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.
Art is individualism, a disturbing, disintegrating force. That’s where its value lies. It breaks the shared mould, unsettles common sense, and opens cracks in the world we take for granted.The trick is to compost individualism into collective creativity, not let it rot into #stupidindividualism.
Why do people nowadays defend systems that make their own lives worse? Why do movements that begin by challenging authority end up creating new authority’s? Why do communities built around freedom develop gatekeepers, purity tests and informal leaders who become impossible to question? Why do people who oppose #dotcons corporate control still spend their time copying corporate platforms, business models and organizational habits? These are not isolated contradictions, they point towards an invisible issue of how power works.
We tend to imagine oppression as something imposed from above, a ruling class, a government, a corporation or an institution that wants to control us. The solution then seems obvious: expose the injustice, remove the people responsible, and replace the system with something better. But what happens when people actively participate in reproducing the same relationships they claim to oppose?
Power does not operate through force alone, it also shapes what we want, what we admire, what we fear and what we consider normal. We become attached to the #mainstreaming because those systems also provide identity, status, security and a sense of belonging. The problem is not simply power controls us, it is that we learn to desire the very world power has built for us. This is one of the hardest lessons for grassroots paths to absorb – that the #deathcult is not something outside us. We live inside it, in the dominant logic organized around endless economic growth, competition, commodification and control, even when these undermine the ecological and social conditions on which life it self depends.
It is easy to point at the visible mess: corporate monopolies, extractive business, environmental destruction and political movements built around fear. But the #deathcult survives more because it is an economic system, pushed over us the last 50 years as a culture, a set of habits and a way of understanding ourselves. our worship is where we learned to measure success through individual achievement, compete for attention and recognition. it is were we treat relationships as opportunities for advancement and look for personal solutions to collective problems. We imagine that security comes from controlling our own little corner of the world, even when that control depends on the same blinded paths that make everyone else less secure.
We might oppose capitalism while still measuring our worth through its ideas of productivity and success, oppose authoritarianism while insisting that our own opinions should never be challenged. We talk about community while treating collective projects as platforms for personal status. The system reproduces itself through these everyday behaver, this is mess even among people who sincerely want something different. That is why changing the #nastyfew people at the top is never enough, if the common sense relationships remain unchanged, the new leadership inherits the old system and reproduce it with maybe a different vocabulary.
This is why oppression feels comfortable – people do not attach themselves to oppressive systems simply because they are foolish or malicious, the reality is more complicated. #Mainstreaming established systems offer familiar routines, clear identities and ready-made explanations for a confusing world. They tell us who belongs, who is responsible, what success looks like and where to direct our anger. A competitive society promises that individual effort will bring individual rewards, hierarchical organization promises that someone competent is in charge, rigid thinking promises certainty. A charismatic leader promises to take responsibility for decisions that would otherwise require difficult collective work, promises can be attractive, especially when people feel insecure and overwhelmed.
The catch is that the comfort comes at a very real price, individual success depends on collective failure. Certainty require silencing disagreement, strong leadership become unaccountable power and belonging can to often depend on excluding outsiders. Fear and control become self-reinforcing, as the more insecure people feel, the more attractive rigid authority becomes. The more authority concentrates, the less opportunity people have to develop the confidence and relationships needed to govern their own lives in any working grassroots paths.
This is one way authoritarianism becomes embedded in everyday life without requiring most people to openly support fascism. People oppose a particular dictator, corporation or political party while reproducing the same “common sense” habits of obedience, exclusion and domination in their own communities. The lesson from this mess is not that everyone is secretly fascist, it is that authoritarian patterns survive inside movements and institutions that sincerely oppose them.
The left is not immune, grassroots and progressive movements begin with a desire to create open and humane societys, but good intentions do not often produce good processes. A movement opposed to hierarchy can still developing invisible hierarchies that nobody is allowed to discuss. They might demand democratic participation while allowing a small group of insiders to control the agenda. Celebrate diversity while pushing blinded conformity or criticize celebrity culture while building its own #fashionista cults of personality.
Sometimes the problem appears as endless internal conflict, sometimes as a demand for unity that suppresses diversity of disagreement. Sometimes it appears as a professionalised activist culture in which visibility, funding and institutional access are more important than the original purpose of the work. These are different expressions of the same danger – the collective project becomes a means of reproducing the status and security of those who push the easy common sense mess.
This is where mixed metaphor of #mainstreaming becomes important. Grassroots projects do sometimes seek funding, recognition and wider influence because they need resources to survive and space to grow. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, the danger comes when adapting to the blinded common sense of established institutions that use there control to change what the project is able to do. A movement that began by building alternatives ends up competing for a place inside the system it wanted to change.
Then we have the #geekproblem building freedom with tools of control – this contradiction is particularly visible in social technology. The #openweb offers the possibility of shared infrastructure people use, adapt and maintain together. Open standards, open data and open-source software help communities escape dependence on the #dotcons. But still #blocking this path is the #geekproblem, the assumption that technical system can solve social problems without changing the relationships through which people use and govern these systems. We build software that makes certain behaviours easy and others difficult, we create interfaces that reward some forms of participation and obscure others, we choose what is measured, what can be moderated and who has permission to make changes. These choices shape the #FOSS culture that grows around the technology.
The path we need is #KISS, resistance means changing what we reward – oppressive systems survive partly because people become attached to their habits and rewards – resistance must involve more than criticism. We need to create practical alternatives that make different ways of living and working possible: rewarding cooperation rather than competition, recognizing maintenance alongside innovation, care alongside visibility, and collective achievement alongside individual contribution.
