Tag: fashionistas

Composting the #techshit, planting the future

DRAFT

We have been stripped 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 soviet 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 the 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 ecosyteams the #dotcons algorithmic machine is accelerating the mess, the traditional media world is closing.

The suffering is 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. The 20th century Marxism of the authoritarian socialism crowded out other left paths, and when it faded, little remained. #Neoliberals didn’t have to control everything; they just had to preside over a void.

And into this void the blinded #fashionistas pushed the #dotcons. YouTube, Facebook, TikTok – as algorithmic machines of 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. The right twisted solidarity into nationalism, collective action into mob violence, critique into conspiracism. We fucked this up, and 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 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 wheel, 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 push. That’s how we turn paralysis into practice. That’s how you start to compost the #deathcult.

For this in activism, 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.

The 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

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 the same empty lines to hide their lack of substance.

We need 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.

Not only that, but we need more projects like the #OMN on this path: open process, open data, open code, open standards. The #4opens is this compass: 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, 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 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. For the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.

A good first step is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the eternal #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense”. 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. #KISS

I understand the focus on the external #dotcons, yes, we also need 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. It 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.

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

#OMN resources we can support

Drafting blog posts, polemics, and rallying calls to sharpen the #OMN narrative. Use the compost metaphors (#techshit, seeds, soil) into accessible messaging that sticks. Editing to transform the long posts into shareable, short-form content for Mastodon, Fediverse, and allied networks.

Curating and organizing existing #OMN writings into a structured wiki-style knowledge base. Building summaries, FAQs, and primers for newcomers who hit the projects cold. Draft “composting guides” – how to deal with #blocking, #fashionistas, and #geekproblem inside communities.

Writing simple documentation for the Unite Forge and other #OMN tools. Helping draft roadmaps that explain what’s built, what’s missing, and what needs contributors. Produce explainers on why #OMN is different from #dotcons and #NGO capture, grounded in #4opens.

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?

What should be closed? And what should never be?

A conversation about ideology, sociology, and the #openweb. Let’s start with a basic liberal framework: “Most social interactions should happen in the open. Some personal interactions should remain private.” Seems reasonable, right? That’s the position many of us think we agree on. Yet when we look at how our technology, and by extension, our society, is being built, that balance is totally out of whack. Today, more and more of life is CLOSED:

Closed apps.

Closed data.

Closed social groups.

Closed algorithms.

Closed hardware.

Closed governance.

And on the flip side, the things that should be protected, our intimate conversations, our location, our health data, are often wide open to surveillance capitalism and state control. What the current “common sense” dogma gets wrong? What is missing is the idea that mainstream tech culture, privacy absolutists, and many crypto/anarchist types:

Almost all good social power comes from OPEN.
Most social evils take root in CLOSED spaces.

When people organize together in the open, they create commons, accountability, and momentum. They make movements. When decisions are made behind closed doors, they breed conspiracy, hierarchy, abuse, and alienation.

It’s not just about what is open or closed, it’s about who controls the boundary, and what happens on each side. If we close everything… If we follow the logic of total lockdown, of defaulting to encryption, of mistrust-by-design… then what we’re left with is only the closed. This leads to a brutal truth, the powers that dominate in closed systems are rarely the good ones.
Secrecy benefits the powerful far more than the powerless. Always has.

So when we let the #openweb collapse and treat it as naive, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re giving up the last space where power might be accountable, where ideas might circulate freely, where we might build something together.

Examples: When openness was lost. Let’s talk about a real-world case of #Diaspora vs. #RSS. 15 years ago, Diaspora emerged with crypto-anarchist hype as the alternative to Facebook. It was secure, decentralized, and… mostly closed. It emphasized encryption and privacy, but lacked network effects, openness, and simple flows of information.

In the same era, we already had #RSS, a beautifully open, decentralized protocol. It powered blogs, podcasts, news aggregators, without permission or centralized control. But the “Young #fashionistas ” of the scene shouted down RSS as old, irrelevant, and too “open.” They wanted to start fresh, with new protocols, new silos, new power. They abandoned the working #openweb to build “secure” ghost towns.

Fast-forward a decade, and now we’re rebuilding in the Fediverse with RSS+ as #ActivityPub. The same functionality. The same ideals, just more code and more complexity. That 10-year gap is the damage caused by the #geekproblem, the failure to build with the past, and for real people.

