Tag: fashionistas

OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons

For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer – Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make it so hard to change the needed balance of power in society? These question matters for working on the future of the society and most importantly the grassroots part of this: #openweb, grassroots media, and projects like #OMN.

The hollowing out of institutions, in the 20th century, politics used to be deeply institutional. People didn’t just express opinions, they joined organisations. If you marched in a protest, we usually marched as a member of something: a trade union, a political party, a civil rights organisation or community association. These organisations formed the infrastructure of democracy, connecting everyday anger and hope to real power.

But beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, much of this infrastructure was deliberately dismantled. Union power was broken, mass political parties were hollowed out, and community organisations lost resources and influence. The result is the political landscape we inherit, a society with political anger but without any working political structures.

Today we live in what #fashionistas and academics call #hyperpolitics or what I call #stupidindividualism in the hashtag story. Yes, some people are more politically engaged than they were in the 1990s or early 2000s: More fluffy protests, #dotcons online political discussion. But this engagement is almost all unstructured in the old sense.

Millions may join a protest or share a political message in the #dotcons, yet very little, if any lasting organisation emerges from this. This surface engagement creates a strange paradox of huge drifting mobilisations leading to very little structural change. We can have the largest protests in history – yet the underlying power structures remain completely untouched.

Closed #dotcons social media lowered the cost of expression, but algorithmically shaped it into smoke and mirrors. Let’s take a moment to lift the lid on this #tecsit mess. The role of media in this is complex, on the positive side, #closedweb platforms drastically reduced the cost of political expression.

Forty years ago, if you wanted to express a political opinion publicly you needed a newspaper, radio station, a public meeting or to stand in a square shouting. Now you can reach thousands of people instantly. But there is a downside that #dotcons smoke and mirror online engagement replaces the slow work of institution-building. Posting, sharing, and reacting can feel like participation, but it has very little role in building the durable structures needed for any long-term change.

So why do the current hard right succeed without institutions? There is an uncomfortable asymmetry between left and right. The right can carry out its agenda without building mass organisations, because it relys on: existing elitist power structures, wealthy donors, state institutions and traditional corporate media.

The left cannot rely on these, historically the left needed mass organisations because its power came from collective action – workers, communities, movements. Without those structures, left politics becomes, mess, fragmented and reactive. This is why protest waves can be enormous but still fail to shift any real policy.

The #undeadleft problem is where vertical left respond to this crisis with nostalgia, there imagination stops at rebuilding the mass political parties and institutions of the 20th century. But this is to often like trying to animate a corpse, even if you could recreate it, the environment has changed so much that it wouldn’t survive.

At the same time, the opposite response – abandoning institutions entirely to relying purely on digital networks – also fails. Purely online movements often dissolve as quickly as they form. We need a #DIY hybrid path based on federated #4opens institutions like the tools we are building and rebooting with the #OMN projects.

Not rigid old institutions, not purely online networks, But something that seeds the in between. The goal is not to create another platform, it is to expand #federated #p2p infrastructure for collective media and collective politics. The original #openweb worked because it supported networks of communities, independent publishers and grassroots movements. The corporate #dotcons replaced this with extractive platforms designed for profit and control.

KISS rebuilding the commons means rebuilding the social infrastructure of media, not just tools, but institutions and practices that persist to allow collective voices to organise and persist.

The simple truth, if we want real political change, we cannot rely on viral posts, temporary movements or algorithmic attention. We need structures that last, connect people, that can turn energy into horizontal power. That work is slow, messy, and unfashionable, but like digging compost for a garden, it’s the only way anything grows.

A path to start to compost this #techshit is growing horizontal tools from the Fediverse for real change (#OMN).

If the problem of our time is political energy without institutions, then the opportunity is clear:
build new institutions native to the #openweb. Not simply recreate the rigid organisations of the 20th century, and not fall into the hollow performative politics of the #dotcons. Instead, we grow native horizontal digital tools to help people organise, coordinate, and act collectively. This is where the Fediverse and projects like #OMN matter.

The #Fediverse already proves that distributed infrastructure works. But right now it is mostly used for conversation. If we want meaningful change and challenge, we need to extend it into practical coordination and collective action. by build tools for organising, not just talking

Current social media tools are built for attention and engagement, not organisation. What we need to add to the mix is simple #4opens tools that help people form groups, coordinate action, share resources, document activity and most importantly maintain continuity over time (#makinghistory). The Fediverse already has #fashionista and #geekproblem pieces of this:

Mastodon / Pleroma → conversation

Mobilizon → events and gatherings

PeerTube → video publishing

PixelFed → visual storytelling

Lemmy / Kbin → community forums

These existing pieces can become seeds to be woven together into workflows for collective action. On this path we need to remember the goal is not more platforms, it’s practical ecosystems. For this to work a first step is rebuilding commons-based media. A core idea behind #OMN is returning to something like the #Indymedia publishing model, but rebuilt using modern federated tools. Instead of a single website, imagine distributed publishing nodes where local groups post reports, media is shared across networks, discussions happen across servers and archives remain accessible and most importantly meaningful.

