One of the most powerful delusions of the #deathcult is our belief that capitalism is human nature, the way we organize work, money, resources and society is how the world works, that there is no alternative. The first step is capitalism is not a natural or spontaneous order, it is a political and economic system that has been built, enforced and maintained through institutions, laws, violence and control. We built it, we can change it.
Capitalism rests on two central relationships: wage labour and private investment, most people have no choice but to sell their ability to work for wages, while a relatively small group controls investment and therefore has enormous influence over what gets produced, why it gets produced and who benefits. The result is production organized around profit rather than human need.
This arrangement did not emerge because people naturally wanted to accumulate wealth, it was built through historical processes of enclosure, dispossession and the removal of people’s ability to sustain themselves outside the market. Once people lose access to land, resources and shared means of survival, they become dependent on selling their labour to survive. This is #KISS not freedom, it is coercion dressed up as (stupid)individual choice.
We are constantly told that austerity is necessary, that public services must be cut, wages restrained and unemployment tolerated to keep the economy functioning. But the unasked question is necessary for whom? Austerity is irrational from the perspective of human need, but, yes, it might be rational within an economic system organized around profit. As keeping people economically insecure weakens their bargaining power and makes them more dependent on wage labour.
The system isn’t necessarily failing when people become poorer while wealth accumulates at the top. It can be doing exactly what it was structured to do. This is why blaming individual greed or a few bad politicians is a manufactured distraction. We need to understand the systemic relationships that reproduce the inequality.
One of capitalism’s most effective blinded ideological tools is the idea that everyone is responsible for their own success or failure. If you are wealthy, you must have worked hard, made good decisions and behaved rationally, if you are poor, you must have made mistakes. This is mainstream #stupidindividualism turned into economic common sense. It hides the relationships of power behind the appearance of individual choice. It encourages people struggling under the system to blame those even worse off, rather than looking at who actually benefits.
This is mess is how the #deathcult maintains its cultural power: not just through coercion, but through consent. People are encouraged to accept the system’s power as their own, even when this power work against their interests.
Capitalism is historically recent, human societies have organized production, resources and relationships in many different ways. There is no single natural economic path that everyone must follow. We should be growing practical alternatives, at the #OMN we are working towards traditions of commons, mutual aid, solidarity economies and participatory democracy. It is practical work in to build and solidify how people come together locally, organize assemblies and begin making collective decisions about resources and paths.
This is important because alternatives cannot simply be written down in academic papers or announced by politicians, they have to be built through practice. People need places where they can learn, organize, experiment and develop the confidence to make decisions together. This is where the #OMN path can become more clear for people.
The #openweb faces a similar problem, we have spent decades allowing the infrastructure of communication and social organization to become dependent on private platforms, commercial investment and corporate control. We are told this is simply how technology works, the #dotcons are inevitable, that centralized platforms are more efficient, and that the only realistic response is to make them slightly nicer.
But this is the same trap, the technology is not neutral, and neither are the economic relationships behind it. Who owns the infrastructure? Who controls the data? Who decides what is visible? Who benefits from the work and relationships that people create? The #4opens and the #OMN are practical different paths of shared infrastructure, open data, open standards and open processes, rooted in grassroots participation rather than private enclosure.
We need to move beyond individual self-interest and build the collective capacity to manage the things we depend on. That means community ownership, mutual aid, shared resources, participatory governance and practical alternatives that people can use in everyday life. It also means recognizing that technology alone will not solve social problems. We need the people, relationships and organizing processes that make the technology meaningful.
We need to reclaim the language of freedom, not only the ability to choose between products in a market. This path is about having a real say over the material conditions of our lives: food, housing, work, resources and the systems we depend on. Democracy cannot stop at voting occasionally while economic decisions remain in the hands of elitist monsters. It needs to reach into the everyday organization of society. This is a practical challenge, not just an ideological argument.
We need to start locally, build alternatives that meet real needs, connect those experiments and create pressure for wider change. The #OMN is part of this work, not a grand solution delivered from above, but an path to build the shared media, information and governance infrastructure that helps grassroots communities develop collective agency.
We are not trapped because capitalism is human nature. We are trapped because we have allowed a particular set of social relationships to become normal, invisible and difficult to challenge. The first step is to see the trap, the next is to build outside it. We built this world, we can build something different. A path of more #lifecult, less #deathcult. More commons, less enclosure. More collective agency, less #stupidindividualism.
The current centrist revolt won’t change the system that produced Trump and the rest of our hard right mess. It might remove one president and replace him with another, but it won’t dismantle the economic power, imperial interests, class structures and political culture that keep producing these outcomes. Trump isn’t the system’s opposite or some unfortunate accident, he’s a product of it.
Too much focus and energy is wasted on #mainstreaming story’s, as though defeating a #nastyfew man will somehow resolve the deeper crisis. This is a convenient, but nasty, distraction: it turns a structural struggle into a personality contest leaving the machinery of power invisible to carry on untouched. The problem isn’t just who occupies the White House or any other centre of vertical power. It’s the entire system, the culture that normalizes it, and the empire that sustains it. We need system-level thinking at the forefront of political dialogue, not another round of #fashionista personality politics and electoral theatre.
But #dotcons social media algorithms reward exactly the opposite: simple enemies, endless outrage, tribal loyalty and shit agents. They push the symptoms into the spotlight while hiding the structures that produce them. And we shouldn’t blame the algorithms alone. They exploit a political culture already addicted to spectacle, easy answers and the fantasy that changing the face at the top will change the world underneath.
The challenge is to stop confusing a change of political management with a change of system. We don’t need a different caretaker for the same failing order. We need to build the collective power to change the order itself #KISS
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.
Our choice for the last 20 years has been between the #deathcult and #fascism, how the hell did we get into this mess? And how do we find a way out? To build a path we need shovels, not saviours. We need to dig through the shit, compost failures and regrow paths to grassroots collective power. To work on this we need to stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start rebuilding the ground beneath our feet.
Politics is the human condition, you’d have to be mad as a hatter, or a liberal, to imagine we can somehow escape it. We live in messy times, and they’re getting dirtier. Politics isn’t going away, the question is whether we organize collectively to shape it, or leave the field to the #nastyfew people already digging our collective graves.
To be clear, what I’m putting forward doesn’t solve any single problem. What it does is take a practical step towards solving many problems, by changing how we work together. What we don’t need is market-based “green” solutions, elitist control or any more left-wing hero worship – as all feed into the same trap – the #deathcult of #neoliberalism. That common sense keeps us looking upwards for leadership, waiting for markets to save us or hoping the next hero will finally get things right, meanwhile, our uncommon sense collective ability to act decays.
To use a shovel we need is to move beyond fear and control towards trust, open processes and grassroots power. And yes, this isn’t the normal #blinded path about finding another perfect ideology to worship, it’s messy, its about growing practical tools and relationships to allow us to act together, to learn from failure and make change possible.
I should not HAVE to keep saying this, but this is what the #4opens process is about – moving beyond #stupidindividualism, beyond copying the #dotcons, and towards a path we can actually walk together. Open data, open source, open standards and open processes are practical starting points for shared responsibility. They test us, to build in public, hold power to account and create commons that belong to participation rather than private ownership.
The last 50 years of common sense monetization of everything is the #deathcult, as is the endless me, me, me that fragments our ability to act collectively. We won’t compost this mess by repeating the same individualistic habits with a few new slogans, we have to change the practices that keep reproducing it.
