#stupidindividualism is the manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective survival. It is not simply “people being selfish” – it is a social behaviour shaped and reinforced by decades of politics and economics teaching people to see themselves as isolated consumers, competitors and brands.
Forty years of #neoliberalism normalised the idea that individual choice is the highest form of freedom. The language sounds empowering: be independent, maximise your opportunities, look after yourself, compete and succeed. But underneath this is a deeper mess that has shifted our cultural – the erosion of the idea that we are connected, that we have responsibilities to each other, and that communities are something we actively build and maintain.
The result is a strange contradiction, that people are encouraged to believe they are exercising freedom while making choices that reduce their own collective freedom. Choosing convenience over resilience, competition over cooperation, private solutions over public infrastructure, endless consumption over ecological survival. The individual becomes trapped inside blinded paths that reward behaviour harmful to everyone, including themselves.
#stupidindividualism appears when people defend a personal advantage that damages the commons they depend on. It is the person fighting against community organisation because “no one should tell me what to do”, while benefiting from the roads, healthcare, knowledge, ecosystems and social networks created through collective effort. It is the belief that independence means having no obligations, rather than having the power to participate meaningfully with others.
This is not an argument against individuality, as its #kiss obvious that real individuality depends on a healthy commons. Creativity, freedom and personal expression flourish when people have trust, shared resources and supportive communities. The problem is the manufactured isolation that turns people against each other and hides the collective systems that make any individual lives possible.
The challenge for movements like #OMN and the wider #openweb is rebuilding the social habits that #stupidindividualism has weakened: cooperation, trust, sharing, moderation, collective memory and responsibility. We need to move from a culture of isolated consumers competing for scraps towards communities that can create, maintain and defend the commons together. Freedom is not the ability to ignore everyone else. Freedom is the ability to work with others to shape the world we share.
#techchurn is the #blocking cycle of adopting new platforms, tools and technologies – not because they solve real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. Every year there’s a new framework, protocol, social platform, programming language or AI tool that promises to change everything. Communities rush to migrate, developers rebuild the same ideas, and institutions rewrite strategies. Meanwhile, the basic fundamental social problems remain untouched.
The churn becomes the work that burns what remains of our commons, as the cost of this mess isn’t technical, it’s social. As every migration leaves people behind, communities fracture across platforms, documentation becomes obsolete, skills have to be relearned, leading to the disappearance of institutional memory. Relationships weaken as peoples energy and focus is consumed by rebuilding instead of improving. The result is a perpetual state of “starting again.” – it should be easy to understand as the illusion of innovation
The tech industry depends on the story that newer is always better, this isn’t simply marketing, it’s the economic engine of the industry. Venture capital needs growth, platforms need lock-in, consultants need transformation projects, and companies need reasons to upgrade. The easiest way to sell something new is to convince people that what already works is obsolete – the old becomes unfashionable long before it stops being useful.
The #geekproblem feeds this cycle, as technologists focus on technical elegance while treating social continuity as someone else’s responsibility. The result is software that may be cleaner, faster or more modern, but communities that are weaker, smaller and less resilient. Technology is replaced, trust is not.
What doesn’t change – Despite decades of innovation, the same underlying power structures remain remarkably stable. The dominant platforms still centralise attention – Advertising still shapes communication – Algorithms still determine visibility – Corporate ownership still captures value created by communities. The interfaces change, logos change, programming languages change but the power relationships barely move. This is why #techchurn feels productive while producing very little social change.
Communities don’t become stronger by constantly relocating, the #openweb needs the same attitude to build slowly, maintain carefully, document openly. Value continuity over novelty as the future isn’t another platform, it’s resilient communities using technology they understand, control and can pass on. That’s the opposite of #techchurn and how we build commons.
The current mess in media isn’t that journalism has become biased, its always been, the problem is that the “progressive” #mainstreaming institutions trying to solve the crisis are still inside the assumptions that created it. Take the current liberal darling project Ground News, their promise is attractive: escape your filter bubble, compare left and right, become a more informed citizen. But notice the framing, the solution to broken media is… another layer of liberal media infrastructure.
This is a classic liberal response, instead of questioning the structure, it tries to manage the symptoms. The wrong question is “How do we balance left and right?” where it’s better to ask “Who owns the infrastructure? Who controls trust? Who decides what is visible?” These are very different questions. Political bias matters, but ownership, funding, moderation and publishing infrastructure matter far more. They shape what can be said long before anyone labels an article “left” or “right”.
Modern liberal media believes enough transparency, enough fact-checking and enough algorithmic tuning can repair journalism. But every new layer simply becomes another institution requiring trust.