It means creating organizations where people can question decisions without being treated as enemies. It means making power visible, distributing responsibility and developing ways to correct mistakes without destroying the people who make them. It also means accepting that there is no perfect community and no final control that will eliminate conflict. People will disagree, projects will fail, some participants will behave badly, others will make mistakes while trying to do something worthwhile.
What history tells us is the working path is not in creating pure community’s free from contradiction, its is more in balancing the processes that can recognize and work through contradiction without turning every difficulty into a struggle for domination. This is the practical meaning of moving beyond #stupidindividualism, we do not abandon individual agency, we develop the collective conditions that allow the path to become something more than competition between isolated individuals.
So, what dose this means for projects like the #OMN, attempts to put this path into practice through grassroots media, shared data and federated communication. Were the starting point is that people should be able to publish, share, organize and moderate media through open processes rather than depending on a central platform to determine what is visible and who has power. Technical openness is necessary for the kind of commons we want to grow, but, yes, it is not sufficient.
The #OMN path is #KISS, shared flows of information rather than locked-in applications – content moves between communities and instances. Stories gain visibility through trust and linking. Local moderation can respond to local needs without requiring a central authority to control the network. It is an path to support a different social relationship with information, less ownership, more participation, less central control, more distributed responsibility.
As we highlight, the work is about confronting our own contradictions, were we avoid turning open standards into rigid dogma, grassroots leadership into personal empires, or collective projects into another competition for recognition. We need to build these paths that help people work together, while remaining open to criticism and change. From the #deathcult to the #lifecult, by changing the everyday practices the current system reproduces, recognizing that our desire for certainty, status and individual security sometimes pull us back towards the very systems we want to escape.
The #deathcult tells us that competition is human nature, that everything must be owned, that markets should decide what matters and that collective problems require stronger systems of control. The #lifecult begins with a different possibility, people can build trust, share resources, care for one another and create institutions that support life rather than undermine it.
Neither possibility becomes real through words alone, the difference emerges through practice. Most importantly, it means building alternatives that work well enough for people to experience the difference. That is the work of grassroots paths, it is why projects like the #OMN and communities like #Oxfordboaters could matter. And that is why we need to keep digging, composting the failures and growing something different together.
At the root of the mess we face is the worship of the #deathcult, the idea that competition, individualism, control and endless growth are simply human nature, they are not, they are systems we keep reproducing, even when it is making society unlivable.
We now have seed funding for the #OpenMediaNetwork projects. That gives us a chance to move beyond endlessly talking about the problems and start building practical tools for a different path. Were next? The #4opens gives us a basic test for the technology. The #OGB points towards grassroots governance. Together, these are part of a DIY toolkit for moving power away from the #dotcons, the #geekproblem and the #NGO mainstreaming that keep reproducing the same mess in supposedly alternative paths.
But funding is only a beginning, the real challenge is social – how do we compost the recurring cycles of paranoia, status games, dogmatic individualism of people pushing themselves towards the top? How do we build trust, shared responsibility and structures for people to work together without recreating the hierarchies we claim to be opposing?
To compost this mess, we need to look at the current arguments about the left and right paths. Yes, people understandably want to escape institutions they no longer trust, some retreat into private life, nature and their own projects, others double down on leadership and control. But walking away from society doesn’t make the wider problems disappear, replacing one set of bosses with another isn’t an alternative.
We need to think horizontally, by growing trust, keeping processes open, sharing power and making space for people to participate without demanding that they surrender their independence. So what can you do? Follow the hashtags, read the ideas, ask questions, find a part of the project you can contribute to – you don’t need to understand everything before taking this first step.
And yes, bring a shovel, social composting is messy work, we have plenty of accumulated shit to turn into something useful. A simple first test for #stupidindividualism, can you find your way into a shared project without demanding that it revolve around you? Can you help build something that benefits people beyond yourself?
If not, that’s not a reason to give up, it’s a place to start digging. The #openweb won’t rebuild itself, we need people, practical tools and grassroots structures that make cooperation possible. A little seed funding gives us a chance, the next step is building the crew to do the work to grow the commons.
At #OMN, we’re working to compost the #techdebt problem using federation and the #4opens. The idea is simple, build apps around shared data flows, not locked-in codebases. Keep the data useful across projects, while the code becomes a golden ladle in a #witchescauldron, a tool for shaping and serving the commons, not a container that owns it.
New codebase? Let the data flows move across. Less tech debt, less churn, more reuse. Build on what we have, rather than endlessly starting again.
The problem is that five years of funding have helped create a poor diversity of codebases and approaches. We need to mediate this blinded #geekproblem and grow more working grassroots paths that people can spread out across, rather than keep funneling everyone into the same few #openweb codebases.
Yes, there’s a lot of #techshit to compost. And yes, we need people with shovels to do the work of clearing the ground, reusing what’s useful, and planting seedlings along more native #openweb paths.
Less tech churn, more shared flows. Less lock-in, more commons.
Our choice for the last 20 years has been between the #deathcult and #fascism, how the hell did we get into this mess? And how do we find a way out? To build a path we need shovels, not saviours. We need to dig through the shit, compost failures and regrow paths to grassroots collective power. To work on this we need to stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start rebuilding the ground beneath our feet.
Politics is the human condition, you’d have to be mad as a hatter, or a liberal, to imagine we can somehow escape it. We live in messy times, and they’re getting dirtier. Politics isn’t going away, the question is whether we organize collectively to shape it, or leave the field to the #nastyfew people already digging our collective graves.