At #OMN, we’re turning to decades of grassroots experience of practical tools for collective action. #OGB, #indymediaback, #MakingHistory people have been working on for years. But, they’ve been stuck at the development stage for far too long. The challenge now is to get them moving, connect the people and skills involved, and turn activist traditions into working infrastructure for grassroots media, shared knowledge and collective organization.
This isn’t a magic solution, it’s a way to start growing many solutions from the ground up, rather than waiting for the market, the state or another self-appointed hero to deliver them. Please get off your knees, pick up a shovel, the ground is covered in mess, but that’s exactly why we need to start composting. We have plenty of shit to work with, and plenty of seeds worth saving.
We need to incurage people to better balance personal coping with collective power to challenge the #DeathCult as we are living through a time when the world is becoming harder to live in, yet the dominant message is that we must learn to cope better as individuals. #Climatechaos accelerates, inequality deepens, and the #nastyfew accumulate wealth and power while communities struggle to meet basic needs. Democracy is hollowed out, public services are weakened, and the institutions that should protect us increasingly serve the interests of those who already hold power.
The answer our #fashionistas sell us is to often more self-help, become more resilient, set better boundaries, meditate, journal, practise mindfulness and learn to manage our anxiety. Some of these things can help, and people need space to rest and recover. But something is deeply wrong when the response to a collective crisis is an endless demand for individual self-improvement. If we are all busy fixing ourselves, we have less time and energy to challenge the systems making our lives harder.
This is #stupidindividualism, the assumption that social problems can be solved through private choices, personal discipline and consumer spending, rather than collective action and shared responsibility. It is one of the ways we worship the #deathcult – learning to experience structural failure as personal inadequacy. When work becomes unbearable, we are told to improve our resilience. When communities fall apart, we must develop better coping strategies. When insecurity becomes normal, we must manage our anxiety. The system remains unquestioned, while the individual becomes the problem to be solved.
Even care becomes another market, we are sold products, subscriptions and services to help us endure conditions we have little power to change alone. We are encouraged to become healthier and more resilient while the social and ecological foundations of our lives continue to deteriorate. Self-care matters. But there is a difference between caring for ourselves so we can live, and being encouraged to care for ourselves so we can tolerate the intolerable indefinitely. Self-care without community becomes sedation.
The same problem runs through the economy – this individualizing logic is not confined to self-help. It runs through the mainstream story about how the economy works. We are told that markets are natural, competition is inevitable, profitability is the ultimate measure of success, and alternatives must prove themselves within the very system they seek to change. Even the economic left remains trapped in arguments about how to improve capitalism’s imperfections, rather than questioning the assumptions that organize it.
The liberal fantasy of perfect competition hides the struggle taking place inside the economy. Real firms fight for markets, push down costs and seek advantages over workers, suppliers and rivals. This is not an unfortunate deviation from a harmonious market, it is central to how capitalism operates. Profit, and exploitation, is not simply a side effect, it is an organizing principle.
Businesses invest where they expect returns. Capital moves towards greater profitability, shaping employment, production, trade and investment. Communities lose industries and economic security because production has moved elsewhere. Environmental destruction can remain profitable when its costs are pushed onto workers, communities and future generations. What is profitable and what is socially useful are not the same thing.
An economy can grow while people lose security, solidarity and control over their futures. Environmental protection is supported when it makes money, and decent wages are defended when they improve productivity. But what happens when doing the right thing becomes less profitable? When justice depends on profitability, justice remains conditional.
This is the wider #deathcult, a path that treats accumulation as success even when the social and ecological consequences are destructive. Our head down worship of this mess teaches us to accept the economy as an impersonal machine, beyond our collective control, rather than as a set of human relationships and institutions that people have built, and can change.
The myth of the isolated individual. The economic story and the self-help story share a deeper assumption, that people are fundamentally isolated individuals, responsible for maximizing their own interests. But people are not calculating machines operating outside society. Our behaviour is shaped by relationships, emotions, culture, class, gender, nationality, history and the influence of others. What we want, what we believe is possible and how we act are all shaped by the communities and institutions in which we live.
When we build institutions around the assumption that everyone is an isolated competitor, we reward competition and weaken cooperation. We then point to the resulting behaviour as proof that competition is simply human nature. The system produces the behaviour it expects, then uses that behaviour to justify itself.
The same pattern appears in our personal lives. We are encouraged to compete for work, status and security, then blamed when we become exhausted, anxious or isolated. We are told to become better individuals rather than asking why our lives have been organized in ways that make collective well-being so difficult. This is not an argument against personal responsibility, it is a rejection of the idea that personal responsibility can substitute for shared responsibility. We cannot solve collective problems by treating every person as a separate problem to be fixed.
From private survival to collective care – the alternative is not to shame people who are tired, overwhelmed or unable to do more. Demanding that everyone become a full-time activist would reproduce the same pressure to perform and succeed that helped create the problem. People need rest, they need friendships, personal space and the freedom to step away from constant crisis. But personal peace is not the same as collective freedom.
We need to rebuild the social structures that make care possible: mutual aid, local groups, shared spaces, grassroots media, community resources and relationships where people participate without turning everything into a transaction. This means making participation possible at a human scale. Share skills and resources. Build trust, create spaces where people can disagree, work through conflict and take practical action together. Let people contribute what they can, rather than expecting everyone to do everything.
Care is not simply something we consume, it is part of how we organize our lives together. Real freedom means more than managing our own private existence, it also means having a collective say in the conditions we live in. The path we need now is from collective care to the commons, this is where the #OMN – Open Media Network – fits into a wider political project.
If the existing system organizes life around profitability and private accumulation, we need to build spaces where social usefulness, collective participation and shared responsibility can become organizing principles in their own right. We need grassroots media and archives that serve communities rather than advertisers. We need cooperatives and worker-owned organizations where people have a meaningful stake in decisions. We need shared infrastructure that communities govern, rather than relying on corporate #dotcons platforms and institutional #NGO gatekeepers.
We need to move past the people currently #blocking. The #OMN is not another platform promising to solve society through technology, it is a practical attempt to help communities share news, preserve collective memory, connect local struggles and build trusted flows of information. It is about moving power towards the people who create and use media, rather than leaving it concentrated in the hands of corporate platforms or a small groups of technical elitists.
The challenge is to better connect the technical, economic and social dimensions of the commons. To grow a different common sense. Were we have ways of understanding society that connect theory to lived experience, expose the power relationships hidden behind supposedly neutral systems, and help us test alternatives in practice. We need to stop treating the market as a neutral measure of human value, just as we need to stop treating individual resilience as the answer to collective breakdown.
The personal and the political meet in our everyday lives, in whether we have time to rest, whether we can afford to live, whether our communities have places to gather, whether our work is meaningful, whether we can trust one another, and whether we have any real power over the decisions shaping our futures. These are not separate problems, they are connected expressions of how society is organized.
So to sum up, the task is to move from private coping towards collective agency. Less pressure to optimism ourselves, more power to change the conditions we live in. Less isolation, more mutual aid. Less consumption disguised as healing, more care organized through community. Less dependence on profitability as the measure of value, more collective power to decide what matters.
