The #Hashtags Tell a Story: Building Trust in a Messy World

We live in a time of crisis. Climate, community, communication, all are breaking down. Our tools and platforms no longer serve us. To make sense of this, we need to tell stories. And in the digital world, hashtags are one of the most powerful ways we do this. But our hashtags don’t just tag, they trace the roots of our problems, and signpost paths out. Each one is a seed. Together, they are a map.

#dotcons – From #openweb to walled gardens. Once, the internet was a place of openness, built on free tools, shared protocols, and community spirit. Then came the #dotcom era, where profit became the driving force. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, what we call the #dotcons, reshaped the web to lock us in and sell us out. A handful of corporations own the highways of our communication, and their algorithms guide what we see, say, and believe.

#dotcon = profit for a few, con for the rest.

#stupidindividualism – A trap we set for ourselves, we were promised empowerment. But what we got was individualism without solidarity. We’re told: brand yourself, hustle alone, curate your reality. But without community, there is no resilience. Without cooperation, there is no change.

#stupidindividualism is the cultural poison that tells you “you’re on your own.” It weakens us from the inside.

#deathcult – Forty years of neoliberalism. The last four decades have been shaped by a ruthless ideology, that markets solve everything, government should step back, and people must compete, not care. This is the #deathcult – a term for the deadly logic of late-stage capitalism. It’s taken over politics, media, even our sense of self.

Climate denial, gig work precarity, housing crises, mental health collapse - these are all symptoms.

#geekproblem – The failure of trust in tech. Even our allies, the people building tech to fix things, fall into a trap. The #geekproblem is when developers replace trust with control, more permissions, more encryption, more complexity. Instead of building with people, they build over them. The result? More unusable tools, more silos, more #techshit that ends up needing to be composted in abandoned GitHub repos.

#4opens is a way out of the mess, we need this new paths, based on simplicity, humility, and openness, a compass. If a project doesn’t pass the #4opens, it’s not building for the commons, it’s just making another silo.

#OMN, shovels and compost, we already have the tools, projects that build media flows, not platforms. To connect blogs and podcasts into open rivers of content, using simple tech instead of complicated “Web3” vaporware or #dotcons mess.

We’ve built up piles of #techshit. It’s time to pick up our #shovels, compost the waste, and grow something new.

Hashtags = Soft tools for hard times. We use soft metaphors because we live in soft systems: culture, emotion, trust. You can’t “solve” these with code alone. You need care, community, and storytelling. Yes, many demand hard, scientific “proofs” or “frameworks.” But if someone can’t feel the metaphor, they’re probably not ready for the work of rebuilding. We need to focus on those who can, who’ve seen that a different world is possible.

If you can understand that different ideologies shape different realities, then these hashtags will start to speak to you.

Let’s recap the key tags in the story:

#dotcons – Corporations that own and fence in our web

#failbook – Facebook and its culture of manipulation

#openweb – The decentralized, people-powered internet

#4opens – A compass for ethical, sustainable tech

#geekproblem – Tech that controls instead of empowers

#stupidindividualism – Isolation sold as freedom

#deathcult – Forty years of neoliberalism and its collapse

#OMN – Building networks, not silos

#techshit – All the unusable tools that ignore real needs

#shovels – The work we must do

#compost – Making good soil from past mistakes

We don’t need heroes, we need gardeners, grab a shovel, let’s build a future please.

Criticisms of capitalism and its digital children, the #dotcons

Capitalism, especially in its late-stage #neoliberal form, has always had significant structural problems. In recent decades, these problems have been amplified and globalized through our society, I look here at the path of the digital platforms, what we call the #dotcons. These companies are not in any way a break from capitalism, they are its most refined, efficient, and extractive version to date.

Income Inequality

Traditional critique: Capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of those who own capital (factories, land, assets), while workers receive only a small slice of wages.

#Dotcons example: Big Tech CEOs and early investors have become some of the richest people in human history – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – while gig workers and content creators struggle to survive.

Amazon workers are underpaid and overworked, with high injury rates in warehouses. Meanwhile, Bezos took a vanity trip to space.

Uber/Lyft drivers bear the cost of vehicles and insurance, receive no job security, and can be "deactivated" (fired) algorithmically with no recourse.

Exploitation

Traditional critique: The wage labour system is inherently exploitative, profits come from paying workers less than the value they produce.

#Dotcons example: Digital platforms exploit user-generated content while paying creators next to nothing.

YouTube demonetizes videos arbitrarily. Creators build platforms that YouTube controls and profits from.

Facebook/Meta builds its empire off unpaid emotional labour — your social life, your attention, your photos — monetized through surveillance and advertising.

TikTok algorithms suck in youth creativity, reward a few, and discard the rest. The work is free, the profit is centralised.

We’ve all become digital piece-workers, feeding the machine with likes, posts, and swipes, and we’re not even getting wages any more.

