A Tolkien view of #OMN

A central thesis of Tolkien’s books is that evil provides the means of its own defeat. Sauron forged the One Ring that destroyed him. Shelob impaled herself on Sam’s blade. Smaug exposed his belly to Bilbo and revealed the weak point that brought him down. Tolkien’s world is full of this pattern: the seed of destruction lies buried inside the will to dominate. Power over others always carries its own undoing.

But there’s a second truth, less often spoken. Good must still act. The Ring did not cast itself into the fires of Mount Doom, it had to be carried, inch by inch, through the mud and terror, by two small Hobbits who refused to give up. Shelob could only fall because Sam held his arm firm when it would have been easier to drop the blade. Smaug was slain not by fate, but by the hand that fired the black arrow.

Even when evil weakens itself, the act of courage still has to be taken. The small people still have to step up. And there’s a third lesson here, one that feels painfully relevant to our time: good only loses when it surrenders to hopelessness. Denethor’s despair nearly doomed Minas Tirith.
Frodo would have fallen without Sam’s stubborn love. Bilbo’s small act of faith. In Tolkien’s world, hope is not naïve optimism, it’s an act of defiance.

In our current #closedweb Mordor, we see a similar pattern. The #dotcons – Facebook, Google, X, TikTok – are our modern Mordor. Their empire of control looks invincible, but the same logic applies: the seed of their undoing lies within their design. They rely on enclosure, makes them brittle. They feed on attention, makes them hollow. They claim to connect, yet they isolate. Their power depends on us believing there is no alternative. The moment we act otherwise, the “Ring” begins to crack.

This is where the #OMN (Open Media Network) is about, it’s the Hobbits of the #openweb, a simple idea built around trust, openness, and shared meaning, the values that the #mainstreaming web abandoned in their push for scale and profit. The #OMN path is not glamorous, it’s messy, human, and small in the best possible way, it’s the hobbit path.

While the lords of code build towers of algorithms and surveillance, the #OMN builds compost – small, fertile spaces for stories, community, and resistance to grow. Each node, each local server, each trust-based network is another Hobbiton – small, grounded, but vital to the health of the wider networked world.

And like Tolkien’s hobbits, the people carrying these projects are not heroes in the conventional sense. They’re tinkerers, storytellers, boat-dwellers, coders, gardeners – ordinary people who refuse to give in to despair.

The weakness of the Ring, is the weakness of Mordor – and of our #dotcons empires – is that they depend entirely on compliance. Their control works only as long as we feed it: our attention, our data, our labour. The act of reclaiming media, even on a small scale, is an act of resistance, the equivalent of carrying the Ring toward Mount Doom.

But again: it doesn’t happen automatically, we have to act, have to keep building, sharing, teaching, mediating – before the co-option machine moves in, before the #fashernista crowd turns the work into branding and drains it of meaning.

This is the role of projects like #OMN, #indymediaback, #4opens, and the broader #openweb ecosystem. They’re not just technical projects, they’re moral ones. They remind us that good requires persistence, that hope is work, and that defeat only comes when we stop trying.

Evil destroys itself, yes, but only if someone carries the Ring. The systems of enclosure, surveillance, and monetized despair will fall apart on their own contradictions, but only if enough of us are walking the long, muddy road toward something better.

That’s what the #OMN is for: a space to hold hope, to act before hopelessness takes root, to build the commons even when it feels impossible. And like Tolkien’s world, we won’t win through strength, but through endurance, through small acts done together, with trust.

Because the web – like Middle-Earth – is worth saving.

Support letter for funding application

To Whom It May Concern,

I am Hamish Campbell, a UK-based media professional, long-time participant in the independent media movement, and advocate for #4opens, federated, and trust-based communication networks.

I am writing to express my support for the #datweb project, which I see as a needed step toward rebalancing the web away from centralized control and enclosure.

Over the past 30 years working within grassroots and activist media, from the early days of Indymedia through to my current work with the #OMN (Open Media Network), I’ve witnessed both the power and fragility of our digital commons. Centralized platforms and corporate hosting have repeatedly shown themselves to be brittle, censorable, and extractive. In contrast, peer-to-peer, distributed technologies could, when embedded in social tech projects, have potential to restore autonomy and resilience to how communities publish and share information.

The datweb approach – a browser-based method for decentralised content distribution – offers something rare and valuable: practical accessibility. By enabling secure, resilient publishing directly within the web interface, it lowers the barrier for journalists, small collectives, and under-resourced communities who can’t rely on proprietary software or heavy infrastructure. This kind of bridging simplicity (#KISS) and openness (#4opens) is what’s is needed to build trust-based, human-scale systems to empower rather than control.

In my experience, technology alone doesn’t create freedom – culture and governance matter just as much. The datweb project’s openness to community engagement and interoperability makes it a strong candidate for alignment with wider #openweb efforts and grassroots media networks seeking to build from the bottom up rather than impose from the top down.

I endorse this project and I am willing to contribute further advice, feedback, and collaboration to ensure its development remains grounded in real-world publishing needs and in the ethics of shared stewardship rather than institutional control.

