In our media and tech projects, we’re walking two very different paths – often without any or partly realising the tension between them. On one side, we’re seceding under capitalism. That means navigating funding applications, #NGO partnerships, grant cycles, and institutional compromises. It’s where projects get trimmed down to what’s legible to funders. It’s survival, maybe even minor success, inside the system.
On the other side, we’re seceding toward the change we want and need. Building alternatives with radical trust, open governance, mutual aid, and grounded peer-to-peer systems. It’s messy, difficult. But it’s actually outside the system, what we used to call prefigurative politics, what we now build as #openweb infrastructure, federated networks, and horizontal institutions.
These two paths are not the same. And if we pretend they are, we lose. What we need is a #4opens bridge between them:
Open data to keep control in the commons.
Open source to prevent black boxes of power.
Open process so anyone can inspect and challenge decisions.
Open standards to build actual interoperability - not walled gardens in disguise.
But here’s the problem we are currently blind to – that bridge doesn’t stay up on its own. It has to be maintained through deliberate political will, through active resistance to co-option, through remembering why we started building in the first place.
The mainstream will always try to absorb the open, turn it into a sandbox, a product, a brand. That’s the nature of #mainstreaming and #NGO logic. We’ve seen it again and again – #FOSS, #indymedia, #activism – all turned into funding pipelines and branding opportunities if not defended.
So our task is not just technical, it’s political infrastructure work to hold the bridge. Guard the open paths, so that we can compost what’s broken. And always build forward.
There’s an old rot in the heart of European tech policy – and it’s not just from the corporate lobbies. It’s also sprouting from the well-funded, #NGO-flavoured corners of what should have been grassroots. A contradiction that tells us everything we need to know about how broken the current #EU#mainstreaming crew and paths are.
Take #Eurostack for example, on paper, it looks decent: a collaborative push toward European digital sovereignty, resilience, and open-source infrastructure. The slogan is right, some of the tech might be right. But the people who will be driving it? And the people that will flood onboard to push it thought, that’s where it falls apart.
The same revolving-door #NGO actors, the same consultant-heavy think-tankers. The same polite funding circles that treat power as something to be managed, not challenged. These are not builders, these are managers of decline, politely sanding the edges off radical tech to make it presentable to policymakers, while completely ignoring the communities that could actually make it work.
And then we have #NLnet, which still has some grassroots soul left, but let’s be honest, the #geekproblem rears its head. Some of the funded projects are brilliant in technical terms but exist in complete social isolation. Beautiful protocol paths that no one will use. Decentralized stacks with zero real social onboarding. Tools solving problems that are themselves geek-invented, not in any sense real-world urgent.
So what do we get? Corporate-captured “open” projects that simply entrench the status quo, with a shine of progressive #PR (hello #Mozilla). Funded grassroots tech that is overengineered, fragile, and oblivious to social or political context it’s built for. Endless talk of “digital commons” by people who’ve never participated in one.
The result? More #techno-solutionist dead ends, more paper victories, more funding poured down the drain, to tame, abstracted versions of real solutions. And worse, a complete blind spot for why the #openweb is in crisis: it’s not a lack of good tech, it’s a lack of courageous, messy, trust-based social organising.
Too many of the actors at the table are blinded by the #deathcult of neoliberal governance. They don’t want alternatives – they want reforms that keep their seats at the table warm. This isn’t conspiracy talk. It’s about structural failure: the very people tasked with change have made comfort and compliance their operating system. That’s why the best thing we can do with this EU mess is compost it.
Let’s be clear: We’re not burning bridges with #NLnet or even #Eurostack. We’re building parallel paths with stronger roots, clearer intentions, and radical memory. We’re rebooting native projects like #indymediaback and the #OpenMediaNetwork not because the EU can’t help, but because it won’t, unless it’s dragged there by working alternatives. Until then, the #mainstreaming “solutions” paths will remain #PR for a status quo that’s rotting and failing with decay. Pastime for you to help to compost the lot, and grow better from the mulch.