This builds collective memory, something the algorithmic feeds of the #dotcons constantly destroy. Movements need memory to learn.

#makinghistory is the same code-base as this grassroots media project

One reason mass organisations collapsed is that participation became too heavy, people don’t want to “join a church” politically any more. So tools should allow different levels of engagement: casual participation, occasional contribution, active organising with core stewardship. The Fediverse naturally supports this because it allows loose affiliation rather than rigid membership. You don’t need permission from a central authority to participate.

Focus on infrastructure, not branding. A common #NGO trap in activist tech is building new branded platforms that compete with existing networks. That approach usually fails. The better path is infrastructure building based on protocols instead of platforms for #4opens interoperability instead of silos, tools that connect existing communities. This was the original power of the #openweb, protocols scale. Platforms capture.

Keep the tech simple (#KISS), as the biggest barrier to grassroots technology is complexity. Many promising projects fail because they become too technical for real communities to use. So the rule should always be KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Tools should be installable easily, understandable by non-geeks and maintainable by small communities to grow resilience without large funding. If only developers can run the system, it will never become a movement infrastructure.

Compost the failures (#techshit). Another key idea is recognising that the tech world constantly churns useful waste. Old tools, failed platforms, abandoned code, all of this is #techshit that can be composted instead of chasing fashionable new tech, we reuse working ideas, simplify existing tools to combine proven approaches. The #openweb already solved many of these problems decades ago. Sometimes progress means going back to what worked.

Build trust networks, as the most important layer isn’t technical – it’s social. Horizontal networks only function when there is trust and shared culture. The Fediverse works because communities can federate with trusted peers, block hostile actors, build local norms. This allows networks to remain open but resilient. The challenge is nurturing communities of practice around the tools.

Grow slowly and organically, movements that scale too quickly often collapse. The better model is ecological growth with small nodes → connected networks → resilient ecosystems. Just like compost turning into soil. The goal is not explosive growth, its sustainable infrastructure for collective action.

The real challenge is the biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it’s the #geekproblem – the gap between technical culture and social reality. Too many tech projects assume that better tools automatically produce social change, but tools only matter when they are embedded in real communities and struggles. The work of projects like #OMN is bridging that gap.

Shovels, not silver bullets, we don’t need magic platforms, we need shovels, tools that help people dig, build, connect, and organise together on the native #openweb. If we can do that, the Fediverse becomes more than an alternative social network, it becomes infrastructure for democratic power.

What projects like #OMN can learn from history

Fascism, treats collaboration as weakness.

Fascism, treats collaboration as weakness. Something you only (pretend to) do when you’re not strong enough to dominate outright. In the fascist worldview, cooperation isn’t power, it’s a temporary tactic until hierarchy and force can be re-asserted. That’s why fascists can never be trusted. Not tactically, not strategically, not “just this once.” They don’t believe in shared outcomes, public goods, or mutual care. They believe in command, obedience, and extraction.

We also touch on this in our own #geekproblm, this is why the #OMN line is drawn. Open Media, commons-based infrastructure, and collective governance only work if collaboration is real, if participation isn’t a trick, and if power actually flows horizontally. Fascist politics is structurally incompatible with this. It can mimic collaboration, but only as camouflage. The moment it has leverage, it closes processes, centralises control, and purges dissent.

We have now made such a mess of society and our ecology that getting out of this mess is going to create lots of new mess, this issue is the base of the democratic path of the #OGB project. Please don’t be a prat on this, because this is also why fascism always collapses. Systems built on domination can’t sustain themselves, they can’t maintain shared infrastructure or produce trust, care, and resilience. They can only hoard, police, and coerce, until the system eats itself.

Meanwhile, everyone else survives by doing the one thing fascism cannot: building together. Collective projects, mutual aid, shared media, and public knowledge create abundance through cooperation. They scale through trust, not fear, and grow because people see themselves in the outcome.

Our #fashionistas if we dont build working alternatives today.

In the long run, fascism doesn’t lose because it’s defeated by force alone, it loses because it refuses to participate in the commons. It isolates itself, hardens, and withers, while networked, cooperative cultures keep building better lives in the open.

That’s the wager of #OMN: Not domination, but participation, not hierarchy, but shared process, not spectacle, but collective power. Fascism cannot survive in that terrain.

Software licences and the #geekproblem

There are meany online exchanges about software licences that can help to highlight the #geekproblem. Yep, these conversations can sound radical at first glance:

“Software licences won’t destroy capitalism, but if they can be even slightly annoying to capitalists in the meantime, I’ll take it.”