Environmental Degradation

Traditional critique: Capitalism’s drive for infinite growth in a finite world results in ecosystem destruction.

#Dotcons example: The cloud isn’t light and airy, it’s made of data centres that consume vast amounts of energy and water.

Bitcoin mining (driven by capitalist speculation) consumes more electricity annually than Argentina.

AI training for LLMs (like ChatGPT) has a massive carbon footprint, often hidden behind “green” branding.

Amazon delivery and consumption cycles have increased packaging waste and pushed unsustainable shipping logistics into overdrive.

Digital capitalism gives us the illusion of “clean” convenience, but its ecological impact is catastrophic and accelerating.

Short-Term Thinking

Traditional critique: Shareholder capitalism focuses on quarterly profits, not long-term well-being.

#Dotcons example: The platforms build attention economies, short-term dopamine hits over sustained engagement, destroying social connectivity and democratic culture.

Twitter/X encourages outrage over insight. Algorithmic virality means trolls win.

Facebook actively promoted divisive content because it increased “engagement.”

Startups "move fast and break things" without repairing the damage. Few are held accountable.

Product design is driven by venture capital exits, not by usefulness or ethics. Tech isn’t solving problems; it’s creating new ones, faster and faster.

Lack of Access to Essential Goods and Services

Traditional critique: In capitalism, basic needs like healthcare, housing, and education are commodified, your access depends on your income.

#Dotcons example: Digital access is the new essential, but it’s increasingly paywalled and monopolized.

Google Classroom became a default education tool during COVID — but it’s ad-funded, tracks users, and lacks any transparency.

Zoom and other platforms required for remote work/schooling are corporate-run silos, with data surveillance baked in.

People in the Global South are increasingly pushed into “zero-rated” Facebook and WhatsApp ecosystems — giving up any path to digital autonomy for basic closed access.

The digital divide isn’t just about cables or bandwidth, it’s about who owns and controls the networks we rely on to build a future.

From Capitalism to #dotcons to #deathcult, the digital platforms didn’t disrupt capitalism, they turbocharged it. What we’re living through and witnessing now isn’t Big Tech behaving badly, it’s the logical endpoint of capitalism in a networked world. The #dotcons replicate and intensify the worst features of capitalism:

More control with less accountability

More labour with less compensation

More growth with more destruction

They’re efficient machines of extraction, cloaked in the language of innovation and empowerment. What’s the Alternative? We need to stop asking how to “fix” the #dotcons and start building outside of them. That means:

Supporting the #fediverse and #ActivityPub as protocols of freedom and decentralization

Backing grassroots media and alternative tech through projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network)

Embracing the #4opens

Fighting back against #mainstreaming capture by NGOs and foundations that reproduce te normal power hierarchies

Prioritizing trust over control, cooperation over extraction, and commons over private for profit platforms

We need to name the problem for what it is: Capitalism – digital or otherwise – is incompatible with the future of people and planet. It’s past time to compost it and grow something better. As a first very basic step, let’s build tech that reflects our #KISS values, not just our fears.

Building Alt/Grassroots Media Networks to Challenge and Widen Traditional Media

The current ecosystem of alternative and grassroots media is too narrow in its imagination of what media could, and should, be. There’s a persistent naivety or, in some cases, a self-serving dishonesty. Many of the most “successful” progressive media groups continue to mimic #traditionalmedia without understanding, or addressing, the fact that they do not control their distribution. In effect, they’re renting space in someone else’s empire.

This is not just a mistake. It’s the same mistake that corporate media has been making for years: relying entirely on the #dotcons, especially Google/Meta/Facebook, to reach people. The algorithms shape the message. The gatekeepers never disappeared, they were replaced by code, powered by ad dollars.

Where are we now? Most grassroots and alt-media outlets do have websites, which means they technically sit on the #openweb. But their sites rarely, if ever, link to other alt-media projects. Despite the rhetoric of solidarity, there is little visible network of mutual support, not even basic hyperlinking between allies.

They podcast, another foot in the #openweb. Yet their outreach and engagement still happen inside #silos like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. In practice, this reinforces the #deathcult’s control of visibility. You can’t build a new world inside the structures of the old, not if the old is designed to undermine you. Why is this mess happening? Two dominant forces are shaping this failure:

On the big scale, we have the #Fashernista embrace of the #dotcons

Many alt-media producers came of age inside the mainstream tech stack. They built their platforms and careers inside the same closed systems they claim to challenge. Their political commitments might be radical, but their infrastructure choices are entirely conventional. This is the liberal, capitalist version of #mainstreaming – reform, not replacement.

