Tag: deathcult

Why the #OMN needs a different path

The problem we face isn’t simply that the system is broken, it’s that we’re still trying to fix it using the thinking that built it. This path of only describing how bad things are, identifying the bad actors and demanding that those in power do better have failed to produce the necessary change. We already know the problems. We have mountains of research, reports, campaigns and expert recommendations. Yet the machinery keeps rolling. Why?

We should understand by now that the problem is deeper than bad decisions or a lack of information, it’s embedded in the social processes through which we create what we accept as rational, reasonable and possible. the work of composting this mess has important connections with what we’ve been trying to work through in the #OMN. The is a trap we need to shovel is the #mainstreaming idea of rationality.

    We have inherited a political culture that assumes if we provide enough evidence, make a convincing argument and present a reasonable solution, people and institutions will eventually do the sensible thing. But this isn’t how power works – institutions develop their own interests, habits and survival mechanisms. Media, government, professional organizations and political movements reinforce one another. They create a shared version of reality that becomes detached from the conditions outside of this narrow view.

    This is the current problem with #mainstreaming – the constant reproduction of accepted thinking, even when that thinking is clearly failing. The problem isn’t that rational thought has no value, it’s that treating rational argument as the only legitimate way of understanding and changing the world leaves out the emotional, cultural and social processes that actually shape human behaviour. We end up arguing only inside the very framework we need to be challenging.

    Over the last 50 years we have made a compleat artificial mess of our society, economics and political systems and this fog of complexity (re)creates the current political paralysis. Responsibility gets distributed across supply chains, institutions, technologies and distant relationships. Harm becomes normalized because nobody sees the whole process or feels directly responsible for its outcomes – createing a dangerous form of desensitization.

      We are continually presented with crises, disasters and warnings, each is supposedly unprecedented, yet the next arrives before we’ve processed the last, eventually, even enormous problems become background noise. The #deathcult survives partly through this exhaustion, we become accustomed to systemic failure and lose the ability to imagine anything different.

      More information alone won’t fix this, we need different social processes for making sense of complexity and acting collectively. We need circuit breakers, not more common sense hierarchy. One core path to this is projects like the #OGB, with the use of randomly selected body members (voices) to create federated’ assemblies, useing three essential elements:

        Sortition: bringing people into the process from outside established political and institutional networks.

        Free deliberation: giving them space (working groups) to think and work through problems without simply following existing political loyalties.

        Real authority: ensuring their conclusions have meaningful social power.

        The metaphor that might have power on this needed path is the #circuitbreaker. Instead of allowing the same institutional networks to reproduce the same decisions, introduce a process that interrupts established power and creates space for different outcomes. This for the #OMN is the #OGB: grassroots governance with mechanisms that distribute power, allow participation, enable recall and prevent permanent leadership positions from becoming personal fiefdoms. Its #KISS, we need to build these processes into the technology itself, not bolt them on afterwards.

        This possible opening takes us into working alongside the current blinded rationality to try to rebuild human connection. People aren’t rational processing units, social movements aren’t management systems. Trust, shared experience, imagination, solidarity and collective practice are essential parts of how people make change. This is one of the biggest problems with the #geekproblem, the assumption that if we build the correct technical system, the social problems will somehow resolve themselves. They won’t.

          Transgression means building outside the existing paths and frameworks, not simply better campaigning, better messaging or more efficient versions of existing institutions. We need to challenge the assumptions that make the current system appear inevitable. For the #OMN, this means moving beyond the familiar cycle of identifying problems, writing reports, applying for funding and waiting for institutional approval. It means rebuilding grassroots media, shared infrastructure, collective governance and human relationships. It means creating practical alternatives that people can participate in.

          The #openweb is part of this, not as another technology market, but as a different way of organizing information, ownership and social power.

          • gives us a practical starting point: open data, open source, open standards and open process.
          • #OGB explores how we can build horizontal governance into the foundations rather than relying on whoever happens to hold the keys.
          • #indymediaback is about recovering the grassroots media practices that once made independent networks possible.

          These aren’t separate technical projects, they are parts of wider attempts to rebuild the social conditions for collective action. But to make this path work we need to compost the biggest danger, that we fall into the same mess, as the existing system becomes more unstable, we double down on its assumptions. More hierarchy, more professional management, more institutional control, more technology promising to optimize the same broken processes.

            This is the familiar #mainstreaming response of absorbing the criticism to turn it into another professional programme and carry on as before. We need to resist that pull, we need to keep to the path as the answer isn’t to find better princes and kings, or to build more sophisticated digital castles. It’s to create systems where power is shared, decisions remain accountable and people can participate without needing permission from above.

            We need to compost assumptions, recover the grassroots knowledge buried underneath and grow something different to take the path of less management of the existing mess, more practical experiments in building what comes next. The future won’t arrive as a finished blueprint, we have to grow it together.

            A (un)romantic view of composting this with swearing

            Composting the #deathcult means building an alternative

            For 40 years we’ve been told there is no alternative. The neoliberal #deathcult has made a religion of markets, competition, individualism and profit. We’ve been told to keep our heads down, accept the consequences and leave everything to the market. Now look at where this has taken us. People work hard but cannot afford housing, food, energy or the basics of a dignified life. Economic insecurity grows while wealth and power concentrate in fewer hands. Democracy becomes hollow when governments tell people that nothing can be done about the things that matter most in their lives.