To be clear, what I’m putting forward doesn’t solve any single problem. What it does is take a practical step towards solving many problems, by changing how we work together. What we don’t need is market-based “green” solutions, elitist control or any more left-wing hero worship – as all feed into the same trap – the #deathcult of #neoliberalism. That common sense keeps us looking upwards for leadership, waiting for markets to save us or hoping the next hero will finally get things right, meanwhile, our uncommon sense collective ability to act decays.
To use a shovel we need is to move beyond fear and control towards trust, open processes and grassroots power. And yes, this isn’t the normal #blinded path about finding another perfect ideology to worship, it’s messy, its about growing practical tools and relationships to allow us to act together, to learn from failure and make change possible.
I should not HAVE to keep saying this, but this is what the #4opens process is about – moving beyond #stupidindividualism, beyond copying the #dotcons, and towards a path we can actually walk together. Open data, open source, open standards and open processes are practical starting points for shared responsibility. They test us, to build in public, hold power to account and create commons that belong to participation rather than private ownership.
The last 50 years of common sense monetization of everything is the #deathcult, as is the endless me, me, me that fragments our ability to act collectively. We won’t compost this mess by repeating the same individualistic habits with a few new slogans, we have to change the practices that keep reproducing it.
At #OMN, we’re turning to decades of grassroots experience of practical tools for collective action. #OGB, #indymediaback, #MakingHistory people have been working on for years. But, they’ve been stuck at the development stage for far too long. The challenge now is to get them moving, connect the people and skills involved, and turn activist traditions into working infrastructure for grassroots media, shared knowledge and collective organization.
This isn’t a magic solution, it’s a way to start growing many solutions from the ground up, rather than waiting for the market, the state or another self-appointed hero to deliver them. Please get off your knees, pick up a shovel, the ground is covered in mess, but that’s exactly why we need to start composting. We have plenty of shit to work with, and plenty of seeds worth saving.
We need to incurage people to better balance personal coping with collective power to challenge the #DeathCult as we are living through a time when the world is becoming harder to live in, yet the dominant message is that we must learn to cope better as individuals. #Climatechaos accelerates, inequality deepens, and the #nastyfew accumulate wealth and power while communities struggle to meet basic needs. Democracy is hollowed out, public services are weakened, and the institutions that should protect us increasingly serve the interests of those who already hold power.
The answer our #fashionistas sell us is to often more self-help, become more resilient, set better boundaries, meditate, journal, practise mindfulness and learn to manage our anxiety. Some of these things can help, and people need space to rest and recover. But something is deeply wrong when the response to a collective crisis is an endless demand for individual self-improvement. If we are all busy fixing ourselves, we have less time and energy to challenge the systems making our lives harder.
This is #stupidindividualism, the assumption that social problems can be solved through private choices, personal discipline and consumer spending, rather than collective action and shared responsibility. It is one of the ways we worship the #deathcult – learning to experience structural failure as personal inadequacy. When work becomes unbearable, we are told to improve our resilience. When communities fall apart, we must develop better coping strategies. When insecurity becomes normal, we must manage our anxiety. The system remains unquestioned, while the individual becomes the problem to be solved.
Even care becomes another market, we are sold products, subscriptions and services to help us endure conditions we have little power to change alone. We are encouraged to become healthier and more resilient while the social and ecological foundations of our lives continue to deteriorate. Self-care matters. But there is a difference between caring for ourselves so we can live, and being encouraged to care for ourselves so we can tolerate the intolerable indefinitely. Self-care without community becomes sedation.
The same problem runs through the economy – this individualizing logic is not confined to self-help. It runs through the mainstream story about how the economy works. We are told that markets are natural, competition is inevitable, profitability is the ultimate measure of success, and alternatives must prove themselves within the very system they seek to change. Even the economic left remains trapped in arguments about how to improve capitalism’s imperfections, rather than questioning the assumptions that organize it.
The liberal fantasy of perfect competition hides the struggle taking place inside the economy. Real firms fight for markets, push down costs and seek advantages over workers, suppliers and rivals. This is not an unfortunate deviation from a harmonious market, it is central to how capitalism operates. Profit, and exploitation, is not simply a side effect, it is an organizing principle.
Businesses invest where they expect returns. Capital moves towards greater profitability, shaping employment, production, trade and investment. Communities lose industries and economic security because production has moved elsewhere. Environmental destruction can remain profitable when its costs are pushed onto workers, communities and future generations. What is profitable and what is socially useful are not the same thing.
An economy can grow while people lose security, solidarity and control over their futures. Environmental protection is supported when it makes money, and decent wages are defended when they improve productivity. But what happens when doing the right thing becomes less profitable? When justice depends on profitability, justice remains conditional.
This is the wider #deathcult, a path that treats accumulation as success even when the social and ecological consequences are destructive. Our head down worship of this mess teaches us to accept the economy as an impersonal machine, beyond our collective control, rather than as a set of human relationships and institutions that people have built, and can change.
The myth of the isolated individual. The economic story and the self-help story share a deeper assumption, that people are fundamentally isolated individuals, responsible for maximizing their own interests. But people are not calculating machines operating outside society. Our behaviour is shaped by relationships, emotions, culture, class, gender, nationality, history and the influence of others. What we want, what we believe is possible and how we act are all shaped by the communities and institutions in which we live.