Who rates the raters?
Who moderates the moderators?
Who audits the algorithms?
The answer is usually another professional organisation, another foundation, another for profit corporation, or another “independent” expert group. This creates an endless chain of powerless power rather than building any genuine public trust, it’s the false centre. One #KISS thing we need to understand is that political “centrism” is not a neutral place, it is constructed. On a surface layer – when publications owned by billionaires are labelled “centre”, while grassroots or socialist publications are labelled “left”, the scale itself quietly normalises existing power. This isn’t necessarily a conspiracy, it is simply what happens when institutions built inside capitalism reproduce capitalist assumptions.
The #OpenMediaNetwork starts somewhere else – instead of trying to create perfect neutrality, it creates open process. The #4opens don’t solve bias or decide truth to determine who is correct, they simply make the process visible. This doesn’t eliminate conflict, instead it makes conflict transparent. People can inspect decisions, challenge moderation, fork communities, preserve history and build alternative trust networks. The goal isn’t perfect objectivity, it is accountable process, that in the end trust comes from communities
Liberal media imagines trust that comes from old (and by now well captured) institutions – where the #OMN argues that trust emerges from communities that can see how decisions are made, that trust is built through transparent moderation, open metadata, public discussion, versioned history actively used for federation instead of monopoly. This native path is closer to how the early #openweb worked, and how projects like #Indymedia succeeded before platforms enclosed this public conversation flow.
Ones you take this #KISS path the problem isn’t simply media bias it’s about ownership of traditional media itself. As long as publishing, discovery, moderation and archives remain controlled by institutions whose survival depends on existing power structures, every attempt to “fix” journalism will reproduce those same structures. This is the root problem when liberal media keeps trying to repair liberal media.
The #OMN starts somewhere different – building commons instead of platforms, process instead of authority and trust instead of branding. Yes, that won’t magically solve media bias, but what it can do is balance the current mess by creating open space where communities can solve these problems together. That is a much stronger foundation than asking another algorithm to tell us which billionaire newspaper is slightly more “centre” than another.
History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed.
Today we face a different crisis, but one driven by the same logic. The #deathcult metaphor tells us that the right to extract, pollute, and profit need to be better balanced with the right of communities to defend the ecosystems they depend on. This isn’t currently in any real balance. Over the last forty years we’ve shifted the political centre so far toward markets and private accumulation that environmental destruction is treated as normal, while protecting the commons is portrayed as extreme.
If we continue to use our current “common sense” to “balance” destruction against survival, destruction wins. Climate breakdown isn’t negotiated with, ecosystems don’t compromise, physics doesn’t vote. The task is therefore not to seek a mythical middle ground, but to move the social balance back towards the real commons, cooperation, stewardship, and long-term thinking. Only by changing what society sees as “common sense” do we have any realistic hope of avoiding deeper ecological and social collapse.
This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN is not simply another technology project. It is an attempt to shift power away from the #dotcons and away from the #geekproblem that has dominated so much of the #openweb. Instead of platforms extracting value from people, or technical elitists deciding what everyone else needs, the path is to place power back in the hands of the people who actually create culture, knowledge, and media.
The #4opens provide the practical framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. Together they create the conditions for shared ownership, transparency, and trust rather than enclosure and extraction.
The #OGB complements this by providing grassroots governance. Rather than relying on central authorities or corporate gatekeepers, it explores ways communities can make decisions together while remaining federated and autonomous.
None of this guarantees good outcomes, technology never does. What these projects do is create the possibility for healthier social relationships. They build commons infrastructure instead of proprietary platforms, they distribute power instead of concentrating it, they make cooperation easier than enclosure. As the future is not determined by technology alone, it is determined by the values embedded in the systems we build and the communities that choose to use them.
That’s why the real struggle isn’t simply over software, t’s over the values that software embodies. #KISS reminds us to keep these solutions simple enough for ordinary people to understand, use, and shape themselves. Without that, the commons will once again be enclosed by experts, corporations, or bureaucracies, and we will repeat catastrophes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) in todays rush towards #climatechaos.
The choice is ours. The tools matter because they shape the possibilities. What we build with them remains a collective responsibility.
We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they’re sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn’t simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it’s understanding how they find their way back out again.
History suggests something important – entering crisis is often easier than leaving it – it’s a downhill path. For long periods, societies can appear stable. Institutions function, people get on with their lives, and conflict remains manageable, yet beneath the surface something changes.
Power concentrates.
Wealth accumulates upward.
Institutions begin serving themselves rather than the commons
Public trust erodes.