We are not simply broken individuals who need to become better at surviving a broken society, we are people who need the collective space, trust and tools to build a better one. That is the work of the #OMN, the #openweb and the grassroots commons paths, connecting personal well-being with community well-being, critical understanding with practical participation, and #4opens technology with pushing collective power.
We have more than enough code, what we need is technology that helps people build power together. If you work in free software, #FOSS, decentralized networks or the #Fediverse, you probably already understand some of the problems with corporate #dotcons platforms. You may be building alternatives because you want technology to be more open, more democratic and less controlled by a handful of corporations.
That is a good place to start, but there is a recurring problem in grassroots technology – we keep trying to solve social and political problems by building more technology. A new protocol, another platform, a different database or a cleverer technical architecture is offered as the answer. Yet the same old problems keep returning, concentrated power, passive users, gate keeping, status games and communities that struggle to organize themselves.
This repeated outcome is what we call the #geekproblem, the habit of treating human problems as if they were primarily technical ones. The way past this is not a blinded luddite reaction to abandon technology, it is to connect our technical skills to the social realities they are supposed to serve, that is where the #4opens as social technological path comes in.
Open source, #FOSS is by it self necessary, but it is not enough. Open-source code matters, open protocols matter, without them, communities have little chance of building infrastructure they can inspect, adapt and maintain themselves. But open code does not automatically produce an open community. A project can publish its source code while keeping its data inaccessible. It can implement an open protocol while making participation difficult. It can claim to be decentralized while leaving all the meaningful decisions in the hands of a few developers or administrators.
Think about a project that runs on an open-source codebase. Can its users access and move their data? Can other projects connect to it using shared standards? Can the community understand how decisions are made, challenge them and take part in shaping the project’s direction? If the answer is no, then the project may be open in a narrow technical sense while remaining closed in practice.
This is why we use the #4opens as a practical framework:
Open Data: The data can be accessed, reused and shared under clear, appropriate terms.
Open Source: The code can be inspected, modified and redistributed.
Open Standards: Interfaces and formats make it possible for different systems to communicate and interoperate.
Open Process: The decisions, governance and working practices are visible enough for people to participate and hold power accountable.
These four openings work together, none is a substitute for the others. The path we hope to take from this is rebalance people-to-people before the normal peer-to-peer were decentralization is presented as a technical property. Build a peer-to-peer network, distribute the data, remove the central server and the problem is solved. But a network can be technically decentralized and socially dysfunctional when peers still fight, exclude people, hoard influence and reproduce the same hierarchies found on corporate platforms.
This is also where we encounter the #encryptionist tendency, the belief that cryptography and protocol design can replace the need for human trust and collective responsibility. Encryption is essential where privacy and security require it. It protects people from surveillance and helps keep private communication private. But it cannot decide how a community should resolve a disagreement, distribute responsibility or hold an administrator accountable. Nor can it establish that every person using a system is acting in good faith.
#P2P needs to mean people-to-people before peer-to-peer. The point of decentralized technology should be to strengthen relationships between people and communities, not to pretend those relationships can be engineered away. For developers, this changes the questions we ask. Instead of only asking how to eliminate a central server, we also ask how communities can share infrastructure, moderate their spaces, move between services and maintain control over their collective work.
The technical architecture matters, so does the social architecture. We need to stop rebuilding the same problems Grassroots technology has a familiar cycle. A project emerges with a strong vision, builds useful tools and attracts a community. Over time, technical complexity grows, a small group accumulates influence, participation narrows and the original purpose becomes harder to recognize.
Eventually, people leave or start building something new. The next project promises to solve the previous project’s problems, but often carries the same habits into a fresh codebase. We call this #techchurn, the problem is not that developers experiment or that software needs replacing. It is that we repeatedly invest energy in new technical systems without doing the harder work of changing the social patterns around them.
We reproduce #stupidindividualism: everyone wants autonomy, but few people want the shared responsibilities that make autonomy possible. We fall into blocking and exclusion instead of building workable ways to handle conflict. We mistake technical authority for community legitimacy. And when governance is left informal, power does not disappear. It becomes harder to see.
Someone still decides what gets merged, which features matter, who receives access, which conflicts count and whose complaints are ignored. If these decisions cannot be understood or challenged, an ostensibly open project can become a small technical fiefdom. Open Process means treating governance as part of the infrastructure, not an awkward extra to discuss after the code is written.
That does not mean every code review needs a committee or every decision requires a vote. It means being clear about who decides what, how decisions can be challenged and how responsibility can be shared or handed over. Good technical work should make those relationships more accountable, not hide them behind complexity.
Build infrastructure for the commons – the #4opens are not another badge to put on a project website. They are a way to ask whether our technology helps communities build and maintain shared resources. A commons is more than something that is free to download. It involves people who use, contribute to and take responsibility for a shared resource, with practices that help keep it useful and prevent it from being captured by a narrow interest.
This matters for grassroots media, community archives, local networks and the wider #Fediverse. These projects need more than software that runs. They need ways to preserve collective memory, share information across communities, moderate public spaces and maintain infrastructure beyond the lifetime or interests of any single developer.
For the Open Media Network (#OMN), this means thinking about media as shared objects moving through trusted community flows, rather than treating every platform as a separate walled garden. It means connecting projects through open standards and bridges, while leaving communities room to make their own decisions. The goal is not to build one giant system that controls everyone. It is to help local projects work together without surrendering their autonomy.
That is a different technical challenge, that asks us to build for interoperability, repair, reuse and community control rather than endless engagement, growth and platform replacement. To find this path we need to look for the gaps, perhaps the code is open but the data is trapped, perhaps the protocol is open but the project has no workable way for its community to influence development. Perhaps the governance looks good on paper but all the practical knowledge sits with one exhausted administrator.
These are not reasons to dismiss a project, they are places to start improving it. You can help document systems so others can maintain them. You can make data easier to move. You can build bridges between existing projects instead of another isolated platform. You can help communities share moderation and maintenance. You can make governance visible without turning every small task into a bureaucratic exercise.
Above all, you can work with the people who will actually use and maintain the tools to move from technical skill to collective power. The wider problem is political. Corporate platforms concentrate power because their business models reward extraction, dependency and control. Replacing their code without challenging those relationships will not get us very far.
We need to stop treating every failure as an invitation to start another platform. We need to connect our technical work to existing grassroots communities, shared resources and the practical struggle to build alternatives. The #4opens offer a simple starting point. They help us ask not only whether technology works, but who it works for, who controls it and whether people can collectively change it.
For technologists, this is an invitation to bring your skills into a bigger conversation. You do not have to become a political theorist, abandon your craft or agree on every detail. You do need to recognize that technical decisions shape social power, whether or not we choose to discuss that openly. The challenge is not simply to write more open code, it is to build open, usable and accountable infrastructure that people can make their own.
Build tools people can understand, share what they need to maintain them. Connect projects rather than trapping them. Make decisions visible. Help communities develop the confidence and capacity to govern their own infrastructure. That is how we move beyond the #geekproblem and begin to compost #techchurn into something more useful.
Open the code. Open the data. Open the standards. Open the process. Put people first. That is the #4opens. That is a practical starting point for rebuilding the #openweb as a grassroots Commons.
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?
This #blocking conversation on the #oxfordboaters chat is a intolerant conflict between trying to manage the immediate problem and building the collective process needed to stop the same problems recurring. Lets look through a needed #KISS lens at the cludge between reactive (stupid)individualism and the harder work of building community structures.