On the small scale, #Encryptionist obsession and the #geekproblem

At the other extreme, we have alt-tech projects so obsessed with privacy and control that they create pointless parallel networks that no one uses. They fetishize encryption and “clean standards” over actual human use. The result is tech that is “safe” but irrelevant, drifting into a shrinking ghetto of #stupidindividualism. This is the libertarian version of #mainstreaming – escape, not engagement.

The has been practical work on the ground, over the last years an #openweb tech revolution built around ActivityPub and Fediverse, with projects like Mastodon, which in theory is guided by the #4opens. Yet, despite this, we still hit a wall of self-interest, naivety, and careerist short-termism from the media groups and meany individuals inside this movement.

What can we do? The web is made of links, the #openweb dies without them. If alt/grassroots media want to be part of the solution, they must start acting like a network. A simple step is to start linking to each other. Publicly. Repeatedly. On websites. On blogs. On Fediverse accounts. Use hashtags. Use lists. Tag each other. Cross-publish when relevant. This one act can change the ecosystem.

To solidify this, it’s past time for a new alt-media reboot, a small crew of linked-up, working examples that can pull others onto a sustainable, #openweb path. A real, living network of trust and mutual visibility. If we can show what’s possible, by doing it, we might begin to shift the culture. Let’s find the hopeful, grounded people to help shovel this forward.

If you’re interested in building the open media commons, join the #OMN conversation at https://unite.openworlds.info/explore/organizations to “Make the world you want to see.” or splash some dosh here https://opencollective.com/open-media-network we will make good use of it

The #OMN really complex? It’s not in the code – it’s in us. Let’s be blunt:

The Outside Threats:

The #dotcons (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.)

Surveillance capitalism

Attention farming

Closed distribution algorithms

Platform lock-in

The Internal Saboteurs:

Encryptionist geeks obsessed with crypto but forgetting human users

NGO social media managers who talk community but build silos

Process vampires who kill projects by committee

Fashionistas who follow hype cycles and abandon working tools for shiny vaporware

The #OMN is native to none of these tribes. That’s its strength. But also why it’s often ignored or misunderstood. No permissions, no gatekeeping, no central database. It just works. That’s the #KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

None of the usual suspects like this: Geeks: Don’t like using old tools like RSS or thinking socially. Politicos: Prefer being seen at the cutting edge, even if it leads nowhere. NGOs: Want measurable outcomes, not messy grassroots growth. But we need to stop building castles in the sky. Start building bridges instead.

The real block? The mental model of our tech and political culture. We’re still thinking in terms of silos, ownership, and control.

Hopelessness is a deeply conservative reaction to change and challenge

In the face of mounting crisis – social breakdown, political polarization, ecological collapse – many people turn inward. And in this turn, they mistake passivity, irony and detachment for resistance. But hopelessness is not radical, it’s deeply conservative. It says: “Nothing can change.” “Everything is corrupt.” “Why bother?”

This isn’t rebellion, it’s surrender. And it’s the exact emotional state that power systems – what we call the #deathcult of neoliberalism – need us to be in. It feeds on your hopelessness, it wants your sarcasm, it loves that you’re “above it all.”

Meme culture & irony: Subversion or sedation? What started as absurdist and ironic commentary devolves into a feedback loop of reaction over reflection. Sarcasm and irony dominate, and this can be useful satire, but more often it’s deflection. You’ll see it in:

The snide quote-tweets with no solution.

The endless “vibes” critiques in social threads.

The collapse of political dialogue into aesthetics and shitposting.

This “cool detachment” doesn’t move us any were toward change, it actively blocks it. We saw this in the decline of many #Occupy offshoots, where internal meme culture replaced organising. Or more recently in parts of climate circles, where #doomposting pushes people into nihilism instead of movement.

Inward-looking tribalism in a globalising world, the creeping tribalism of identity performance, the tendency to build ever-smaller circles of agreement and define yourself against the world instead of with it. On the surface, this might seem like radical rejection of the #mainstreaming. But it’s the opposite, a deeply conforming reaction to consumer individualism.

“Build your brand.”
“Curate your followers.”
“Find your niche.”
“Be your own revolution.”

This is #stupidindividualism, a self-defeating survival mode learned from decades of #neoliberal collapse. But there is no individual path through #climatechaos, only collective ones. We see this mess when grassroots media creators ignore collaboration and #4opens publishing, instead choosing to grow their own follower count on YouTube, TikTok or Substack. We see it when radical tech projects are siloed by pride and petty grudges, while the #dotcons eat their functionality alive.

This performative tribalism ends in isolation, not revolution. All of this is the problem, not the solution, let’s be clear:

Sarcastic detachment = stagnation.

Tribal identity wars = division.

Hopelessness = inaction.

Together, they serve the status quo. They are cultural arms of the #deathcult, a system designed to:

Feed on fear.

Incentivize competition.

Reward silence over solidarity.