            This is fertile ground for fascism – when the existing system becomes unbearable, we become open to #nastyfew fascists who promise blinded alternatives. On one hand the far right understands this, offering belonging, agency and a mythical better past, but builds that promise around exclusion, hierarchy and the dehumanization of others. On the other hand the progressive failure is that we have not built a convincing alternative.

            We cannot simply defend the existing mess and expect people to keep believing in it, nor can we offer abstract utopias without practical paths for getting there. We need to start with the things people actually need:

            • A floor under people’s lives, affordable housing, food, energy, transport and care.
            • A ceiling on concentrated power, challenge monopolies and corporate capture.
            • Shared public infrastructure, public options that put people’s needs before privatized profits.
            • Democracy, participation and collective power in the decisions that shape everyday life.
            • Ecological transition to change how we produce and distribute resources.
            • International solidarity, stop treating the lives and livelihoods of people elsewhere as expendable collateral damage.

            But there is another deeper layer we need to take seriously, the social/tech infrastructure that makes these alternatives possible. This is where the #OMN path is useful, we need to rebuild the grassroots networks, independent media, shared spaces and open processes that allow people to organize, communicate, disagree and cooperate. Not more centralized platforms, not more #NGO-shaped projects or another collection of isolated individuals competing for attention.

            We need practical commons infrastructure that grows trust, participation and collective agency. The native #openweb is part of this path. Then the give us a practical starting tool: open data, open source, open standards and open processes. this can put more of us on paths were technology supports human relationships and collective organization, not replaces them.

            The central lesson is simple – the hard right is offering people a sense of agency in a world that has taken their agency away. We cannot defeat that by simply shouting louder about how bad the far right is, we have to build something people can actually participate in, see working and believe in.

            This is social composting – stop defending the rotting system, stop getting trapped in endless symbolic battles. Dig into the shit left by 40 years of #deathcult worship and turn it into the healthy ground for something better. We don’t need another saviour, we need to rebuild the collective ability to act so grab a shovel, build the compost heap, grow the alternative.

            Leading in an age of disinformation: who gets to control the truth?

            lets look at an example of this. I went to a Kellogg Conversation at Oxford on “Leading in an age of disinformation”. It brought together voices from the BBC, science, policing and business to discuss how leaders should respond when truth is contested and trust is fragile. What was interesting was not just what they said, but what each institution revealed about its own relationship with power.

            • The BBC talked about information control: status games, motivation, fear, help and the growing influence of state actors. Its concern was how established media can retain trust when the old gatekeepers no longer control the flow of information.
            • The police talked about social control. Their interest in social media and influencers was largely about outreach, reaching people through trusted voices and using influence to support policing agendas. There was a strong desire for information to be state sanctioned, controlled and not in any way alternative..
            • Business talked about money control. Influencers, marketing and AI were discussed through the familiar language of reach, reputation and trust. The underlying question was how to make influence work for business.
            • Science was the odd one out. There was more recognition that knowledge is uncertain, that information can be cherry-picked, and that attempts to automate the handling of information can create new problems. There was at least some willingness to question the assumptions behind the systems.

            But there was a bigger problem with the whole conversation, nobody was really talking about freedom. Each institution was looking at the #dotcons mess through the lens of the power it already holds. The BBC wants to maintain authority over information. The police want reliable channels for social outreach. Business wants to turn influence into money. Science wants better ways to establish and communicate knowledge. These are not necessarily all bad aims, but they leave out the people and communities who actually create, share and make sense of information.

            The problem is that we don’t know as much as these institutions often pretend, the information landscape has changed, but the institutions are still trying to manage it using old habits of authority and control. Influencer culture is a good example. People increasingly use peer-to-peer language and trust relationships to communicate, but that doesn’t make something trustworthy. We need to understand this difference rather than simply trying to recruit influencers into existing systems of control.

            One question from the discussion stood out: what are you actually trying to achieve when you tell someone something? That is a much more useful starting point than simply asking whether information is correct. What relationship are you building? What action are you encouraging? Who benefits? Who gets to challenge it?

            This is where the #openweb and #OMN paths matter. We need open information flows, visible sources, human context, shared moderation and the ability to challenge and correct what circulates. Not another layer of automated control pretending to solve a social problem. We need to make it easier for people to understand where information comes from, how it travels and why it is being promoted.

            The danger is that the old gatekeepers respond to losing control by building new forms of control, while the #dotcons turn the resulting confusion into another market. We need an educational critique of how we are using information, not simply another professional conversation about how to manage it. Trust cannot be manufactured by institutions, bought by business or imposed by the police. It has to grow through open relationships and accountable practice.

            Nobody on that panel seemed to be speaking from the starting point of freedom, that absence is the real story.

            #OMN #openweb #disinformation #mainstreaming #dotcons

            Capitalism is not human nature

            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 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

            The work of composting the #deathcult and growing something more human

            The world is such a mess, partly this is because we use fear as a motivation to grasp for control were we should be reach for competence instead. The mess this makes needs shovels to work at composting, it is what tools like the #OMN are trying to provide, but to close this circle we have to first make them, then pick them up, then use them to shovel the #techshit into compost that is in part feeding this mess.