When we build institutions around the assumption that everyone is an isolated competitor, we reward competition and weaken cooperation. We then point to the resulting behaviour as proof that competition is simply human nature. The system produces the behaviour it expects, then uses that behaviour to justify itself.
The same pattern appears in our personal lives. We are encouraged to compete for work, status and security, then blamed when we become exhausted, anxious or isolated. We are told to become better individuals rather than asking why our lives have been organized in ways that make collective well-being so difficult. This is not an argument against personal responsibility, it is a rejection of the idea that personal responsibility can substitute for shared responsibility. We cannot solve collective problems by treating every person as a separate problem to be fixed.
From private survival to collective care – the alternative is not to shame people who are tired, overwhelmed or unable to do more. Demanding that everyone become a full-time activist would reproduce the same pressure to perform and succeed that helped create the problem. People need rest, they need friendships, personal space and the freedom to step away from constant crisis. But personal peace is not the same as collective freedom.
We need to rebuild the social structures that make care possible: mutual aid, local groups, shared spaces, grassroots media, community resources and relationships where people participate without turning everything into a transaction. This means making participation possible at a human scale. Share skills and resources. Build trust, create spaces where people can disagree, work through conflict and take practical action together. Let people contribute what they can, rather than expecting everyone to do everything.
Care is not simply something we consume, it is part of how we organize our lives together. Real freedom means more than managing our own private existence, it also means having a collective say in the conditions we live in. The path we need now is from collective care to the commons, this is where the #OMN – Open Media Network – fits into a wider political project.
If the existing system organizes life around profitability and private accumulation, we need to build spaces where social usefulness, collective participation and shared responsibility can become organizing principles in their own right. We need grassroots media and archives that serve communities rather than advertisers. We need cooperatives and worker-owned organizations where people have a meaningful stake in decisions. We need shared infrastructure that communities govern, rather than relying on corporate #dotcons platforms and institutional #NGO gatekeepers.
We need to move past the people currently #blocking. The #OMN is not another platform promising to solve society through technology, it is a practical attempt to help communities share news, preserve collective memory, connect local struggles and build trusted flows of information. It is about moving power towards the people who create and use media, rather than leaving it concentrated in the hands of corporate platforms or a small groups of technical elitists.
The challenge is to better connect the technical, economic and social dimensions of the commons. To grow a different common sense. Were we have ways of understanding society that connect theory to lived experience, expose the power relationships hidden behind supposedly neutral systems, and help us test alternatives in practice. We need to stop treating the market as a neutral measure of human value, just as we need to stop treating individual resilience as the answer to collective breakdown.
The personal and the political meet in our everyday lives, in whether we have time to rest, whether we can afford to live, whether our communities have places to gather, whether our work is meaningful, whether we can trust one another, and whether we have any real power over the decisions shaping our futures. These are not separate problems, they are connected expressions of how society is organized.
So to sum up, the task is to move from private coping towards collective agency. Less pressure to optimism ourselves, more power to change the conditions we live in. Less isolation, more mutual aid. Less consumption disguised as healing, more care organized through community. Less dependence on profitability as the measure of value, more collective power to decide what matters.
We are not simply broken individuals who need to become better at surviving a broken society, we are people who need the collective space, trust and tools to build a better one. That is the work of the #OMN, the #openweb and the grassroots commons paths, connecting personal well-being with community well-being, critical understanding with practical participation, and #4opens technology with pushing collective power.
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 #4opens 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 #4opens – 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.
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 #4opens: 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.
Enforcing artificial scarcity when we finally have the technology to move towards a post-scarcity world is what’s driving us towards real scarcity. And if you think artificial scarcity is bad, wait until you experience the real thing. Much of this mess is avoidable, but we keep prioritizing #nastyfew wealth and profit over building a sustainable future. We have the technological potential to do better, but we’re choosing to keep worshipping a #deathcult that protects scarcity for the few at the expense of survival for the many
In the #OMN story, #encryptionist describes the tendency to priorities technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem. It is the belief that social and political problems can primarily be solved through cryptography, protocols and mathematics, rather than through communities, relationships and accountable governance.
Encryption itself is not the problem, strong encryption is essential, private communication and secure infrastructure matters. People living under authoritarian governments, journalists protecting sources and activists defending themselves from surveillance all depend on robust cryptographic tools.
The #OMN critique is directed at #encryptionist – the narrow view that elevates technical security above every other social value. The assumption becomes – If we can encrypt everything… .we have solved the problem. But technology cannot replace trust, Encryption can prove that a message has not been altered, it cannot prove that the sender is honest. Encryption can protect communication, it cannot build community. Encryption can hide information from attackers, it cannot help people resolve disagreements, share responsibility or govern themselves.
These are social problems, they require social solutions. This is where #encryptionist thinking becomes a form of the #geekproblem. Faced with messy human questions, the instinct is to build another protocol, another identity system, another blockchain. More cryptographic layers, another clever piece of infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the harder questions remain untouched. Who controls the community? Who moderates abuse? How are decisions made? How social trust is earned? And finally how is social power distributed? These questions cannot be encrypted away.
The history of the internet is full of examples of technically elegant systems that failed because nobody wanted to use them. Perfectly secure software abandoned because there was no community around it. Projects that solved fascinating engineering problems while leaving ordinary people confused, excluded or dependent on technical specialists.
This is why #OMN puts people before protocols – the phrase #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer captures this perfectly. The purpose of technology is to strengthen human relationships, not replace them.