So what is the change we need? A first step is in #KISS reviving:

Networks of trust, not control (#4opens).
Tools that connect, not isolate (#OMN, #OGB).
Spaces where we speak with doubt, and listen with care.
Structures of cooperation, not only critique (#indymediaback).

We don’t need perfect answers, we need open processes, and we need to reclaim hope, not as naïve optimism, but as active engagement. So pick up your shovel, join a group of composters, feed the soil of a future worth living in.

Hashtags are the River.

A conversation about money and the #openweb

Let’s talk about the tension at the heart of the modern #openweb, and why so many grassroots builders and radical technologists find themselves on the outside looking in. Scene: A typical “open internet” conference in Europe. Excited NGO-funded attendee toots:

“Just booked my place for ePIC in Lille! My first Eurostar trip! It’s where I started 10 years ago with Mozilla. Time flies. #OpenBadges #VerifiableCredentials”

Me (a social tech outsider):

“These things are hopelessly expensive. To attend you have to worship the #deathcult. Hard to know what to do with these two-track approaches. Kinda can’t be #openweb if they’re locked behind temple walls.”

PS. It’s a metaphor. But not an empty one.

Two economies, two Internets, the #mainstreaming of the #openweb means that most so-called “open” events are inaccessible unless you:

Work for a #NGO, startup, or university with a travel budget

Have a career track aligned with #neoliberal frameworks

Can spend hundreds of pounds on accommodation, tickets, and travel

That’s not grassroots, not radical, not open – it’s branded openness for the networking class. The Reply:

“I think that’s a complicated way of saying you can’t afford to go?”

No, it’s not, it’s a social critique, and a common one from those of us who have spent decades building grassroots tech infrastructures and activist media, unpaid or underpaid, mostly ignored. It’s about asking: Who is the #openweb for, really?

Why this matters, when we raise issues like this, we’re not “being reply guys.” We’re making a point about the structural divides that are silencing and marginalising the very voices we need most in these spaces, the people actually building and defending the #openweb on the ground. You can’t build democratic tech by replicating elitist spaces and calling them “inclusive” just because the code is on GitHub. The pushback:

“You can’t live outside the mainstream, throw rocks at it, and complain when it doesn’t accommodate you.”

“I’ve never had a positive interaction with you. You wear that like a badge of honour. I’m muting you.”

Pause here, is this really the attitude we want? If you’re part of the #NGO world, if you have stable income and access to conference budgets, then you are in a position of power. When someone critiques that system, not you personally, but the structures you inhabit, and your reaction is to mute, dismiss, or mock them… something has gone wrong. This is exactly how we lose the #openweb. Not to tech giants, but to social silos within our own communities.

A different approach? Imagine this instead:

“You're right, many of these events are structurally exclusionary. I’ll raise this at the conference. How do you think we can bridge this divide without compromising either side?”

That’s the kind of solidarity we need, that’s how we stop #mainstreaming the death spiral, how we build together. If we want an #openweb that isn’t just another branded ladder for careerists, we have to defend the messy, painful, and vital presence of the grassroots, even when they come knocking without a conference pass.

Muting critique is easy, building bridges? That’s harder, but it’s the only thing worth doing right now.

#NLnet #NGI #NGIzero #EU #funding

Why most #geekproblem software fails: Trust vs. control

What do you mean by “mainstreaming”?

At its core, #mainstreaming is how we, often unconsciously, uphold and reproduce the values of the dominant system. In our time, that system is #neoliberalism, or what I metaphorically call the #deathcult. It’s the air we breathe: shaping our politics, our economics, even the food we eat and how we relate to each other.

In activist terms, #mainstreaming too often means pushing this dominant worldview into alternative spaces, building careers and institutions that play progressive on the surface, but ultimately reproduce the very system that’s driving the crisis. It’s what happens when people take grassroots energy and repackage it in #NGO boxes or #dotcon business plans. The result? We end up feeding the monster we’re supposed to be fighting.

This is the path to #stupidindividualism, where neoliberalism “common sense” didn’t just attack unions, welfare and public goods – it atomized our very identities. Over the past 40 years, we’ve been trained to act as isolated economic units. Individualism replaced solidarity. Competition replaced care. This is what we metaphorically call #stupidindividualism – the corrosive belief that the only way forward is by looking after yourself, even when your actions are part of a system that destroys community and climate. And as history has shown us, when communities collapse, what rushes in to fill the vacuum is fear, resentment, and authoritarianism, in a word: #fascism.

In real-world examples, let’s take @NovaraMedia. They produce great content. But their distribution strategy is rooted in #dotcons (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram), and their cultural aspirations are aimed at becoming the next @Guardian – a new node in the old system. They’re playing inside the media ecosystem of the #deathcult. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to grow an audience. But if we don’t also invest in building and sustaining #grassroots alternatives, we’re just treading water in the mainstream’s tide.