The immediate conflict is a symptom, not the underlying problem
The conversation is filled with suspicion and frustration about people, conduct, and the proposed response to HT. There is a concern, and a #blocking that the group is accommodating behaviour that should be challenged. This is a two sided mess we need to compost as these conflicts become more damaging because the group lacks the processes and structures needed to deal with any collective working path.
Politeness and niceness become tools of control
The articles smiling-faced vileness and WhatsApp plebiscites reveal the wider mess we need to compost. That enforced niceness discourage the needed confrontation, that composting is about. Our focus on informal #dotcons chat platforms encourage reactive opinions and shallow consensus rather than sustaining any working collective decision-making. People trying to challenge dysfunctional paths are framed as the problem because they make the people blocking and obscuring uncomfortable.
In this self creating mess, the pressure to remain agreeable prevents a working group empowered culture from developing the capacity to act effectively. This is not an argument against kindness, it is an argument against using politeness as a weapon of control to substitute for accountability, political clarity and collective action we need.
The current flipping of #WhatsApp groups is this same problem because it shapes the process. This is a part of the blinded objection to setting up the #opencollective page, its unthinking #blocking, not merely technological. The group had an opportunity to move away from the limitations of the #dotcons but instead blindly reproduced the same failed patterns and paths that are shaping the current mess.
The underlying argument here is simple that the tools we use shape what we can collectively do. When the group stays locked into a reactive chat environment, where decisions emerge through fragmented discussion and informal fear based influence, it becomes harder to maintain any shared direction, to challenge obstruction or organize sustained work we need. The medium is helping to reproduce the dysfunction we already suffer from.
The group needs basic, half step, working activism infrastructure, like moving to Signal chat from WhatsApp, not just more noise, and blind reaction inside the #dotcons. Then we have #OpenCollective role in cutting through and composting this crap, to establish a clearer organizational and resource base. then the simple process of Working Groups give people defined areas of responsibility and #KISS accountability, with out this the is ZERO trust that we can deal with conflict without repeatedly returning to the same informal blocking arguments and paths.
The purpose for this change is not bureaucracy for its own sake, it is to make collective action possible without relying entirely on personal relationships, goodwill or whoever happens to be most active in the chat.
Working groups are not a magic solution
Yes, working groups often disappear, and the same people end up doing all the work. That is a genuine challenge to any horizontal path. Composting is not just adding more material to the pile, it requires active work to turn the material into something useful. A working group without responsibility, follow-through and a shared direction is just another layer of organizational clutter. What it dose give us, and what we need, is transparency and focus, it can be used as a path to organically work round the nasty-ness of smiling passive blocking.
We need to focus, on taking responsibility for growing the path out of our group’s own dysfunction. The difficulty is not an external force that the group can do nothing about, the group is reproducing its own problems through its current practices. Instead of treating every dispute as a fresh crisis caused by particular people, the group needs to examine the conditions that allow the same patterns to recur. That means moving past blame to structure, from reaction to process, and from informal influence to shared responsibility.
The immediate HT response is distracting from the work
The disagreement is not necessarily about whether NBTA proposed response is factually or tactically sound. It is about whether solving the immediate problem is being allowed to substitute for fixing the conditions that keep producing these problems. The group needs an active pause, to examine the wider issues and decide whether it is willing to pursue a more functional collective path.
What is not working or sustainable is the current messy flow of immediate conflict, suspicion, frustration, disagreement. We need to compost the mess of enforced niceness, reactive chat, informal power and avoidance of any difficult questions. Its been a year and we still have no reliable shared process, clear responsibilities or sustained collective organization. OpenCollective, working groups, #KISS structures and accountable processes. So the question that matters is can we do the difficult work of changing our practices, or just continue reacting to each new crisis?
Lets look at these flows – first, #stupidindividualism is strong, treating each incident as a problem of individual behaviour rather than examining the social structures that reproduce it. Even when people recognize that something is wrong, they remain trapped in personal reactions, competing opinions and informal status games. The answer to this kinda mess is not to build an elaborate governance system, it is to establish the minimum viable structure that allows our group of disparate boaters to make decisions, share responsibility, resolve disagreements and get things done. Simple does not mean structure-less.
We need to focus on social composting of the existing conflict, frustration and failed attempts are the raw material for building something better. But they do not transform themselves, the current people (or a smaller subset of them) has to do the work of turning experience into shared learning, practical process and renewed collective capacity. The important distinction is that a working group, an OpenCollective account or a new chat platform is not, by itself, an alternative. These are tools, the alternative is the commons practice that makes them useful. There is still to wide a gap between identifying the problem and making the solution work in practice.
Peoples objection exposes this – how do working groups avoid becoming inactive, and how do they stop the same few people carrying all the work? The next step needs to have solid moorings, what is each working group’s purpose? Who has committed to take responsibility for this work? The #4opens is core here, how are decisions made and communicated? What happens when commitments are not met? How does the group review progress and change direction? Yes, without answers to these questions, calls for structure risk becoming another round of mess created discussion. With them, #KISS becomes a practical path rather than just a principle to stand on.
The Oxford boaters’ problem is not simply a difficult dispute with #HT, it is that the group is trying to act collectively through bad, reactive and conflict-avoidant practices that repeatedly undermine our ability to act. Rather than building the simple, accountable structures needed to turn shared frustration into collective power we need to keep our moorings. That is the central #OMN point – stop trying to fix each new mess in isolation, and start building the community process that compost our mess into something useful.
This mess is driven by climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems, they reinforce each other. At the same time, we are seeing a feedback loop of political movements built around fear, scapegoating, hierarchy and fantasies of escape. This creates a basic question we need to focus on – how do we build the means to live through these crises together, rather than retreating into individual survival, authoritarianism or delusions of technological escape?
One of the strongest #blocks running through the current crisis is, what could call, exit culture. You can see this in the wealthy #nastyfew who push the mess attempt to buy their way out through the nasty fantasy of private security, property and technology. Some feed political movements that imagine an escape into an ethnically or culturally purified nation, the hard right. Some religious movements look towards another imagined world. Some technology #geekproblem culture imagines that humanity can escape its material limits through AI, automation, space or digital transcendence.
The world is broken, so find a way out, a dangerous stupid social response to the systemic social and ecological crisis. But any one with any sense can see there is no #stupidindividualism exit from #climatechaos. There is no technological #dotcons platform that allows us to escape social relationships. And there is no bunker large enough to protect a society from the consequences of destroying the living systems it depends upon. What is needed is we need to actively be composting this mainstreaming mess, the alternative is not to escape, it is to focus on becoming more capable of being here.
Then on the left the is a matching fantasy, we romanticism collapse, but it is not automatically progressive. It is easy to look at broken institutions and think that their collapse must create an opportunity for something better. But collapse has no political direction of its own, maybe it can produce mutual aid, solidarity and new forms of democratic organization. More likely we get authoritarianism, scapegoating, violence and stronger hierarchies.
The outcome depends partly on what people and communities are ready to do when crisis washes over them. If communities have networks (like the #OMN), relationships, communication systems, practical skills and ways of making decisions together (like the #OGB), crisis can become an opportunity to build something new. If they don’t, people are much more likely to fall back on fear and whoever appears to offer simple answers.