The #encryptionist mindset often begins from an assumption that people are the weakest part of any system. Humans make mistakes. Humans cannot be trusted. Humans introduce uncertainty. Therefore, remove humans from the process wherever possible.
The #OMN path starts somewhere different, humans are not bugs, they are the point. Technology should help people build trust – not eliminate the need for it. A healthy community is not one where nobody has to trust anyone. It is one where trust can grow because people have transparent processes, shared history and accountable relationships.
This is why #openprocess is just as important as encryption, if governance happens behind closed doors, secure communication does not create democratic accountability.
This is why #openweb native projects like #makinghistory matter. Communities need memory as much as secrecy, this is why #grassroots matters, people need relationships as much as protocols. This is why the #4opens fit together.
Open systems create public accountability.
Encryption creates private security.
These are complementary values, not competing ones, the danger comes when security blindly becomes the only value. An obsession with technical purity can easily produce systems that ordinary people cannot understand, maintain or participate in. Complexity becomes a gatekeeper. Technical experts become the hidden authorities. Communities become dependent on those who understand the cryptography.
Ironically, systems designed to eliminate trust often end up demanding enormous trust in a small group of experts. Trust the developers, trust the protocol, trust the mathematics. Trust that someone else has implemented everything correctly. The trust never disappears, it merely becomes invisible.
The #OMN approach argues that invisible trust is more dangerous than visible trust. Better to acknowledge that communities depend on relationships and build institutions that make those relationships accountable. This is where the #Fediverse offers an interesting lesson.
Its success has come less from cryptographic innovation than from federation, shared standards and community moderation. It works because independent communities develop their own norms while remaining connected through open protocols. The technology enables the relationships, it does not replace them. The same lesson applies across the #openweb.
In the #OMN story, #encryptionist is a warning against forgetting this balance. The path is not to build a world where nobody has to trust anyone, it is to build a world where trust is deserved, distributed and supported by technology rather than replaced by it.
The #Fediverse exists because the corporate #dotcons are not enough, we don’t wont more of our social lives as products, our relationships into #closeddata, and our communities into audiences to be managed. We wont a different way to communicate, organize and build power together.
But the #Fediverse is not simply a kinder version of corporate social media, its has a promise based on the history of the #openweb: people and communities building their own spaces, connecting through open standards, and sharing power without handing control to a central platform.
The problem we need to compost is that there are few working, humane alternatives to the current #deathcult. So for meany people simply stepping away isn’t an option – We need practical alternatives that work in the real world, rooted in grassroots experience and capable of growing beyond isolated projects for these people to step to.
We already have a first step, that is the point of federation, with #ActivityPub, independent communities can connect and share without having to surrender their autonomy. We can scale horizontally, linking working social projects together rather than building another “common sense” centralized empire.
The #OMN takes this to the next step by bringing in grassroots practices we know work to this open technology, human trust and shared responsibility. #MakingHistory, #IndymediaBack, the #OGB and the #4opens are stepping stones towards a more sustainable world, not products to consume, but tools for #KISS collective action.
This is why the current push for #mainstreaming is more problem than solution. If we bring the habits of the #dotcons into the #Fediverse, we are pushing the turning of build something different into another version of the same old “common sense” mess – we become users demanding personal comfort, rather than participants building communities.
And this is where #BLOCKING becomes political. Blocking has a place, especially when people need protection from harassment and abuse. But if it becomes our default answer to every disagreement, it turns despair into the appearance of action. We retreat into smaller and smaller spaces while the structures of power who are ripping the world apart remain untouched.
We cannot build solidarity by pretending differences don’t exist, we build it by developing and growing ways to work through those differences, set boundaries, share responsibility and act together. That is how grassroots movements for the last 100 years have always built real capacity.
“Another world is possible” cannot just be a slogan, we have to make it possible, through practical projects, open infrastructure and communities that learn how to govern themselves. The #Fediverse exists to give us a path to do that. Whether we use it to build a different world, or simply recreate the one we already have, is up to us.
Keep it #KISS, less platform worship, less knee-jerk rejection, more collective work. We won’t block our way into another world, we have to build and grow it.
“Another world is possible” – but our friendly enemies keep pushing #mainstreaming dressed up in radical language. The result? We’re accepting “common sense” of the system instead of challenging it. Solidarity gets fragmented into identity and partisan battles, while class power escapes scrutiny. We end up pointing fingers at each other while the #deathcult carries on.
We need to defend the right to care, but turn that care into collective power. Real solidarity means looking beyond the latest distraction, naming structural power and building alternatives together. Don’t just make the existing world look kinder.
In alt-culture paths we have meany problems, one of them is the #mainstreaming “colonize” what works, absorbing popular, fringe, and grassroots ideas, stripping them of their radical core, and adapting them to serve the common sense #deathcult paths. Let’s look at an example of this sewage pipeline:
Organic success, a movement, phrase, or subculture gains organic traction because it effectively speaks to real-world anxieties, desires, or truths (e.g., environmentalism, civil rights language, or anti-establishment rhetoric).
The “invasion” of language, institutions, corporate entities, or dominant political figures notice the strategic effectiveness of this concept, they “colonize” it by adopting its language, framing, and aesthetics to appeal to the public.
Dilution and diffusion, absorbed into the mainstream, the original, transformative power of the idea is neutralized, restructured to reinforce existing power systems rather than challenge them.
An example we can look at here is the story of Burning Man that holds a warning for the #Fediverse and the wider #openweb reboot. That #techshit success can becomes the process that destroys the thing that made our reboot worth doing in the first place.