Most NGO agendas follow this same mainstreaming logic: speak in respectable tones, aim for policy tweaks, never rock the boat too hard, and above all, protect your funding. This echos my experience of doing media training and its limits, i’ve spent 25+ years training thousands of people to create radical, grassroots media, through projects like #Undercurrents, #Indymedia, #visionontv, and now the #OMN. Here’s what happened: Most of those trained went on to have careers in mainstream journalism or #NGO communications. Almost none stayed with grassroots projects. And honestly, I kinda don’t blame them, it’s hard to survive outside the system. But that’s the problem: without long-term support for non-mainstreaming work, there’s no soil for alternatives to grow.

We trained them to change the world, but the world trained them to change careers. So what do we do? If we don’t build real, working alternatives, then the only future left is one where billions of people die or are displaced over the next 100 years, from accelerating #climatechaos, and the rise of digital authoritarianism and political fascism. That’s why we need to push back against mainstreaming, not with purity politics or infighting, but with tools and structures that offer real alternatives.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is one such tool:

Technically solid

Politically grounded in the #4opens and #PGA hallmarks

Designed to resist co-option by the #NGO sector or #dotcon logic

Rooted in peer-to-peer cooperation instead of hierarchical control

This path is a seed of something better, not perfect, not finished, but growing from decades of experience. We can’t blame people for trying to survive, but still we can and must build and defend spaces that nurture something, different, better.

Otherwise, the #deathcult “wins” by default.

Everything we build sits on standards

An example of the #geekproblem is the refusal, or failure, to engage seriously with standards. In tech, as in life, nothing exists in isolation. Every app, every protocol, every line of code rests on a foundation of inherited agreements: protocols, languages, schemas, and governance systems. These are the invisible scaffolding of the digital world, we call them standards, and whether people like it or not, everything you’re building is already part of an industrial web of standards.

Now, here’s the issue, some people like building sandcastles, it’s fun, creative, and ephemeral and that’s fine for a beach. But when you’re trying to build something social, collective, public, sandcastles don’t last. Tech built without engagement with standards is just that, fantasy castles doomed to wash away with the tide. The #geekproblem is this tendency, to act like you’re inventing from scratch, when you’re just ignoring the foundations that are already holding you up.

So, what is an “Open Industrial Standard”? Think of it this way:

An industrial standard is a shared agreement that enables interoperation. Think HTTP, HTML, RSS, USB, SQL, IP, ActivityPub. These let different things talk to each other, without asking permission.

An open standard means anyone can read it, implement it, and improve it — without a license fee or gatekeeper.

When it works well, it becomes a public commons — infrastructure we all use without even thinking about it.

That’s the real power of the #openweb, these boring, beautiful agreements that allow radically different people and machines to cooperate at scale. And yes, the process of defining them can be nebulous and political. There are gatekeepers, old boys’ clubs, turf wars (just ask anyone who’s fought through the W3C or IETF). But without engaging with these processes, you’re not doing tech that scales, you’re doing cosplay.

Tribalism vs standards, some geeks mistake tribal loyalty for technical innovation. They reject standards because they didn’t write them, or because they’re seen as “corporate,” or because it’s not their language/community. This is understandable, but it’s also deeply destructive when building shared tools. This tribalism can be:

Beautiful — as identity, passion, and solidarity.

Problematic — when it blocks interconnection, growth, and real-world relevance.

And yes, nationalism is another form of this, some #dotcons are more powerful than countries, so perhaps it’s a useful metaphor. If Amazon or Meta can out-legislate half of Europe, then tribal structures and state structures start to blur. The violence of exclusion, whether through passport or platform ban, operates in similar ways.

The #geekproblem is a 20th-century hangover, a part of the tech tribe that’s clung to personal purity, control, and isolation. But this path is real damage: #climatechaos worsened by inefficient or extractive systems, #failbook dominating sociality through centralised design, #diaspora outreach falling apart from internal ego wars.

The #geekproblem refuses the hard, messy work of social coding, open standards, federation, collective governance. It prefers to build new silos rather than inhabit and improve shared space. We see this constantly. New protocols, platforms, forks. Few links, no bridges. We need to talk about this, as it’s not personal, it’s structural. But people get very personal when you point this out, that’s the #stupidindividualism talking. Instead of building relationships and cooperation, they build sandcastles and expect others to admire them from afar. Meanwhile, the world burns, and tech could be helping, but mostly it isn’t.

In Summary: Open industrial standards are the foundations of anything that actually works at scale. The #geekproblem is a block when it pretends these don’t matter. Sandcastles are nice, but you can’t build a future on them. Let’s engage, not isolate. Link, not fork. Share, not hoard.
That’s the path to a real #openweb, that resists the #deathcult and has a shot at making lasting change.