            So what is blocking this work? In part it is we use language irresponsibly, and partly that this is a class issue. Groups feed back and reinforce bad language, forming tribes, these blinded groups then ingest the sickness and poison from each other. This is the world we have created over the last 50 years, shaped by the “law of the jungle”, where people behave less like humans and more like animals.

            The irony is that the people with the most agency are often the most afraid of change. This is particularly visible in the #fashionista crew, Who constantly block necessary change, making process nasty and often violent until crisis overwhelms their fear. Only then do some maybe finally use their agency to try to save the situation, late and messily, when much of the damage is to late to be avoided

            Lets look at this wider, there is a bigger argument than the current chattering class noise – how the last 50 years of #neoliberal culture reshaped social behaviour, language and, most importantly, our ability to act collectively. This connects to the #geekproblem, #fluffy/#spiky divide, #NGO #mainstreaming and why rebuilding the #openweb requires changing social norms, not only writing better #FOSS software.

            Over the last 50 years, #neoliberalism shaped the social environment we live in, competition, individual advancement, insecurity and the worship of markets become normalized. We have been encouraged to see ourselves as competing individuals rather than participants in shared social paths. This is not simply a communication problem, it is a class problem, a cultural problem and ultimately a problem of collective growing any agency paths. Words that should help us understand the world have become tribal signals, instead of describing reality, they mostly describe which group we belong to, who we trust and who we are supposed to oppose.

            The resulting mess where groups feed back their own language, assumptions and prejudices to each other is a feedback loop few try and escape from. They form tribes that develop internal vocabularies that reinforce their versions of reality. These closed feedback loops become increasingly disconnected from any idea of the wider world. People ingest the same social sickness and then pass it around, often believing they are defending something good, this is how bad ideas become new social norms.

            Language should be a tool for exploring reality, negotiating differences and developing shared understanding, instead, much of our political and technological culture uses language as a form of social sorting. Words like safe, inclusive, progressive, radical, professional, disruptive, community and innovation lose their descriptive meaning and become membership badges.

            The important thing for #mainstreaming is using the approved language rather than understanding the underlying reality, a strange situation were people become skilled at talking about social change while becoming increasingly unable to participate in it. We see this across our #openweb reboot were projects spend more time managing the language around participation than actually developing meaningful participation. The #fluffy approach then blindly turns kindness into avoidance – the #spiky approach can turn honesty into aggression. Both can become self-protecting tribes rather than useful approaches to collective work.

            The class problem behind the tribes is that these behaviours don’t develop in a vacuum. Different social groups experience the world differently, have different resources and face different risks. They also develop different forms of agency, some people have professional security, institutional connections and the ability to move between funded projects. Others have practical skills, lived experience and grassroots relationships but little institutional recognition or financial security. These differences shape how people behave, for example:

            • The professional #NGO layer: Often has access to funding, institutional language and organizational influence. Its poison can be turning political struggle into manageable projects, consultation and career development. Its value is organizational experience, resources and the ability to maintain long-term work.
            • The #fashionista layer: Gains influence through cultural positioning, language and social legitimacy. Its poison can be conformity, status competition and policing who belongs. Its value is cultural energy, communication and the ability to bring new people into movements.
            • The technical #geekproblem layer: Gains agency through specialist knowledge, software and infrastructure. Its poison can be control, abstraction and the assumption that technical functionality solves social problems. Its value is practical skills, maintenance and the ability to build working tools.
            • The grassroots #spiky layer: Often has direct experience of organizing, conflict and practical resistance. Its poison can be hostility, burnout and destructive internal conflict. Its value is independence, political clarity and willingness to challenge established power.
            • The grassroots #fluffy layer: Often brings care, mediation, inclusion and relationship-building. Its poison can be conflict avoidance, endless consensus-seeking and enabling existing power. Its value is trust, participation and the social glue that keeps communities together.

            These are all tendencies, not fixed identities. People move between them, and most projects contain several of these cultures at once, the thing is to understand that every group brings something useful and every group can also bring something destructive, we need to understand both. #Fluffy and #spiky: Two necessary sides of collective agency – the #fluffy/#spiky divide is a useful way of understanding a recurring problem in grassroots organizing.

            #Fluffy

            • Trust and relationships
            • Care and inclusion
            • Mediation and consensus
            • Social stability

            Failure mode: avoiding necessary conflict.

            #Spiky

            • Challenge and resistance
            • Political clarity
            • Boundaries and accountability
            • Willingness to act

            Failure mode: turning every disagreement into a battle.

            Neither is enough on its own – without #fluffy, movements become hostile, exhausting and difficult to sustain. Without #spiky, movements become places where difficult questions are endlessly postponed and existing power is protected. To start to compost this mess we need to repair our grassroots groups so they can change the social norms to make these approaches work better together agen. Kindness must not mean avoiding accountability. Honesty must not mean abandoning care. A healthy movement needs both the ability to welcome people and the ability to challenge them.

