Rebuilding Grassroots Media – Back to the Soil

From my point of view, it needs to start from the raw truth: There is currently no functioning grassroots media. Not in any coherent sense. Before we talk about video, storytelling and digital tools, we have to answer the most basic question, one that most people have forgotten to ask: What is grassroots media?

It’s not “content creation.”
It’s not “influencer culture.”
It’s not another #NGO-funded project selling “voices from below” to tick a box for a funder’s annual report.

Grassroots media is the messy, local, real-world network of people using simple tools to speak, share, and act together, outside institutional control.
It’s about agency, not branding.
It’s about trust, not reach.
It’s about doing, not performing.

This is the core almost everyone skips, and it’s why so much “independent media” ends up feeling like a watered-down copy of the mainstream it was meant to replace.

Building networks, not platforms. If we want living, breathing alternatives, we need to think like ecosystem builders, not tech entrepreneurs. Balance means deliberately prioritising the roots – where stories grow from – to counter the dominance of traditional and #NGO media that always speak from above.

The corporate #dotcons – Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X, all of them – have poisoned the soil. Their logic is control, enclosure, and profit extraction. We can’t reform them, but we can compost them. Use what’s left of their infrastructure tactically. KISS – keep it simple, use and abuse what remains as compost to fertilise the new.

We need to dig back into the living history of #DIY media culture, those messy, chaotic, beautiful experiments that worked, to where and when media grown from social trust, not algorithmic metrics. Back in the day, it used to work because it was grounded in the #openweb a culture built on openness, transparency, federation, and collaboration. What we call the #4opens.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) path is about rediscovering that soil and replanting in it.
Building federated, trust-based, messy, human networks of media again. It’s not about replacing corporate platforms with shinier tech. It’s about rebuilding the culture of open media, the relationships, the ethics, the shared practice of truth-telling and collaboration.

Because if we don’t grow our own grassroots media again, someone else will sell it back to us in plastic wrap.

Extreme liberalism is the outcome of #postmodernism, the rot at the heart of the current “progressive” mess. It’s what happens when shared stories are replaced by (non) individual narrative, and meaning dissolves into (non) individual performance.

Our current #fashernistas swim in this thin soup, they call it “diversity,” “empowerment,” “innovation,” but it’s a dysfunctional mess, with marketing dressed as virtue. The problem we need to compost is that every attempt to make something that works – collective, rooted, accountable – gets drowned in an endless tide of self-expression and identity management.

Postmodernism was supposed to liberate us from hierarchy and dogma. But it left us atomised, trapped in their #dotcons feeds, without any shared compass. Out of that vacuum came the extreme liberalism of the last 20 years we think as “progressive”: the cult of the individual, the religion of choice, and the morality of markets. It’s the #KISS polite face of the #deathcult, its neoliberalism with a rainbow filter.

The #openweb – through the #4opens – is a path out of this swamp. It’s not about the illusion of freedom sold by #dotcons, or the grant-funded “activism” of the #NGO class. It’s about activist trust-based openness: code, data, governance, and process dogmatically open, that people and community can build, see and shape.

The #OMN (Open Media Network) grows from this ground. It’s not another brand or a platform – it’s a garden for messy, local, grassroots media to regrow. It starts from compost: the failures, the blocks, the burned-out projects. From that, we build something living again.

To move at all on this, we have to compost #postmodernism, keep its healthy scepticism, but drop the self-absorption. Keep openness, but return to shared meaning. Truth matters. Trust matters. The network needs to feed the commons, not the “individual” play-acting ego.

It’s how humans have always lived – together

For 200 years, capitalism, for the last 40 years #neoliberalism, taught us that we’re isolated individuals who compete to survive. But any real view of our actual history – and our biology – say the opposite: we’re interdependent, social, and ecological beings. For almost all species time before the current mess, we thrived through commons-based systems, shared forests, grazing lands, rivers, and community knowledge. Villages maintained open wells, fishermen shared tidal calendars, and guilds protected collective craft standards. Cooperation, not competition, is what allowed us to endure.

This is why now alt tech, matters, it is about rediscovering, what makes us human, the digital form of that is commoning online. Just as medieval commons were fenced off during enclosure, our early digital commons were captured by #dotcons. Rebuilding the #openweb is the act of reclaiming that shared ground, not nostalgia, but in the era of #climatechaos and hard right shift its #KISS survival.

What we need to compost is our own-shared memory. The commons are missing from today’s “common sense”. The idea that people can manage shared resources together has vanished from public imagination. Yet the commons is the older, more adaptive, and far more humane way of organizing.