I’ve been fighting this for 20 years. I wrote this in 2005, and it still holds:

“It’s going slow but we are getting there… One of the main problems seems to be a dysfunctional idea of division of labour – ie. Everyone seems to think I should do everything – as I am pretty useless at many things it’s no wonder it is going so slow… If you wanna see something miraculous happen you gotta wave your arms around a bit and mutter some arcane words… Go on you can do something… Just look at the blog page to see what.”

What Do We Do With Our #Mainstreaming Alt-People?

This is an old and familiar problem: people who say they want change but consistently choose the path that neutralises it. Welcome to the “common sense” #NGO worldview, currently being repackaged in the #Fediverse as things like the Fedi Foundation. It’s not new. It’s not empowering. It’s a tired institutional gravity that drags every radical project into a fog of bureaucracy, branding, and paid careers.

In contrast, we have the “nativist” #openweb crew – grassroots people working with messy horizontalism and free tools, trying to keep the fire alive. See the more grounded reflections like What would a fediverse “governance” body look like?.

And then, sitting awkwardly in between, we have the #geekproblem, coders who are working hard on technical processes like the FEPs (Fediverse Enhancement Proposals) but who avoid touching anything political. They’ve been pushing the #fep process for years now, and while technically interesting, they often ignore the deep political questions of governance and power. That’s fine. But it leaves a vacuum.

The risk: If native paths don’t move, the NGO model will win by default is the hard truth, if the “native” #openweb people don’t move beyond our tired leftist divisions and infinite internal critique, then the #NGO model will be imposed. History tells us this, over and over again. Nature abhors a vacuum. Institutions are always waiting to fill the space with “best practices,” dull forms, and “inclusive” hierarchy. It’s just what happens when there’s a failure to organise from below.

And here’s the problem, the argument between “structure” and “lack of structure” is largely a strawman. Most functioning grassroots projects have lots of structure, it’s just soft structure: relational, implicit, culturally encoded, emergent. The #OGB project (Open Governance Body), for instance, grew from the #EU outreach work and shows this kind of structure in action. It’s not rigid like an NGO. It’s not anarcho-chaos either. It’s #KISS structure, small, practical, and adaptable. But people often miss this because they’ve been taught to only see hard structure: constitutions, charters, legal entities, chairs, and trustees. This blindness is a serious block.

On coops, NGOs, and the shadows of the #Deathcult. A note on coops: They’re often cited as a model alternative. And yes, coops can be good. But many have been co-opted. They function more like bureaucratic relics than vibrant counter-systems.

Examples:

The Coop supermarket hired Tesco managers to “turn it around,” resulting in soviet-style shopping and a full embrace of corporate logics.

The Coop Bank? Try dealing with them — they’re functionally broken through bureaucracy.

1970s wholefood coops had potential — many evolved into neoliberal health shops in the 1990s, selling overpriced turmeric capsules to middle-class wellness seekers.

In contrast, activist organising – even when messy, clumsy, and exhausting – is a better bet. It rarely becomes the shadow of the #deathcult because it is in active struggle against that system. NGOs and formalised coops often become the shadow by default.

What should we do?

Name the problem without being prats about it. People drift into #mainstreaming by habit, not usually by conspiracy. But habits can kill movements. Name them. Push back gently but firmly.
Embrace diversity of organising models. Don’t push coops or NGOs as a one-size-fits-all. Sometimes a loose affinity group or soft network is better. Sometimes a coop makes sense. But don’t dogmatise structures that we know often fail.
Build soft structure, not rigid rules. Ask simple questions like “How does this work with the #4opens?” or “Does this strengthen the PGA Hallmarks?” This builds accountability without shutting down creativity.
Support native projects like #indymediaback, #OGB, and the #OMN, these are based on working structures, rooted in radical history, and built by people with lived experience of doing the work.
Don’t confuse visibility with substance. Just because a foundation or NGO gets press or looks shiny, doesn’t mean they’re doing anything real. Look under the hood.
Compost what needs composting. Don’t let failed or flawed projects keep clogging up energy space. Say goodbye, thank them for their lessons, and move on. We have enough shit to shovel already.

In summary, we don’t need to choose between chaos and bureaucracy. There’s a third path of soft, relational, rooted organising with shared values, proven history, and practical tools. But we have to fight for it. Because if we don’t, the NGO train will keep rolling through, colonising everything with HR-speak and grant metrics. And we’ll be stuck rebuilding, again and again. Let’s not waste more time on that.

Stop throwing regurgitated theory at me: We’re drowning in academic mess

The “common sense” of mainstreaming #deathcult worship is one thing. But a different side, i’m getting bored – and honestly frustrated – with people constantly throwing academic articles and dense theory into conversations about practical grassroots change. If academic knowledge worked in the real world, we wouldn’t be stuck in a permanent state of crisis. We wouldn’t be burning out. We wouldn’t be watching every radical initiative slowly get co-opted, neutralised, then forgotten.