So preparation matters, but preparation is hopeless, if people do not pick up the tools or when it means becoming an individual survivalist. We need to balance this commons sense urge, with working collectives to create social relationships and grow ways of looking after each other. It is now 20 years past time to move for survivalism to #KISS mutual aid, we need focus on how do we make sure people can look after each other when things become difficult?
That means better late than never to building relationships before the crisis, knowing who is around us, knowing how to communicate, where resources are, how to organize. Knowing how to disagree without destroying the group, how to make decisions, share responsibility. This is grassroots working democratic resilience from the bottom up.
We need grassroots repossess to authoritarian pushing insecurity – find someone to blame – the nation against the foreigner – the majority against the minority – the “real people” against outsiders – the pure against the contaminated. The hard right are pushing belonging through this kinda blaming exclusion.
We need to work to balance this mess, we need another form of belonging, that means building coalitions capable of holding difference without turning every disagreement into another power struggle. We need to compost the false choice between local organizing and large-scale networks, we need the strong local relationships to provide the social foundation of our change and challenge.
But we also need #KISS technology as tools, #4opens flow networks to allow those communities to exchange knowledge, resources and experience without surrendering their autonomy. This is one of the reasons the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub are interesting. Federation gives us a technical path where independent communities can remain independent while still communicating with each other.
This principle can extend beyond the current #openweb reboot of the fedivers, copying #dotcons social media. We need to build projects like the #OMN based on local relationships + open networks = distributed resilience. This is a much more interesting path than simply building another or replenishing the normal centralized platforms we currently live inside. This move need to be based on technology that supports social process rather than replace it with blinded control.
We don’t need a perfect future, a lot of political narrow thinking is trapped between two fantasies. One says, the existing institutions will eventually fix themselves. The other says, the whole thing has to collapse before we can build something new. It is dangerous to accept either of these paths blindly. What we do need is to grow, trust networks, practical democratic experiments, its fine that none of these are perfect. They need to work better than the current mess, to connect people and communities, so they can step from fear to cooperation.
The current hard right is good at turning insecurity into fear, they feed from fear of migration, cultural change, technological change. Fear of economic collapse, losing status and fear of the future. But the knee jerk reactions cant be to simply tell people not to be afraid as people have real reasons to feel insecure. The better balancing is to build something that gives people something better to fall back on than fear. That means replacing fear → scapegoating → authoritarianism with crisis → cooperation → solidarity. Not in a utopian sense, but as practical path.
On the native openweb path this is the question and the bigger reason for building the #OMN. As we don’t know exactly what the next twenty or forty years will look like, we do know that the existing system is becoming increasingly unstable. We know that #climatechaos is accelerating, that #dotcons technology is concentrating power. We know that authoritarian politics is growing. And we know that simply defending the existing structures is not enough.
So rather than waiting for the next crisis to tell us what to do, we start building now. Practical grassroots paths, not as an escape route, another #closedweb platform as smoke and mirrors for another hierarchy waiting to take control. A network of people and communities that can communicate, remember, cooperate, organize and govern themselves. That is the native #openweb path to compost this mess, that is the practical meaning of the old slogan “another world is possible”.
We don’t have to wait for another world, we can start building the means for it here.
There is a temptation to see today’s hard right move as something new. Looking at this mess, the #deathcult is the name I use for the destructive logic of #neoliberal capitalism: a world where profit, growth and competition are the dominant measures of value, while human needs, shared resources and collective responsibility are pushed aside.
If we want to understand the political crisis, we need to dig beneath its surface of how social crisis becomes authoritarian politics. The hard right doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, it draws power from the insecurity, anger and social fragmentation that this system helps produce. History offers some uncomfortable lessons.
Mussolini came from the socialist movement before breaking with the left over the First World War and moving towards nationalism, political violence and authoritarianism. Early fascism combined different political currents before developing into a more defined authoritarian project. In Germany, the Nazis used the myth that internal enemies had betrayed the nation to explain defeat and social crisis. Antisemitic conspiracy theories became central to their account of national decline.
The pattern matters more than any simple comparison between past and present. A society experiences economic insecurity, political failure and declining trust. People feel betrayed, existing institutions appear unable to respond. There are often genuine grievances underneath this anger, the dangerous move comes when structural problems are turned into stories about enemies.
Economic insecurity becomes the fault of immigrants. Political failure becomes the fault of an imagined conspiracy. Cultural change becomes evidence of national decline. Complex social problems are reduced to a few people or groups who can be blamed. The system disappears from view, and the scapegoat takes its place. This is politically powerful because it gives people a clear target without requiring anyone to challenge the structures producing the crisis.
The promise to make the nation great again, authoritarian nationalism often offers a story of lost greatness and promised renewal. Mussolini drew on an idealised image of the Roman past. Nazi ideology constructed a racialised national community around ideas of ethnic purity and exclusion.
National identity itself is not the problem. People need belonging, shared history and meaningful relationships with the places where they live. The danger comes when belonging becomes exclusion. “We live here together” becomes “this is ours, and those people do not belong.” A collective need for security is turned into a demand to identify outsiders. The promise of renewal becomes permission to deny others their place in society.
This is one way the #deathcult and the hard right can reinforce each other. A society organised around competition and insecurity leaves people looking for explanations. Authoritarian nationalism offers belonging and certainty without requiring a fundamental change to the economic structures producing the insecurity. The blame moves around, the underlying system remains.
The important point is the process of #mainstreaming. In social democracy, a fringe idea becomes a campaign demand, it enters a manifesto, other parties adopt parts of it. Newspapers discuss it as common sense, eventually, the boundaries of acceptable political debate have moved. The mess is not only the most extreme position, it is the gradual normalisation of the assumptions underneath it: that particular groups are the cause of national decline, that exclusion will restore social stability, or that some people’s rights can be treated as expendable.
This is how political culture changes before a decisive break with democratic institutions ever occurs. There is an important difference between the political environment of the twentieth century and our own, as the #dotcons algorithmic control industrialize the problem. The old hard right relied on newspapers, meetings, party organisations and physical networks. Today, political messages also travel through algorithmic platforms capable of distributing them at enormous speed.
The #dotcons turn grievance into a feedback loop: anger → attention → engagement → more anger. A complicated social problem becomes a short video with a villain. A conspiracys travel faster than a careful explanation. Outrage becomes a product, and the systems distributing it have incentives to keep feeding people these digital drugs to keep people engaged.
The #dotcons commercial incentives of attention-driven systems amplify conflict, reward emotional reaction and make it harder to sustain a shared understanding of reality. That is part of the #techshit problem, were, technical systems built around commercial incentives reproduce and intensify social problems while presenting themselves as neutral tools.
The #deathcult encourages #stupidindividualism the idea that everyone is responsible for their own survival, that social problems are individual failures, and that collective solutions are either impossible or unnecessary.
History shows how political fragmentation pushes authoritarian movements. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, conflict between the left’s major parties, violence and the selling out/weakening of parliamentary government contributed to the conditions in which the Nazis gained power.
Polarization makes collective action harder when it turns differences into an existential conflicts, when movements spend all their energy fighting internally, they stop building. When every disagreement becomes betrayal, cooperation becomes impossible.
When people lose the ability to work together across differences, someone can arrive promising to settle everything through force and authority. This leaves people isolated precisely when they need one another. When the emergency becomes permanent, we cannot build an alternative society if we destroy every space in which we might cooperate.