“It’s fascinating to see how the #OpenWeb ideology was formed in the late aughts... Open Web evangelists criticizing early Facebook for being too private is an incredible heap of irony.”
— [Someone missing the point entirely]
Let’s be clear: this is a historical and political mess, and one worth composting. The original #openweb vision, was wide, from the original European social vs the American libertarian, the person quoted is talking his view from inside the #blinded USA path rather than the original #WWW#mainstreaming of the more social European path.
The idea on both paths was never about exposing personal data, that’s a strawman born of today’s #dotcons-common-sense, where everything gets flattened into privacy = good, openness = bad. A deeply ahistorical take, infected by the post-Snowden wave of #encryptionism that conflates liberation with hiding, and assumes the only threat is surveillance by “them,” never enclosure by “us.”
The actual #4opens path—Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process – is still a radical project rooted in trust, transparency, and collective power. It is about creating shared public spaces and protocols to collaborate, self-organize, and break the silos both big, built by emerging tech monopolies and small built by our #encryptionists dogmas. This original path draws from traditions of anarchist publishing, community radio, and autonomous tech. And yes, it explicitly distinguished between publishing and privacy.
Early Facebook wasn’t “too private.” It was already a walled garden – a corporate trap disguised as a community. The real critique from #openweb folks was that it centralized control, commodified interaction, and locked users in. That’s why people built alternatives like #Indymedia, #RSS networks, (sudo)federated blogging, and early #P2P social tools.
To say the openweb led to surveillance capitalism is like blaming bicycles for car crashes. What happened wasn’t openness going too far, it was openness being abandoned, subsumed, and bastardized by closed platforms under the guise of “convenience” and “safety.” And now, some are trying to rewrite that history to serve the logic of today’s bloated encryption silos and #NGO-funded moderation regimes. This is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. Because without remembering what native open tech looked like, we’ll keep mistaking the problem for the solution.
So yes, this quote, and the worldview it represents, is a mess. But we don’t throw it in the fire, we compost it, break it down, extract the nutrients, and grow something better from the rot. The #openweb was never about exposing people, it was about building shared power. Don’t confuse that with the platforms that sold us out, and don’t mistake critique for irony when it’s actually prophecy.
What can we learn from the current mess. The protests didn’t fail because people didn’t care. They failed because the system is not built to respond to protest, it’s built to absorb it. We’ve marched for climate justice, taken the streets for peace, rallied for gender freedom, and now we mobilize for Palestine. The awareness is unprecedented. The turnout is historic. But what has shifted?
Police powers expanded. Fossil fuel extraction accelerated, Gaza burns. The truth is: awareness is not power. That’s a bitter pill for many on the #mainstreaming liberal left, who still believe that if we just scream loud enough, someone with authority will finally listen. But listen to what? A million voices chanting through state-sanctioned routes, wrapped in #NGO branding, monitored and shaped by our mobile devices?
This isn’t failure by accident, it’s design. Modern post #neoliberal governance has perfected the art of managing dissent, it doesn’t crush opposition, it curates it. It schedules protest, builds fenced-off “free speech zones” tallies engagement for annual reports. It makes this work by funding the same nonprofits it pretends to oppose to push protest as a pageant, a performance of resistance that never practically interrupt the flows of capital.
Worse than this, it trains us into harmless routines: march, chant, selfy, hashtag on the #dotcons, disperse, donate, repeat. It pacifies rage by channelling it into metrics, and then sells those metrics back to us as success. It offers us vacuous victories made of smoke and mirrors: a viral post, a headline, a panel discussion.
But to put this simply, real power doesn’t care how you feel, it cares what you can disrupt. And right now, they know we can’t disrupt much, because power doesn’t fear signs or slogans, it fears logistics. We know this from history. The Viet Minh didn’t defeat the French colonial army with slogans. The IRA didn’t survive the British Empire through branding. The Zapatistas didn’t hold territory in Chiapas by waiting for permission. These movements did not rely on protest. They relied on operations. On strategy. On adaptability. On patience and planning.