The truth is obvious: most academic frameworks don’t translate well into real-life practice. They to often abstract away the people, the politics, the pain, and the actual doing. And when you try to impose this abstract knowledge onto the messy, complex world of activism, it often backfires. Badly.

Example: The Horizontalist Trap – We’ve all been in those consensus meetings that take hours because someone read a paper on “formal process” and insists we follow it to the letter. The outcome? People walk away frustrated, nothing gets done, and the only ones who benefit are those with time, education, or social power, the exact opposite of what the theory promised.

Example: The NGOization of Resistance – Academics love to talk about power and hegemony, then take funding from the same institutions that perpetuate the problems. They publish papers about “grassroots voice” while never showing up to a single protest, occupation, or food distribution.

Worse still, academic frameworks often become the justification for #NGO “best practices”, which means measurable, fundable, easily controlled deliverables that neuter real resistance and keep everything nice and “professional.” Look at the climate movement’s NGO wing, all form, no fire.

Example: The Misuse of Radical Jargon – Words like “intersectionality,” “decolonisation,” “assemblage,” and “ontology” are thrown around like power spells. But often, they act like a fog machine, confusing, not clarifying. They become tools for gatekeeping rather than building shared understanding.

This isn’t to say these ideas are worthless. But if they aren’t grounded in practice, in lived reality, in #DIY doing, they become another form of control, the academic equivalent of bureaucratic jargon. Empty power.

Let’s Talk About Practice – If you’re serious about radical change, start with what people are actually doing. Watch how trust is built. How disagreements are handled. How collective tools succeed or fail. This is the terrain of useful knowledge. Theory should grow from practice, not the other way around.

This is the basis of the #DIY approach. It’s what grounds #OMN, #IndymediaBack, and the #4opens framework. These projects didn’t come from a PhD thesis, they came from struggle, failure, and iteration on the ground. They work because they grow from practice.

Stop adding to the mess – when you post academic articles without any connection to what’s happening now, in the real world, you’re not helping. You’re contributing to the noise. To the inertia. To the pile of unread PDFs sitting in everyone’s guilt folder.

Instead:

Link to practical guides, not just papers.
Summarise ideas in accessible ways, not just as a show of knowledge.
Relate theory back to what people are already doing.
And most of all, ask first: Is this helping, or is this just feeding my own need to be heard?

We don’t need more theory right now. We need fire, tools, and compost. If you must bring theory, make sure it’s something that came from someone doing the work. Otherwise, maybe save it for the seminar room.

We’re building from the bottom, join us there.

#DIY #NothingNew #4opens #OMN #IndymediaBack #Activism #Compost #OpenWeb #Deathcult

Theory and Practice in Activism

The roadblocks to change are #Stupidindividualism and the #Deathcult that breeds it

If you’ve ever tried to build something radical, collective, and actually useful, you’ve run into these #blocking forces. They’re not just annoying, they’re dangerous, structural, and they always show up. This post is about naming those, calling them what they are, and understanding how they’re entangled in the wider problem:

A culture that valorizes individualism, feeds on careerism, and bows to the false “common sense” of the neoliberal #deathcult.

The #NGO agenda: Careerism in activist clothing. Too many grassroots projects are co-opted by well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) NGOs and their functionaries, who come waving grant forms and talking about partnerships. But really, they’re selling a diluted, bureaucratic version of change that fits inside capitalist institutions, with jobs and funding flows to protect.

At best, they water down radicalism into “deliverables.” At worst, they actively trample grassroots horizontality to build careers. They normalize the #dotcons. They manage, rather than transform. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s structure. And we need to build outside this model.

Petty politics and personal grudges, grows as micro-level sabotage, let’s be honest, some people would burn the future to win a petty feud. This is the everyday rot of #stupidindividualism, where narrow self-preservation and shallow ego become more important than collective progress.

Projects like #indymediaback, which depend on shared vision and mutual respect, break down when people refuse to grow beyond grudges. These behaviours reflect deeper cultural damage, we’ve been trained to see each other as threats, not collaborators. We can’t build anything real if we don’t actively mediate this. That means talking it through, holding space, calling it in, before it derails the work.

The liberal trap is about dogma masquerading as “common sense”. I’ll say something unfashionable, I have respect for old-school liberalism. It gave us social safety nets, education, some rights, a lot of good stuff came out of liberal traditions. But today’s dogmatic liberals, clinging to broken institutions and smearing “common sense” over radical action, are a drain on movement energy. Their default is always compromise, always moderation, even when the world is on fire. We’re stuck negotiating with people who believe the future is a reformed version of the past. It isn’t. We need to move forward, not beg to stay where we are.