Another historical warning concerns the politics of exception. Authoritarian movements argue that ordinary democratic processes are too weak to handle a crisis, extraordinary circumstances supposedly require extraordinary authority. An emergency like on rushing #climatechaos does not automatically produce authoritarianism, societies sometimes genuinely need exceptional measures to respond to immediate dangers.
The #deathcult thrives on the claim that there is no alternative. The hard right turns that same sense of inevitability into a demand for control. If people are persuaded that the only choices are fear or authoritarian order, the space for alternatives becomes smaller. This leads to the next stage of the #deathcult – when human beings become economically useless.
Beneath these political mechanisms sits a deeper problem, the idea that human worth depends on blinded economic usefulness. As people are encouraged to see themselves as individual economic units, competing for a place in a system that treats profit, growth and capital accumulation as its highest values. Work harder. Consume more. Compete better. Become more productive. Apologise for needing anything.
What happens when you become ill, disabled, unemployed, old, poor or simply unwilling to spend your life enriching someone else? If your value depends on your productivity, it becomes easy to treat your needs as a burden and your existence as something that must be justified. This is one of the cruellest tricks of #stupidindividualism: a structural problem becomes a personal shame.
People begin asking whether they deserve a decent life, rather than asking why the conditions for a decent life are being made conditional in the first place. At the same time, the concentration of wealth creates opportunities for a small number of #nastyfew actors to influence politics, media, infrastructure and public debate. The danger of systems that weaken accountability and treat the suffering of some people as an acceptable cost of doing business.
Homelessness, preventable illness, poverty, displacement and environmental destruction do not all arise in the same way. They do, however, show how human needs can be subordinated to other priorities. A system can destroy lives without ever officially deciding to kill anyone. The question is not only whether a class of people might directly target those they consider economically useless. It is why we tolerate arrangements that make some lives more expendable than others.
And why do we internalize that judgement, apologizing for our existence instead of challenging the system making us feel ashamed? The problem is social, not individual, as there is no individual solution to a fundamentally collective problem.
We cannot buy our way out of a crisis produced by the concentration of wealth and power. We cannot solve social isolation through endless individual self-improvement. We cannot rebuild shared reality by retreating further into personalised feeds and private bubbles. Nor can we expect a change of politicians, a new app or another set of slogans to solve the deeper problem on its own.
We need to rebuild the social capacity to act together, that means practical communities, independent media, shared resources, public accountability and spaces where people can disagree without destroying their ability to cooperate. It means creating alternatives before a crisis forces us to act, rather than waiting for existing institutions to fail completely.
This is where the #openweb becomes important, the #OMN: news, archiving and governance. The path is news → archiving → governance. Before we can govern together, we need ways to remember together. Before we can remember together, we need trustworthy public media. And before that works, we need communities capable of disagreeing without destroying themselves.
The #OMN works towards federated media flows in which people and communities can publish, subscribe, moderate, archive and share information without handing ownership of the entire media environment to a central platform. The #4opens – open data, open source, open standards and open process – provide practical principles for examining whether this infrastructure is genuinely open and accountable.
The aim is not to pretend that technology alone will save us, it is to build tools that support collective participation rather than passive consumption, and shared resources rather than platform ownership. The same principle lies behind #OGB, the Openweb Governance Body: exploring how autonomous communities coordinate, negotiate and govern their relationships without surrendering everything to a central authority.
These projects are small parts of a much larger social challenge. But they offer a practical direction beyond simply complaining about the existing system. This is social composting: learning from the mess
We need to compost history, that does not mean romanticizing the past or pretending that every earlier movement got things right. It means treating history as material we can work with. Keep what helps us understand, expose what failed, learn from the damage. Do not repeat the structures that produced it.
The hard right thrives when people believe that the only choices are fear or control. The #deathcult thrives when people believe that there is no alternative to competition, extraction and permanent insecurity. Our task is to make other possibilities practical.
Trust instead of fear, commons instead of concentrated ownership, participation instead of spectatorship, cooperation instead of permanent culture war. Not another shiny political platform, and not another round of #techchurn. We need social infrastructure through which people can build together, maintain shared memory, challenge concentrated power and create alternatives rooted in everyday life.
The future is not predetermined, the worst outcomes are not inevitable. But ignoring the mechanisms that produce them will not make them disappear. The hard right becomes dangerous while its assumptions are becoming normal. The #deathcult becomes harder to challenge when we mistake its values for common sense.
We need to dig at the roots, not just cut back the visible growth. Pick up the shovels to start growing the commons. That’s the #OMN path.
One of the simplest lessons from revolutionary politics is that power should stay with the people doing the work, not with a permanent party, bureaucracy, or managerial class. This has strong relevance for the #OMN project’s first step.
A clear second step is needed, one that moves beyond reformism as an end point, not a rejection of reforms outright. Winning better wages, shorter working hours, stronger rights, and better conditions matters. These are how people develop confidence, solidarity, and an understanding of their collective power. The problem arises when reform becomes the destination, rather than a deeper process of social change.
When movements become satisfied with managing the existing system, the system itself becomes invisible. Language changes, structures become professionalised, leaders become representatives, activists become stakeholders, and participation becomes consultation. Eventually, the movement is managing the symptoms of the system it originally wanted to change and challenge.
Reform is a means of building collective power, not an excuse to abandon the possibility of fundamental change. We’re not interested in building better communications infrastructure to serve existing power structures. Our path is changing who has meaningful power over media, information, and governance.
This is an old story, moving from representation to participation – council communism. The alternative paths explored were the workers’ council, a project like the #OGB, where power wasn’t handed to a permanent party leadership.
In our 21st-century digital version, delegates are sorted, held accountable, and recallable. Governance bodies federate together without becoming subordinate to a permanent central authority. To grow spaces were the question is not – who represents us? The question isn’t who represents us, but how people participating in something retain meaningful control. A very different starting point from the current mainstreaming.
The #OMN social tech project is built from this federation, not centralisation. People and groups participate locally while remaining connected to bigger networks through #4opens standards and shared protocols. A local group is autonomous while participating in a wider network. #OGB ideas like recallability, transparency, open process, and distributed decision-making become practical, not just theoretical.
For the #OMN, the daily struggle and larger transformation are connected, reform is a means of building collective power, not an excuse to abandon the possibility of fundamental change. On this path, we are not interested in building better communications infrastructure so that the existing power structures can communicate more efficiently. Our path is changing who has meaningful power over media, information and eventually governance.
But, yes, there is a temptation to romanticise grassroots movements, we should resist this, as the historically these paths declined for good reasons. They were to frequently divided by factional disputes, ideological arguments and organisational conflicts. We should not need to repeat how suspicion of bureaucracy sometimes became suspicion of organisation itself.
To heavy structure creates problems, but to light structure also creates problems, if you build no durable structures, somebody else eventually fills the vacuum. Romantic anti-authoritarian intentions do not automatically produce democratic outcomes, a group can reject formal hierarchy while developing powerful informal hierarchies. A movement can reject leaders while allowing a few confident voices to dominate discussions. An organisation can demand decentralisation while becoming impossible for ordinary people to participate in, and can become so fragmented that cooperation becomes harder than centralisation. This is one of the most important lessons, that shapes the #OMN.
Decentralisation needs usable governance, that is not to abandon structure, but make structures that remain accountable to the people using them. That means keeping governance simple enough to understand, open enough to inspect and flexible enough to change. It means separating coordination from ownership, by making sortition temporary and contestable.