            The law of the jungle and the loss of human behaviour is another uncomfortable part of this argument. After 50 years of competitive individualism, much of our social behaviour is the law of the jungle. People become defensive, territorial, status-conscious and opportunistic. They protect their immediate position, compete for scarce resources and treat other people as threats or opportunities. This isn’t because people have somehow become less human by nature, it is because the systems we have built reward these behaviours. When insecurity becomes normal, trust becomes risky, when competition becomes normal, cooperation needs justification, when status becomes the measure of success, collective achievement becomes difficult to recognise.

            We end up with groups that can talk endlessly about solidarity while behaving according to the opposite logic, this is one of the worst contradictions of the current #deathcult worship. We built social systems that undermine the very human qualities we need to change these systems.

            The agency paradox: Those most able to act can become the biggest blockers is a particularly important contradiction. Some of the people with the greatest social agency are also the people most afraid of change. They have established positions, reputations, networks, professional identities and cultural influence, have learned how to operate within the existing system. They may have the resources to initiate change, but they also have the most to lose if the ground shifts beneath them, this is where the #fashernista problem becomes particularly visible.

            The people who are most confident in progressive language tend to be the least willing to support actual structural change. They to often block emerging processes, challenge uncomfortable ideas, demand endless consultation and make practical experimentation socially difficult. They don’t necessarily do this consciously, as often they believe they are protecting the community, maintaining standards and preventing harm, but the outcome is the same: pre-emptive obstruction.

            Then something interesting happens, as a crisis develops, the old structures begin to fail. Eventually the consequences become impossible to ignore. Suddenly, some of the same people who resisted change discover their agency. They start organizing, making decisions and taking responsibility, but by then the situation is much worse, the opportunity for gradual, thoughtful change has been lost. What could have been a manageable transition becomes a nasty and destructive crisis, the people who could have helped prevent the crisis discover their agency only when the crisis starts to threaten them directly. This is a currently a recurring failure of mainstreamed progressive culture: fear of manageable change produces the conditions for unmanageable change.

            Functionality – People have different ideas about what works – this explains why arguments about functionality are often so difficult. People don’t approach a project with neutral ideas about what works, they bring their social position, experience, expectations and cultural assumptions. For one group, functionality means safety, predictability and professional standards, for another, it means speed, experimentation and getting something working. For another, it means participation, inclusion and making sure nobody is excluded, for another, it means political effectiveness and the ability to challenge established power.

            These are not simply different opinions about people, software or project management, they are different ideas about how society should work. The problem comes when one group assumes its own definition of functionality is universal – this is particularly visible in the #geekproblem – the assumption that if something works technically, it must work socially, it doesn’t. A technically “perfect” platform can support terrible social relationships, a beautifully inclusive process can produce nothing useful, a politically radical project can destroy its own community through internal conflict.

            We need to judge functionality across the whole system:

            • Does it work technically?
            • Does it work socially?
            • Does it support meaningful participation?
            • Does it distribute agency?
            • Can people challenge and change it?
            • Can it survive conflict, failure and changing circumstances?

            This is why we need to bring in native development. As changing the social norms is needed, we cannot solve these problems simply by asking people to be nicer, more inclusive or more radical. Those often become just more tribal signals, we need different social practices. Some starting points:

            • Make disagreement normal. Conflict is not automatically a failure. The ability to disagree openly without destroying relationships is a foundation of collective work.
            • Separate criticism of ideas from attacks on people. We need to be able to say that a process is broken without turning every argument into a personality conflict.
            • Reward practical agency. Value the people who maintain, build, organise, experiment and take responsibility, not just those who are best at managing the language around projects.
            • Make power visible. Who decides? Who controls resources? Who can block progress? Who benefits from the existing arrangements?
            • Allow experimentation. Small failures are often cheaper than large, delayed failures. We need room to try different approaches without demanding institutional approval for everything.
            • Build accountability into care. Being welcoming does not mean accepting destructive behaviour. Being challenging does not mean abandoning collective responsibility.
            • Protect the commons. The people who contribute to a shared resource must have meaningful ways to influence and govern it.

            The #OMN path is about this – building social technology for human agency, it is why the #OMN is not simply a software project – balanceing – growing social technology that supports different groups, different cultures and different forms of agency without allowing one group to capture the whole path or process. But as people likely reply, openness alone isn’t enough, we also do need the social practices that make openness useful.

            The #OMN approach is to build networks of flows rather than centralized platforms. People and communities publish, subscribe, moderate, curate and maintain relationships with information. Trust develops through human participation rather than being imposed by a single algorithm or management structure. The #OGB work is about building the governance needed to make that shared infrastructure accountable. And #indymediaback is about recovering the grassroots publishing and organizing practices that made the native #openweb meaningful in the first place.

            These projects need to work across the different social cultures, not become or be seen as another tribe defending its own assumptions. We need #fluffy people who can build trust, #spiky people who can challenge power, technical people who can maintain infrastructure and organizers who can turn shared intentions into practical action. None should dominate, all should be accountable.

            The bigger change is that the last 50 years have normalized a particular kind of anti social behaviour: competitive, defensive, individualistic and increasingly disconnected from collective responsibility. To step away from this mess, we need to stop pretending that better interfaces, nicer language or another round of professional management will fix this. The problem is deeper, we need to rebuild the social norms that make collective agency possible. That means learning to recognize the different poisons circulating through our groups, understanding the useful capacities hidden inside those same groups, and finding ways to bring those capacities into productive relationships.