What do we need, to shift from affective protest to effective resistance? This doesn’t mean abandoning public protest entirely, but it means recognizing what it is: a signal, not a structure. It’s the spark, not the engine. And too often, we mistake the spark for the fire.
So what does this shift look like? Stop chasing virality. Build networks that don’t rely on platforms owned by billionaires. Organize in ways that can’t be throttled or shadowbanned. Don’t just protest; prototype. Create alternatives: cooperative farms, tool libraries, mesh networks, open media infrastructures (#OMN), community defence projects. Measure what matters. Track not followers or clicks, but mutual aid distributed, infrastructure built, people trained, tools replicated. Treat resistance like an ecosystem. Not wannabe famous (stupid)individuals shouting louder, but communities learning, adapting, and reproducing decentralized power.
In short, we need an operational culture, built not on outrage cycles but on daily commitment, iteration, and survival. This is prefigurative politics in action: we don’t beg the world to change, we build the new one inside the shell of the old. Yes, the current system will collapse. It is already collapsing. The question is no longer how to reform it, but at this stage, how to outlive it, and outgrow it.
This is where strategy matters, this is where affect must meet action. Because we aren’t here to perform resistance for an audience, we’re here to construct parallel systems in the cracks of empire. And that starts with understanding: protest alone is not enough. We must become ungovernable, not just in what we say – but in how we live.
For thousands of years, the demands of the oppressed have remained startlingly consistent: Erase all debts, Burn the records, redistribute the land. These weren’t radical demands. They were and are common sense for those crushed by the weight of extraction, enclosure, and empire.
Compare that to today’s to often #fashionista “leftist” rallying cry of “Tax the rich.” Let’s be honest, this is moderate, half-baked reform in the #KISS sweep of human struggle. “Tax the rich” still assumes the rich deserve to keep most of what they’ve hoarded. It doesn’t touch the foundations of power. It doesn’t challenge the right of a #nastyfew to control the lives and labour of the many, it’s simply a polite request for a fairer share of exploitation.
Let’s talk about #conservatism – not the myth, but the mechanism. It’s not in any way about preserving “traditional values.” That’s branding. It’s about conserving power. Specifically, it’s about conserving the power relationships of the #nastyfew who own and rule, while the rest of us keep our heads down, grateful for scraps. It’s about saying the rich deserve their wealth, and the poor deserve their suffering. It’s about hiding violence behind respectability, and calling it “order.”
This didn’t start yesterday, from the French Revolution to today’s food bank capitalism, conservatism has been #blocking grassroots movements work to compost this mess. And now, it masks itself in liberal #mainstreaming, progressive slogans, while cops will increasingly beat your neighbours in the street.
And yes, if they’re beating your neighbours today, they’ll be beating you tomorrow. But maybe that shouldn’t be the reason to care, maybe it should be enough that they’re beating your neighbours today. This is not about guilt, it’s about clarity, we need to remember what real justice has always meant. Not tweaks, not taxes, not “top” tables with seats for the “marginalised.” But a complete rethinking of power, because if we don’t start #KISS thinking again, we’re not challenging anything – we’re decorating to hide the smell of the #deathcult
A musical interlude about the prats running the world
So how did we get into such a mess, one vile prat sells weapons to another vile prat so he can flatten a hospital being used by another vile prat, who then returns the favour by bombing the vile prat’s power grid. Then they both turn to the cameras and declare it’s all the other’s fault, while pointing fingers and shouting: “You’re the real vile prat here!”
Yes, this is a prat, a very nasty prat
Meanwhile, the rest of us, watching from behind #dotcons screens, trapped in algorithmic echo chambers, suffer the fallout, literally and figuratively, as these vile people continue their pushing pantomime of destruction. Whole cities vanish, people starve, oceans rise, and still, the prats keep prattling on.