Sincerely,
Hamish Campbell
Journalist, media activist, technologist, and advocate for the Open Media Network (#OMN)
http://hamishcampbell.com

STAR WARS: THE SOFT EMPIRE

Let’s try some metaphors DRAFT (was looking for a Star Wars meme but find them horribly right-wing, we have made a real mess,,,)

Had to use an old video, kinda on subject to the metaphor

A long time ago, in a network not so far away… The internet was once alive with wild diversity. Countless small worlds of the #openweb – linked by fragile trust, shared roots, and messy, beautiful collaboration.

The #FOSS Federation of Commons was rising… until the Soft Empire came. They did not come with star destroyers or stormtroopers. They came with funding proposals, frameworks, and friendly smiles. Their weapons were not lasers but language, phrases like “scaling up,” “alignment,” and “governance.” They promised stability. What they brought was assimilation.

Across the #Fediverse, the #NGO Order spread its doctrine of “professionalisation,” pushing free instance into managed dependency. The “Fluffy Fleet,” draped in banners of care and civility, softly conquered all that was unruly, replacing the grassroots with “strategic partners.” Yet in the outer systems, among abandoned nodes and fading servers, a Native Resistance survived.

The composting moon, a dim squat, in forests of forgotten code, small online imaginary fires burn. Around one fire sits a circle of rebels – coders, gardeners, storytellers – the last of the Commons Stewards.

“They say ‘alignment’,” whispers one.
“But what they mean is assimilation,” replies another.
“We compost their words,” says the elder. “We turn control into soil for renewal.”

They speak of ancient #FOSS practices – #4opens, the old code of trust. Their whispered language is relational: “affinity,” “balance,” “re-rooting.” They call themselves the Open Media Network (# OMN) keepers of the native web. Their mission: to expose the imperial euphemisms hiding behind “good governance,” to reclaim naming as an act of freedom, and to rekindle the federation of wild diversity across the digital web.

“In the age of the Smiling Empire, domination wears the mask of care. Naming is resistance. Trust is rebellion. And compost is revolution.”

Our language is where the imperialistic pushing hides

In the change and challenge of the #openweb reboot of the last few years, there are strong echoes of imperialism through #NGOs – soft domination rather than open conquest. Funding becomes a disciplining tool: if you want a seat at the table, you must conform to their norms. This is semi hidden economic and cultural imperialism inside the #openweb, pushing the path of replacing shared trust (#4opens) with institutional control.

First, we need to look at where the Imperialistic language hides, the imperialism here isn’t overt, it’s in tone, framing, and process. You see it in phrases like:

“Scaling up” or “professionalising” community work.

“Creating standards for everyone.”

“Ensuring governance” (but meaning control).

“Bringing structure” or “alignment” to “fragmented” communities.

“Representing the movement” or “speaking for the community.”

These sound neutral or helpful, but in context they reproduce colonial logic: centralising power, erasing difference, replacing “native” messy grassroots diversity with clean, managed systems that serve funders and institutional interests. This is soft imperialism – language as enclosure, framing itself as care (“we’re helping you get organised”) but it’s about ownership and #mainstreaming domestication.

In contrast, “native” grassroots languages, speak in a different tongue, open, lived, relational.
You can hear it in:

“Composting” instead of “managing.”

“Rebalancing” instead of “reforming.”

“Native paths” rather than “standardisation.”

“Affinity” instead of “alignment.”

“Trust” instead of “compliance.”

That’s the language of commons stewardship, not imperial management. The clash in practice, is when #NGO-fluffy or #dotcons outreach talk about “onboarding the next billion users” or “building shared infrastructure,” they’re actually talking about absorbing – pulling people into their world, under their definitions, within their control.

Our native path, on the other hand, speaks about bridging, federating, sharing roots, and keeping diversity alive. That’s anti-imperial by design, the tension is clear: #mainstreaming always wants to flatten difference, while we aim to amplify difference within shared openness.

In our work, with clearer naming, we strip away the euphemisms, we call things what they are. Imperial language real meaning:

“Scaling” Colonising
“Professionalising” De-commonsing
“Governance frameworks” Control mechanisms
“Community representation” Gatekeeping
“Alignment” Assimilation

And on the positive side is commons language rooted meaning:
“Grassroots governance” Native balance
“Decentralised collaboration” Open trust networks
“Interoperability” Mutual recognition
“Commons stewardship” Collective autonomy

The positive #KISS thing we can do is in naming the power play as it happens, not after it’s already shaped the story. Imperial language hides behind civility and “neutral coordination.” Naming is power. And if we name it, we can compost it. #OMN’s job – and ours – is to expose those euphemisms and restore native naming so we can see the social terrain clearly.

“Invisible roots / generation change”… “…the original crew who put the real work into growing the Fediverse… are no longer invited, invisible to the new fluffy crew.” This is historical erasure, rewriting origins stories, to present itself as the natural inheritor of progress. Here, “new” replaces “native.” The grassroots phase is forgotten or mythologized, allowing control to shift quietly to NGOs, corporate “helpers,” or state-aligned foundations.