By the time these trends become obvious, society has already gathered momentum, think of it like a huge ball rolling down a steep valley, once it begins rolling, it becomes incredibly difficult to stop. This is where much of today’s #climatechaos, democratic decline and digital enclosure fit. They are symptoms of long-running structural shifts rather than isolated failures.
To understand this recurring mess, it’s useful to think about this is as a wealth pump. Healthy societies circulate resources, were unhealthy societies increasingly extract resources from ordinary people while concentrating wealth and decision-making power into ever smaller circles. Eventually this creates reinforcing problems – the growing insecurity for everyone else, competition between increasingly numerous elitists leads to weakening of public institutions, eventually the system becomes unstable. This describes much of the last forty years of #neoliberalism just as well as many earlier historical periods.
In #OMN language, this is one way of describing the growth of the #deathcult. Technology follows politics, so the same process appears online. The early #openweb distributed power, the #dotcons recentralised it. Open participation became algorithmic engagement, communities became audiences, citizens became products. This wasn’t a simple a technical change, it’s the same mess of concentration of power occurring throughout the wider society. Technology amplified existing political and economic trends, crisis created the possibility.
The encouraging part of history is that outcomes are not predetermined, although the path into crisis is narrow, the path out is surprisingly open. Once institutions begin failing, many futures become possible. Some societies descend into violence, some replace one ruling group with another while changing very little. A few manage genuine reform, the difference comes from organised social movements that are able not merely to seize attention, but to rebuild institutions capable of creating trust again. This matters as moments of instability are also moments when relatively small interventions can have disproportionately large effects.
This is where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not a project to seize power. It is a project to rebuild commons infrastructure. Instead of reinforcing extraction, it strengthens trust. Instead of creating new gatekeepers, it distributes responsibility. Instead of proprietary platforms, it builds open processes. Instead of replacing one monopoly with another, it supports federation and shared ownership.
This is why the #4opens matter, not as ideological slogans, they’re much more useful as practical safeguards against rebuilding the same systems that created today’s crisis. Trying to engineer perfect systems produces new failures, complex societies never become tidy, so the useful goal is not perfection. Rather to create institutions capable of learning, adapting and redistributing power before crises become catastrophic. This is why #OMN emphasises mediation over control, commons over ownership, participation over spectatorship to push trust over extraction.
Building the next commons matters – if we accept that we’re living through a period of structural instability, then waiting for institutions to solve it is unlikely to succeed, the work we need belongs to communities.
Building archives.
Building media.
Building governance.
Building trust.
We can play a part in this by building technologies that reinforce this path rather than undermine it as history suggests that societies emerge from crises when they reverse the flows of concentrated power to begin rebuilding the commons, that’s the path #OMN is on.
All startups are expressions of the #deathcult, every #VC is, in effect, a bishop preaching endless growth, extraction and enclosure. This isn’t innovation. It’s a business model accelerating social breakdown, deepening inequality, and feeding the #climatechaos that will displace billions and cost millions of lives over the coming century. If you’re serious about activism, stop feeding the machine. Put your energy into building the #openweb commons instead.
The whole value system behind startups and #VC is the problem, not the solution. The #KISS truth is simple: endless growth, extraction and enclosure cannot solve the crises they create. They are accelerating today’s breakdown and shaping tomorrow’s catastrophes. We don’t need more investment in the #deathcult. We need investment in the digital commons, the #openweb, and the #4opens.
The crisis of the #openweb isn’t just coming from the #dotcons. It’s also coming from us. Our #mainstreaming#fashionistas are dangerously consumptive, forever chasing the next platform, the next funding round, the next shiny self abstraction. Meanwhile, our alternative #fashionistas mirror exactly the same behaviour, endlessly reinventing tools that never escape their own echo chambers.
Both paths produce the same result: more #TechShit, more #TechChurn, less social value. We don’t need another clever framework, another protocol that nobody uses, or another startup pretending to be commons. What we do need is to change and challenge the social norms that reward novelty over usefulness to make the #4opens fashionable.
Reward open data instead of data hoarding.
Reward open process instead of closed decision-making.
Reward open standards instead of lock-in.
Reward open source instead of proprietary dependency.
And yes, this isn’t about technology, it’s about culture. As Oscar Wilde observed in The Critic as Artist:
“We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
In the current churning mess, that feels even more true today. We are producing more code, more platforms, more content and more noise than ever before, while creating less shared understanding and fewer if any useful durable institutions, structures or networks.
The answer isn’t to work harder. It’s to work differently. The #OMN is a path to do that by stopping repeating the same mistakes by compost the failures of the last forty years, and rebuild the #openweb on social foundations that people can actually live with. If we can’t make this shift, we’ll simply keep rebuilding the same broken systems with newer code.