Then there’s a whole swarm of quieter, vile prats. These are the ones in expensive suits who sit on boards and in parliaments, nodding sagely while doing absolutely nothing. Example? The arms trade with Saudi Arabia. The world watches Yemen bleed dry while the UK and US keep shipping weapons and shrugging. Another? The climate crisis, where oil companies, vile prats with shiny logos, knew the damage decades ago and simply paid the #mainstreaming to bury the evidence. Or look at Gaza. Or Sudan. Or Myanmar. Pick a conflict, you’ll find the same prats.
Our use of tech’s is core to this mess making: the #dotcons, surveillance platforms we call “social media” feed us these nasty prats daily, empowering them while disempowering us. And the #mainstreaming pundits, journalists, and influencers #fashernistas act like this is all normal, business as usual. They’re part of the problem. A bunch of vile prats, simply.
A example of a UK prat
And because this feedback loop of prattery is normalized, people keep telling us this is how the world has to be. No alternatives. No resistance. Just sit down, shut up, and doom scroll. So here’s a humble ask: Don’t be a prat. Don’t excuse prats. Don’t promote prats. Start calling prats what they are. Vile prats.
How the world gets into this nasty mess, One vile prat supplies bombs to another vile prat so he can bomb another vile git, who then bombs the vile prat who bombed him. Then they keep being vile prats to each other and blaming each other and calling each other a vile prat for being a vile prat. And the rest of the world watches and suffers as these vile prats simply keep being vile prats. There are also many other vile prats who don’t speak up because one nasty vile prat, the biggest vile prat, has blackmail photos of them all being perverts, not in a good way.
Anyone #mainstreaming is pushing this mess. (Paraphrased from David Dayan)
An example of what happens in a nasty prat run world, to us.
And people think and act on this as normal behaver, this is why we are in such a mess, #KISS. The path out is to start composting, not feeding the mess. You don’t have to be perfect, just don’t be like everyone else, don’t be that person, thanks.
It’s becoming a problem. When people start asking, “Is @_elena the first genuine superstar of the Fediverse?” – we should all pause. This isn’t idle praise, it’s the reproduction of celebrity culture, liberal imperialism, and vertical hierarchy in a space that explicitly set out to reject those structures.
Have you ever thought – just for a moment – that this might be the completely WRONG path for a horizontal network like the #Fediverse? Yes, we need mess. Yes, we need experimentation. But this? This is #mainstreaming in its most seductive form, a soft power grab, hiding behind friendly faces and growing marketing gloss.
Both #pubconf2025 and #fediforum, and the people who attend them, are becoming a showroom for this liberal capture, promoting star-making and platforming over community process and open governance. It’s a mirror of the conference-industrial complex, repackaged for the #dotcons-weary.
We’ve seen this before: #NGOs turned movements into funding funnels. Influencers replaced organizers. Polite panels replaced fourm-level solidarity. It’s been happening here the last few years. But we do need to remember, the Fediverse isn’t a playground for fame, it’s a commons, to distribute power – not concentrate it. We don’t need to unthinkingly push people down the superstars’ path. We need peers, comrades, care, conflict resolution, and actual shared infrastructure.
So let’s be honest, if you’re pushing “the first superstar of the Fediverse,” you’re not pushing decentralization, you’re pushing brand culture, mainstreaming logic, and attention economies repackaged for liberal feels.
That’s not radical. That’s not native, it’s not what we came here to build. Let’s compost this celebrity logic before it roots too deep. Let’s stay messy, collaborative, and resist the temptation to crown anyone. Because if we don’t? We’re just rebuilding the same old pyramids – with slightly alt avatars.
Let’s look at the more #mainstreaming#dotcons path. The not-so-subtle message we need to remember on social media: Dictators hate to be ignored. Especially on their “special days” – birthdays, elections, court appearances, or orchestrated spectacles. These moments are designed to dominate the media cycle and, by extension, the social media algorithms.