In tech, the #Fediverse shows this in action, thousands of community run servers cooperating through a shared protocol, ActivityPub. Projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, or #Funkwhale replace enclosure with federation, showing that open paths can scale through trust rather than control. Alt tech, built on open protocols and co-governance, is simply the digital commons rebooted, a network of networks where no one owns the whole.

We need much more resources and focus pushed into this real grassroots path of reclaiming the means of communication, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was all ready a commons: decentralized, people-driven, and impactful. Early #Indymedia collectives covered protests outside mainstream #blocking narratives. #4opens email lists and wikis built movements across borders. Then capital pushed in, WE let the #nastyfew of #Facebook, #Google etc privatize our collective infrastructure, turning participation into surveillance and creativity into content.

Alt tech projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), Mastodon, and wider #Fediverse are attempts to rebuild what we keep forgetting, this time, protected by #4opens shield to build shared governance. This path is not a nostalgic throwback, but living/acting paths for post-capitalist communication we need in the growing era of social backdown.

It’s not only “tech” – it’s social trust infrastructure. A common is not only software; it’s the culture of cooperation that surrounds it, shared values, mutual aid, and relational ethics, you can’t “code” trust into hardware, as the last decade of #blockchain and #AI mess proves. Smart contracts failed to make people honest; they just automated mistrust, it’s on going #geekproblem blindness we need to be working to compost.

What works, the resilience, comes from people, not algorithms. Through frameworks like the #4opens: open data, open code, open standards, open process. We can build transparency and accountability into the social layer of the network. Trust is a practice, not a protocol #KISS

We need a future that’s better, not just less bad. The #deathcult story – neoliberalism’s great myth – says “there is no alternative.” Alt tech is the alternative, working proof that cooperation scales, that people build shared infrastructure without extraction and less coercion. Look at LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Linux, or the #Fediverse, all imperfect, collaborative systems built on trust, not profit. They are real-world examples of how collective will outperform the normal deadened paths of corporate hierarchy.

Alt tech gives us believable hope, which is the only real antidote to despair and apathy. The ground for grassroots power is in pushing change and challenge. If the liberal state and #dotcons won’t reform, we need to be building parallel structures that work differently.
Projects like the #OGB (Open Governance Body) experiment with federated, transparent decision-making. The #OMN builds tools to connect grassroots media in trust networks, bypassing gatekeepers entirely. Together they form a scaffolding of a working commons, capable of hosting culture, not only control.

Healing the social media wound? We need to compost the lie of #dotcons which spent the last 20 years turning us into consumers and outrage machines. The shovel we need is affinity groups rebuilding social tech around self-governance, interoperability, and most importantly trust to reclaim the human side of the internet. Imagine the world different, feeds that empower communities, not advertisers, tools that nurture relationships, not metrics, platforms that amplify context, not conflict.

This is the work of making the internet human again, working together on the path of alt tech matters because it’s not about gadgets; it’s about freedom, community, and survival. It’s our path to remembering that the #openweb, like the Earth itself, belongs to everyone, or it belongs to no one. And every time we build a shared tool, or hold open a door, we remind the world that cooperation is not naïve, it’s our oldest #KISS technology.

A cross-cultural conversation on this subject

UPDATE: I haven’t touched on two other #4opens projects here, so let’s tap them at the end: #Nostr is a “me-too” project stuck in the #geekproblem loop, it won’t go anywhere until it learns to value community as a building block. #Bluesky, on the other hand, is already drifting into the hands of VC-funded #fluffy elitists who turn every commons into a brand. It’s a very likely a dead-end for real change or challenge, which is why the #mainstreaming #blocking #NGO and #fashionista crowds flock to it.

UPDATE 02: Digesting the comments. For the past 10,000 years of agriculture, 500+ years of Euro-colonialism, 200+ years of #capitalism, and 95 years of #neoliberalism (45 officially declared as such), the #nastyfew practicing control through production have dominated everyone else. Capitalism, as described in Capital, grew wherever it could. By the late 19th century, labour organised and fought back. Social democracy transformed the capitalist state so effectively that capitalist development stalled by the 1930s.