This is where the #OGB idea becomes important, It allows people to disagree without turning every disagreement into a schism, and build processes that can survive this disagreement. The path is governance that can become something communities can actually do, rather than something handed over to specialists.
Then we need the #4opens as a defence against capture, it is not simply a technical preference, they are social safeguards. Together, they make it harder for power to hide/disappear into a black box. Openness creates places where hierarchy can be seen, challenged and, when necessary, bypassed. We need this to mediate the mess of everyday elitist vanguards that claims to speak for us, but the balance is, neither do we want a collection of isolated individuals pretending that society does not require organisation – the trap of #stupidindividualism. People need shared infrastructure, shared knowledge, shared processes and ways of making decisions together, to hold commons in place.
With the #OGB people participate directly, delegate where useful, contest decisions, fork when necessary and reconnect when possible. That makes low-energy structures more flexible than both the traditional party or the centralised platform. Democracy cannot simply be postponed until after the revolution as people learn collective power by exercising it. When they make mistakes they argue and experiment, change their minds to find what works through participation. Democracy is therefore not just a mechanism for selecting leaders, it is part of the process through which people become capable of governing themselves
We need useful historical lesson about keeping power close to participation. As when a party, committee, NGO, platform or the normal technical elitists begin making decisions on behalf of everyone else, the movement’s own capacity for self-government begins to atrophy. The #OGB simply keeps delegation recallable and infrastructure federated, processes visible and standards open. To keep governance simple enough for ordinary people to use.
And, critically, we need to grow enough structure that disagreement does not automatically destroy the organisation. This is the balance we are looking for, not bureaucracy – not chaos. Not permanent leadership – not isolated individualism. But, native grassroots federated, participatory, accountable organisation. Please – don’t forget anti-authoritarian intent is not enough, without workable governance, openness and trust, decentralised movements can still fragment, stagnate or recreate informal elitists.
The #OMN path is about building the infrastructure to hold those two truths together. Power to the participants, structure without hierarchy, federation without centralisation, governance without a ruling class. That is the path from old political arguments towards more practical working commons paths.
The #deathcult is selling the void, turning meaning into a market, in this post we cover the normal themes of #stupidindividualism, commodification, atomisation, trust and community.
One of the deeper tricks of the #deathcult is that it doesn’t only sell us products. It sells us back the meaning, belonging and connection that the system itself has striped away. Nietzsche’s famous declaration “God is dead.” was not simply that religion was disappearing, but that an outdated system of shared meaning and moral authority had collapsed.
For many people, that leaves a void, a longing for meaning, connection, protection and purpose, for something larger than the isolated self. And where there is longing, capitalism sees a market – consumer capitalism, the market for meaning has always promised that dissatisfaction can be solved through consumption. Buy the car, the clothes, the holiday, the experience, buy the lifestyle. But what this hides is the more profound needs of belonging, meaning, safety, trust, community – don’t fit comfortably into commodity form – more stuff does not fill the hole – so the market moves further inward.
Instead of simply selling objects, it starts selling the self with self-improvement, self-mastery, self-optimization and personal growth. Manifestation and spiritual awakening, the lie becomes: the problem is not the society you live in, the surrounding relationships, or the structures shaping your life, the problem is you. And in the mainstreaming, conveniently, there is always another influencer peddling a course, book, retreat, coach or guru available to fix you.
This is the perfect market because the product must never work, if people actually became fulfilled, the market would disappear. So people need to remain almost healed, almost whole, almost happy, almost enough – the longing itself becomes the business model – this is #stupidindividualism dressed as enlightenment.
Then we have religion reborn – the commercialised form of Western spiritualism – not community ritual, religion or spiritual practice, but the Instagram-ready world of manifestation, “high vibration”, gurus, retreats and personal enlightenment. This supposedly alternative culture simply reproduces the core values of capitalism: individualism, control, competition, self-surveillance and the hero narrative.
Our current “thinking” instead of challenging these values, we spiritualise them, you are told that your thoughts create your reality, everything happens specifically for your personal development. That success proves you are aligned, suffering means you failed to think correctly. The fantasy is that you can become the god of your own reality.
This looks like liberation, but underneath it is the same old #stupidindividualism. The individual becomes the centre of everything, society disappears, material conditions disappear, history disappears and power disappears. The outcome is you treat other people as supporting characters in your personal journey, then exploit them by turning structural problems in to personal failure.
This is where politics becomes important, if every outcome is understood as a reflection of your mindset, then structural criticism becomes difficult. Poverty? It is a mindset problem. Loneliness? Means you need to work on yourself. Abuse? A lesson the universe sent you. Illness? Your energy is wrong. Failure? You did not manifest hard enough.
The effect of this “thinking” is deeply conservative, instead of asking why people are suffering, we tell them their suffering is evidence of their own failure. Instead of rebellion, we get self-improvement. Instead of solidarity, introspection. Instead of collective action, another #SEO journal.
This is an affective #mainstreaming way of neutralising dissent because it turns social pain into private inadequacy. The death of empathy is the ugliest part of this, if someone’s suffering is something they “manifested”, then nobody has to sit with them in it. Nobody has to listen, has to ask what happened, has to offer real help. A platitude replaces solidarity “Everything happens for a reason.” “You need to forgive.” “This is a lesson.” “You attracted this into your life.”
The language sounds caring, but the practice becomes the opposite – cruelty is renamed healing, blame as wisdom, detachment is renamed enlightenment. This is simply more emotional capitalism, were the language of empathy remains everywhere, while the actual social practice of empathy disappears, but when empathy dies, connection dies with it.
Community is dangerous to power, people who gather can organise, people who form relationships can resist. People who trust each other become harder to govern through fear and isolation. The current mess does not need tanks in the streets to atomise people, it can do it culturally as when connection is labelled dependency, needing people becomes weakness and community becomes inconvenient. In our worship of the #deathcult the ideal person becomes the isolated, self-managing individual who treats every problem as something to solve alone.
At the #OMN we keep coming back to the #mainstreaming problem. Why? A system is most powerful when its values stop looking political, when they become common sense, when individualism becomes blinded freedom, competition becomes human nature, consumption becomes happiness. Self-surveillance becomes personal growth and isolation becomes independence. At this point, the system barely needs to tell people what to do, people reproduce the values themselves. They discipline themselves, blame themselves, sell the same worldview to each other. The #deathcult ideology becomes culture, becomes infrastructure.
But, the path away from this mess is simple, without followers, the hierarchy collapses, this is particularly obvious in digital culture. The supposed influencer is still dependent on likes, subscribers, sales, views and reputation. They claim independence while being embedded in the same attention economy they supposedly escaped. They are not outside the market, they are a particularly efficient product of it.
We need to remember that human beings have always created ritual, meaning, myth and shared practices. The #OMN path points in this direction, less self-obsession, more participation. Less individual optimisation, more shared action. Less influencer culture, more horizontal knowledge. Less performance, more trust. Less “fix yourself” more “build something together”.
The #openweb matters here because the structure of our technology also shapes our culture. The #dotcons push the isolated individual, your feed, brand, your followers, your engagement, your identity. The #deathcult repeatedly breaks social things into individual fragments and then sells them back to us. It breaks community and sells networking, meaning and sells lifestyle, confidence and sells self-help. It breaks connection and sells social media, belonging and sells branding.