“Fluffy dominance”, “…friendly, soft, smiling… but sliding into dogmatic blindness.” The language of niceness can act as imperial propaganda. It enforces a monoculture of tone, no dissent, no spikiness. This becomes ideological policing through manners, a soft colonialism of behaviour.

“Zero balance”, “…third event with the same narrow people… zero balance…” Imperial projects always stabilise imbalance. “Balance” is removed, so hierarchy can harden. Here, the imbalance is cultural: those aligned with funding and institutional legitimacy dominate; those rooted in messy grassroots work are marginalised.

Composting the imperialism, in #OMN terms, composting means turning the waste of mainstreaming into soil for renewal. The antidote to imperial framing is openness and plurality:

Reclaim language – stop saying “community” when we mean “closed club.”

Decentralise narrative – many voices, not one authority.

Re-root trust – back to the base layer, where people actually do the work.

Expose the smiling empire – funding, branding, and institutional capture need transparency.

Reassert the #4opens – the anti-imperial charter for #OMN governance.

The future of the #openweb depends on seeing through the soft imperialism of “good intentions.” If we can name it, we can compost it, and grow something real, grounded, and free.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #mainstreaming #grassroots #FOSS

Let’s try a #spiky view of #fluconf

LIVE at c-base a #fluffy Fediverse conference

It’s been going on for the last few years, let’s look at a current example. Live at c-base is a #Fediverse event that highlights the need for composting the dogmatic #fluffy mess making to keep balance in our shared #openweb reboot. With our #fluffy crew talking about the shared reboot, on the surface it looks positive – friendly conversations, smiles, the right hashtags – but underneath it reveals a deeper problem: there is zero balance at these events. This is the third event I’ve seen with the same issue: the same small group, the same narrow framing, the same blindness. It is not healthy. It is not balanced. And it is not a good path to stay on.

What we are seeing, again and again, is a kind of #blinded #blocking. A narrow circle, reproducing itself, shutting out the very people who dug the digital soil for the seedling stage of the current #Fediverse growth. Sadly, #blindness and #blocking makes these people prats, not because they don’t care, but because they can’t see beyond their narrow bubbles.

Composting the mess, we need to be honest here. We all make messes in movement spaces, and the only way forward is to compost these messes. Composting means breaking down what is toxic, unbalanced, or self-serving and transforming it into nutrients that can grow something better. If we ignore the problem, the mess just piles up until the whole project smells. If we compost it, we can build soil, roots, and future growth.

Where’s the hope? Right now, hope is hard to see in these paths. A purely #fluffy approach – friendly, soft, smiling – is good for atmosphere, but it slides into dogmatic blindness. Fluffy alone does not challenge power. Fluffy alone does not create balance. Fluffy alone does not compost.

What we need is spiky/fluffy. We need the warmth of fluff but also the edge of spike, the courage to challenge, to draw lines, to say when things are going wrong. Without this, we share the same blindness, wrapped in smiles and funding applications. One thing that might explain this narrowness is that we are in the middle of a generation change. The original crew who put real work into growing the #Fediverse in its seedling years are no longer invited, and the real problem is that to this new fluffy crowd the last generation are mostly invisible.

Looking at the Berlin Fedi Day schedule the only person I recognise from that seedling stage, that built the current working reboot is Christine Lemmer-Webber, and they were always firmly within the #NGO-fluffy camp. Everyone else? New faces, from before, like Evan Prodromou who played no role in the atavism of the seedling stage or the people from after ??? Who to often bring the #NGO and funding paths that is at the root of current mess making.

One such event would be understandable. But three in a row? It looks less like an “accident” and more like a PRAT move, hardcoded fork of our shared project. A fork that speaks with arrogance “for all of us” while shutting out the #spiky voices of the community who helped built the current #fedivers path. Towards balance, where do we go from here?

Name the mess: We can’t fix what we won’t face. #blinded #blocking is real, and it needs to be called out. This is what I am doing here.

Compost, don’t cancel: These are not enemies, just our #NGO, #fashionista in need of wider perspective. We don’t waste energy and focus in burning them out; we compost their mess into fuel for growth, they are a part of the debate.

Spiky/Fluffy events: The next gathering should explicitly mix both tendencies. Spikiness to challenge, fluffiness to care. That balance is the only way to keep hope alive, let’s not be prats on this, please.

Reconnect with roots: We need to bring back more of the seedling stage #Fediverse builders and seedling voices, not as nostalgia but as grounding. The roots matter if the tree is to grow.

Expand the circle: No small group should speak for the whole. Open doors, open process, open web. #4opens. A part of this is embedded in the closed funding of these events and process.

Final thought, right now, what we’re watching is real prat behaviour, dressed up in smiles and #NGO funding. That’s a dead end. If we want the #openweb reboot to be more than another hollow fad, we need balance, humility, and compost. The fluffy mess won’t compost itself. That’s our job.

You likely need a shovel #OMN to work on composting. Or if you want to continue with this kind of mess making then clearer naming the events for the minority they invite and host would help to make less mess, a few #NGO groups have started to do this like #FediForum and the #SWF now have less imperialistic language, which is at least is a little less blinded.