The response? A reorganisation of capital, using anti-communism as its rallying cry (WWII, NATO, Korea, Vietnam) to defeat social democracy and retake control of the state. By the 1980s, “they” felt secure enough to brand reform itself as a product: #Neoliberalism. I’m simplifying, of course – this is for the #hashtagStory outreach, so it can become a #KISS tool people can actually use. Clarifications and deeper dives you can find in the comments 🙂

Now, about this idea that “capitalism told us we’re isolated individuals competing to survive.” It’s partly true, but not in the way people think. Capitalism depends on interdependence, we work together to produce, but in a way that isolates us socially and politically. That’s the contradiction: interdependence turned into alienation. It’s the mess in our heads that recreates these bad social structures, the inner factory of control. That’s what we have to compost.

In the end, it’s not just social control, it’s social destruction. As we rush deeper into #climatechaos and the global hard-right turn, it’s clearer than ever: the ideology of separation keeps power safe and people powerless. I know this isn’t #mainstreaming liberal logic, that’s the point. We have to think differently.

And for context, I’m not speaking from the sidelines – I’ve got an MA in politics and 30 years of hands-on work in grassroots #openweb tech. Isolation is social control, see #stupidindividualism. Let’s keep this grounded and not turn it into trolling, yeah?

Support letter for funding application

To Whom It May Concern,

I am Hamish Campbell, a UK-based media professional, long-time participant in the independent media movement, and advocate for #4opens, federated, and trust-based communication networks.

I am writing to express my support for the #datweb project, which I see as a needed step toward rebalancing the web away from centralized control and enclosure.

Over the past 30 years working within grassroots and activist media, from the early days of Indymedia through to my current work with the #OMN (Open Media Network), I’ve witnessed both the power and fragility of our digital commons. Centralized platforms and corporate hosting have repeatedly shown themselves to be brittle, censorable, and extractive. In contrast, peer-to-peer, distributed technologies could, when embedded in social tech projects, have potential to restore autonomy and resilience to how communities publish and share information.

The datweb approach – a browser-based method for decentralised content distribution – offers something rare and valuable: practical accessibility. By enabling secure, resilient publishing directly within the web interface, it lowers the barrier for journalists, small collectives, and under-resourced communities who can’t rely on proprietary software or heavy infrastructure. This kind of bridging simplicity (#KISS) and openness (#4opens) is what’s is needed to build trust-based, human-scale systems to empower rather than control.

In my experience, technology alone doesn’t create freedom – culture and governance matter just as much. The datweb project’s openness to community engagement and interoperability makes it a strong candidate for alignment with wider #openweb efforts and grassroots media networks seeking to build from the bottom up rather than impose from the top down.

I endorse this project and I am willing to contribute further advice, feedback, and collaboration to ensure its development remains grounded in real-world publishing needs and in the ethics of shared stewardship rather than institutional control.

Sincerely,
Hamish Campbell
Journalist, media activist, technologist, and advocate for the Open Media Network (#OMN)
http://hamishcampbell.com

So how can people try not to be prats about this conversation?

In alt tech there are lots of people doing good, and they are, but this is blinded shifting to doing “good” head down worshipping the #deathcult, this would be kinda OK if they held the bridge to a wider view of “good” but they don’t, they block and obscure there #blocking, this is bad, very bad as in the end the “good” they say they do, is just more mess we need to compost.

The real solution is always to respect and build from the fluffy/spiky debate, not bury it under politeness or pretend blindly it doesn’t matter. #Fluffy brings empathy, care, and bridge-building – vital social glue. #Spiky brings clarity, honesty, and challenge – the fire that keeps things real. Both are needed if a project is to stay alive and #4opens. The moment one side silences the other, the culture starts to rot. The second-best path, if balance isn’t yet possible, is to shift the #NGO-style fluffy language – soften its domination reflex – so it stops sounding like control disguised as kindness. This is where care can evolve into openness rather than enclosure.

The worst outcome is what we’ve already seen too often: blinded narrowness, the slow creep of civility politics that smothers dissent while smiling at best and ignoring then #blocking at worst. It’s silent damage, and it killed #SocialHub, turning what could have been a commons into a small irrelevant gated forum of insiders. You can’t maintain trust by excluding the spiky voices; you can only maintain a hollow sham.

So how can people try not to be prats about this conversation? Start by listening across difference. Don’t pathologize conflict; compost it. Assume that critique is care, not attack. Drop the impulse to manage or “align” others – those are imperial moves. Instead, nurture space for spikiness within shared trust. The goal isn’t harmony, it’s living balance – a federation of tones, not a choir of compliance.

UPDATE: my feeling and experience of this is that these types of people will with blindness destroy what they say they value for the security of what they say they don’t value. The next generation will likely repeat this mess, and the compost will likely rot, as will our environment because little real change or challenge comes from the narrow blinded path this group push. Yes it’s a hopeless mess, ideas to change and challenge this please?

