Composting the #techshit, planting the future

We have been stripped morally naked by the last 40 years of the #deathcult. Every assumption that we lived in a tolerant, “good” world is slipping away. The growing #classwar was historically balanced to stop the possibility of a socialist takeover, as blinded liberals see this, two accidents: a temporary ecosystemic surplus and a temporary post-WWII settlement. Both have been rapidly dismantled. And when this safety net, foundations are gone, the liberal illusions fall with them.

What this looks like in the USA, Trump, neoliberalism’s golem, is dismantling his creators’ project. The Democrats wander listlessly like puppets with their strings cut. Client states are facing rebellion without the normal imperial backing. This growing stagnation wasn’t an accident, it was the plan. Just enough suffering to keep people scared, not enough to spark revolt. Just enough democracy to keep people hopeful, not enough to allow change.

If things keep going without major changes, we end up with fascism or authoritarianism in every major country. The next possibility of change is whether China’s technological developments manage to hold global warming under 2 degrees. If not, every border becomes a vicious killing zone, not the “minor” ones we already live with, but a planetary system of militarised exclusion and death.

What would stop this? It’s unpredictable, maybe the reboot of an old ideology, or the dramatic growth of one that barely exists today. A return to #neoliberalism won’t help, and a return to pre-neoliberal #liberalism is impossible. Between 1850 and 1950, ideologies bloomed, clashed, and died. In the last 80 years? Nothing but consolidation and suppression pushed the current blindness. In digital media the #dotcons algorithmic machine is accelerating the mess, the traditional media world is closing.

The suffering is rapidly accelerating beyond tolerance, beyond what can be hidden. Some say immiseration brings revolution, but, revolutions comes when expectations of something better are dashed, not when misery drags on. In the 20th century Marxism, authoritarian socialism crowded out other left paths, and when it faded, little remained. For the mess to endure, #Neoliberals didn’t have to control everything; they just had to preside over a void.

And into this void for the last 20 years the blinded #fashionistas pushed the #dotcons. YouTube, Facebook, TikTok – as algorithmic machines feeding fear and control, that then went on to feed the hard right, who picked up the agendas and traditions of the left with the fall of the past left projects and paths. The right twisted solidarity into nationalism, collective action into mob violence, critique into conspiracism. We fucked this up, and now we have to fix it. The fix for this mess isn’t going to come from #mainstreaming policy papers or NGOs. The real fix has to come from the messy, grounded rebuilding of #classwar based open networks to grow and spread grassroots trust.

To make this change we need an affinity group to short circuit the hopelessness they sell us, yes, it’s easy for the few to see that this hopelessness is a lie. But shifting to the majority to rebuild #mainstreaming is a much bigger project. So a small step is projects like the #OMN. If we don’t plant something better like this, we will be force-fed the future YouTube and Meta have already chosen for us. And that future looks a lot like fascism dressed up as entertainment.

#KISS

A small view of steps we need

Evangelicals and the hardright

We’re seeing a pattern here in the UK similar to what Kristin Kobes Du Mez maps out in Jesus and John Wayne, the rise of hypermasculine, nationalist evangelical Christianity that’s far more about power than faith. It’s a core part of politics across the Atlantic for decades, and now the same push is happing here in the UK

Oxford city center, well funded free propaganda

In the US, white evangelicals didn’t back Trump despite his obvious corruption and lack of basic Christian values – they backed him because he embodied their real gospel: patriarchal authority, militant nationalism, fear of outsiders, and a fantasy of strongman salvation. Du Mez shows how generations of evangelical pop culture, from John Wayne to Duck Dynasty – laid the cultural foundations for this, replacing the Sermon on the Mount with cowboy swagger and authoritarian power plays.

Now, we’re seeing the UK version of this evangelical hard right mess pushing. Funded by US networks, hardline churches are expanding fast, particularly in working-class and migrant communities. These aren’t your local Church of England vicars or even your average happy-clappy congregations. We’re talking about groups pushing anti-LGBTQ+ agendas, climate denial, strict gender roles, and blind allegiance to state power, often with serious foundation and corporate money behind them.

Groups like Christian Concern, the Alliance Defending Freedom (which has set up shop here), and various Prosperity Gospel outfits linked to US megachurches are growing in political reach. Evangelical academies and ‘leadership training’ institutions are popping up, producing media-savvy influencers and aspiring MPs. The goal? To reshape UK politics around a Christian nationalist vision, just like in the States.

You can already see it in the way culture war rhetoric is creeping into #mainstreaming politics. Attacks on “woke culture,” trans rights, and environmental protections are all increasingly cloaked in moral panic and biblical justification. This isn’t an organic backlash, it’s strategy.

These churches are increasingly aligning with the hard right, providing the “moral” gloss for austerity, nationalism, and climate delay. And like in the US, they present themselves as victims, claiming persecution whenever they’re called out for bigotry and misinformation.

Let’s be very clear, this has little to do with Jesus, and a lot to do with building a new authoritarian consensus under the banner of faith, flag, and fossil fuels. If you want to know where we’re going unless we push back hard, look at the US. The seeds are already here, and they’re being watered with foreign money and feed on homegrown reaction.