#fediday #c-based

It’s Not About You

The Fediverse is native to the open web

We are having a tech reboot for the last few years, federated seems to be where it’s at right now, and it makes sense, the #fediverse is flourishing where so many “#web3” or pure #p2p projects stumbled. This isn’t to say #p2p is bad. But for a peer-to-peer social network to actually work and be social useful, it would need mechanisms for collectivising: shared moderation, subjective trust, a way to handle conflict. Purely (stupid)individualist solutions have been tried before, and they don’t hold together at all beyond a tiny scale. Atomised people cannot build any lasting commons.

The strength of federation as a path is that it collectivises by default. Servers are groups, not individuals, decisions are made within communities, not in isolation, this builds resilience. What is currently #blocking this path is our #fashionistas and #geekproblem people, who are still clinging to parts of #mainstreaming “common sense!. If you try to vertically scale, if you dream of competing head-on with Silicon Valley, running giant datacentres with teams of sysadmins, you’ve already lost. That’s their game, their best proficiency. You cannot beat them at it.

The path forward is to do something they cannot do without breaking their own business model. Something they would never want to do even if they could. That’s the opening. That’s the #OMN path. So let’s be clear about what the current #openweb reboot and the #fediverse is not:

The fediverse is not an electricity grid. You don’t have to be plugged in everywhere for it to function.

The fediverse is not feudalism. You are not a serf bound to some lord’s server. You can leave, fork, migrate, or self-host.

The fediverse is not a commodity. It is not like a telephone line or a utility service to be packaged, sold, or regulated in the same way.

And no, the fediverse is not a big truck that carries data down the highway. It’s a messy garden, a bazaar, a commons.

The #fediverse works because it is untidy, diverse, and decentralised. It’s a network of collectives, not a monopoly machine. The #OMN path and vision is to lean into this: not to replicate the #dotcons in smaller, scrappier forms, but to compost the mistakes of the past and grow something native, nourishing, and #4opens.

The #OMN isn’t about isolated gestures, it’s about building federated, trust-based media networks that actually work at scale. Right now, the truth is simple: you can’t just join or create one tomorrow. Why? Because the path needs composting first.

By composting, we mean taking the wreckage of past projects – messy, co-opted, burned-out, over-managed, or over-centralised – and turning it into fertile ground. From this social fertile soil can we grow #OMN that support:

Open, federated collaboration

Shared media creation and distribution

Affinity group – based moderation and governance

Strong social resilience against co-option by corporations or #dotcons

We need to then bride this existing federated path into the seed #p2p path with social tools that work and hold this bridge in place. The #OMN is a work in progress, and that’s intentional. It’s about building the crew, the culture, and the infrastructure before anyone can just “join.” This isn’t a platform you log into; it’s a path we create together, step by step. Until we do that composting, passive participation isn’t possible, the first step is #KISS that’s exactly what we’re focused on making happen.

A poet’s view of the path

The #AI bubble might be nastier than the Dot.com crash

The path the #mainstreaming in tech is taking is clear. #AI is fashion, the valuations are absurd, the cost structures unsustainable, and the hype cycle feels like it’s already outpacing reality.

We’ve been here before, dot.com déjà vu. The #dotcons bubble of 2000 was built on fake demand and fantasy valuations. Venture capital flooded into half-baked platforms that promised to “reinvent” everything, while the effect was to hollow out and enclose the native #openweb. When the bubble burst, it wasn’t just investors who lost, the damage was social, cultural, and technological, it’s the mess we are in today.

The AI bubble, 2025 edition, we’re watching the same movie again, only bigger and nastier. This time, the hype engine is driven by press releases and corporate lobbying, amplified by blinded compliant media desperate to see the next miracle story. Every company claims they’re solving “the biggest problem” with AI. But lift the lid, the rhetoric, and what remains? Business models that don’t add value, expensive wrappers around existing tools. Unsustainable costs – GPU farms burning cash and carbon in equal measure. Speculation over substance, #nastyfew investors betting on domination rather than usefulness.

Why this round may be worse, at least the #dotcons bubble left some infrastructure we could build on: fibre, hosting, and the spread of the web itself. The #AI bubble looks different, as it centralises power even further in the hands of a few #dotcons. Accelerates #climatechaos through energy-intensive training runs and datacentre inflation. It undermines our flawed democracies, trust in media and knowledge with floods of synthetic content.

The ending to this video is a shocker, but not unsepreising when you look at the context of the video.

Instead of building open, federated, useful tools, we’re watching another round of #techshit enclosure, hype and money funnelling into projects that can’t last, but which will leave more #techshit scorched-earth legacy when they collapse. The #dotcons crash was messy, the AI crash could be toxic.

What can people do to walk away from this mess? How do you help with the #OMN and #4opens? The AI bubble shows what happens when tech is built on the normal hype, enclosure, and extraction on the #dotcons path. The #OMN is the opposite of this. It’s about building trust-based, federated networks where media, knowledge, and tools aren’t just another asset class to be bought and sold. The #4opens are the activist #FOSS antidote to bubble logic:

Open Data – No black boxes. If #AI is going to be part of any future, the training data, biases, and methods must be transparent, not locked up by Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft.