The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy.
Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, culture, and governance. It’s often like herding cats. This can be frustrating, but it’s also what makes the network resilient. There is no single point of failure, no CEO to sell it, and no corporation that can simply shut it down. The challenge this leave us with is not eliminating the mess, but learning how to live with it productively.
The invisible problem that keeps blocking this path is in part the limits of “common sense”, what the #geekproblem refuses to see is that the difficulty isn’t primarily technical. For over forty years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what people experience as “common sense.” Competition replaces cooperation. Individualism replaces commons. Endless critique replaces collective construction. People absorb these assumptions without realising it, then push them over real alt paths.
When alternative ways of organising are introduced, many people instinctively react with hostility or retreat. Push too hard, and they disappear back into familiar habits, like snails retreating into their shells. This isn’t usually bad faith, it’s learned behaviour.
We have a project to mediate this mess, native governance without hierarchy. This is where the Open Governance Body (#OGB) comes in. The goal isn’t to control the #Fediverse or impose bureaucracy, the goal is to create lightweight, transparent ways for communities to coordinate, resolve conflict, share responsibility, and make decisions together.
Governance should emerge from the grassroots, not be imposed from above. That’s why #OGB builds on the principles of the #4opens:
Open Data
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Process
The last of these – Open Process – is the missing piece. Technical openness alone isn’t enough. Communities also need visible, participatory ways of building trust. What matters is creating processes that turn #mainstreaming failures into shared learning instead of endless conflict.
The future of the #openweb won’t be built by perfect software, it’s built by imperfect people who learn how to cooperate despite their differences. That’s the real work of #OMN and #OGB: not replacing the mess, but giving it enough structure to grow into a healthy commons.
People often ask which messaging platform they should use. Matrix? XMPP? Signal? Something else? The honest answer is there is no perfect option.
At the #OMN we’ve tried running #XMPP servers for years. From a #4opens prospective it’s probably the strongest foundation. Socially, though, it’s still trapped by the #geekproblem, despite years of outreach, we never found any implementation simple enough for normal communities to adopt at scale.
#Matrix is in meany ways worst, but for different resigns. Its governance and development have drifted towards an #opencore and #NGO model that doesn’t sit comfortably with grassroots #openweb values.
#Signal is the best of the bad options. It’s centralised and reproduces many of the patterns of the #dotcons. But people will actually install it and, sometimes, keep using it. That’s worth something.
The point is that these aren’t just technical choices, they’re social ones. Too much of the conversation gets trapped in feature comparisons, cryptography debates and protocol wars, while the real challenge is helping ordinary people communicate, organise and build trust together. That’s why #KISS matters.
Simple tools people actually use are often more valuable than technically perfect tools that remain confined to narrow inward looking communities.
The same lesson applies across the #Fediverse. We have seeded good technology, but we’re allowing the #fashionistas and chattering classes to dominate the conversation while practical grassroots organising gets pushed to the margins.
This is a recurring pattern, and one we need to compost. The future of the #openweb won’t be decided by having the cleverest protocol. It will be decided by whether we build communities around tools that ordinary people can understand, trust and participate in.
Technology matters, but social process matters more. That’s the path we’re trying to grow with #OMN and the #4opens.
The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content.
Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs.
The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the #deathcult, where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking (and acting on) questions the tech industry never asks.
This is where the #OMN approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems.
This mess is a part of our long-standing #geekproblem, that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless #techchurn: one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power.
We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these #techshit outcomes. The #4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the #nastyfew.
That’s the work of the #openweb, and the path of #OMN.
What part can you play? The #openweb is one place to start, keep it simple (#KISS), build commons, compost the mess. The political centre created this mess. Four decades of neoliberal “common sense” deepened inequality, weakened democracy, privatised public goods, and pushed us beyond ecological limits. Yet much of the centre still offers only more of the same: better management of the #deathcult rather than a path beyond it.
That leaves a dangerous vacuum. If progressive movements cannot offer practical alternatives, the far right will continue to grow by presenting itself as the only force willing to confront the crisis. Their answers are built on fear, exclusion and authoritarianism – but they resonate because they acknowledge that the old system is failing, while the centre too often pretends it can be repaired.
Simply defending the status quo is not enough. Nor is retreating into abstract radicalism disconnected from everyday life. We need practical, grassroots alternatives that people can participate in and build themselves.