Fair. Nobody sensible thinks a licence clause will end capitalism. Making exploitation harder while working on the material conditions that allow it to exist is reasonable. But after this, the #geekproblem to often kicks in.

Very quickly, conversations collapses inward. Instead of asking what licences are for, or how they fit into a broader social strategy, we get trapped in internal debates about #GPL vs #AGPL, #FAANG legal departments, #FSF personalities, jurisdictional edge cases, and which licence is more “annoying”.

This is classic geek tunnel vision as the question shifts from power to mechanism, political outcomes to technical purity, and then collective strategy to individual preference and irritation. At this point, the original political intent is already lost.

Yes, saying “we should use licences that protect against FAANG abuses” doesn’t cut it. FAANGs aren’t a licensing problem, it’s a political and economic problem, they shouldn’t exist at all. Pouring huge amounts of energy into licence debates while quietly forgetting the actual goal of changing the social and economic conditions that make enclosure, extraction, and platform dominance possible.

This is why #FOSS needs to be socialised, licences are tools, not politics, they only matter insofar as they support collective power, shared infrastructure, and commons-based production. When they become identity markers, moral badges and endless argument fuel, they stop being useful and start becoming obstacles.

The #4opens framework exists to cut through this mess. Not to find the “perfect” licence, but to ask simpler, grounded questions:

  • Is the code open?
  • Is the process open?
  • Is the governance open?
  • Is the outcome open and reusable?

If those aren’t true, arguing about GPL vs AGPL is mostly noise.

The #dotcons cannot be fixed by clever licensing. And the #fashionistas endlessly flocking to new “ethical-ish” platforms aren’t helping either. What matters is building native, grassroots, public-first infrastructure, and keeping our eyes on that horizon.

So please, use licences tactically, sure. Make capital’s life harder where you can. But don’t confuse irritation with transformation. That confusion – mistaking technical manoeuvring for political progress – is the heart of the #geekproblem.

Long live the GPL, AGPL, or whatever works in context. But without social organisation, collective ownership, and open governance, they’re just paperwork in a burning world.

So as ever, don’t be a prat, please.

Digital Detox Is Urgently Needed

Fighting #fashionistas with fashion. We have an app outline for that: iPhone or android.

Not as a lifestyle tweak, not as wellness branding, not as another individual “better habits” story. These proposed apps and the wider projects have nothing to do with self-optimisation, productivity hacks, or personal purity. Framing it that way is already defeat – that’s #stupidindividualism doing the work of the #dotcons for them.

What we’re facing in our digital mess isn’t only a failure of self-control, it’s a structural capture problem. The #dotcons platforms are designed to extract attention, shape behaviour, and enclose social space. You don’t fix that by telling isolated individuals to be stronger or more disciplined. You fix it by changing the infrastructure people live in.

That’s why this has to be collective infrastructure. Shared norms, shared limits, shared tools. Social agreements embedded in tech and process, not moral pressure dumped onto individuals. The goal is to change default behaviour at the group level, so resistance isn’t exhausting and opting out doesn’t mean disappearing.

The native #OMN path is about rebuilding the commons: tools that assume trust, reciprocity, transparency, and accountability from the start. Defaults that slow extraction, not accelerate it. Processes that make manipulation visible and contestable. Mediation instead of opaque algorithms. Human-scale flows instead of infinite feeds.

We do need to keep lighting, this isn’t self-control, it’s collective self-defence. Anything on the normal path is simply dresses up surrender as “wellness” and calls it choice, it is just more head down, worshipping the #deatcult.

The core idea: The buddy method. You don’t fight addiction alone, don’t detox alone, you don’t escape algorithmic capture alone, you do it with another human.

App 1: Digital Detox Buddy

A simple app that sits on top of existing child lock / screen time APIs. No dark magic, spyware, behavioural profiling. Instead, simple:Just process, consent, and friction.

Defaults matter. Default allowance: 4 hours per day on #dotcons, when time runs out: You get a 10-minute grace extension button. Extending beyond this requires talking to your buddy

To permanently end limits: You must unbuddy (an explicit social action). This creates pause, reflection, conversation – the opposite of dopamine scroll loops.

Time reduction is gradual, a soft landing, not punishment. Start at 4 hours/day, reduce by 1 hour per week/month. People can stabilise or reverse with buddy agreement. This is about retraining habits, not moral purity.

What Is counted (and what Is not)? Metered: Phone screen time (total). Time spent on #dotcons platforms. Unmetered: Web browsing, #FOSS apps, Reading tools, Local-first utilities, Creative tools.

The framing is explicit: The problem is not only “screen time”. The problem is extractive platforms.