PS. I would like to be proved wrong, this is a real opportunity for a nice group of people to do the right thing.

Admit the mess – don’t polish it. Stop pretending everything’s fine. The blindness comes from politeness and professionalised façades – people smiling while quietly blocking change. Naming the rot is the first act of care. #4opens starts with open process, not spin.

Reignite the spiky energy. Spikiness is honesty, critique, fire – not aggression. Without that spark, the culture flatlines into #NGO sludge. Invite spiky voices back with trust, not fear. Build cultures that can handle disagreement as fuel, not threat.

Rebuild from affinity, not hierarchy. Instead of “leadership” and “representation,” think federation – small, rooted, overlapping networks of trust. The #OGB model (Open Governance Body) can be a path: shared stewardship, visible processes, no invisible power.

Compost the infective NGOs. Use what’s useful (resources, access, tools) but don’t let them define the frame. Their language and logic are imperial – centralising, sanitising. Translate their “professional” talk into commons language: from “impact metrics” to “shared meaning,” from “alignment” to “affinity.”

Re-root culture in lived practice. The grassroots aren’t a romantic idea – they’re the only working base. Real change comes from where people actually do things together, not from panels or “stakeholder dialogues.” Focus energy there, make it visible, and let legitimacy flow upward again.

Make openness the discipline. Openness isn’t chaos; it’s a discipline of trust. The #4opens – open data, open process, open source, open access – are the anti-imperial charter. If a group can’t work by them, they’re not #openweb; they’re enclosure with good PR.

Keep it #KISS simple. Most of the blindness hides in overcomplication – endless frameworks, metrics, governance layers. Keep it small, human, and understandable. Simplicity keeps power honest.

STAR WARS: THE SOFT EMPIRE

Let’s try some metaphors DRAFT (was looking for a Star Wars meme but find them horribly right-wing, we have made a real mess,,,)

Had to use an old video, kinda on subject to the metaphor

A long time ago, in a network not so far away… The internet was once alive with wild diversity. Countless small worlds of the #openweb – linked by fragile trust, shared roots, and messy, beautiful collaboration.

The #FOSS Federation of Commons was rising… until the Soft Empire came. They did not come with star destroyers or stormtroopers. They came with funding proposals, frameworks, and friendly smiles. Their weapons were not lasers but language, phrases like “scaling up,” “alignment,” and “governance.” They promised stability. What they brought was assimilation.

Across the #Fediverse, the #NGO Order spread its doctrine of “professionalisation,” pushing free instance into managed dependency. The “Fluffy Fleet,” draped in banners of care and civility, softly conquered all that was unruly, replacing the grassroots with “strategic partners.” Yet in the outer systems, among abandoned nodes and fading servers, a Native Resistance survived.

The composting moon, a dim squat, in forests of forgotten code, small online imaginary fires burn. Around one fire sits a circle of rebels – coders, gardeners, storytellers – the last of the Commons Stewards.

“They say ‘alignment’,” whispers one.
“But what they mean is assimilation,” replies another.
“We compost their words,” says the elder. “We turn control into soil for renewal.”

They speak of ancient #FOSS practices – #4opens, the old code of trust. Their whispered language is relational: “affinity,” “balance,” “re-rooting.” They call themselves the Open Media Network (# OMN) keepers of the native web. Their mission: to expose the imperial euphemisms hiding behind “good governance,” to reclaim naming as an act of freedom, and to rekindle the federation of wild diversity across the digital web.

“In the age of the Smiling Empire, domination wears the mask of care. Naming is resistance. Trust is rebellion. And compost is revolution.”

Our language is where the imperialistic pushing hides

In the change and challenge of the #openweb reboot of the last few years, there are strong echoes of imperialism through #NGOs – soft domination rather than open conquest. Funding becomes a disciplining tool: if you want a seat at the table, you must conform to their norms. This is semi hidden economic and cultural imperialism inside the #openweb, pushing the path of replacing shared trust (#4opens) with institutional control.

First, we need to look at where the Imperialistic language hides, the imperialism here isn’t overt, it’s in tone, framing, and process. You see it in phrases like:

“Scaling up” or “professionalising” community work.

“Creating standards for everyone.”

“Ensuring governance” (but meaning control).

“Bringing structure” or “alignment” to “fragmented” communities.

“Representing the movement” or “speaking for the community.”