Burning Man was born from Rainbow Gathering traditions, from this native path, culture of participation, self-reliance, gifting and collective effort, people didn’t only turn up to consume an experience; they made things #DIY, built spaces, shared skills and invited strangers to join in. The organizations came later, as a way to describe and pass on the culture that had grown organically from the grassroots.
But as Burning Man became successful, those principles became easier to package, sell and perform. Participation become an identity rather than a practice, so self-reliance could become an expensive aesthetic. Then community could become an institution, with the living culture buried beneath branding, bureaucracy and the drug feed path of commercial convenience.
The danger isn’t as simply as outsiders arrived or money entered the picture. It was that the culture became capable of reproducing the appearance of its values without requiring people to practise them. You could buy your way into the experience without developing the skills, relationships and responsibilities that had made it meaningful in the first place.
This is the trap of mainstreaming that the #Fediverse is now walking into it with its eyes closed. We keep hearing from our current self appointed “leadership crew” that the answer to the Fediverse’s problems is to grow, attract mainstream users, become more familiar and make ourselves acceptable to the platforms and institutions we’re supposedly trying to move beyond. On this path growth is treated as success in itself, familiarity becomes the measure of progress. The harder questions about power, ownership, participation and community are pushed aside, ignored and then repressed.
But who is this mainstreaming actually for? What are we trying to grow, and what are we prepared to lose along the way? The #Fediverse like rainbow gathering and its bastard sibling burning man grew from a different set of possibilities: decentralized communication, community-run servers, open protocols and the ability to build social spaces outside corporate control. Its value isn’t simply that it offers another place to post, it is that people participate in building and governing the spaces through which their communication flows.
Yet the blind pushing from the current #mainstreaming crew risks turning those #4opens possibilities into the normal consumer path. Instead of growing communities capable of running their own infrastructure, we concentrate on attracting users. Instead of strengthening collective responsibility, we make everything more convenient and expect somebody else to handle the difficult parts. Instead of building shared power, we copy the familiar platform model and hope a nicer technical foundation will somehow produce a different outcome.
This is where the #geekproblem comes in. Technical people become so focused on adoption, interfaces, scale and implementation that they lose sight of the social purpose of the technology. They build systems that make participation look easy, while doing little to help people become more capable participants. The result is a growing network with increasingly passive users and increasingly concentrated and blinded influence.
The lesson from Burning Man isn’t that growth is always bad, or that institutions and infrastructure are unnecessary. The same culture that produced commercial spectacle also produced genuine solidarity and practical action, including volunteers helping communities recover after Hurricane Katrina. The gift and its shadow grew from the same source.
The question is what our success makes possible – and what it allows us to avoid. A principle is a map, not the territory. Saying we believe in decentralization doesn’t make us decentralized in practice. Saying we support the commons doesn’t mean we share responsibility. Calling something participatory doesn’t mean people have any meaningful influence over it. We have to look at what our structures actually do.
This is why the #OMN project matter in practical sense, not only as culture. We need practical tools for grassroots news, shared archives and community media, built around open flows, reusable data and human trust. We need infrastructure that helps people and communities make things together, rather than another platform designed to turn them into an audience. We need to grow the capacity to participate, not just the number of accounts.
#Mainstreaming should 90% mean taking the values of the #openweb out into the wider world – not reshaping the #openweb until it fits the expectations of the mainstream. If growth requires us to abandon the practices that make the network different, then we need to ask what, exactly, we are growing.
The test isn’t whether our projects become bigger, more polished or more familiar. It’s whether people gain more ability to act, organize, share and govern together. It’s whether the structures serve the communities, or the communities end up serving the structures. Less performance, more participation – Less passive consumption, more shared capacity – Less chasing growth for its own sake, more building things that work.
Keep the tools simple, the flows open and power close to the people doing the work. That’s how we grow the #lifecult instead of reproducing the #deathcult in a new technical wrapper, it’s how we compost the #techshit and build an #openweb worth having. The test isn’t what our projects say they stand for, it’s what people become able to do through them.
There is a temptation to see today’s hard right move as something new. Looking at this mess, the #deathcult is the name I use for the destructive logic of #neoliberal capitalism: a world where profit, growth and competition are the dominant measures of value, while human needs, shared resources and collective responsibility are pushed aside.
If we want to understand the political crisis, we need to dig beneath its surface of how social crisis becomes authoritarian politics. The hard right doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, it draws power from the insecurity, anger and social fragmentation that this system helps produce. History offers some uncomfortable lessons.
Mussolini came from the socialist movement before breaking with the left over the First World War and moving towards nationalism, political violence and authoritarianism. Early fascism combined different political currents before developing into a more defined authoritarian project. In Germany, the Nazis used the myth that internal enemies had betrayed the nation to explain defeat and social crisis. Antisemitic conspiracy theories became central to their account of national decline.
The pattern matters more than any simple comparison between past and present. A society experiences economic insecurity, political failure and declining trust. People feel betrayed, existing institutions appear unable to respond. There are often genuine grievances underneath this anger, the dangerous move comes when structural problems are turned into stories about enemies.
Economic insecurity becomes the fault of immigrants. Political failure becomes the fault of an imagined conspiracy. Cultural change becomes evidence of national decline. Complex social problems are reduced to a few people or groups who can be blamed. The system disappears from view, and the scapegoat takes its place. This is politically powerful because it gives people a clear target without requiring anyone to challenge the structures producing the crisis.