Privacy + accountability balance, Aggregated stats are public (community-level visibility, cultural pressure). Exact stats are buddy-only (trust-based accountability)

Public stats answer: Average phone use, average #dotcons use, detox participation trends

This is #DemocracyOfReach applied to behaviour change – cultural signal without surveillance.

Architecture: First version: client–server is OK, preferably designed for #p2p later

Buddy relationship is explicit, revocable, symmetric, no central behavioural scoring, no advertising, no data resale, this is infrastructure, not a product.

App 2: Consumerism Detox Buddy

Same logic. Different addiction.

Consumerism Is also a platform problem, endless consumption isn’t “choice”. It’s nudging, targeting, and engineered impulse. This second app mirrors the first but focuses on shopping behaviour. How it works, uses geolocation, identifies time spent in: shopping centres, large retail chains, branded consumption spaces,

Same buddy rules: time limits, soft extensions, explicit social negotiation. Local markets, repair, reuse, libraries, commons spaces are excluded or positively weighted.

This is people to people anti-#deathcult economics made concrete in apps.

This is why it belongs on the #OMN path, and why it is not about personal optimisation, quantified-self nonsense, wellness capitalism, #NGO nudging, or behavioural surveillance.

A clear path about collective governance of attention. With explicit social process, open defaults, visible culture change. Tools that support people talking to each other, not being silently managed.

The apps don’t “fix” people, they change the environment people live in. This is striving to mediate what matters now: digital addiction and consumerism aren’t side effects. They are core pillars of the #deathcult. If we can’t or won’t build ways to step out together, all we get is isolated “self-help”.

These apps are p2p, gentle, federated, human-scale refusal, not banning, shaming or preaching. Its #KISS “Let’s do less of this – together.” If we can build social media apps, we can build #dotcons exit apps. A #OMN-native path.

Before you ask, the second stage, step, is to socialise the first step, offline.

The Fediverse is native to the open web

We are having a tech reboot for the last few years, federated seems to be where it’s at right now, and it makes sense, the #fediverse is flourishing where so many “#web3” or pure #p2p projects stumbled. This isn’t to say #p2p is bad. But for a peer-to-peer social network to actually work and be social useful, it would need mechanisms for collectivising: shared moderation, subjective trust, a way to handle conflict. Purely (stupid)individualist solutions have been tried before, and they don’t hold together at all beyond a tiny scale. Atomised people cannot build any lasting commons.

The strength of federation as a path is that it collectivises by default. Servers are groups, not individuals, decisions are made within communities, not in isolation, this builds resilience. What is currently #blocking this path is our #fashionistas and #geekproblem people, who are still clinging to parts of #mainstreaming “common sense!. If you try to vertically scale, if you dream of competing head-on with Silicon Valley, running giant datacentres with teams of sysadmins, you’ve already lost. That’s their game, their best proficiency. You cannot beat them at it.

The path forward is to do something they cannot do without breaking their own business model. Something they would never want to do even if they could. That’s the opening. That’s the #OMN path. So let’s be clear about what the current #openweb reboot and the #fediverse is not:

  • The fediverse is not an electricity grid. You don’t have to be plugged in everywhere for it to function.
  • The fediverse is not feudalism. You are not a serf bound to some lord’s server. You can leave, fork, migrate, or self-host.
  • The fediverse is not a commodity. It is not like a telephone line or a utility service to be packaged, sold, or regulated in the same way.
  • And no, the fediverse is not a big truck that carries data down the highway. It’s a messy garden, a bazaar, a commons.

The #fediverse works because it is untidy, diverse, and decentralised. It’s a network of collectives, not a monopoly machine. The #OMN path and vision is to lean into this: not to replicate the #dotcons in smaller, scrappier forms, but to compost the mistakes of the past and grow something native, nourishing, and #4opens.

The #OMN isn’t about isolated gestures, it’s about building federated, trust-based media networks that actually work at scale. Right now, the truth is simple: you can’t just join or create one tomorrow. Why? Because the path needs composting first.

By composting, we mean taking the wreckage of past projects – messy, co-opted, burned-out, over-managed, or over-centralised – and turning it into fertile ground. From this social fertile soil can we grow #OMN that support:

  • Open, federated collaboration
  • Shared media creation and distribution
  • Affinity group – based moderation and governance
  • Strong social resilience against co-option by corporations or #dotcons

We need to then bride this existing federated path into the seed #p2p path with social tools that work and hold this bridge in place. The #OMN is a work in progress, and that’s intentional. It’s about building the crew, the culture, and the infrastructure before anyone can just “join.” This isn’t a platform you log into; it’s a path we create together, step by step. Until we do that composting, passive participation isn’t possible, the first step is #KISS that’s exactly what we’re focused on making happen.