So what is the #geekproblem? At root, it’s a worldview issue. A failure to think about human beings in real social contexts. Geeks (broadly speaking) assume:

  • People are adversaries or threats (thus: encrypt everything),
  • Centralization is evil, but decentralization is always pure (thus: build silos of one),
  • Social complexity can be reduced to elegant protocols (thus: design first, use later).
  • But technology isn’t neutral. It reflects ideologies. And if we don’t name those ideologies, they drive the project blindly.

A place to start is to map your ideology, want to understand how you think about openness vs. closedness? Start by reflecting on where you sit ideologically, not in labels, but in instincts. A quick sketch:

Conservatism: Assumes order, tradition, and authority are necessary. Values stability, hierarchy, and often privacy.

Liberalism: Believes in open society, individual freedom, transparency, and market-based solutions.

Anarchism: Rejects imposed authority, promotes mutual aid, horizontal structures, and often radical openness.

None of these are “right,” but understanding where you lean helps clarify why you walk, build or support certain tools. If you’re building tools for the #openweb, these questions matter:

Do you default to closed and secure, or open and messy?

Who do you trust with knowledge—individuals or communities?

Do you believe good things come from control, or emergence?

These are sociological questions, not just technical ones, maybe start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies. Where do we go from here? Let’s bring this back to the openweb and the projects we’re trying to build, like:

#OMN (Open Media Network)

#MakingHistory

#indymediaback

#Fediverse

#P2P tools (DAT, Nostr, SSB, etc.)

All of these projects struggle with the tension between openness and privacy, between usability and purity, between federation and anarchy. But if we start with clear values, and an honest reflection on the world we want to create, we can avoid the worst traps. Let’s say it plainly:

Not everything should be open. But if we close everything, we lose what’s worth protecting.

Let’s talk: What do you think should be closed? What must be kept open at all costs? What’s your ideological instinct, and how does it shape your view of the #openweb?

Rise and Fall of Grassroots #OpenWeb

The #fashionistas are coming https://yewtu.be/embed/u_Lxkt50xOg? It’s time to become more real before this inflow swamps our “native” reboot, if we let them they will consume it and shit it out as more mess. To mediate this shit storm, it’s time to act, please, feel free to repost these web posts, thanks.

To understand where the #Fediverse and the #OpenSocialWeb are heading, and how not to lose our way, we need to reflect on where we’ve come from. The history of grassroots #openweb activism offers both inspiration and hard lessons.

Foundations are built by real people, social movements start local, they begin with people on the margins – those directly affected by injustice – taking action with the tools they have. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, tech projects like #Indymedia were the blueprint: decentralized, radically open, and run by volunteers who trusted each other and worked horizontally. It worked, for a while.

Today, projects like #OMN (Open Media Network), #indymediaback, and #makeinghistory try to learn from that past. They aim to reboot media infrastructure and historical memory, powered by the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. We need to remember that this kind of work doesn’t scale by magic, it grows from grounded trust and native infrastructure, not from #VC injections or #NGO grants.

The trap of #NGO thinking is one of the biggest reasons grassroots projects fail, co-optation. When grassroots groups chase funding, they start shifting agendas to fit the funder’s priorities. Slowly, the mission gets neutralized. Culture changes, risk-taking of change and challenge vanishes, the projects to often become empty shells wearing yesterday’s slogans.

This has happened time and again, from later #Indymedia nodes to #EU-funded tech projects that are now more about kickbox reports than what any “user” wonts or the needed basic radical change. We can’t afford to go down this path again in the current #openweb reboot, the Fediverse.

We need Spiky/Fluffy balance, mutual aid that’s not just charity, but infrastructure. That’s where the #Fediverse shines: not just as an alternative platform, but as a parallel public space for organizing, sharing, and then resisting. It has to support both spiky (radical, disruptive) and fluffy (care-focused, relational) approaches.

On these paths, memory matters, projects like #makeinghistory remind us: if we don’t remember our wins and losses, we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes. Documenting not just content but working practice, how decisions were made, what trust looked like, what failed and why – is crucial. History is not just a mirror; it’s compost.