Open Code – Instead of closed, centralised data sets and platforms that extract rent, we need free/libre code anyone can run, fork, and improve.

Open Standards – The current AI mess is about silos and monopolies. Federated standards (like ActivityPub for social) are how we work to keep diversity alive and break enclosure.

Open Process – The opposite of corporate secrecy and hype. Decisions need to be made in the open, accountable to communities, not hidden boardrooms or PR cycles.

The #AI bubble is the normal every day #deathcult logic of the #dotcons playing out again: extract, enclose, collapse, repeat. The #OMN and #4opens give us a way to compost this mess into something more fertile. From enclosure → to federation. From secrecy → to openness. From hype cycles → to slow, messy, sustainable growth.

If we don’t actively build and defend this needed native path, we’ll be left cleaning up another round of collapse, only this time with more concentration of power, more environmental damage, and a deeper erosion of trust. The choice is simple: do we keep betting on bubbles, or do we build commons?

And the path is #KISS, so people please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

YouTube and the #deathcult of “Independent” Media

Over the last ten years, we’ve all been spending more and more time on #YouTube. And maybe you’ve noticed something strange: many of the channels you once thought of as independent are no longer independent at all. They’ve been quietly bought up by private equity firms with billions in backing from SoftBank, Amazon, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone – the usual #mainstreaming priests of the #deathcult.

Channels like Task & Purpose, Vice, Veritasium, Donut Media, Simple History, Economics Explained, The Drive, and History Hit are already part of the buyout wave. Some of the biggest names in our worship of “creator culture” – CocoMelon, Colin and Samir, The Theorists, Dude Perfect – too. And that’s just the ones who admitted it. There’s no law requiring disclosure.

Capitalism has a logic, that creators are commodities. “Independent” YouTubers once worked on tiny budgets – a camera, editing software, a couple of friends – to reach millions. They were messy, risky, sometimes radical. Capital sees something else: predictable cashflow, brand expansion, safe investment. But these operations are fragile. They depend on one platform (#YouTube), one personality, and an algorithm that can erase a career overnight. Normally, this risk would scare off capitalists. But with $12 trillion sloshing around private equity in the US alone, they’ve run out of businesses to buy. YouTube channels are the new frontier.

This is how grasping control kills creativity, when capitalism takes over, the overhead explodes. Analysts, strategists, managers, lawyers all need their cut. That means: more ads, more sponsorships, more merch, safer, algorithm-friendly content, the same formula cloned across every channel in the for profit portfolio. This “roll-up” logic flattens everything into old-school TV. Risk disappears, the spark that made YouTube compelling at first is smothered by business strategy. We’re already seeing it with channels like Veritasium, slowly shifting away from Derek Muller to reduce “keyman risk.” Once a personality becomes a liability, the accountants start grooming replacements.

Old school #traditionalmedia tried to counter te first wave of #dotcons social media by throwing money at “new media” outfits like Vice, Buzzfeed, Mashable, and Vox. They burned cash, collapsed, and left nothing but layoffs. The new approach is simpler: don’t build, just buy. Disney doesn’t need to grow the next Vice; it just needs to buy a handful of YouTube channels and tell shareholders it’s “ready for the future.”

The same #deathcult logic applies to this, appease shareholders first, audiences last. The cost is paid by viewers, the result for us – #dotcons friendly content becomes blander and safer, sponsorships dominate, but direct support (merch, memberships) dries up, because who wants to fund faceless #nastyfew agendas? “Creators” burn out, and vanish, replaced by interchangeable hosts or locked down with non-compete contracts. It’s the industrialisation of #fashionista “independent culture”.

There is a history to this, and #openweb parallels, we’ve seen this story before, in the 90s, independent radio stations were bought out by Clear Channel, homogenising the airwaves. In the 2000s, blogs were enclosed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter, killing off messy but vibrant grassroots media. Even movements like Occupy or Extinction Rebellion felt the same pressures: a burst of openness and creativity, followed by co-option, #NGO capture, and fragmentation under managed dissent. The lesson is always the same: once capital steps in, the mess is tidied away, and any possibility of change and challenge dies.

I have seen this on the #dotcons platforms we use as backups and hook for the #openweb native projects, our visionontv YouTube loses a video or two every month to not advertising friendly, copyright strike for clear fair use etc.

The #OMN Lesson, YouTube is repeating the same pattern we’ve seen across the #closedweb: a few years of openness and experimentation, followed by enclosure, consolidation, and financialisation. Capitalism cannot tolerate risk, it cannot tolerate diversity, it needs control, predictability, and growth at all costs. And that is the death of any real grassroots media.

The #OMN path is the opposite. We need federated, messy, trust-based networks where media is not just another asset class. Media must be inherently open – created, shared, and remixed under the #4opens. If we don’t build and defend this, the future of online culture is already sold out.

Mess and more mess, “diversity”

We need to look at our paths and current the controversy in “diversity” in our #deathcult worship, to see the need to compost the current mess. The problem with “pushing diversity” isn’t diversity itself. That’s fine – essential, even. The problem lies in the ideology shaping the push.