They thrive on attention, and whether that attention is praise or outrage, it fuels their visibility and power. Here’s the social tech they exploit:
When you doomscroll their face, the algorithm sees interest.
When you post disgust, the algorithm sees engagement.
When you argue with trolls, you’re boosting the signal of the original post.
When you call them names, it still centres them.
That’s the #dotcons feedback loop, engagement is king, and dictators know how to play that game. Let’s break this circle, on these days, do something different:
Share stories of local mutual aid.
Link to historical context that exposes the long game of these power grabs.
Boost voices that decentralize attention, not concentrate it.
Post about books, direct action, food sovereignty, climate organizing, and tools for collective autonomy.
Highlight grassroots projects like #OMN, which are building sustainable, decentralized alternatives.
This is how we take the air out of #mainstreaming fires. Starve the algorithm and feed the resistance. Focus on things that actually matter, remember: not engaging is a strategy. Ignore the circus. Build the commons.
Because power matters, and power is never given – it’s taken, built, and at its best, shared. That’s why we care. That’s why the #Fediverse matters.
Let’s rewind: Private property wasn’t born from reason or consensus. It came from someone with a club drawing a line in the sand and saying:
“Cross this, and I’ll kill you.”
That’s the origin of power in the current #mainstreaming paths – violence, enclosure, and exclusion. This is not the foundation of the #Fediverse.
The Fediverse flows from a different source, built in open, social webs, where the lines we draw are “blowing in the wind.” Yes, a lot of people don’t get this. That’s why they try to jam it back into old models: branding, control, platforms, “governance,” and “best practices.” They want order. They want power they can hold.
But here’s the thing, There is such a thing as society, and we need to build tools that reflect this, not deny it. The beauty, and challenge, of the #Fediverse is that there is no central governance. And that’s a good thing. Because it means we aren’t trapped by legacy systems of control. We don’t have to fit into the broken economies and top-down paths that dominate the “real” outside world.
The Fediverse was born from the “cats” of libertarianism and anarchism (without the [O]). And in this space, we have the radical opportunity to build different, native paths, based in trust, mutual aid, and the #4opens. But to keep building this, we have to compost the mess pushing: People pushing “common sense” corporate-style governance are part of the problem, they want to tame the wild, they want hierarchy where there should be networks, they want control where we need flow.
To be native to the Fediverse, we have to stop importing “common sense” control systems. Instead, we must use code – and culture – to build native #openweb society. Tools that empower. Processes that are messy, open, federated, and yes, hard to define. Organizing for community empowerment need to embed anti “common sense” in the same way the Fediverse is anti-enclosure. Because if we forget this… We don’t build a better web, we just recreate the old one with new colours. Let’s not just repeat history, let’s not draw new hard lines in the sand with the same threat of old clubs. A step away from this is to build bridges, not borders.
It would be helpful to talk about the industrial-scale air freshener being sprayed to mask the stench of collapse. An example, while Gaza burns and genocide unfolds in real time, too many on the soft left are busy sniffing their own ideological mess.
“Oh, but they used a plane once…”
“Oh, that project isn’t perfect, so let’s not support it at all…”
“Oh, their anti-Nazi message is just a header image. That’s clearly useless propaganda…”
This is troll logic. This is #psyop brainrot, it’s weaponized idealism used to undermine action.
“Sure, they’re doing good - but not perfect. So discredit, disengage, demoralize.”
It’s the tactic troll farms use on the #dotcons to feed manipulative, because it appeals to insecure egos and a culture soaked in #stupidindividualism, where the look of moral “purity” is more important than building power, solidarity, or impact.
And too many fall for it, because they don’t see it for what it is: A feedback loop that leads nowhere. A stalling tactic. A demobilizer. It’s not accidental, it’s designed to stop us acting. It’s strategic passivity masquerading as moral high ground.