The promise to make the nation great again, authoritarian nationalism often offers a story of lost greatness and promised renewal. Mussolini drew on an idealised image of the Roman past. Nazi ideology constructed a racialised national community around ideas of ethnic purity and exclusion.
National identity itself is not the problem. People need belonging, shared history and meaningful relationships with the places where they live. The danger comes when belonging becomes exclusion. “We live here together” becomes “this is ours, and those people do not belong.” A collective need for security is turned into a demand to identify outsiders. The promise of renewal becomes permission to deny others their place in society.
This is one way the #deathcult and the hard right can reinforce each other. A society organised around competition and insecurity leaves people looking for explanations. Authoritarian nationalism offers belonging and certainty without requiring a fundamental change to the economic structures producing the insecurity. The blame moves around, the underlying system remains.
The important point is the process of #mainstreaming. In social democracy, a fringe idea becomes a campaign demand, it enters a manifesto, other parties adopt parts of it. Newspapers discuss it as common sense, eventually, the boundaries of acceptable political debate have moved. The mess is not only the most extreme position, it is the gradual normalisation of the assumptions underneath it: that particular groups are the cause of national decline, that exclusion will restore social stability, or that some people’s rights can be treated as expendable.
This is how political culture changes before a decisive break with democratic institutions ever occurs. There is an important difference between the political environment of the twentieth century and our own, as the #dotcons algorithmic control industrialize the problem. The old hard right relied on newspapers, meetings, party organisations and physical networks. Today, political messages also travel through algorithmic platforms capable of distributing them at enormous speed.
The #dotcons turn grievance into a feedback loop: anger → attention → engagement → more anger. A complicated social problem becomes a short video with a villain. A conspiracys travel faster than a careful explanation. Outrage becomes a product, and the systems distributing it have incentives to keep feeding people these digital drugs to keep people engaged.
The #dotcons commercial incentives of attention-driven systems amplify conflict, reward emotional reaction and make it harder to sustain a shared understanding of reality. That is part of the #techshit problem, were, technical systems built around commercial incentives reproduce and intensify social problems while presenting themselves as neutral tools.
The #deathcult encourages #stupidindividualism the idea that everyone is responsible for their own survival, that social problems are individual failures, and that collective solutions are either impossible or unnecessary.
History shows how political fragmentation pushes authoritarian movements. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, conflict between the left’s major parties, violence and the selling out/weakening of parliamentary government contributed to the conditions in which the Nazis gained power.
Polarization makes collective action harder when it turns differences into an existential conflicts, when movements spend all their energy fighting internally, they stop building. When every disagreement becomes betrayal, cooperation becomes impossible.
When people lose the ability to work together across differences, someone can arrive promising to settle everything through force and authority. This leaves people isolated precisely when they need one another. When the emergency becomes permanent, we cannot build an alternative society if we destroy every space in which we might cooperate.
Another historical warning concerns the politics of exception. Authoritarian movements argue that ordinary democratic processes are too weak to handle a crisis, extraordinary circumstances supposedly require extraordinary authority. An emergency like on rushing #climatechaos does not automatically produce authoritarianism, societies sometimes genuinely need exceptional measures to respond to immediate dangers.
The #deathcult thrives on the claim that there is no alternative. The hard right turns that same sense of inevitability into a demand for control. If people are persuaded that the only choices are fear or authoritarian order, the space for alternatives becomes smaller. This leads to the next stage of the #deathcult – when human beings become economically useless.
Beneath these political mechanisms sits a deeper problem, the idea that human worth depends on blinded economic usefulness. As people are encouraged to see themselves as individual economic units, competing for a place in a system that treats profit, growth and capital accumulation as its highest values. Work harder. Consume more. Compete better. Become more productive. Apologise for needing anything.
What happens when you become ill, disabled, unemployed, old, poor or simply unwilling to spend your life enriching someone else? If your value depends on your productivity, it becomes easy to treat your needs as a burden and your existence as something that must be justified. This is one of the cruellest tricks of #stupidindividualism: a structural problem becomes a personal shame.
People begin asking whether they deserve a decent life, rather than asking why the conditions for a decent life are being made conditional in the first place. At the same time, the concentration of wealth creates opportunities for a small number of #nastyfew actors to influence politics, media, infrastructure and public debate. The danger of systems that weaken accountability and treat the suffering of some people as an acceptable cost of doing business.
Homelessness, preventable illness, poverty, displacement and environmental destruction do not all arise in the same way. They do, however, show how human needs can be subordinated to other priorities. A system can destroy lives without ever officially deciding to kill anyone. The question is not only whether a class of people might directly target those they consider economically useless. It is why we tolerate arrangements that make some lives more expendable than others.
And why do we internalize that judgement, apologizing for our existence instead of challenging the system making us feel ashamed? The problem is social, not individual, as there is no individual solution to a fundamentally collective problem.
We cannot buy our way out of a crisis produced by the concentration of wealth and power. We cannot solve social isolation through endless individual self-improvement. We cannot rebuild shared reality by retreating further into personalised feeds and private bubbles. Nor can we expect a change of politicians, a new app or another set of slogans to solve the deeper problem on its own.
We need to rebuild the social capacity to act together, that means practical communities, independent media, shared resources, public accountability and spaces where people can disagree without destroying their ability to cooperate. It means creating alternatives before a crisis forces us to act, rather than waiting for existing institutions to fail completely.