These sound neutral or helpful, but in context they reproduce colonial logic: centralising power, erasing difference, replacing “native” messy grassroots diversity with clean, managed systems that serve funders and institutional interests. This is soft imperialism – language as enclosure, framing itself as care (“we’re helping you get organised”) but it’s about ownership and #mainstreaming domestication.

In contrast, “native” grassroots languages, speak in a different tongue, open, lived, relational.
You can hear it in:

“Composting” instead of “managing.”

“Rebalancing” instead of “reforming.”

“Native paths” rather than “standardisation.”

“Affinity” instead of “alignment.”

“Trust” instead of “compliance.”

That’s the language of commons stewardship, not imperial management. The clash in practice, is when #NGO-fluffy or #dotcons outreach talk about “onboarding the next billion users” or “building shared infrastructure,” they’re actually talking about absorbing – pulling people into their world, under their definitions, within their control.

Our native path, on the other hand, speaks about bridging, federating, sharing roots, and keeping diversity alive. That’s anti-imperial by design, the tension is clear: #mainstreaming always wants to flatten difference, while we aim to amplify difference within shared openness.

In our work, with clearer naming, we strip away the euphemisms, we call things what they are. Imperial language real meaning:

“Scaling” Colonising
“Professionalising” De-commonsing
“Governance frameworks” Control mechanisms
“Community representation” Gatekeeping
“Alignment” Assimilation

And on the positive side is commons language rooted meaning:
“Grassroots governance” Native balance
“Decentralised collaboration” Open trust networks
“Interoperability” Mutual recognition
“Commons stewardship” Collective autonomy

The positive #KISS thing we can do is in naming the power play as it happens, not after it’s already shaped the story. Imperial language hides behind civility and “neutral coordination.” Naming is power. And if we name it, we can compost it. #OMN’s job – and ours – is to expose those euphemisms and restore native naming so we can see the social terrain clearly.

“Invisible roots / generation change”… “…the original crew who put the real work into growing the Fediverse… are no longer invited, invisible to the new fluffy crew.” This is historical erasure, rewriting origins stories, to present itself as the natural inheritor of progress. Here, “new” replaces “native.” The grassroots phase is forgotten or mythologized, allowing control to shift quietly to NGOs, corporate “helpers,” or state-aligned foundations.

“Fluffy dominance”, “…friendly, soft, smiling… but sliding into dogmatic blindness.” The language of niceness can act as imperial propaganda. It enforces a monoculture of tone, no dissent, no spikiness. This becomes ideological policing through manners, a soft colonialism of behaviour.

“Zero balance”, “…third event with the same narrow people… zero balance…” Imperial projects always stabilise imbalance. “Balance” is removed, so hierarchy can harden. Here, the imbalance is cultural: those aligned with funding and institutional legitimacy dominate; those rooted in messy grassroots work are marginalised.

Composting the imperialism, in #OMN terms, composting means turning the waste of mainstreaming into soil for renewal. The antidote to imperial framing is openness and plurality:

Reclaim language – stop saying “community” when we mean “closed club.”

Decentralise narrative – many voices, not one authority.

Re-root trust – back to the base layer, where people actually do the work.

Expose the smiling empire – funding, branding, and institutional capture need transparency.

Reassert the #4opens – the anti-imperial charter for #OMN governance.

The future of the #openweb depends on seeing through the soft imperialism of “good intentions.” If we can name it, we can compost it, and grow something real, grounded, and free.

#OMN #openweb #4opens #mainstreaming #grassroots #FOSS

Let’s try a #spiky view of #fluconf

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

The #AI bubble might be nastier than the Dot.com crash

The path the #mainstreaming in tech is taking is clear. #AI is fashion, the valuations are absurd, the cost structures unsustainable, and the hype cycle feels like it’s already outpacing reality.

We’ve been here before, dot.com déjà vu. The #dotcons bubble of 2000 was built on fake demand and fantasy valuations. Venture capital flooded into half-baked platforms that promised to “reinvent” everything, while the effect was to hollow out and enclose the native #openweb. When the bubble burst, it wasn’t just investors who lost, the damage was social, cultural, and technological, it’s the mess we are in today.

The AI bubble, 2025 edition, we’re watching the same movie again, only bigger and nastier. This time, the hype engine is driven by press releases and corporate lobbying, amplified by blinded compliant media desperate to see the next miracle story. Every company claims they’re solving “the biggest problem” with AI. But lift the lid, the rhetoric, and what remains? Business models that don’t add value, expensive wrappers around existing tools. Unsustainable costs – GPU farms burning cash and carbon in equal measure. Speculation over substance, #nastyfew investors betting on domination rather than usefulness.