Much of it comes from #mainstreaming progressive liberalism, which operates inside the logic of the deathcult. It reduces diversity to a checklist, a branding exercise, a way to appear “inclusive” while leaving power untouched. This is not liberation, it’s management.

When we enter into these spaces, conversations about diversity collapse into the same-old mess: the mixing of right and left framings, suspicion on all sides, endless accusations. Instead of solidarity, we end up with #blocking. Instead of building, we burn out. The is no good outcome.

This is the normal worship of the #deathcult, the endless loop of optics and control, where movements fracture and collectives suffocate with “diversity strategies” that have no relation to grassroots realities.

The path as ever is compost. Take the mess – the liberal tokenism, the reactionary backlash, the burnout – and compost it into something alive. Composting means, returning to grassroots voices, not NGO checklists, seeing diversity as lived struggle, not branding. Grounding it in #4opens, where openness makes co-option harder, to turn toxic blocks into fertile soil for collective growth

The #OMN path is simple: it’s not about ticking boxes or replicating liberal #NGO frameworks. It’s about federated, messy collaboration that actually works. Diversity is not a corporate slogan. It’s the lived complexity of struggle. If we can compost the deathcult ideology that poisons it, diversity becomes strength rather than a management tool.

The question is, are we willing to compost the liberal mess, or do we let it keep rotting movements from the inside?

From “Woke” Capital to MAGA Capital – A Case Study

In the US, every presidential election is sold to us as a transformation of the nation. The chattering class pundits and their #fashionista followers tell us: a new people have been elected alongside a new government. Obama, Trump, Biden, each framed as a seismic cultural shift. But if you care to look, the reality is different: turnout is low, margins slim, the electoral college dulls change. What’s hyped as a national rebirth is just a reshuffling of the same #deathcult mess.

Still, perception matters. After Trump’s re-election, the “zeitgeist shift” rippled through politics and corporate boardrooms. Suddenly, dozens of corporations rolled back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (#DEI) programs. Woke capital simply pivoted into #MAGA capital.

Liberal woke capital was about projecting inclusion as market expansion: Pride logos in June. Minorities cast in blockbuster films. “Inclusive” ad campaigns. It looked progressive, but it was always about markets: new demographics = new customers. Sometimes the invisible hand holds a rainbow flag.

MAGA Capital, in contrast, is about disciplining workers and pleasing investors. It’s about showing loyalty to the strongman, not customers. DEI didn’t collapse because “the people rejected it.” CEOs saw an opening: align with Trump, roll back diversity, keep profits flowing.

The firings of Colbert and Kimmel crystallized this shift. Networks needed mergers approved. “Ratings” were the excuse, but raw political loyalty was the reality. This is crony capitalism: the stockholder and the strongman aligning. Trump, the fake businessman from TV, borrows legitimacy from profits and ratings, hiding authoritarianism in smoke and mirrors “democracy”. This is the logic of the #deathcult: all values are disposable, as long as accumulation continues.

Lessons for the #OMN path. The shift from Woke to MAGA shows how fragile diversity is when it’s managed as a brand. It’s reversible, hollow, and always subordinated to capital. For the #OMN and the #openweb reboot, the lesson is simple: Don’t outsource diversity to branding exercises. Don’t confuse representation under capitalism with liberation. Don’t build systems where power pivots on a corporate whim. Instead, compost the mess. Root diversity in lived struggle. Anchor it in the #4opens so co-option is harder and collaboration is resilient.

What should be more obvious is that capital, the #nastyfew, its servants, doesn’t care about values, only accumulation. If we want diversity, inclusion, and justice to be real, we have to build them outside the #deathcult logic, in federated, grassroots spaces that don’t bend every time the political wind shifts.

The question remains: will we keep chasing the mess of spectacle – Woke vs. MAGA, or will we compost it and build something more rooted, messy, and alive #KISS

It’s Not About You

We live in an era where everything tends to be framed in personal terms: your brand, your feed, your truth. This is from the ideology of #stupidindividualism witch tells us that the highest form of freedom is to curate a bubble and call it a life. But this is the common sense illusion, the mess we need to compost. When I say “it’s not about you”, I don’t mean you don’t matter. I mean: you really matter in relation to others. You, in society, in collectives, in struggles that go beyond the mirror.

Thinking only in the first person – the endless monologue of me, my, mine – is not freedom. It’s a cage. And in the non-personal, political sense, it becomes a form of blocking. Sometimes wilfully, when people refuse to act collectively because they want control. Sometimes will-lessly, when people have been so trained in individualism that they literally cannot imagine acting as part of a whole. Both forms stop us from building the commons we desperately need.

Blocking is social rot, it is not neutral, it kills movements, turns every initiative into a “project of one.” It’s why promising spaces collapse into burnout, sectarianism and co-option. #Stupidindividualism whispers: “If I don’t get my way, I’ll take my toys and go home.” But society can’t be built like that. Collective projects thrive when people accept that compromise is not defeat, that mediation is not weakness, that our worth is measured by what we build together, not what we hoard alone.