“Don’t link to that, it’s not flawless.”
“Don’t share that resource, the font is ugly.”
“Don’t support that campaign, they once took a selfie on a plane.”
Are you serious? While people are being murdered by states, you’re sniffing out aesthetic imperfections? Here’s #KISS:
Nobody wins by demanding perfection.
Nobody builds movements by tearing down every action.
Nobody helps anyone by blocking solidarity and smearing efforts.
We need to focus attention, not fragment it. We need to act in coalitions, not purity circles, we need to smell the rot, not cover it with ideological air freshener. Because this isn’t a game, it is about #powerpolatics, and how it’s wielded or lost. And while you troll your own side for imaginary infractions, the fascists are laughing – and organizing.
For more than 40 years, the default #mainstreaming path has led straight into worshipping of what can only be described as a #deathcult. This isn’t just metaphor, it’s literal. We’ve watched the ecosystem collapse, inequality explode, communities fragment, and culture rot under the weight of corporate-controlled sameness. And through it all, the one thing we haven’t been allowed to do, culturally, politically, or economically, is to imagine an alternative.
Since Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” the world has been locked in a feedback loop. Fukuyama told us it was the “end of history.” Blair polished the same lie in softer tones, calling it a “post-ideological society.” What they all meant no matter how broken, no matter how brutal, it’s this, or “chaos”.
This ideological mess, our progressive chattering classes, call capitalist realism. The imposed feeling that everything else has failed, that even critique itself must operate within the narrow #neoliberal system, never against it. That anything outside is too utopian, too dangerous, too naïve to be worth considering. The result is generations raised not to debate capitalism, but to tweak it around the edges. And when the tweaks fail, when the system cracks the official line is always: “That’s just how capitalism works. And this is a capitalist country. What else do you want?”
But the truth is, there were alternatives. There are alternatives which keep being crushed, ignored, and parasitized at every turn. This is why we need to talk more about the parasite class and the memory hole. Every time a genuine alternative surfaces, every time a counter-current starts to build, there’s a swarm, a parasite class gathers. Not to support, but to feed, to suck the creativity, the vision, the life out of resistance and repurpose it for the status quo. This is the essence of #mainstreaming, it cannot generate ideas, only feed off of them.
Just look at any radical movement over the last four decades. Greenham, Climate camps, Digital commons, #Occupy, #BLM, The Fediverse. Each time, there’s a surge of energy, messy, collective challenge to the dominant #mainstreaming stories and paths. And each time, the #NGOs, institutions, think tanks, and media players show up, not to amplify the challenge, but to smooth it over, make it palatable, safe, marketable.
Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work, building networks, holding the line, defending autonomy get sidelined. Then forgotten, or worse, written out of the story entirely. The result is activist history rewritten by the least effective, most self-promoting voices. The messy, thus vital truth gets buried under branding and bureaucracy. The stories of resistance become content for the same system they were fighting against.
This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN (Open Media Network) exists to break this pattern, by holding open spaces for the stories that matter. To surface the compost, not the plastic packaging. It’s not about building a new platform for ego. It’s about building a garden for alternatives to grow. We’re trying to reboot history here, document from the bottom-up, not top-down. To give focus back to the people who said “don’t look at me,” and ask them to please speak, because if they don’t, the parasites will write the ending. Again. We need open tools with shared protocols, trust-based networks that isn’t just reactive, but generative. Not perfect, not polished, but messy and alive, like all growing alternatives must be.
What we don’t need is a healthy #deathcult, the #NGO crew have little understanding of this needed negative imagination. Let’s be blunt, we don’t want the #deathcult to be healthy. We don’t want to be its lifeblood. We don’t want to be mainstreamed. We want the current mess to collapse under its own contradictions. And it will, it is, but feeding it while it failes is not helping.