Why this round may be worse, at least the #dotcons bubble left some infrastructure we could build on: fibre, hosting, and the spread of the web itself. The #AI bubble looks different, as it centralises power even further in the hands of a few #dotcons. Accelerates #climatechaos through energy-intensive training runs and datacentre inflation. It undermines our flawed democracies, trust in media and knowledge with floods of synthetic content.

The ending to this video is a shocker, but not unsepreising when you look at the context of the video.

Instead of building open, federated, useful tools, we’re watching another round of #techshit enclosure, hype and money funnelling into projects that can’t last, but which will leave more #techshit scorched-earth legacy when they collapse. The #dotcons crash was messy, the AI crash could be toxic.

What can people do to walk away from this mess? How do you help with the #OMN and #4opens? The AI bubble shows what happens when tech is built on the normal hype, enclosure, and extraction on the #dotcons path. The #OMN is the opposite of this. It’s about building trust-based, federated networks where media, knowledge, and tools aren’t just another asset class to be bought and sold. The #4opens are the activist #FOSS antidote to bubble logic:

Open Data – No black boxes. If #AI is going to be part of any future, the training data, biases, and methods must be transparent, not locked up by Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft.

Open Code – Instead of closed, centralised data sets and platforms that extract rent, we need free/libre code anyone can run, fork, and improve.

Open Standards – The current AI mess is about silos and monopolies. Federated standards (like ActivityPub for social) are how we work to keep diversity alive and break enclosure.

Open Process – The opposite of corporate secrecy and hype. Decisions need to be made in the open, accountable to communities, not hidden boardrooms or PR cycles.

The #AI bubble is the normal every day #deathcult logic of the #dotcons playing out again: extract, enclose, collapse, repeat. The #OMN and #4opens give us a way to compost this mess into something more fertile. From enclosure → to federation. From secrecy → to openness. From hype cycles → to slow, messy, sustainable growth.

If we don’t actively build and defend this needed native path, we’ll be left cleaning up another round of collapse, only this time with more concentration of power, more environmental damage, and a deeper erosion of trust. The choice is simple: do we keep betting on bubbles, or do we build commons?

And the path is #KISS, so people please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

Mess and more mess, “diversity”

We need to look at our paths and current the controversy in “diversity” in our #deathcult worship, to see the need to compost the current mess. The problem with “pushing diversity” isn’t diversity itself. That’s fine – essential, even. The problem lies in the ideology shaping the push.

Much of it comes from #mainstreaming progressive liberalism, which operates inside the logic of the deathcult. It reduces diversity to a checklist, a branding exercise, a way to appear “inclusive” while leaving power untouched. This is not liberation, it’s management.

When we enter into these spaces, conversations about diversity collapse into the same-old mess: the mixing of right and left framings, suspicion on all sides, endless accusations. Instead of solidarity, we end up with #blocking. Instead of building, we burn out. The is no good outcome.

This is the normal worship of the #deathcult, the endless loop of optics and control, where movements fracture and collectives suffocate with “diversity strategies” that have no relation to grassroots realities.

The path as ever is compost. Take the mess – the liberal tokenism, the reactionary backlash, the burnout – and compost it into something alive. Composting means, returning to grassroots voices, not NGO checklists, seeing diversity as lived struggle, not branding. Grounding it in #4opens, where openness makes co-option harder, to turn toxic blocks into fertile soil for collective growth

The #OMN path is simple: it’s not about ticking boxes or replicating liberal #NGO frameworks. It’s about federated, messy collaboration that actually works. Diversity is not a corporate slogan. It’s the lived complexity of struggle. If we can compost the deathcult ideology that poisons it, diversity becomes strength rather than a management tool.

The question is, are we willing to compost the liberal mess, or do we let it keep rotting movements from the inside?

From “Woke” Capital to MAGA Capital – A Case Study

In the US, every presidential election is sold to us as a transformation of the nation. The chattering class pundits and their #fashionista followers tell us: a new people have been elected alongside a new government. Obama, Trump, Biden, each framed as a seismic cultural shift. But if you care to look, the reality is different: turnout is low, margins slim, the electoral college dulls change. What’s hyped as a national rebirth is just a reshuffling of the same #deathcult mess.

Still, perception matters. After Trump’s re-election, the “zeitgeist shift” rippled through politics and corporate boardrooms. Suddenly, dozens of corporations rolled back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (#DEI) programs. Woke capital simply pivoted into #MAGA capital.