This is where the #openweb becomes important, the #OMN: news, archiving and governance. The path is news → archiving → governance. Before we can govern together, we need ways to remember together. Before we can remember together, we need trustworthy public media. And before that works, we need communities capable of disagreeing without destroying themselves.
The #OMN works towards federated media flows in which people and communities can publish, subscribe, moderate, archive and share information without handing ownership of the entire media environment to a central platform. The #4opens – open data, open source, open standards and open process – provide practical principles for examining whether this infrastructure is genuinely open and accountable.
The aim is not to pretend that technology alone will save us, it is to build tools that support collective participation rather than passive consumption, and shared resources rather than platform ownership. The same principle lies behind #OGB, the Openweb Governance Body: exploring how autonomous communities coordinate, negotiate and govern their relationships without surrendering everything to a central authority.
These projects are small parts of a much larger social challenge. But they offer a practical direction beyond simply complaining about the existing system. This is social composting: learning from the mess
We need to compost history, that does not mean romanticizing the past or pretending that every earlier movement got things right. It means treating history as material we can work with. Keep what helps us understand, expose what failed, learn from the damage. Do not repeat the structures that produced it.
The hard right thrives when people believe that the only choices are fear or control. The #deathcult thrives when people believe that there is no alternative to competition, extraction and permanent insecurity. Our task is to make other possibilities practical.
Trust instead of fear, commons instead of concentrated ownership, participation instead of spectatorship, cooperation instead of permanent culture war. Not another shiny political platform, and not another round of #techchurn. We need social infrastructure through which people can build together, maintain shared memory, challenge concentrated power and create alternatives rooted in everyday life.
The future is not predetermined, the worst outcomes are not inevitable. But ignoring the mechanisms that produce them will not make them disappear. The hard right becomes dangerous while its assumptions are becoming normal. The #deathcult becomes harder to challenge when we mistake its values for common sense.
We need to dig at the roots, not just cut back the visible growth. Pick up the shovels to start growing the commons. That’s the #OMN path.
OK, lets not deny real risks, but also don’t accept the AI industry’s mythology as the starting point for discussing risks. The useful question is what currant AI’s actually do, who controls them, and what infrastructure and power relationships we are building around them.
AI is useful technology wrapped in a massive social, political and financial mythology. At the #OMN we are less interested in the usual argument between “AI will save humanity” and “AI will destroy humanity”. as both become noise in the current #LLM mess. To get a clearer picture we need to step back to ask a much simpler question – what does the technology actually do, and what are we building around it? Because there is a trap here.
We take an interesting piece of software, call it “AI”, then AI becomes AGI, AGI becomes superintelligence, and suddenly we are discussing machines as if they are becoming digital people. The #dotcons are happy with this story, as this story justifys gigantic data centres, enormous energy use, massive investment, extraordinary infrastructure contracts and the concentration of yet more technological power in the hands of the #nastyfew.
But there are serious questions about AI safety – autonomous weapons – cybersecurity – biological research – critical infrastructure – economic disruption – surveillance – disinformation – concentration of power. The replacement or degradation of human work. But there is a difference between looking at concrete risks and accepting a mythology about an imaginary future machine.
lets look at some of these risks: “AI will destroy humanity” argument starts somewhere like this – AI becomes more intelligent than humans – it develops goals – those goals don’t align with human interests – it becomes capable of improving itself – it gains access to infrastructure – it protects itself from being switched off – it expands its ability to act. Eventually humans become an obstacle, therefore humanity is eliminated. If we were actually building #AI not the current LLM’s that would be a possible speculative scenario.
But notice how many assumptions are packed into that chain. AI → AGI → autonomous agency → self-improvement → independent goals → infrastructure access → resistance to control → human extinction. Each arrow needs evidence, to judge this #KISS becomes useful. Don’t start with the end of the story, start with the machine in front of you. What can it actually do?
An #LLM generating confident bullshit isn’t evidence of an emerging artificial mind, a badly isolated “autonomous” system causing damage is an engineering and security problem. A corporation using dysfunctional AI to replace workers is an economic and political decision. A military using LLM’s based on the history of litterateur, feed partial data to kill people is a legal, political and military decision. A government using AI for surveillance is a governance problem. A data centre consuming enormous amounts of electricity and water is an infrastructure and ecological problem.
These things don’t require us to believe that a machine has become conscious, they require us to look at the #nastyfew are pushing over us. If we don’t look at the problems from this view we make the same mistake we have made with technology for decades, turning a social problem into a technical problem. Have you noticed that it is the priests of the #deathcult who loves AI.
But the are real problems in the #AI arms race – military competition → autonomous weapons → humans delegate decisions because machines are faster → competing systems interact → escalation/control failure → mass killing. Here extinction result from autonomous weapons, nuclear systems, biological weapons or other military infrastructure. That argument doesn’t require AGI it is simply the current mess with added tech mythology.
The #OMN critique isn’t so much about whether LLM’s are “good” or “bad” it is about the economic and social system surrounding the current #techshit paths, we already have piles of #techchurn to compost with out adding more. The #OMN doesn’t want to repeat this mess with AI, what we need is ways of keeping power visible enough that people can challenge it, for this we need to compost the mythology.
This is why the #OMN is deliberately boring compared with the AI storeys. Our focus is not technological salvation, or technological apocalypse. We need useful #KISS technology embedded in social structures where people can understand, challenge, change and, when necessary, walk away from. The mistake is always turning the tools into a mythology and then building society around the mythology. The #deathcult has had fifty years of economic “thinking” on this, look at the mess, now lift your eyes.