The #geekproblem is about control, complexity, and disconnection. We’ve talked about this before, and it keeps coming up. The #geekproblem is when technologists build tools for control rather than empowerment, for complexity rather than access, for themselves rather than people. Often dressed in “neutral” language or “perfect systems,” these tools lock out users, deny social context, and kill collaboration with arrogant assumptions. The fix? Build for people, not machines. Use the #4opens. Work from #DIY practice, not just theory. Centre community. Make it work for the bottom, not the top.

The path we need is compost, this isn’t about perfection. We’ve all played roles in the mess. The key is naming it, owning it, and moving differently. Tools like #OMN, #indymediaback, and #OGB are not shiny new things. They’re grounded in lived practice, built to solve real problems. They don’t pretend to be magic fixes. But they are shovels, to compost the current mess, and grow something better.

We don’t need another app, another platform, another paper. We need to build trust-based networks, support each other, and get our hands dirty together. If we work for it a humanistic, future is still possible, if we stop feeding the #deathcult and start feeding the soil.

Add your thoughts in the comments: What Blocks the progressive path? We need to name these issues clearly, not to shame individuals, but to make them visible as systemic patterns we all get caught in. So tell me: what else is holding us back? What sabotages collective projects from within? Let’s document the patterns so we can start composting them.

#grassroots #DIY #openweb #4opens #nothingnew #postcapitalism #stupidindividualism #culturewars #commoning

Talking about the mess we’re in

We’re living in an age of permanent crisis, there’s no going back to “normal.” Stop waiting for it. Let’s just STOP worshipping the #deathcult as a first step away from this mess. The trap we’re in, neoliberalism, or the #deathcult, isn’t optional. It’s systemic. You don’t get to opt out unless you’re rich enough to buy an island… and even then, it’s a fantasy.

But metaphors have value. #deathcult is a metaphor, yes, and a sharp, useful one. It’s a name for the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: neoliberalism, where markets are sacred, society is optional, and #climatecollapse is just another economic opportunity.

We use hashtags like #deathcult, #fashernista, #climatechaos, #stupidindividualism not to confuse, but to bring dry, academic critique into emotional, accessible terms. They’re #KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid. They cut through the noise, if you let them.

Want an example? I lived a metaphor, ten years ago, I bought a lifeboat and sailed away. Not into isolation, but into reflection. For the last five years, I’ve lived outside most laws and norms. Not because I think that’s the answer, but because it’s one place to plant seeds for better ones.

But the boat, like the #nastyfews islands, isn’t freedom. It’s a metaphor. A stopgap. A reminder that we can step sideways, temporarily, to prepare for change, but only IF we come back and build together.

Power is always social. There is no “DIY freedom” that doesn’t end in loneliness or failure. You are powerless until you engage with others, to build trust and accountability. This is what the #OMN is about. It’s not individual exit, it’s collective entry.

So, talk in metaphors. Use the hashtags. Share the language. Together, they tell a story. But only if you join in.

No more waiting for heroes.
No more worshipping broken systems.
No more technocratic denial.
It’s time to compost the old world and plant something new.

Theory and Practice in Activism

There’s a common confusion, pushed by well-meaning #fashernistas, about how change actually happens. They love theory. They love to talk about change. But when it comes to doing, things go sideways. Why? Because good horizontalists know: theory must emerge from practice, not the other way around.

At the root of radical practice is #DIY culture. We don’t wait for perfect theory or academic approval. We get our hands dirty. We try things, we fail, we try again. Through this, we build theory that is grounded in reality, not floating above it.

The Problem with top-down theory is that when you start from theory alone, disconnected from lived experience, you go ground and round in abstract circles. Then, inevitably, someone tries to apply this neatly wrapped theoretical package as a “solution” to the mess we’re in… and it breaks everything.

At best, this leads to another layer of #techshit to compost. At worst, it becomes academic wank, beautifully phrased but practically useless, imposed on grassroots organisers trying to get real work done. We’re tired of clearing up after these failed interventions. Focus matters. Resources are scarce. Energy is precious. The practice-first approach, is why we’re doing something different with projects like:

#OMN (Open Media Network): building tools from the bottom up, with open metadata flows and radical trust.

#Indymediaback: rebooting a proven model of grassroots publishing that worked, updated for today.

#OGB (Open Governance Body): prototyping governance based on lived collaboration, not abstract debate.

All of this is theory grown from practice. None of it came from think tanks or grant-funded consultants. It came from kitchens, camps, squats, TAZs, mailing lists, and dirty hands. If you want to be part of this work, great. But please engage with it as it is. Bring your experience, your skills, your curiosity. But don’t dump disconnected theory on it. Don’t smother the flow with top-down frameworks or overthought abstractions.

We need people to join the flow of practice. Let the theory emerge where it’s needed, like compost, growing what feeds us. So: Start where your feet are. Build from what works. Trust the process of doing. And please, don’t push mess our way. We’ve got enough of that already.

Let’s build something real. Together.

#DIY #grassroots #4opens #KISS #deathcult #nothingnew