The path we need to take is, yes, it is about you. But not in isolation. It’s about you as part of us as a voice in a circle, a node in a federation, a shovel in the compost heap. The #openweb, the #OMN, the reboot of grassroots media, these are not projects that can survive on these monologues. They only live if we break the spell of (stupid)individualism and start thinking, feeling, and acting on collective paths again. Because the truth is simple: alone, we block; together, we build.

Why Fail Safe Matters Now

Full film Fail Safe (1964) is a cultural mirror, from another age, that helps us think about the next ten years of mess. With technical systems out of human control. The film’s malfunctioning machines map directly onto today’s algorithmic governance (#dotcons, #AI, automated warfare). Once the chain starts, humans can’t pull back.

Leadership under impossible pressure. Henry Fonda’s president embodies the loneliness of decision-making when systems collapse. Compare that to our current leaders, who are weaker, more performative, and less willing to carry the weight of consequence.

The Professor’s logic vs. human life: Matthau’s cold “game theory” feels like the #neoliberal technocrat mindset – numbers over people, outcomes over ethics.

The unthinkable concessions of the ending forces us to imagine the price of avoiding total annihilation – not a win/lose game, but a choice between different forms of catastrophe. That’s climate politics, resource wars, pandemics, and #dotcons algorithm risk we face.

What lessons can we learn for the next decade? System fragility is the real enemy – climate systems, financial systems, digital platforms: one glitch, and collapse ripples out. We don’t have the principle modernism, Fonda’s gravitas – our current elitists class are hollowed out by #PR driven populism; when the crisis comes, trust won’t be there. The “Professor” mindset dominates – policy is still guided by “hard” data, models, metrics, and “rational actors,” even though reality has long escaped those dogmatic frames. Watching Fail Safe today is like watching the #deathcult’s worldview in black and white: centralized control, elitist decision-making, people as statistics.

What we need is open, collective mediation – instead of waiting for one lonely leader in a bunker, we need horizontal systems (#OMN, #openweb) that can act before catastrophe hardens. The #OMN and the #openweb reboot are the anti–Fail Safe projects: decentralize agency, mediate conflict before escalation, building trust outside fragile centralized systems. It’s a powerful film, because it frames the stakes not just as “politics” but as civilizational survival.

It’s a film of our times, what can we learn for the #openweb? In 1964, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe held its audience in terrified silence. A simple technical malfunction – a misread code – sent American bombers hurtling toward Moscow. No one could call them back. The world’s survival depended on one president’s unthinkable decision. It was fiction, but it spoke to a truth of the nuclear age: centralized systems, once in motion, cannot be controlled.

Sixty years later, we are in our own Fail Safe moment – but this time the system is digital. The malfunction, is #neoliberalism embedded in our algorithmic #dotcons pipelines. As we push more #AI moderation system, hallucinates flags, the error replicates at machine speed across platforms. What began as a technical hiccup hardens into policy. Governments, seeing chaos, step in “to restore order.” dictators empower security agencies to control networks, to stabilise their hold on power. Like the bomber wings in Fail Safe, the system escalates itself. Once the order is given, there is no recall code.

The #OMN alternative to this is #KISS we need to build is affinity groups on the #openweb – messy, small, federated – to keep our communities talking. Instead of one brittle command chain, thousands of small nodes exchange trust. Instead of a sinal voice, a new signal-to-noise ratio emerges. This slows the shift right. People can begin to rebuild, bottom-up.

Fail Safe ended in tragedy, with a president sacrificing New York to prevent global annihilation. It was a portrait of lonely leadership in a centralised system gone haywire.

Our age offers another path. The lesson is stark that In centralised systems, malfunction = collapse. In federated, mediated systems, failure = resilience. The #openweb reboot is not about nostalgia for old tech. It’s about building structures that can survive the malfunctions ahead. When the next ten years are defined by glitches, spirals, and breakdowns – and they will be – then the survival of our social fabric depends on embracing the horizontal path.

The nuclear age taught us that a single misread code could end the world. The algorithmic age is teaching us that the current glitch could end society.

The #openweb native path gives us more of a chance to be Fail Safe.

#Film #coldwar #review

“Your Party” and the Fluffy/Spiky debate – a working path

A wider view of this https://nathanakehurst.medium.com/whose-party-ce23a8099624

Fluffy side: cautious, slow-moving, grounded in “keeping the peace” and managing optics. Classic problem: avoidance of conflict means bottlenecking decisions, blocking energy, and trying to centralise control, so things don’t blow up. Spiky side: impatient, direct, “get it done” energy. Spikiness pushes things forward, but often burns bridges, creating splits and mistrust. Neither path alone works – one stalls out, the other fragments. Their clash in the UK “Your Party”, just tore apart what was an opening for a broad left #mainstreaming alternative which we do need.

There are lessons here for horizontal/grassroots paths, a big one is that centralisation kills: When “leadership” becomes bottlenecked around personalities (Corbyn as “elder statesman”, Sultana as “young firebrand”), it reproduces the same control problems we see everywhere – #NGO capture, careerist gatekeeping, etc. Energy without mediation burns out: Spiky approaches are essential (they break inertia), but without social glue and open processes, the movement shatters.