A poet’s view of the path

Composting the #techshit, planting the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#KISS

A small view of steps we need

Pick up the shovel: turning habits into compost

The problem isn’t that people refuse to act. The problem is that most are stuck in paralysis: “What do I do?” If the only options they see are worshipping the #deathcult or reinventing the wheels, passivity looks like the safest choice.

The design challenge of the #OMN isn’t just tech – pipes, tanks, metadata – it’s rituals and rhythms that invite participation. We need a seed affinity group whose job is simple: set the shovel down in front of people.

Don’t only complain that they aren’t digging. Literally put the shovel in their hands and say:

  • Run a local flow.
  • Tag a batch of data.
  • Moderate one stream.
  • Host one screening/fire circle.

Tiny, clear tasks. The kind you can do in an hour. That’s how you turn passivity into momentum. Shifting habits into usefulness, instead of fighting people’s flaws, turn them into leverage.

#fashionistas crave visibility. Fine. Give them the role of spreading compost metaphors, making the work look alive and fresh. Let them shine light on the soil.

#geekproblem crave puzzles and edge cases. Good. Hand them the tricky parts: trust plumbing, metadata sieves, redundancy logic. Their obsessiveness is an asset if aimed at the right joints of the system.

#mainstreaming crave “safe” recognition. Use it. Frame #OMN as “the next big thing everyone will need to join.” Let them be the “early adopters” who stay safe by appearing ahead of the curve. They don’t need to lead, they just need to follow momentum.

Each group moves in circles, polishing surfaces while the compost pile rots. But if you show them something real – a flow that works, a network that breathes – they drift toward it. Shiny surface with soil beneath, puzzles that connect to lived use, recognition that feels inevitable.

The Lesson, is, don’t try to convince people in the abstract. Show them working compost. Show them trust flows in action. Show them that it’s easier to do something useful than to do nothing. That’s how we should be pushing, that’s how we turn paralysis into practice. That’s how you start to compost the #deathcult.

For this to flow in activism, We need to compost – some traditions work, many do not. It’s more complex than it looks, because those traditions that “don’t work” often do work – but only for the people who push them. That’s the root of the hashtag story: a tactic, a format, a ritual can give visibility, ego, and career advancement to its promoters, while leaving the commons weaker. The tradition “works” as a personal lever, but fails as a collective tool.

We’ve all seen this: Endless meetings that build someone’s identity as a “process person,” but drain energy from action. Branding projects that make a clique look good to funders, while hollowing out grassroots trust. Campaigns designed for headlines and hashtags, not for long-term change.

There is a bitter truth: a tradition can succeed as a ladder while failing as a bridge. We don’t need to throw everything away. We need to compost. To ask: Who does this serve? Does it build trust, or personal power? Does it strengthen the commons, or just the clique?

The hashtag story isn’t about rejecting all rituals. It’s about refusing to confuse personal gain with collective growth. Traditions that build soil – trust, flows, openness – must be tended. Traditions that rot into self-serving traps must be turned, aerated, broken down. That’s the cycle: compost the false, nurture the living.

#OMN #4opens #KISS

Commons and the metaphor of “grow a backbone”

With the tyranny of the structureless path, every attempt to share the commons decays into a fog of personalities, cliques, and unspoken power. What needs composting here is that, at best, you end up with a smiling violent man as the backstop of governance.

Without mediating structures, what emerges is not freedom but hidden hierarchy. “Smiling violence” – the agreeable man (or clique) who insists they’re just holding things together – quietly blocks challenge, manipulates process, and reserves the final say. If you’re not paying attention, and can’t move away, you wake to find yourself living in #feudalism, with its ever-present threat of personal violence lurking behind the smile.

This is how “horizontal” spaces rot. They confuse the absence of shared structures with openness, when in fact it is poisoned soil: domination by those most willing to coerce, block, or flatter. Without functioning myths and traditions, shared trust, and open processes, what grows is not commons but personal power, one person’s will, or a small group’s grip.

The smiling violent man is not an accident. He is the inevitable product of structurelessness:

Without flows of accountability, you get bottlenecks of control.

Without mediating trust systems, you get gatekeepers posing as “protectors.”

Without a backbone, you get a backstop, a hard edge of coercion dressed in kindness.

The result: commons replaced by fiefdoms, trust replaced by muscle, care replaced by the mask of “caring the most.” Once that happens, the commons are no longer common, they are held hostage.