A lot of resources are put into this outreach

This is why our response has to go beyond satire and eye-rolling. We need to compost this mess before it can root. Because this isn’t about church or state. It’s about who gets to shape the future, and who gets left out entirely. These people are funded to push the hard right mess in the UK. when you lift the funding lid, this is more about #classwar than “religion”.

Trumpism and the progressive paths to an alternative future

#Oxford

Enclosure of the openweb

This spirit of the early internet and #WWW – sharing, remixing, collectively creating – is the heart of what we once called the #openweb. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a space of possibilities, commons, where you could take what you needed and leave something behind, hyperlink by hyperlink. The tools were open – #RSS feeds, #XMPP and #indymedia were built to bridge between ideas and movements, not walls of monetized algorithmic sludge we have today.

But the #dotcons came. They fenced in the wild garden. What we’re living through now is a digital version of the enclosure of the commons, a #neoliberal land grab dressed in Silicon Valley T-shirts. Just like in 16th-century England, they drew arbitrary lines around our #4opens shared land (data, conversation, culture), declared it private property, and shut the gates. And we, the people, got algorithmic slop in return.

The comparison isn’t metaphor – it’s literal. Just as the landed gentry stole the commons to fuel the industrial revolution, the tech gentry stole our digital commons to feed surveillance capitalism. They did it through legalese, marketing BS, and brute force. We were left outside the firewalls, told to be thankful for “free” services while they harvested our metadata lives to sell back to us as advertisements and social control.

The #techbros didn’t invent this theft. They just updated the tools, the same ideological mess that displaced peasants from their land now displaces communities from their networks and platforms, kills independent sites, closes APIs, and locks away archives behind paywalls. Twitter’s 2023 shutdown of free API access? A textbook enclosure. Hundreds of # fashionista grassroots tools and bots vanished overnight, #Techshit at its most brazen.

And then there’s #RSS – the veins of the old web. Stabbed slowly. First by Facebook, then by Google. For the #fashernistas, the blade fell hardest in 2013 with the death of Google Reader, a quiet coup that pushed most of us into the fenced-off gardens of algorithmic consumption we live so much of our lives in today. The commons didn’t vanish; it was actively destroyed, under the smog of monetization, “engagement,” and corporate “safety.”

This isn’t #progress, it’s theft. The same kind that wears the mask of legitimacy because lawyers and lobbyists made it look neat on paper. The reality is old, it’s a #classwar fought with code instead of clubs, and it’s won because we stopped remembering what common “land” even looked like.

But not everything is lost. The #Fediverse, the #OMN (Open Media Network) still plants seeds in the cracks. #Wikidata, #OpenStreetMap, the #ActivityPub protocol, these are digital hedgerows that survived the scorched earth. They are messy, collaborative, and unmonetized. That’s their strength, that’s what the #fashernistas to often don’t get – they can’t sell what they can’t own.

The #geekproblem here is fatal, in both the grassroots and the #dotcons, too many technologists are blind to the politics in their code. In the #mainstreaming, they build better tools for corporations that destroy the commons. Over and over again. The solution? For the grassroots coders, compost the #techshit, seed something else, and reclaim what was always ours. As when we lift the lid, the #dotcons mess our unthinking #fashernistras, #NGO geeks call the internet is simply a thin veneer on top of what is actually ours, the #openweb

Let’s stop being polite about this. The #closedweb is a crime scene. The platforms we rely on are bonfires of common culture, feeding the engines of the next wave of control. If we don’t remember how we got here, we can’t get out. It’s time to say it plain: The privatized web is a #deathcult, and only a #4opens reboot can bring life back.

An article: https://johl.io/blog/enclosures-and-the-open-web

The left, right mess is on repeat

This is at the heart of the contradictions and confusion in the political landscape today. The liberal and left muddle, where elements of economic populism are shared across ideological divides, is something we’ve seen before, especially in the 1930s, when fascist movements co-opted working-class grievances while pushing reactionary nationalism.

Lets looks at history #Bannon, like the Nazi Röhm long before him, plays a dangerous game by mobilizing working-class anger against neoliberal “elites” but steering it toward nationalism rather than genuine class struggle. The key difference is that Bannon, unlike the decedent Röhm, seems aware of how these power games play out, he’s studied history and applies these lessons to manipulate movements in favour of the #nastyfew being pushed into power. The economic critiques overlap with parts of the left, but his solutions (corporate nationalism, authoritarianism) are the very real danger. The question is: how do we make these distinctions clear to people trapped in the populist right-wing narratives? We need a strategy to cut through the confusion:

Recentre on Class Struggle (#KISS #classwar) by striping away the nationalist framing and refocus on economic realities: who actually benefits from policies? Who holds power? Expose how right-wing populists co-opt class anger but always serve capital in the end.
Expose the fake anti-establishment, Bannon claims to fight “globalists,” but his solution is just another form of “elite” rule, corporate fascism, not worker control. The “anti-tech bro” stance is surface-level; fascists historically seek state-corporate fusion, not any real accountability.
Build a networked radical alternative, left populism needs to be clearer, bolder, and independent of liberal NGO-driven paths and politics. We need grassroots led movements like the #OMN
Break through the media fog, #Mainstreaming and #dotcons push right-wing populism by treating it as an acceptable part of discourse rather than a threat. Use independent media (like #indymediaback) to reframe the conversation on more clear class terms.