Sadly, it’s looking like the political vacuum, is back. The 700,000 people who signed up are proof that there is real mass desire for something beyond the #deathcult #mainstreaming. But they’re now “homeless” – with no trustworthy structures to plug into. That vacuum will either be filled by opportunists (careerists, NGOs, “#fashernista”), or open the path for something like the #OMN: messy, federated, not centralised around personalities. And/Or the Green Party (this needs a separate post).

Focusing on the grassroots path I have been working on: this is exactly why the #OMN and #openweb reboot needs balance, so the signal-to-noise ratio can stay healthy. Otherwise, we just mirror the left’s long history of splits. What it means for the fluffy/spiky debate: The “Your Party” implosion shows us:

You can’t fix spiky by being fluffy. The soft style just frustrated allies and deepened mistrust.

You can’t replace fluffy with spiky.

The only path forward is process, not personality. That’s where horizontal projects like the #OMN can work – by creating open, transparent, mediated structures that don’t depend on charismatic individuals at the centre.

For the #openweb reboot, this bad moment is actually what we are working to fix. It shows how much energy there is (hundreds of thousands signing up). It shows the cost of control blindness. Likewise, it creates urgency for native governance paths and experiments in the #fediverse and beyond – where messy affinity-based groups, guided by the #4opens, can provide a home that doesn’t implode around personality clashes.

The question now is who can see the need for the practical mediation layer of the #OMN, is designed to bridge – not abstract theory – it’s the path that makes messy, spiky, fluffy humans work together without blowing everything up. For the #OMN and #openweb reboot, the answer isn’t “less conflict” or “more central leadership,” but better mediation and horizontal process, so collective energy isn’t wasted on repeating the same old splits.

What we are the seeing is the limits of #fashionista and #geekproblem control blindness.

How do we deal with this generation of people – formed by #neoliberalism, #dotcons, #mainstreaming, #stupidindividualism – when what’s needed is collective change and challenge?

The generation of the last 40 years of “There is no alternative” (Thatcher → Blair → Sunak/Starmer) produced passivity and cynicism. #Dotcons capture: people live inside algorithmic bubbles, shaped for consumption, not collaboration. This is the era of individualism as common sense: many can’t even imagine “the collective” except as a threat. We now face naked, fear + distraction: #climatechaos, wars, economic precarity → endless doomscrolling instead of agency. And this is why movements implode: the raw material (people) have been warped by the #deathcult.

What we can work with, even in this mess, people still show hunger for meaning (why 700,000 signed up for Corbyn–Sultana’s thing). Anger at the #nastyfew elitists (but it often gets channelled rightwards – Farage, Trump, Reform, conspiracies).

There are moments of solidarity (mutual aid, Palestine protests, climate camps). Skill fragments (#geekproblem energy, activist culture, DIY practice – but siloed). We don’t start from zero – we start from these contradictions.

Practical paths for dealing with this generation is in part about: Break the spell by expose #mainstreaming as a control system, using simple, repeatable stories (hashtags, memes, metaphors like composting/shovels) to make the invisible visible.

Then the path, affinity first, not mass. Don’t try to herd 700,000 people. Start with small, trust-based circles that actually work. Show results, not rhetoric. This attracts people who are sick of endless talking shops. Compost the conflict, instead of suppressing spiky energy (which turns toxic), build mediation layers, so conflict gets processed into growth. This prevents the inevitable splits from killing projects before they start.

We need working, visible alternatives, things people can touch: #OMN publishing hubs, #fediverse tools, radical media gardens. Each working piece is a counter-spell against “there is no alternative.” This is about reframing success and stop only measuring change in electoral wins or #NGO funding circles. We need to measure it in resilient collectives, working infrastructure, and shifts in common sense.

The challenge we need to compost, is that, the current generation has been trained in #stupidindividualism. What we need to learn is you cannot beat that as individuals, the only path is to recreate collectives – messy, organic, trust-based – where people can unlearn the #deathcult through practice. That’s why #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback matter: they’re not just tools, they’re containers for relearning collective life.

Looking for an affinity group to take the first step #OMN

The #algorithm on #YouTube has flipped hard right wing for me, a few other people have said the same, please add if you have seen this as well? If this is widespread, it shows how important it is to get normal people back to the #openweb reboot we are all involved in here.

This is obviously a form of social control, with the dominating of the #dotcons platforms in most peoples lives, plain and simple, the price of us building this domination.

The #hashtag story begins with disempowering the #mainstreaming in our own minds. First step: breaking the spell, realising we don’t have to live inside their frame.

Second step: forming the affinity group circle. Gathering with others who can see through the smoke and mirrors. From that circle comes the power to build the #OMN shovel.

Third step: composting. Taking all the #techshit – the failed projects, poisoned cultures, and dead ends – and turning them back into fertile soil. #OGB

What we do with that soil is up to us. That’s where the future grows. #KISS

The #geekproblem only sees #cavetechnology. But society is far too complex for that, you’d have to kill billions to make it work.

4opens is the opposite: a data commons. Light as a tool to fight with, not darkness to hide in.

Thinking outreach of the hashtag story