            We need to stop rewarding people for defending their positions and start rewarding people for helping communities move forward, and most importantly, we need to stop waiting for crisis to give people permission to act. The point of grassroots organizing is to build the agency to change things before the crisis arrives, the work is of composting the #deathcult and growing something more human.

            The #OMN path is about the stories we tell to make technology acceptable

            The #OMN path is about the stories we tell to make technology acceptable, the institutions that repeat those stories, and the grassroots work left waiting while the money follows the next “miracle” story. A useful tool gets wrapped in a grand narrative, funding follows the narrative rather than community need, and the people building alternatives are pushed to the margins. When the story finally weakens, the underlying technology may remain – but the promised social transformation never arrives.

            The story is always bigger than the technology, and when the story collapses, the people trying to build something useful are left to compost the mess. The AI hype is beginning to meet this reality that caught up with so many previous waves of technology. The promises were enormous: artificial general intelligence, automated abundance, the end of work as we know it, and machines that would solve the problems we have failed to solve ourselves. Trillions in investment followed the story.

            But beneath the #PR claims the practical uses remain much more ordinary. Large language models (#LLM) do have useful capabilities. But they are not evidence that we have created a new form of human intelligence, nor do they justify meany of the promises made in their name. The interesting question is not whether the technology has some value, it clearly does. The question is why we keep wrapping useful tools in stories of technological salvation, and why so much of our social and political life gets pulled into those stories.

            Every technology comes with a story, we have seen this cycle meany times. The #dotcons, social media promised to connect the world. #Web3 promised to decentralize it. #Blockchain promised to rebuild trust. Now #AI promises to automate intelligence itself. Each wave arrives with a familiar script, first, a genuine technical development, then a much bigger story about what it means for humanity. Blinded investors pour in money, bureaucratic businesses scramble to adopt it, governments fear being left behind, and the traditional media repeats the promise until it starts to feel like transentery common sense.

            The technology becomes almost impossible to discuss outside its mythology, is how the #deathcult works, it turns a economic and political path into an inevitable dead end future. We are told to adapt, adopt and accelerate, because questioning the direction means falling behind. But as always, the question of who benefits disappears beneath the pressure to keep up. To compost this mess we need to separate what the technology can actually do from the stories being sold around it, as if we accept the industry’s framing that today’s language models are becoming digital people, even our criticism ends up strengthening that framing. The task is to compost the mythology, the failed dreams of #mainstreaming.

            But we face is what happens when the story’s collapse, who pays? The AI industry sold different stories to different audiences. Consumers were promised an intelligent assistant. Businesses were promised efficiency and reduced labour costs. Governments were warned that they must join a geopolitical race. Workers were told they were participating in a historic mission. Investors were promised extraordinary returns. These stories reinforced one another. Government investment legitimized the industry. Corporate adoption made it appear inevitable. Financial speculation funded further expansion. Media attention turned uncertainty into spectacle.

            And when this investment bubble deflates, the damage will not be limited to shareholders. Public resources have been committed to speculative infrastructure. Workers have lost jobs in anticipation of automation that never delivered as promised. Communities may be left with more centralized infrastructure and less control over the information systems they depend on. Yes, the technology will continue in some form, the question is more who ends up owning it, who benefits from it and who is left holding the bill.

            There are are likely useful things we can do with language models. They can help people process information, translate material, assist with coding and make some technical tasks more accessible. We should assess those uses honestly, including their limitations and costs. But we do not need to pretend these tools will create a new civilization, we do not need to build our communities around corporate #dotcons products, by handing over public knowledge to private platforms to replace human judgement with automated output.

            We do need to ask what tools can contribute to collective work, and what relationships must remain human, accountable and open to challenge. For #OMN, this means keeping our focus on shared media flows, grassroots publishing, archives and the commons. The work is to help communities create, discover, moderate and maintain their own information systems. On this path the offer a practical test: open data, open source, open standards and open processes. These do not magically guarantee a good outcome, but they make it easier to inspect, reuse, challenge and improve the systems we build.

            The #AI story needs compost, not another hype cycle. There is a useful ecological metaphor here, composting does not mean pretending that everything discarded is worthless. It means separating what can nourish future growth from what needs to break down. The AI boom contains technical developments, useful tools, accumulated knowledge and some worthwhile experiments. It also contains inflated promises, speculative finance, extractive business models and a great deal of #techchurn.

            That means, focus, shifting our attention away from chasing the next big story and towards the less glamorous work of building things people actually use. Shared infrastructure. Open processes. Community maintenance. Human trust. The ability to disagree, adapt and walk away. This work will not attract the same speculative billions. It may never produce a spectacular demonstration or a promise of god-like intelligence. Good.

            We need less technological theatre and more collective capability, less dependency and more participation, less worship of the #deathcult and more practice of the #lifecult. The AI bubble will deflate, or the industry may keep finding new ways to keep the story alive. Either way, the underlying choice remains, do we build alternatives or keep chasing the next #mainstreaming day dream, or maybe better, do we practically use the wreckage of these failed promises to grow something more useful?

            The #OMN path is to compost the hype, keep the useful tools, expose the power relationships and build the commons. Not one perfect platform, not one miracle technology, a living ecosystem of tools, communities and shared practices that grow beyond the control of the #dotcons.