When I see this again and again, I sometimes say: “grow a backbone.” But this rarely lands well. So let’s pause and ask what backbone really means in social settings:

  1. Structure / Stability: Like a spine holding the body upright, a social backbone is the framework that keeps everything from collapsing into mush. In #OMN terms: the #5F framework is the backbone, UX, UI, and culture all grow around it.
  2. Courage / Integrity: To “have backbone” means to stand firm under pressure. For movements, this means holding the line when mainstreaming forces, fashionistas, or gatekeepers push back. Backbone is refusing co-option, staying rooted in trust.
  3. Invisible but Essential: The backbone is not the face, not the style. It’s the quiet strength – shared trust and open processes – that allows everything else to move. Often invisible, but without it, nothing functions.

A social backbone, then, is the shared trust + open processes that holds a community upright against both internal decay and external capture. By contrast, on the progressive path the #fashionistas build style without backbone (pretty, but collapses quickly), and the #geekproblem builds bone without flesh (rigid, alienating).

Metaphors work when people use them, this might become convoluted 🙂

The comments brought up some points -When we talk about composting bad process, the stink comes from rot sealed off from air, the smiling violence holding the heap down, suffocating flows. The shovel (#OMN) exists to turn the pile, let oxygen in, keep the ecosystem alive. But the real work is done not by the shoveler but by the hidden actors: the invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria. The slow, distributed, many-voiced work of transforming mess into fertile ground. That’s us, when we build trust-based flow networks.

So let’s think about this backbone metaphor more. In biology, spines give structure, but ecosystems are held up just as much by invisible scaffolding: fungal networks, soil webs, rhizomes. In tech, the Internet “backbone” was designed with redundancy, no single node decisive, everything routing around damage. That’s closer to an exoskeleton or even a rhizome than to a rigid spine: strength through distributed paths, not central authority.

Back to the subject of tech #Mainstreaming likes to tell the story that the Internet came from the Pentagon, born a war machine. There’s truth there. But there’s also the buried history (see APC’s work) of people shaping it into a commons, a tool for organizing, a network not of command but of association. That history is the “invertebrate” path, fragile, messy, hard to see, but alive. And in truth, tech is ideology embodied: the people who built the early net built something that could survive without the state, routing around command and control. That’s a good definition of anarchy.

So the wider metaphor isn’t just backbone, but ecosystem: A scaffold that gives form (#5F of the #OMN as the bones). Shovels to aerate and mediate (#OGB as the process tools). Invertebrates and fungi (the hidden actors – users, trust webs, communities). Rhizomes and redundancy (the net’s anarchic, native design).

The danger comes when we forget this, and mistake surface style for soil depth. The #fashionistas offer flowers without roots, the #geekproblem offers bone without flesh. The commons require both – backbone and compost, scaffold and ecosystem. Otherwise, the heap stinks and collapses into fiefdoms.

A small history – Russia

The story of the 1990s in #Russia is not just a local tragedy. It is the cornerstone of the modern #deathcult order. December 25th, 1991. The Soviet flag lowered for the last time. The West declared victory. The Cold War was over. “Democracy” had won.

But for millions of Russians, that night was not liberation. It was the start of collapse. The USSR’s vertical system had provided stability: guaranteed jobs, cheap housing, free healthcare. When it fell, all of it was ripped away in the name of “shock therapy” engineered by Western #neoliberal economists.

Prices exploded 2,500% in a single year. Pensions evaporated. Scientists, teachers, and doctors became taxi drivers and street vendors. Oligarchs bought entire industries for the price of a few crates of vodka and envelopes of bribes. The “transition” wasn’t transition at all. It was theft on an unprecedented scale.

From stability to rot: Bandit capitalism of factories sold for pennies, resources looted, mafia rule normalized. Gangster democracy with car bombs, contract killings, “roof” protection rackets running entire cities. Humiliation of grandmothers begging at metro stations, teachers starving, children roaming unsupervised.

This was not an accident, it was planned, the #deathcult in action, the neoliberal faith that “free markets” would magically self-organize into harmony. What actually emerged was rule by predators. While the West celebrated the “end of history,” Russia burned.

And from that compost of despair, a “quiet man from the KGB” rose up. Putin was not a break from the chaos, he was its product. The mafia state fused with the official state, suffering compacted into concrete, poured into the foundations of authoritarianism.

This is not only a Russia’s story, it’s the parable of the last century: Stalinism’s dead weight crushed trust and creativity. Postmodernism’s cynical fog turned truth into a selfish plaything. Neoliberalism’s greed-choked rot hollowed out alternatives and sold them for scrap. Each era piled on the stink. Each era buried and obscured the simple #KISS truth:

  • The right-wing feeds on division.
  • The left-wing grows from trust.

This 1990s history matter because it exposes the current right-wing hallucinations of the #deathcult, the lie of the free market, the false “victory” of the Cold War, the blind faith in Western models. Millions lived and died in that wreckage. And the system that followed, that is now pushing war and control towards the art of Europe – authoritarian, kleptocratic, imperial – was fertilized in this mess.