No monoculture, today, #Mastodon is becoming the monoculture of the Fediverse. It’s not evil. But it is dominating to the point of distortion. It’s following NGO-friendly paths and watering down the radical possibilities the #openweb offers. That’s a problem. We need more balance, more useful codebases, more governance experiments. This space is meant to be a garden, not a plantation.

Security isn’t paranoia, it’s culture, security on the #openweb isn’t about creating another bureaucratic nightmare of permissions and logins. It’s about cultural practices, trust, openness, moderation by consent, and keeping things simple. Most of all, it’s about not building what you don’t need, complexity is the enemy of security.

Final thought, to build real alternatives, we need to stop chasing virality and start building resilience. Less hype, more humility. Less “engagement,” more entanglement. And always, a ruthless focus on not becoming the thing we were trying to replace. Let’s not feed the mess. Let’s compost it and grow something better.

Digging over the rot and planting something more real

Q: People are angry about #AI scrapers and that this is exploiting everything for “free” – our art, our words, our data. But let’s be honest, we’ve spent the last 40 years gorging on “free” content online, music, games, video, writing, without paying for a thing unless forced to with a paywall. Yes. We block the ads, we hate the tracking, and we very rarely donate. So… with the idea that everything has to be paid for, are we really that different from the AI scraping machine?

A: The current “common sense” frames this as a moral issue, but it’s better seen as a systematic one. And that’s where people keep getting lost in talking about this.

We live in a society rooted in greed and extraction. That’s the baseline. It’s called capitalism, and for the last 40 years it’s been accelerated by the neoliberal #deathcult, where today “ethics” is bought in plastic tubs of organic yogurt at our local supermarket.

What grows out of this shit heap? #Stupidindividualism, people demanding everything for free while shouting about their personal rights to consume. They want to save the planet, but only with next-day delivery and zero commitment. Then you’ve got the #fashionistas – the “good people” who “perform” care while feeding the same destructive paths. It’s not irony, it’s the logic of the path we take.

No, I don’t want tracking ads. No, I don’t want my ideas and writing turned into #AI sludge. But I’m also not pretending this is a matter of “personal choice”, when we need to shout loudly and continually that it’s a system built to turn “creators” into social shit and call it innovation, when better to speak truth and call it compost.

We don’t fix this by feeling guilty, we fix it by building something else. That’s what #OMN is for, that’s why #4opens matter. Public media, open processes, radical trust, of native #openweb paths, not just another polished platform for exploitation with feel good #UX

It’s not about blame. It’s about digging over the rot and planting something more real #KISS

Enclosure of self is deathcult worship in the era of #climatchaos

#Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic system, it’s a cult of self-enclosure. Its superpower? #stupidindividualism, turning people inward, away from shared life, into isolated fragments clicking, swiping, and scrolling through ruins. It disconnects us from collective being, and then sells the pieces back as “individual freedoms.” This isn’t an accident. It’s the plan, a trick of enclosure, take a concept of civic breakdown and turn it into a moral failing of the person, not the system. A classic #deathcult move.

Let’s call it what it is #stupidindividualism = the neoliberal condition of enclosure. A social operating system designed to lock us into self-referential survival while the commons burn.

We’ve all been forced into #stupidindividualism with the #dotcons enclosing our attention. The gig economy encloses our labour. Even our friendships are enclosed in “encrypted” DMs, monetized by adtech. Public life? Gone, auctioned off to the highest bidder or locked behind paywalls.

We are encouraged to be good “idiots” in the ancient Greek sense – disengaged from collective power. This #deathcult under capitalism, is a feature, not a bug. They, the #nastyfew want “us” atomized, docile, and scrolling, not stepping away from the path to new norms. And so we rot in a swamp of aestheticized politics – “likes” over lives, vibes over values, empty radical branding over messy collective struggle.

Some symptoms of this sickness can be seen in commons being destroyed: Libraries gutted, parks sold off, hospitals privatized. Nothing left to meet in. Social life enclosed: From Facebook groups to “creator economies,” all relations are branded and transactional. Fear replaces solidarity, precarity rewires our brains – everyone a competitor, every community a threat. Politics becomes content, no spaces for deliberation, only locked comment sections and algorithmic outrage. Under this path, “engagement” is a metric, not a practice. #stupidindividualism is the “normal” common sense path we currently blindly walk down.