            There is no magic, there is only work.

            #AI mythology is currently more of the same
            Our failure to mediate the mess
            The #openweb is #4opens, where dues this place the current #AI path?

            The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: Civilizing Russia, or whitewashing Neoliberalism?

            Dr Tobias Rupprecht’s seminar at St Antony’s College was The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: The Failed Quest to Civilise Russia, 1972–2022. But sitting through the discussion, I was left wondering whose tragedy we were really talking about, and who gets to define what it means to civilize a country. The nitpicking Oxford event kinda made sense, but pull back and my impression was that this was an apologetic account of the #neoliberal project in Russia: a story that gives market liberalism respectable historical roots while leaving too many of its own political responsibilities unexplored.

            This guy looks so uncomfortable presenting his book, not surprising as his book is about rejuvenation of shock doctrine neoliberalism in Russia. This should feel uncomfortable, as for the last 20 years this same mess has ripped apart the global economy and society. Its a mess we need to compost not something to nitpick thought as liberal apology.

            One of the striking things was the attempt to present Chicago School economics as something that grew naturally out of Russian experience. What was missing was any account of the international circulation of neoliberal ideas, the networks promoting them, and the ideological project that had been developing since the late 1940s. #Neoliberalism did not emerge from Russian soil, it had a history, a political purpose and powerful international connections.

            The discussion of perestroika seemed equally uncomfortable. Liberalism was presented as having little or no role in the process, which was instead framed as purely Communist. But this leaves the central question hanging: how did market liberalism become such a powerful force in the transformation of the Soviet system?

            Then there was the constitutional crisis, the bombing of parliament and the question of political responsibility. The impression he gives was that the liberals had clean hands. Anatoly Chubais was presented sympathetically, despite his central role in the “reforms” and upheavals of the period. The liberals helped bring Putin to power, then found themselves pushing back against the system they had helped create. The Chechen wars and the retreat of democratic liberalism formed part of this story, but the larger political responsibility seemed to dissolve into the narrative.

            The Russian liberals were not simply neutral democrats caught in somebody else’s tragedy. They were also participants in a project of internal imperialism: a vision of modernization that treated Russian society as something to be managed, reorganised and disciplined from above. Chubais was described as a democrat while simultaneously expressing deep distrust of the Russian people. That contradiction deserves more judgement than it received in the talk

            The comparison with China raised another uncomfortable question. Russia’s industrial development and social security were presented as obstacles to the transformation being attempted, while China’s large peasant population and overseas connections offered different conditions for market reform. But if the argument is that existing social protections made a country harder to reshape for the market, perhaps we should ask what kind of progress this version of liberalism actually represents.

            At one point, a question about soviet algorithms prompted laughter in the room. Yet the wider discussion seemed to leave the basic assumptions of neoliberalism untouched. That was the most revealing part of the event for me. The room was bowing before the #deathcult, the belief that the market is the inevitable measure of progress, that societies must be remade in its image, and that the damage caused along the way is a regrettable but necessary price.

            Nobody was willing to challenge the underlying framework directly, nobody in the room had any clothes on – the ideological assumptions were exposed – but the performance of respectable scholarship continued. Only one question near the end felt genuinely sane: an older woman asking something that cut through the comfortable narrative.

            The tragedy is not that Soviet market economists failed in their quest to “civilise” Russia, it is more that the idea of civilizing a society through market discipline was part of the problem from the beginning. Liberalism presents itself as common sense, modernization and freedom. But when its advocates distrust the people they claim to liberate, excuse the violence of transformation, and treat social protections as barriers to progress, we should ask whose freedom is actually being served.

            This is the wider problem with our worship of the #deathcult,turning blinded ideology into an unquestionable reality. Once that happens, the discussion examines every historical detail except the assumptions that hold the whole story together. We need to stop treating neoliberalism as the neutral destination of history. We need to examine the power behind it, the social damage it leaves behind, and the alternatives that have been pushed aside.

            That means building from the grassroots, through open processes and shared power, rather than imagining that societies can be perfected by economists, markets and elitists who do not trust the people they govern. The question is not whether Russia was sufficiently civilised for the market, it is whether the market’s self-appointed civilisers were ever willing to recognize the people whose lives they were reshaping.

            The event was about teaching the young people that liberalism was not responsible for the mess… and the polite youth lap it up, no critical questions from them in the Q&A

            END.

            #Oxford #Talk #Event

            The uncomfortable question

            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.

            Oscar Wilde, with an #OMN twist

            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.

            #OMN: WHERE NEXT? WE HAVE SEED FUNDING, NOW COMES WORK

            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 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 . 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.

            Why does this matter? The #mainstreaming path, represented by projects like https://blog.joinmastodon.org/, is becoming narrow through #NGO capture and institutional funding priorities.

            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.

            #OMN #OGB #OpenWeb #KISS #MakingHistory #indymediaback

            Please get off your knees and pick up a shovel

            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 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.

            And if you need a shovel, ask in the comments.

            #OpenWeb #FOSS #OMN

            We need people learning how to work together

            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 technology with pushing collective power.