The answer is not another product, its simply to rebuild the social fabric that commodification has been eating away. Yes, real connection is messy, solidarity is inconvenient, community involves disagreement, compromise, responsibility and mutual care. You cannot optimise it, you have to participate in it. And it is one of the reasons the #OMN keeps saying the same apparently simple thing – Trust matters. Community matters. Participation matters. The #deathcult wants you staring endlessly into yourself, the commons start when we look outward and find each other #KISS
I kind of though this was incomplete so did some reading and added this section.
Maybe focus on different paths to get a balance of good and bad…
The Chinese Cultural Revolution remains a difficult and important experiences for anyone seriously interested in emancipatory politics. It is tempting to reduce it to the normal #mainstreaming a story of authoritarianism, Mao, political violence and social chaos, but doing that misses something more useful. The Cultural Revolution was also a huge experiment in what happens when millions of people are encouraged to challenge established political power and create new forms of organisation.
Its failure raises a question that remains relevant today – how do people share real power without reproducing the behaviour of the structures we are trying to replace? – This is a central question for the #OMN path to walk from challenging power to creating alternatives.
The distinction between dismissal and pluralisation.
Dismissal is the politics of removing people, defeating factions and taking control. It is fundamentally about deciding who should have power and who should be excluded from it.
Pluralisation is different. It is about people organising themselves, experimenting with new relationships and creating institutions outside existing hierarchies.
The Cultural Revolution contained both tendencies, in its early years, independent organisations and new forms of mass political participation emerged. But these experiments became caught up in factional struggles. Groups began fighting over who would control political power rather than concentrating on what new forms of social organisation they could create.
The result was destructive, the politics of negation overwhelmed the politics of creation. This distinction matters as it is relatively easy to define what we are against. It is much harder to build something that people actually want to participate in. A movement can become good at identifying enemies while becoming progressively worse at creating alternatives.
That is one of the traps that the #OMN path is avoiding. A simple problem is that authoritarianism does not require a state, it is possible for people to reproduce authoritarian relationships among themselves. You can see this today in cancel culture, how ordinary people became involved in policing one another, enforcing political identities and attacking those considered insufficiently revolutionary.
This creates a difficult problem for anyone pursuing decentralised or anti-authoritarian politics, simply removing the state does not automatically create freedom. Simply decentralising power does not automatically make relationships democratic. A crowd can become authoritarian, a community can become authoritarian, a movement can become authoritarian or a social-media group can become authoritarian.
Even a supposedly horizontal organisation do develop informal hierarchies, gatekeepers and systems of exclusion. This is why “power to the people” is not enough as a political programme. We also need structures that help people exercise power without turning that power into domination over others. This is what the #OGB is for and about.
The danger of dismissal has a connection with what we now call cancel culture, although the underlying behaviour is much older than social media. The important issue is not simply criticism of individuals, criticism is necessary in any functioning democratic culture. The problem is the development of an internal policing culture where belonging depends upon ideological or moral purity. People are divided into the good and the bad. Disagreement becomes evidence of corruption. Mistakes become grounds for exclusion and political differences become moral crimes, eventually the movement starts consuming its own members. This is the logic of dismissal.
And it is particularly dangerous for grassroots movements because they lack the institutional safeguards that exist, at least theoretically, within formal democratic structures. Without some way of managing disagreement, accountability and conflict, decentralisation simply produce competing factions fighting for informal control.
Creation has to be the core path, this is the most important lesson, not simply “don’t be authoritarian.” It is more positive than that. Build, build! Institutions, relationships, build commons, build democratic practices, build alternative infrastructures. Build ways for people to participate without having to surrender control to a central authority, this #KISS step changes the political question.
Instead of asking – who should control the existing system? We ask – what can we create that makes the existing system less necessary? This is a much more interesting question, that moves politics away from permanent opposition and towards experimentation. The goal is not simply to seize somebody else’s institution and run it with different people, it is to create institutions with different relationships built into them.
Then we have the old stalwart of class analysis, this is useful for understanding economic power and exploitation, but when class becomes a moral label, it becomes another mechanism of dismissal. Someone is no longer disagreed with because of what they are proposing, they are dismissed because of what category they have been placed into.
This creates a strange reversal, the people who were supposedly building a more egalitarian society can become increasingly concerned with identifying and eliminating the “wrong” people. The category becomes more important than the political project, a historical paradox that people who had been oppressed under the old system could become defenders of the new hierarchy, while people from previously privileged backgrounds could become radical opponents of bureaucratic privilege. People are more complicated than political categories that matters for any attempt to build a genuinely participatory politics.
A needed balance is that institutions matter, we should not only romanticise spontaneity. People organising themselves is important, grassroots experimentation is important, but spontaneous organisation does not automatically remain democratic. There need to be ways to deal with disputes, abuse, exclusion, manipulation and concentrations of informal power.
This does not mean rebuilding a centralised bureaucracy, more about developing lightweight (like the #4opens) democratic institutions that protect pluralism and participation. The challenge is to create enough structure to prevent domination without creating so much structure that the institution becomes another hierarchy. Yes, a difficult balance, but avoiding the problem does not make it disappear.
The #OMN project is not about building another political machine, it is to experiment with infrastructure that allows people to organise, communicate, publish, archive and make decisions while retaining meaningful control over their own participation. That means moving away from the logic of the centralised platform, instead of one organisation → one authority → one set of rules, we can explore, many participants → shared protocols → transparent processes → distributed participation.
But distributed does not mean unaccountable, the infrastructure needs mechanisms for trust, moderation, transparency, rollback, correction and disagreement. The aim is not to eliminate conflict, it is to make conflict productive rather than destructive. But openness alone is not enough, an open system can still develop closed social relationships. A technically decentralised network can still become dominated by a few people. A community project can still develop gatekeepers. So the technical architecture and the social architecture have to develop together.
This is why the #OMN path is not simply about technology, it is about learning how to build social systems that are capable of remaining open, while not repeating the politics of negation. The path is therefore be surprisingly simple, a movement cannot define itself forever by what it opposes. If all our energy goes into removing enemies, exposing bad actors, denouncing ideological impurity and winning internal arguments, we eventually become trapped in the same power logic we claim to oppose.
We need to spend more energy on creating, create spaces where people can participate, commons where people can contribute without surrendering ownership to a corporation, archives that preserve collective memory. We need media systems that don’t depend upon algorithmic gatekeepers, governance where disagreement does not become exclusion. Not only that, but we need to create institutions that can learn, this path is the difference between negation and creation.
We need a path, not a blueprint. Questions to address, problems any emancipatory movement has to confront. How do we prevent bureaucracy from becoming permanent? How do we stop decentralisation becoming factionalism? How do we deal with disagreement without turning it into moral warfare? How do we give people real power without enabling new forms of domination? How do we create democratic institutions that remain open to change?
The #OMN therefore starts from a path of creation rather than dismissal, we should not try to build a perfect system. We build systems that people can participate in, question, modify and improve. That means accepting disagreement, allowing experimentation to create mechanisms that prevent any one group from permanently capturing the commons. This path to self-government has to be learned, practised and institutionally supported.
Freedom is not created simply by removing authority, it is created by building the social relationships and institutions that allow people to exercise power together without turning that power into domination. That is a much harder project, but also the more interesting one.
The #OMN path is not about taking power – it is about building the capacity for people to share power #KISS