The left hasn’t escaped, we’re not immune, we’re infected. Too much of what passes for radicalism is just #stupidindividualism with better fonts. Buzzwords, identity consumption, internal drama cycles, empty memes. Most leftist language itself has been enclosed into performative radicalism, saying the right things in the right tone to the right audience – but nothing changes. It’s a ritual, not resistance. Aesthetic replaces action: Solidarity becomes merch. Mutual aid becomes charity. “Revolution” becomes content marketing.

This is all the “common sense”, #mainstreaming by another name, the #stupidindividualism is also core to what meany of our #fashionistas call the left. And, simply, we can’t win if we keep playing by the #deathcult’s dogma. So how do we compost this? We grow living language from real ground. No more floating hashtags. No more semantic bubbles. Here’s the path, embed language in practice, political terms should come from mutual aid kitchens, picket lines, and assemblies – not Slack threads or Twitter feuds.

Don’t just “speak truth to power” – speak truth to each other, if we want to build a better world, we need collective life again. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s survival. We’re in a fight against a system that thrives on isolation. #Neoliberalism has turned us all into (stupid)individuals, and then blamed us for it.

Let’s be clear, the opposite of #stupidindividualism is not intellect, it’s interdependence. So let’s plant words in soil again. Let’s grow meaning from shared struggle. Let’s compost the #deathcult and sprout something real. On this path, just say no to self-enclosure. No to semantic drift. No to aesthetic radicals trapped in content loops. Instead, let’s get our hands dirty.

#deathcult / #geekproblem / #nothingnew

#Techshit Hype – #NothingNew

The is nothing new to pointing out that our #fashionistas #mainstreaming crew push tech mess.

Remember when drone deliveries were going to revolutionize shopping? When every major news outlet unthinkably reported that we’d have autonomous quadcopters dropping off toothpaste and Amazon boxes on our doorsteps?

Or when 3D TVs were the future of entertainment, pushed so aggressively that manufacturers stopped making non-3D models for a while? Where are they now? Rotting covered in dust in clearance bins or forgotten in garages.

Then there was the Internet of Things (#IoT) hype, your fridge was supposed to talk to your toaster, which would text your smart kettle to boil water before you even knew you wanted tea. Instead, we got insecure, surveillance-riddled devices spying on us for #dotcons corporate profit.

And we need to not forget #blockchain, #NFTs, and the endless #Web3 hype? Each was pushed as a revolution, yet all followed the same pattern of hype, vulture capital gold rush, and then, inevitably, disillusionment. NFTs went from “the future of digital ownership” to being abandoned by even their most vocal promoters.

If we won’t a progressive world, why do we keep pushing this #techshit? Every time a new #mainstreaming tech fad appears, it follows a predictable, boring hype cycle. First, it’s marketed as the next big thing, a must-have, must-invest, must-embrace technology. Then, sceptics, like this site, are ridiculed as out-of-touch or anti-progress, at best or simply trolling at worst. But when the promised revolution never materializes, the same people, quietly move on, forgetting the past mistakes and priming ourselves for the next wave, this is a rinse and repeat cycle.

We need more people, to lift their heads, to say, “Not this again, you were wrong last time”? So we have space to ask why do we let the wannabe #nastyfew feed us this mess, why do we let it slide, allowing the same marketing binds to #blind us over and over?

The answer is that we have our heads down worshipping a #deathcult, and this is the pushing of #fashernista tech, the cycle of embracing new trends not because they work but because they fit the cultural moment. A mixture of corporate propaganda, social pressure, and the desire to be seen as forward-thinking creates a path where critical thinking is drowned out by #FOMO (fear of missing out). It’s fear, simply fear.

How do compost this? A first step is, instead of dismissing #KISS critics, we should embrace grounded scepticism as part of a healthy tech culture. The goal isn’t to reject all new technology, it’s to demand real, meaningful progress rather than letting corporations sell us snake oil over and over. There’s a hashtag for this: #nothingnew, a reminder that most “revolutions” are just recycled ideas repackaged for a new round of exploitation.

This is part of the native #openweb story, not just about technology, but about culture. We don’t need to keep mindlessly adopting every new fad. Instead, we should compost the hype, extract what’s useful, and discard the corporate waste. Yes, it’s messy. But that’s what being native to the #openweb means.

Read more: hamishcampbell.com