            #KISS #OMN #openweb #commons #stupidindividualism #deathcult #oxfordboaters

            Composting the mess, growing the alternative commons paths

            Online and offline, we are living through an interconnected crisis of ecological breakdown, economic inequality, political disillusionment and social fragmentation that are not separate problems. They feed into each other, creating #mainstreaming paths that are increasingly unable to meet basic social and environmental needs.

            The usual response to this now visible mess is to ask the same institutions that created these problems to keep managing the consequences. the chattering classes that run our governments promise new policies, corporations promise new technologies, and professional campaigners promise another round of reform. There people are inside the worship of the #deathcult, and their efforts are constrained by the paths they walk, endless growth, profit extraction, bureaucracy, electoral cycles and the concentration of #nastyfew power.

            So this now visible mess, is not only a problem of individual greed or corruption, it is structural. That the #mainstreaming paths keep reproducing the problems because of the unthinking relationships remain unchanged. From common sense, and the #OMN perspective, this is where we need to change the conversation, to not keep relying on better management of #deathcult paths – we need to build the practical foundations of something different.

            The old idea of #commons (a polite way of saying #communism) offers a grassroots path away from this spreading political frustration towards practical collective paths. This new path is based on older anarchist ideas, that are critical of the two dominant ways of organizing: the market and the state. Were we are told to buy what we need through commercial markets or campaign for governments to provide it. Yes, maybe both have their place, but neither gives communities any real much control over the resources and paths they need to grow.

            So what is the idea of commons? let look at this, commons exists when people share responsibility for resources, establish collective “rules” and manage those resources for mutual benefit. This can mean land, housing, food, energy, knowledge, software, media or the infrastructure that connects communities. The point is that a Commons is not simply something owned collectively, it is something people actively maintain and govern together.

            Examples, at a grassroots level, a community garden, a housing cooperative, a repair café, an open-source project and a grassroots media network can all be part of this path. They look different, but each creates space for people to become participants rather than remaining consumers, clients or spectators.

            From a practical #DIY path we need to move past the #blocking of thinking of a utopian blueprint waiting for the right political moment. Commons already exist, our work is to strengthen them, learn from their successes and failures, and connect them, in the #OMN work using technology to widen political and economic alternatives.

            It is about moving from spectators to participants, the most damaging consequences of our current blinded political culture is the loss of agency. People are repeatedly told that the important decisions are made elsewhere: by governments, corporations, financial markets, technical experts or professional #NGO organizations.

            This path has lead to years of broken promises, so it is little surprise many withdraw. Some become cynical about politics; others retreat into, conspiracy, private life or the exhausting routines of survival in late stage capitalism. We can see this only as apathy, when it is a reasonable response to having little meaningful influence or power.

            People need practical ways to take part in shaping their lives. Communing offers this through experience, people come together around a shared need, make decisions, distribute responsibilities, deal with disagreements and see the results of their work. They develop the skills and relationships that make further collective action possible.

            This is political activity, even when nobody calls it politics – a community that takes control of its housing, food supply, energy or media infrastructure is not merely providing a service. It is changing who has power, who makes decisions and who benefits from the resources being created. The political shift is from asking those above us to solve everything towards building the collective capacity to solve more of it ourselves.

            So yes our path is to build the new, but understand the struggle, that meeting real needs to make the old arrangements less necessary. This is a valuable corrective to a political culture that is trapped in permanent resistance, to do more than protest against enclosure, extraction and corporate power, we need to create shared resources that people can actually use.

            But we should not mistake this for the idea that politics can be avoided. The existing system does not simply disappear because we build something better. Land, housing, infrastructure and productive resources are already controlled by power if #nastyfew interests and our own common sense. Communities face legal barriers, financial pressures, unequal access to time and skills, and the constant risk that successful initiatives will be absorbed, commercialized or captured by institutions.

            Building the Commons is therefore both constructive and political. We create alternatives while challenging the conditions that prevent them from flourishing. The path is not to fight every battle on the opponent’s ground, more to develop enough practical capacity, shared resources and collective confidence that we have more choices about where and how to struggle.

            The Commons needs protection against capture – shared ownership does not guarantee a fair or democratic path. A blinded commons might reproduce the same inequalities it set out to overcome. A closed group can accumulate informal power, technical experts become gatekeepers, and participation reduced to approving decisions made elsewhere.

            This is where governance projects like the #OGB matter, communities need transparent processes, meaningful participation, accountability, accessible conflict resolution and ways to challenge people who accumulate too much control. Responsibilities shared, decisions remain open to scrutiny, and resources be protected from being quietly transferred back into private ownership.

            The same principle applies to funding, yes, grants and investment help build useful infrastructure, but they can also redirect projects towards the priorities of founders. We need ways to bring resources into community control without allowing outside money to take control of the community.

            The aim is to make the Commons durable without turning it into another institution that exists primarily to sustain itself. To help with this we need to move from isolated projects to a grassroots networks. A single local project can meet a local need, a connected network of projects begin to become change and change communities.

            This is the idea of an wider Commons: many independent initiatives, rooted in their own places and circumstances, sharing knowledge and resources while retaining local autonomy. We do not need every community to follow the same path. Different places have different needs, histories, cultures and resources, diversity is a strength. Some experiments will fail; others will work well enough to be adapted elsewhere. What matters is that people can learn from one another instead of repeatedly starting from scratch.