The 21st Century Struggle is about climate, class, and collapse. This isn’t just about fighting fascism, it’s about surviving #climatechaos and social collapse. The solutions that emerge now will shape the next century. If we allow the right to set the terms, we end up in corporate #feudalism. If we organize and push a real alternative, there’s still a chance to shift to something better.

How do we sharpen this message so it cuts through the noise? What channels do you see as effective? We need working change and challenge #KISS

Trump is more Italian #fascism than German fascism

Trump and the tools of the old world order

The defeatist Illusion of realism in the era of the #deathcult

Our everyday, often dogmatic “common sense” in capitalism disregards the history of socio-economic material conditions, #classwar, #ecocide, debt, slavery, violence, and oppression. In this we are currently blinded by the myth that there is no alternative to the current crap and broken system, this willfull blindness blinds us and obscures the brutal realities, pushed out of sight, on the edge of our “privileged” western lives. The narrative is too often of inevitability, the market logic pushing us down the path of extinction is natural and unchangeable. So, what can we do? It becomes obverse that we need to change this “common sense”, how do we do this?

To understand why capitalism cannot be reformed into an ethical system, we need to delve into its history. Capitalism always thrives on exploitation and inequality, the wealth of the few is built on the backs of the many, over the last 40 years, after the decades of hard moving away from 20th century social democracy this has accelerated into view.

Class War: The division between the working class and the ruling class has is stark, with the latter using their power to maintain and increase their wealth at the expense of the former. This struggle is not just economic, but also a political and social battle, deeply embedded in the fabric of our societies.

#Ecocide: Capitalism’s dogmatic pursuit of “profit” leads to environmental degradation, which now grows at on an unprecedented scale with the blinded pushing of #climatechaos. It’s simple, the logic of endless growth is incompatible with the finite resources of our planet. This drive for the illusion of total control leads to a legacy of destruction that we are now have to begin to reckon with.

Debt and Slavery: The modern economy is built on a foundation of debt, trapping people and “nations” in cycles of dependence and exploitation. This mirrors the historical use of slavery, where human lives were commodified and controlled to serve the interests of capital. While the forms of exploitation have changed, the underlying power dynamics remain the same. From colonial conquests to modern-day policing, violence is a tool of the capitalist system to suppress dissent and build control.

The liberal attempts to reform capitalism have failed because the system’s core is fundamentally unethical. Reforms serve to placate dissent without addressing the root inequality and exploitation. This band-aid approach leaves the structural issues intact, allowing them to fester and re-emerge in new forms we see today.

Economic Inequality: while making lives meaningful for meany people, wealth redistribution measures, such as progressive taxation or social welfare programs, do little to challenge the accumulation of capital by the worst people. When the cycle of boom and crash comes round, these measures are rolled back and undermined, highlighting the difficulty of enacting lasting change within the capitalist path.

Environmental Initiatives: Green capitalism, focus on sustainable business practices and eco-friendly products, fails to address in any way, the systemic drivers of environmental degradation. It results in greenwashing, where the appearance of sustainability masks ongoing ecological harm. It’s not working and is not going to work.

Social Reforms: While social justice movements have achieved victories, they face fierce resistance and are limited by the capitalist context in which they operate. True social change requires a fundamental shift in the distribution of power and resources #KISS

Today, we are at a juncture, the choice is simple: continue down the path of capitalist “common sense” with its smoke and mirrors and building crises, or embark on a journey towards a different, equitable, and sustainable future. This shift requires collective action, imagination, and the courage to change and challenge entrenched holders of power. The revolutionary calls for a new global movement established outside the collapsing system, ready, willing, and able to build examples of this alternative, so people have options to move away from the blinded “common sense”. In this change, we don’t actually have any choice!

#OMN #Revolution #NewFoundations #EndCapitalism #SustainableFuture #CollectiveOwnership #Degrowth #RadicalDemocracy #UniversalBasicServices #NonviolentChange #GlobalMovement #R21C #OGB

You can help make this happen https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

Brixet and the Labour Party -Why the media is full of lies

You do understand that almost all #traditionalmedia coverage of #brixet and the labour party is a right meme the labour party have a solid policy on this subject, that is not explained, thus the right wing meme issue. Please check sources before spreading media #openweb

I think meme is actually a good way of describing the issue as #traditionalmedia moves its #classwar into the internet era. They used to have a fig leaf of objectivity when the only news source. If you look this has now been removed, I suppose am not surprised people don’t look 😉

The labour party POLICY has nothing to do with #traditionalmedia agenders, its a sensible 3 stage democratic process. Ie most articals are FUD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

People push right wing memes from #traditionalmedia to the #dotcons were the algorithms push it into every unthinking addictive corner of society. Not surprisingly few people have any understanding of the policy of the British Labour party, nothing new here, but our own role, this is new.