Liberal woke capital was about projecting inclusion as market expansion: Pride logos in June. Minorities cast in blockbuster films. “Inclusive” ad campaigns. It looked progressive, but it was always about markets: new demographics = new customers. Sometimes the invisible hand holds a rainbow flag.

MAGA Capital, in contrast, is about disciplining workers and pleasing investors. It’s about showing loyalty to the strongman, not customers. DEI didn’t collapse because “the people rejected it.” CEOs saw an opening: align with Trump, roll back diversity, keep profits flowing.

The firings of Colbert and Kimmel crystallized this shift. Networks needed mergers approved. “Ratings” were the excuse, but raw political loyalty was the reality. This is crony capitalism: the stockholder and the strongman aligning. Trump, the fake businessman from TV, borrows legitimacy from profits and ratings, hiding authoritarianism in smoke and mirrors “democracy”. This is the logic of the #deathcult: all values are disposable, as long as accumulation continues.

Lessons for the #OMN path. The shift from Woke to MAGA shows how fragile diversity is when it’s managed as a brand. It’s reversible, hollow, and always subordinated to capital. For the #OMN and the #openweb reboot, the lesson is simple: Don’t outsource diversity to branding exercises. Don’t confuse representation under capitalism with liberation. Don’t build systems where power pivots on a corporate whim. Instead, compost the mess. Root diversity in lived struggle. Anchor it in the #4opens so co-option is harder and collaboration is resilient.

What should be more obvious is that capital, the #nastyfew, its servants, doesn’t care about values, only accumulation. If we want diversity, inclusion, and justice to be real, we have to build them outside the #deathcult logic, in federated, grassroots spaces that don’t bend every time the political wind shifts.

The question remains: will we keep chasing the mess of spectacle – Woke vs. MAGA, or will we compost it and build something more rooted, messy, and alive #KISS

Why Fail Safe Matters Now

Full film Fail Safe (1964) is a cultural mirror, from another age, that helps us think about the next ten years of mess. With technical systems out of human control. The film’s malfunctioning machines map directly onto today’s algorithmic governance (#dotcons, #AI, automated warfare). Once the chain starts, humans can’t pull back.

Leadership under impossible pressure. Henry Fonda’s president embodies the loneliness of decision-making when systems collapse. Compare that to our current leaders, who are weaker, more performative, and less willing to carry the weight of consequence.

The Professor’s logic vs. human life: Matthau’s cold “game theory” feels like the #neoliberal technocrat mindset – numbers over people, outcomes over ethics.

The unthinkable concessions of the ending forces us to imagine the price of avoiding total annihilation – not a win/lose game, but a choice between different forms of catastrophe. That’s climate politics, resource wars, pandemics, and #dotcons algorithm risk we face.

What lessons can we learn for the next decade? System fragility is the real enemy – climate systems, financial systems, digital platforms: one glitch, and collapse ripples out. We don’t have the principle modernism, Fonda’s gravitas – our current elitists class are hollowed out by #PR driven populism; when the crisis comes, trust won’t be there. The “Professor” mindset dominates – policy is still guided by “hard” data, models, metrics, and “rational actors,” even though reality has long escaped those dogmatic frames. Watching Fail Safe today is like watching the #deathcult’s worldview in black and white: centralized control, elitist decision-making, people as statistics.

What we need is open, collective mediation – instead of waiting for one lonely leader in a bunker, we need horizontal systems (#OMN, #openweb) that can act before catastrophe hardens. The #OMN and the #openweb reboot are the anti–Fail Safe projects: decentralize agency, mediate conflict before escalation, building trust outside fragile centralized systems. It’s a powerful film, because it frames the stakes not just as “politics” but as civilizational survival.

It’s a film of our times, what can we learn for the #openweb? In 1964, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe held its audience in terrified silence. A simple technical malfunction – a misread code – sent American bombers hurtling toward Moscow. No one could call them back. The world’s survival depended on one president’s unthinkable decision. It was fiction, but it spoke to a truth of the nuclear age: centralized systems, once in motion, cannot be controlled.

Sixty years later, we are in our own Fail Safe moment – but this time the system is digital. The malfunction, is #neoliberalism embedded in our algorithmic #dotcons pipelines. As we push more #AI moderation system, hallucinates flags, the error replicates at machine speed across platforms. What began as a technical hiccup hardens into policy. Governments, seeing chaos, step in “to restore order.” dictators empower security agencies to control networks, to stabilise their hold on power. Like the bomber wings in Fail Safe, the system escalates itself. Once the order is given, there is no recall code.