            Open-source #FOSS software is part of the answer, but it is not enough. We need grassroots digital infrastructure that is open in practice: open data, open source, open standards and open processes -the – combined with trust, human moderation and community responsibility.

            Technical federation, like #activitypub allows this to grow without centralization were communities share tools, infrastructure, experience and political influence without handing their decisions to a distant headquarters. This is a space where grassroots organization becomes a bigger political path. Connected together, we can become the material foundations of a different social order. The process is gradual, uneven and full of conflict. But it creates something that symbolic politics alone cannot: an expanding body of people with practical experience of doing things differently.

            The #OMN projects are a direct connection to grassroots media and the #openweb. Communities need to communicate, preserve their histories, share knowledge and coordinate action. Yet much of our digital public life is controlled by the #dotcons: commercial platforms that turn participation into a resource to extract, measure and sell. With our unthinking #fashionistas even supposedly alternative spaces become dependent on centralized platforms, opaque moderation and technical gate-keeping.

            The #OMN is not another social media platform. It is a path towards shared grassroots infrastructure for news, archiving and, further down the road, governance. The aim is to help communities create and manage their own media resources, while connecting their work through open networks rather than surrendering control to the normal centralized platforms.

            Media is part of the political infrastructure of the Commons. If communities cannot tell their own stories, preserve their own histories or communicate beyond corporate channels, their capacity to organize is weakened. A grassroots #openweb can help make local knowledge visible, allow successful experiments to be copied and give independent initiatives ways to connect. It can help turn scattered projects into a living network without requiring them to become one large organization.

            From the local to the political – the commons is not a replacement for every form of politics. We still need struggles over public policy, land, housing, workers’ rights, ecological protection and the distribution of wealth. We need to challenge the power that keeps resources enclosed and decisions out of public hands. But these struggles become stronger when they are connected to practical alternatives.

            A housing campaign can do more than oppose unaffordable rents if it also helps build community-owned housing. A food campaign can do more than expose an unjust supply chain if it develops cooperative ways to grow and distribute food. A media campaign can do more than criticize corporate #dotcons and #traditionalmedia platforms if it helps build shared, community-controlled infrastructure like the #fedivers.

            This is how the commons becomes part of a bigger political path, not by asking everyone to agree on one path, but by connecting the practical work people are already doing around shared needs. The work provides a meeting point between people who might disagree about theory but can cooperate around tech, housing, energy, care, media or the future of their neighbourhood. Shared practice builds relationships, and those relationships support wider political action.

            Over time, these connected efforts move resources out of extractive circuits and into forms of ownership and governance that serve the people who sustain them. This is a material shift in power, not just a change in language. The work starts where we are, there is no single blueprint, central plan or perfect organization that will deliver this transformation. The commons grows through people trying things, sharing what they learn and building on one another ‘s work.

            That means starting with real needs, keeping projects accessible, making decisions accountable and sharing the tools and knowledge that others can reuse. It means accepting that communities are messy, that conflict is unavoidable and that trust has to be built through practice rather than demanded as a slogan.

            It also means resisting the #geekproblem, the idea that the right technical system can solve social problems. Technology supports relationships and participation, not replaces them. The same applies to political organizations, structure matters, but it needs to remain accountable to the people doing the work.

            We need to move beyond the choice between endlessly criticizing the existing system and retreating into disconnected #blocking. We build practical Commons while connecting them into a wider movement to challenging the mess that keeps people powerless.

            The current #mainstreaming encourages us to see ourselves as isolated individuals competing for security and influence. The commons begins somewhere else, with the recognition that much of what makes life possible is already shared, and that we can organize more of it around mutual care and collective responsibility.

            This is a political choice, to shifts power from extraction towards participation, from passive consumption towards communing, and from centralized control towards connected grassroots autonomy.

            For #OMN, the task is to help build the media and digital infrastructure that makes this possible, on this path we do not have to wait for permission. We do have to do the work, learn from our mistakes, protect what we build and connect with others doing the same.

            Build locally, share openly, govern together, connect without centralizing is how we begin to grow a different future from the ground up.

            The #AI mess

            We don’t need to believe machines suffer to recognize that the system building them is already causing real harm. The #AI consciousness debate is a useful example of how the #deathcult works – we are encouraged to worry about whether a chatbot can suffer, while the human labour, exploitation and environmental costs of building these systems are pushed out of sight.

            Fluent language is not evidence of consciousness. #AI can produce plausible expressions of distress without there being evidence that it feels anything. We need to separate what the technology can demonstrate from the stories being sold around it.

            This is not about shutting down philosophical questions. It’s about asking why corporate #PR is so keen to turn software into a personality, and who benefits when we start treating commercial products as moral subjects.

            The #geekproblem narrows the discussion to what the technology might be, while the wider social and political questions disappear. The #dotcons turn that confusion into engagement, investment and power to control us.

            An #OMN response starts with the : look at the evidence, expose the incentives, make the processes visible, and ask who benefits. Keep our attention on the people, labour and communities affected by these mainstreaming paths.

            We don’t need to believe machines suffer to recognize that the system building them is already causing real harm. Stop focusing on the PR story to look at the material reality, build the #openweb around people, not the next tech bubble please.