Only if we remember that our job isn’t to improve capitalism, but to compost it. Not to brand rebellion, but to build real, rooted alternatives. We’re 45 years deep into a dead-end story. It’s time to write a different one. And that begins, as always, with remembering what they told us to forget.
All activist history is soaked in struggle, not just against the oppressive systems we set out to confront, but also internally, against the deep currents of sectarianism that fracture our own movements. The history of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp offers a vivid example. The colour-coded gates, yellow, red, blue, were more than navigation markers. They were flags of ideology, staking claims in this radical space, they were spreading stories. This was strength, it was a reflection of our tolerance: the ever-present bridging of views of ourselves as we build collective power.
And what is negative in this networked space? The same pattern, again and again. The loudest, most performative, and often the least effective people are the ones who tell the story. “Look at me,” they shout. “I was there. I led.” But where are the people who actually did the work? They’re still busy doing it. Quietly. Relentlessly. With their eyes on the issues, not on the spotlight. “Don’t look at me, I’m busy,” they say, trying to keep the fire alive.
The result is a warped memory. A messy, inaccurate activist history dominated by ego, not impact. And this distortion doesn’t only affect our understanding of the past, it shapes the strategies of the present and the futures we dare to imagine.
This problem doesn’t end with internal dynamics. Around every genuine social alternative, there gathers a familiar class, the parasites. These are not builders. They do not risk, they do not create. They arrive when the work is already done, when the energy is starting to rise, and they feed. They bring language, branding, metrics. They bring funding models. They bring institutional polish. And they bring rot.
This is the strong flow of #mainstreaming, the parasite class turns counter-currents into lifeblood for the dominant #deathcult, giving the reformist rebellion just enough edge, just enough cool to remain relevant. It does this because the mainstreaming, what we call the #deathcult, has little vitality of its own, being built on extraction, not creation.
And here lies the source of the recurring stress, that is present in every activist conversation worth having today. We don’t want the #deathcult to be healthy. We don’t want to be the raw material for its constant renewal. But how do we resist this co-option without collapsing into more sectarianism? How do we build spaces where the real work is visible and valued, without falling into the trap of ego?
This isn’t just about correcting the history books. It’s about reclaiming our stories so we can reclaim our strategies. If we don’t tell the truth of our movements, the parasites will. And they will use our truths as the next marketing campaign.
So, the challenge, we need to build cultures of memory and documentation that serve the work, not the egos. We need to resist the urge to pointlessly divide over differences when we could be multiplying our strengths. And urgently, we must recognize and mediate the damage parasites do, not with purity tests, more with clear boundaries and rooted values like the #4opens and #PGA hallmarks.
This is not about nostalgia, rather it’s about survival. It’s about #makeinghistory, the stories that keep the fire burning, not just for ourselves, but for everyone who still works for a better world,
It’s important to be honest about the landscape we’re working in. Just about every so-called “alternative tech” or #opensocialweb event – especially those run under the #NGO banner – is riddled with institutional parasites. They talk a big game about ethics, governance, and decentralisation, but their main role is to capture energy, not release it. The value in these spaces is minimal, maybe a few decent corridor chats, but structurally, they serve the status quo.
What we’re seeing is an attempt to #mainstream change by reshaping it into something more passive and marketable. It’s branding, not building. It’s funding cycles, not freedom. And people are so used to the #feudalism of current #FOSS governance models, full of gatekeepers, toxic meritocracy, and internalised hierarchy, that they don’t see the need to move past this. They double down instead, its just #blocking masked as principled caution.
That’s why the #OGB project (Open Governance Body) takes a radically different approach: build it permissionless and let it loose. No waiting for gatekeepers, no begging for funding, no asking nicely. Just making space for people to actually do the thing – together, in the open. If it works, people will come. If not, we try something else. But we stop wasting energy on the #mainstreaming rituals.