We see the same script running in the USA, and soon, likely, across the UK. This is now the legacy, social brake down packaged as progress, and authoritarianism sold as the only escape from #neoliberal collapse.

And, the lesson from this mess, is not that collapse is inevitable. The lesson is that composting is necessary. The wreckage of “proper channels”, whether Soviet bureaucracy or neoliberal privatization, is raw material. When left to fester, it breeds gangster rule and authoritarian “order.” Where the path we need to take, If we turn it, together, shovel in hand, it might become the soil of humane culture.

This work is not glamorous, it is not the smiling-face hallucination of the #fashionistas. It is dirty. Necessary. Real. Pick up the shovel, compost the #deathcult, grow something alive, before the tanks of war can churn over our gardens.

The West, Russia, and the madness of mutual sabotage

Pick up a shovel, the work is ours

The right-wing feeds on division.
The left-wing grows from trust.

This simple #KISS truth is buried under decades of shit.

Stalinism’s dead weight.
Postmodernism’s cynical fog.
Neoliberalism’s greed-choked rot.
All piled onto our social soil.

Now we stand in the stink:
social, technological, political, philosophical mess.

We don’t deny it.
We compost it.
We turn the pile, let it breathe,
make decay into fertile ground.

From this soil, we grow a humane culture.
Trust. Commons. Care.
A path beyond the #deathcult.

Pick up a shovel.
The work is ours.

#OMN #4opens #KISS

The victimhood narrative needs composting

What is #blocking this simple step away,
one reason is the #mainstreaming insist you use the “proper channels”
is because they own the channels.
They wrote the rules. They staffed the committees.
They built a maze where the end is always defeat.

That’s why they’re so confident it “won’t work.”
Because it isn’t designed to.
The proper channels exist to bleed energy,
to bury dissent in paperwork and “stakeholder processes,”
to keep power safe where it already sits.

The #OMN takes the opposite path.
No hard gatekeepers. No “proper channels.”
Just open flows. #4opens all the way down.

Instead of wasting years trying to squeeze through their pipes,
we compost their mess and build new streams.
Trust networks. Shared publishing.
Messy collectives that actually do the work
instead of talking it to death.

That’s what really scares the #mainstreaming people most.
That we don’t need their channels at all.
That we can walk away and build our own.

The deep wound a lot of people carry – and it’s not personal, it’s structural. When “you” don’t feel “respected,” when the mainstream has no time or use for “you”, it’s because their whole machine is built on efficiency of exclusion. They don’t even see “you” as a subject in the conversation – you’re treated as noise, not signal.

And when the alt paths are blocked – often by the same smiling faces, the same gatekeepers in different clothing – the feeling is doubled: shut out by the mainstream, and suffocated by those who claim to be building alternatives.

This is by design, the “common sense” mainstream wants you atomized, silenced, despairing. The #fashionistas push you into disciplined frameworks, their branding, their “proper channels.”

What happens then? Most people turn inward. Cynicism. Burnout. Bitterness. Or they retreat into bubbles that feel safe but become sterile. That’s the trap.

The composting metaphor matters here. The disrespect, the exclusion, the blocking, it’s all stink. If we don’t turn it, it just festers and poisons everything. If we do turn it together – shovel in hand – it becomes the soil of solidarity, resilience, culture.

The act of composting is, naming the disrespect (without internalizing it), pulling people back from isolation into trust networks, refusing to fight on their terrain (mainstream channels, fashionista frameworks), building small, living alternatives that don’t need their validation.

The painful truth: you will never get “respect” from #mainstreaming. The dignity comes from walking away, composting their waste, and growing something rooted in trust not division.

#KISS

The #mainstreaming is hallucinating

Let’s look at this problem, the #fashionistas are everywhere in our spaces. They look shiny, sound clever, and always seem “in the know.” But scratch the surface, and you find nothing but mirrors and buzzwords. They are hallucination machines, not listening, not dialoguing, not building, just repeating empty noise to hide their lack of substance.

What we need to do, is to shovel the empty words into piles, turn them over, and use the stink to fertilize something real. The #OMN is one such tool, not polished, not PR-friendly, not built for grants or press releases. It’s messy, grounded, spiky, and fluffy. A toolkit for people who actually want to build, not brand. The #fashionistas will hate it, because it doesn’t need them. Good, that’s how we know we’re on the right path.

These #fashionistas, conscious or not, are about wrapping the #deathcult in a soft blanket of jargon and “professionalism”, to make exploitation sound like innovation. To turn grassroots messiness into #PR. And people keep falling for it. Why? Because the #fashionistas sell the feeling of being respectable, of being listened to by power. They dangle the bait of #NGO grants, seats at the table, and photo ops. But what they deliver is silence, blockage, and decay.