The #OMN alternative to this is #KISS we need to build is affinity groups on the #openweb – messy, small, federated – to keep our communities talking. Instead of one brittle command chain, thousands of small nodes exchange trust. Instead of a sinal voice, a new signal-to-noise ratio emerges. This slows the shift right. People can begin to rebuild, bottom-up.

Fail Safe ended in tragedy, with a president sacrificing New York to prevent global annihilation. It was a portrait of lonely leadership in a centralised system gone haywire.

Our age offers another path. The lesson is stark that In centralised systems, malfunction = collapse. In federated, mediated systems, failure = resilience. The #openweb reboot is not about nostalgia for old tech. It’s about building structures that can survive the malfunctions ahead. When the next ten years are defined by glitches, spirals, and breakdowns – and they will be – then the survival of our social fabric depends on embracing the horizontal path.

The nuclear age taught us that a single misread code could end the world. The algorithmic age is teaching us that the current glitch could end society.

The #openweb native path gives us more of a chance to be Fail Safe.

#Film #coldwar #review

Looking for an affinity group to take the first step #OMN

The #algorithm on #YouTube has flipped hard right wing for me, a few other people have said the same, please add if you have seen this as well? If this is widespread, it shows how important it is to get normal people back to the #openweb reboot we are all involved in here.

This is obviously a form of social control, with the dominating of the #dotcons platforms in most peoples lives, plain and simple, the price of us building this domination.

The #hashtag story begins with disempowering the #mainstreaming in our own minds. First step: breaking the spell, realising we don’t have to live inside their frame.

Second step: forming the affinity group circle. Gathering with others who can see through the smoke and mirrors. From that circle comes the power to build the #OMN shovel.

Third step: composting. Taking all the #techshit – the failed projects, poisoned cultures, and dead ends – and turning them back into fertile soil. #OGB

What we do with that soil is up to us. That’s where the future grows. #KISS

The #geekproblem only sees #cavetechnology. But society is far too complex for that, you’d have to kill billions to make it work.

4opens is the opposite: a data commons. Light as a tool to fight with, not darkness to hide in.

Thinking outreach of the hashtag story

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

The algorithm is feeding us fascism – Time to step away

The hard right is taking all the agendas, traditions, and paths that the left abandoned, and twisting them to push its authoritarian politics harder. It’s a mess of our own making. When we walked away from the sense-based left paths – trust, solidarity, open debate, collective action – we left a vacuum. The right filled it with fear and control. We fucked this up. Now we have to fix it. #KISS

With the spreading of right-wing propaganda on the #dotcons what we’re experiencing is a late-stage symptom of the #dotcons algorithm machine. Once it starts feeding this level of right-wing “recommended” propaganda, you can be certain that the average person has been saturated with it for years. That’s how we end up with the cultural rot and polarisation we see now.

The dynamic is simple:

Engagement is the only metric → anger and fear drive more engagement than trust or hope → the algorithms amplify right-wing and conspiratorial content.

Normalisation follows → people stop noticing the manipulation, because it comes wrapped in everyday “banter,” “debate,” or “news.”

Politics bends to the feed → #mainstreaming media, #NGOs, and politicians chase the same attention flows, further dragging “common sense” into the gutter.

So yes, getting people to step away from #dotcons and back into the #openweb is crucial. The compost metaphor fits:

#techshit to compost → all the broken, manipulative, ad-driven “social” platforms.

#OMN → a messy, trust-based garden where communities can grow their own media again, rather than being force-fed monoculture by algorithm.

Path forward → build simple, transparent tools (#KISS) and link them to social practices (trust, affinity, #4opens) so people see the difference in their own lives.

The move is urgently necessary because the alternative is to let the rotting #deathcult (#neoliberalism + #dotcons) push smoke and mirrors, feeding on our attention, poisoning our discourse, and steering our politics to the hard right.

The right propaganda, commentators, try to distract us from the extremes of the right by claiming there’s an “extreme left.” Let’s lift the lid on this. The right is driven by individualism and the obsession with “winning” as if it’s a contest. This path breeds selfishness and calculated cruelty with zero empathy – more selfishness, more cruelty. The left, is a strong contrast, it starts from kindness and mutual support. It believes in sharing, in building together. The extreme of that isn’t violent chaos but extreme kindness, extreme empathy. Which side would you rather see amplified by algorithms?

We need to get to work with shovels to compost this mess.