The key is to recognise that there’s a different and much larger group of people, beyond the usual suspects, who can be empowered by tech if the structures are simple, human, and social enough. People who want to work together, share power, and build resilience, not just ship code. Yes, the tools need to exist, the ideas already exist, what’s been missing is a path that doesn’t instantly collapse into control.
That’s why #OGB is a #KISS project, it’s not about perfection. It’s about functioning enough to seed community processes that can grow over time. Something you can pick up and use, rather than argue about forever in a GitHub issue or a grant proposal.
Let’s be real, people are up shit creek without a paddle right now. And most of what’s presented to them as “solutions” are just more mess dressed up in new UX. If we want people to find different ways out, we have to build different places to look. That means creating tech ecosystems rooted in social trust, creativity, and actual autonomy, not more extractive platforms or performative NGOs.
We also need to deal with the deeper issue of apathy and Laissez-faire fatalism. People feel the system’s broken but don’t believe it can be changed. They’ve internalised the idea that trying is pointless. So we need to design structures that take this into account. Systems that don’t rely on constant enthusiasm or perfect participation. That hold space through thick and thin, for the long term.
This is where there’s real space for creativity and care, not just in what we build, but in how we build it, and who we build it with. Not self-promoting conferences, not glossy decks, but compost piles and messy gardens, things that live, change, and root themselves in everyday needs.
The #OGB project is just one shovel. But there are others. Pick one up. The ground’s ready.
We’re seeing a pattern here in the UK similar to what Kristin Kobes Du Mez maps out in Jesus and John Wayne, the rise of hypermasculine, nationalist evangelical Christianity that’s far more about power than faith. It’s a core part of politics across the Atlantic for decades, and now the same push is happing here in the UK
Oxford city center, well funded free propaganda
In the US, white evangelicals didn’t back Trump despite his obvious corruption and lack of basic Christian values – they backed him because he embodied their real gospel: patriarchal authority, militant nationalism, fear of outsiders, and a fantasy of strongman salvation. Du Mez shows how generations of evangelical pop culture, from John Wayne to Duck Dynasty – laid the cultural foundations for this, replacing the Sermon on the Mount with cowboy swagger and authoritarian power plays.
Now, we’re seeing the UK version of this evangelical hard right mess pushing. Funded by US networks, hardline churches are expanding fast, particularly in working-class and migrant communities. These aren’t your local Church of England vicars or even your average happy-clappy congregations. We’re talking about groups pushing anti-LGBTQ+ agendas, climate denial, strict gender roles, and blind allegiance to state power, often with serious foundation and corporate money behind them.
Focue on the young and working class
Groups like Christian Concern, the Alliance Defending Freedom (which has set up shop here), and various Prosperity Gospel outfits linked to US megachurches are growing in political reach. Evangelical academies and ‘leadership training’ institutions are popping up, producing media-savvy influencers and aspiring MPs. The goal? To reshape UK politics around a Christian nationalist vision, just like in the States.
You can already see it in the way culture war rhetoric is creeping into #mainstreaming politics. Attacks on “woke culture,” trans rights, and environmental protections are all increasingly cloaked in moral panic and biblical justification. This isn’t an organic backlash, it’s strategy.
All photes Oxford 06/06/2025
These churches are increasingly aligning with the hard right, providing the “moral” gloss for austerity, nationalism, and climate delay. And like in the US, they present themselves as victims, claiming persecution whenever they’re called out for bigotry and misinformation.
Let’s be very clear, this has little to do with Jesus, and a lot to do with building a new authoritarian consensus under the banner of faith, flag, and fossil fuels. If you want to know where we’re going unless we push back hard, look at the US. The seeds are already here, and they’re being watered with foreign money and feed on homegrown reaction.
A lot of resources are put into this outreach
This is why our response has to go beyond satire and eye-rolling. We need to compost this mess before it can root. Because this isn’t about church or state. It’s about who gets to shape the future, and who gets left out entirely. These people are funded to push the hard right mess in the UK. when you lift the funding lid, this is more about #classwar than “religion”.