They call it communication, but it’s not dialogue, not listening, not truth. It’s hallucination: Smiling faces repeating empty words. Buzzwords to cover the rot, smoke and mirrors to keep power safe in its head down worship.

This is the work of the #fashionistas of our spaces. They parade their new “frameworks,” their shiny “initiatives,” their endless “community guidelines.” Always dressed up, always polished, always empty. They are masters of looking good while doing nothing.

They sell hallucinations because reality frightens them. Reality is messy, full of dissent, full of challenge. Reality is compost – steaming, turning, breaking down. From compost grows life. From their hallucinations grows only more of the #deathcult. While they hold the space, communities are silenced. When they push themselves, the centre holds only rot. With their hallucinate, the #mainstreaming keeps killing the margins.

What we do not need is their delusions. We do not need their fashion “shows”. Our path is different. The path we take is composting. Shovel in hand, we turn the pile. We let the stink breathe. We break down the lies, the #PR, the shiny reports. We turn their hallucinations back into fertile ground for something real.

Yes tis is work, we need more projects like the #OMN: open process, open data, open code, open standards. The #4opens: sunlight over secrecy, dialogue over control. The #KISS principle is our reminder: keep it simple, keep it real.

Let the #fashionistas keep their hallucinations. We need to be busy with planting the soil.

Sanity means stepping outside the churn. The obstacle is simple but heavy, people cannot see change and cannot face challenge. That blindness keeps us stuck, yes, some say what I write here is “bleeding obvious.” It is, but that’s the point, it’s not for the already converted, not for the initiated. These posts are shovels: tools to compost the #fashionistas and the #geekproblem, to turn the pile of #techshit into fertile soil.

The #OMN project grows from this compost. It’s not a theory to admire, it’s a path to move people out of #mainstreaming and into diverse subcultures where we actually live change and challenge. When rupture comes – and it always does – the strength of that diversity, the lived practice of horizontals, will be seeds for planting a future worth having.

This path is not about being “original.” It’s about being useful. About creating spiky, fluffy translations that help us step aside from the churn, shovel in hand. Use them, or lose them, just dont stand aside like a prat, please.

We keep seeing this mess. The moment grassroots energy spills over into #mainstreaming, something alive, the #fashionistas arrive to “facilitate.” Suddenly the spiky edges are dulled, the fluffy warmth is flattened, and what’s left is another empty process path, they kill with kindness, or worse, with “common sense.”

Let’s be very blunt, these people are not important as individuals. What matters is the path they push us down. The “commonsense” they sell is poison. Every time we let them set the frame, our direction, our spaces collapse back into #stupidindividualism or #NGO capture. Every time.

Compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth

It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. But for the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That waisted time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.

A good first step to this is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the external #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense” colonialisation. That’s why we need to put activism into composting the internal #blocking (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost). Composting isn’t just a metaphor – it’s a way to recycle the piles of #techshit we’ve built up into soil that can grow new #openweb seeds we need to cultivate.

I understand the normal focus on the external #dotcons, yes, we need to balance this to keep pushing back against the external enclosures. But inside our own spaces, it’s clear that possessiveness, in code, in reputation, in control over projects, undermines cooperation and destroys trust. It wastes resources, it corrodes integrity – People often destroy what they love, not out of hate, but out of possession.

This is directly relevant to the degeneration of the #SocialHub project (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/why-teach-everyone-to-code-has-become-a-dead-end-slogan/). What was once the lively centre for the #ActivityPub and #Fediverse reboot is now reduced to a handful of unthinking “problem” people circling the drain. That’s not unusual, it’s a normal outcome when we fail to compost mess.

The lesson is simple: compost the blocking, keep the seeds alive, and make space for growth.

What can you do? Use the compost metaphors (#techshit, seeds, soil) into accessible non-branded messaging that sticks. You can help with editing to transform the long posts into shareable, short-form content for Mastodon, Fediverse, and allied networks.

Help is needed in curating and organizing existing #OMN writings into a structured wiki-style knowledge base. To build summaries, FAQs, and primers for newcomers who hit the projects cold. We need draft “composting guides” – how to deal with #blocking, #fashionistas, and #geekproblem inside communities. Moving this simple documentation to the Unite Forge and other new #OMN tools. Helping draft roadmaps that explain what’s built, what’s missing, and what needs contributors. Producing explainers on why #OMN is different from #dotcons and #NGO capture, why being grounded in #4opens matters.

Write out templates for horizontal decision-making (#OGB style) that projects can adapt. Suggest practical ways to “compost” blockers while keeping the wider network fertile. Help draft neticate rooted in #KISS + #4opens rather than #NGO-speak.

Each of these can be grown into living resources: wiki pages, blog posts, shareable guides, or activist toolkits – depending on where you want the energy to flow.

Who are the #nastyfew?