and cynicism: keep the ideals, but be realistic about how power actually works.
To get beyond people feeling lost and political debate becoming pointless, it helps to use a simple #KISS lens: fear and trust. The right mobilize through fear – fear of loss, outsiders, disorder and change. The left has been strongest when it builds from trust – solidarity, openness, cooperation and collective action. These are not absolute categories, but they can help us see some of the dynamics underneath political arguments. Fear creates cycles of control; trust creates the possibility of openness and collaboration.
This matters for the current #openweb reboot. What happens when #mainstreaming pushes projects away from trust and towards fear, control, exclusion and defensive code? Could we use this simple lens to highlight which direction our projects are actually moving in – regardless of what language games people play? And this leads to the sharper question: are we building systems based on fear, or systems based on trust? The fear loop is simple:
Fear the right → fight the right → feed the right → create more fear of the right → fight the right harder. Fear becomes the fuel, the response becomes the problem, the cycle feeds itself. You can end up fighting the politics you fear in ways that reproduce the fear, division and control that give those politics space. So the #KISS question to talk about tonight is, are we breaking the fear loop, or feeding it?
For the native #openweb path, that means building from trust, solidarity and collective capacity rather than letting fear set the agenda. This is also why I keep coming back to the practical work around #OMN, #4opens, #makeinghistory,#IndymediaBack and #OGB. The point isn’t to win another argument on the existing path, it is to grow working alternatives outside current assumptions.
The challenge tonight is to keep the bridge open, cynical about power, but not cynical about people, idealistic about the future, but practical about how we get there.
The #Fediverse exists because the corporate #dotcons are not enough, we don’t wont more of our social lives as products, our relationships into #closeddata, and our communities into audiences to be managed. We wont a different way to communicate, organize and build power together.
But the #Fediverse is not simply a kinder version of corporate social media, its has a promise based on the history of the #openweb: people and communities building their own spaces, connecting through open standards, and sharing power without handing control to a central platform.
The problem we need to compost is that there are few working, humane alternatives to the current #deathcult. So for meany people simply stepping away isn’t an option – We need practical alternatives that work in the real world, rooted in grassroots experience and capable of growing beyond isolated projects for these people to step to.
We already have a first step, that is the point of federation, with #ActivityPub, independent communities can connect and share without having to surrender their autonomy. We can scale horizontally, linking working social projects together rather than building another “common sense” centralized empire.
The #OMN takes this to the next step by bringing in grassroots practices we know work to this open technology, human trust and shared responsibility. #MakingHistory, #IndymediaBack, the #OGB and the #4opens are stepping stones towards a more sustainable world, not products to consume, but tools for #KISS collective action.
This is why the current push for #mainstreaming is more problem than solution. If we bring the habits of the #dotcons into the #Fediverse, we are pushing the turning of build something different into another version of the same old “common sense” mess – we become users demanding personal comfort, rather than participants building communities.
And this is where #BLOCKING becomes political. Blocking has a place, especially when people need protection from harassment and abuse. But if it becomes our default answer to every disagreement, it turns despair into the appearance of action. We retreat into smaller and smaller spaces while the structures of power who are ripping the world apart remain untouched.
We cannot build solidarity by pretending differences don’t exist, we build it by developing and growing ways to work through those differences, set boundaries, share responsibility and act together. That is how grassroots movements for the last 100 years have always built real capacity.
“Another world is possible” cannot just be a slogan, we have to make it possible, through practical projects, open infrastructure and communities that learn how to govern themselves. The #Fediverse exists to give us a path to do that. Whether we use it to build a different world, or simply recreate the one we already have, is up to us.
Keep it #KISS, less platform worship, less knee-jerk rejection, more collective work. We won’t block our way into another world, we have to build and grow it.
“Another world is possible” – but our friendly enemies keep pushing #mainstreaming dressed up in radical language. The result? We’re accepting “common sense” of the system instead of challenging it. Solidarity gets fragmented into identity and partisan battles, while class power escapes scrutiny. We end up pointing fingers at each other while the #deathcult carries on.
We need to defend the right to care, but turn that care into collective power. Real solidarity means looking beyond the latest distraction, naming structural power and building alternatives together. Don’t just make the existing world look kinder.