This same pattern appears in technology. Our #geekproblem isn’t primarily bad code – it’s a culture of arrogance and ignorance. Technical communities often reproduce the assumptions of the wider society without questioning them. They celebrate disruption while recreating centralisation. They mistake individual freedom for collective liberation, reproducing #stupidindividualism while unconsciously serving the logic of the #deathcult.
This isn’t usually malicious. It’s a feedback loop. The culture produces the technology, and the technology reinforces the culture. The answer isn’t to reject technology. It’s to mediate it socially.
Open Process ensures communities – not just developers or investors – shape the progress.
We need to use this to composting 40 Years of “Common Sense”, For the last 40 years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what passes for “common sense” in #mainstreaming society. Their influence runs so deep that many assumptions now feel natural rather than ideological. When these assumptions are challenged, people react defensively, not because they’re bad people, but because their worldview feels under attack.
This isn’t just a mainstream problem. Activist spaces reproduce the same patterns. The result is endless circular arguments, performative politics, and fragmentation rather than solidarity. Our task isn’t simply to oppose this culture, it’s to mediate it, to compost the mess rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Composting means taking the waste of the last forty years – failed assumptions, captured institutions, #techchurn, #fashionista politics, and individualism – and turning it into fertile ground for something better.
The worrying trend is that the grassroots signal is being submerged beneath an echo chamber of #mainstreaming voices. On many #fashionista threads, noise overwhelms practical action. We spend time performing politics rather than building the infrastructure movements need. That requires empathy, patience, and practical organising. It means creating spaces where people can step outside inherited “common sense” without feeling they have to defend it. It means building working alternatives instead of only criticising broken systems.
The answer isn’t to shout louder, it’s to build better spaces, better tools, and better processes. The signal-to-noise ratio can change again, but only if we do the patient work of mediation, trust-building and commons creation – The work of #OMN.
People sometimes ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult. It isn’t just a provocative label, it is to name the dominant political and economic logic that has shaped the last forty years. By #deathcult, I mean the era of #neoliberalism: a system that treats endless economic growth, privatisation and competition as unquestionable “common sense,” even when the consequences are ecological collapse, growing inequality and social breakdown.
I call it a cult because, like any successful ideology, it becomes difficult to see from the inside. Its assumptions become so normal that alternatives appear impossible. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There Is No Alternative,” sums this up perfectly. The “death” part has become harder to ignore, due to movements like #XR (Extinction Rebellion), the reality of #climatechaos has entered mainstream discussion. We can now see that continuing on our current path means ecological collapse, mass displacement and the deaths of millions – and displacement of billions – of people over the coming century.
Of course, neoliberalism is not something entirely new. It is an extreme form of capitalism, and history has seen similar periods before. One example is Britain’s response to the Irish Potato Famine, where market ideology took precedence over human need, contributing to mass starvation, displacement and suffering.
After the Second World War, many countries moved towards forms of social democracy. Capitalism was softened by stronger public services, labour rights and welfare systems. These reforms were far from perfect, but they recognised that completely unrestrained markets created instability and injustice. In part this “liberal golden” era was held in place by there being an alternative of soviet communism.
From the late 1970s onwards, much of that understanding was forgotten. Deregulation, privatisation and financialisation became the dominant ideology once again. Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders represent attempts to move back towards that earlier social democratic settlement. Though this compromise path of social democracy is not a final answer, as it still operates within capitalism, but it is certainly preferable to the #neoliberal model that currently dominates. As radicals, though, we should aim higher. We need to build systems based on commons, cooperation, ecological responsibility and democratic participation, not simply manage capitalism more fairly.
This is where #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. The problems we face are not only economic, they are also about communication. Today’s digital infrastructure is dominated by #dotcons: corporate platforms that monetise attention, shape public debate and concentrate power. Facebook, Google, Apple, X and similar platforms have become essential infrastructure while remaining accountable only to capital rather than communities.
The answer isn’t simply better regulation, it’s rebuilding the #openweb. Like the #Fediverse, the #OMN is one small contribution towards this path: creating media and communication infrastructure based on the #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process – so communities can shape their own communication instead of renting it from billion-dollar corporations.
People also ask why I use so many hashtags, the answer is simple, the web is made from links. Hashtags are one of the few linking technologies that work across platforms. They allow conversations to escape individual silos and become discoverable across the wider web. They are not meant to replace ideas; they are signposts pointing towards larger conversations that matter. Yes, they can look cryptic, but every shared language starts somewhere. If we never create language for new problems, we remain only trapped inside the vocabulary of the systems we’re trying to change and challenge.
Changing language doesn’t change the world by itself, but it can change how we think about the world, and changing the conversation is often the first step towards changing society itself. That’s why I still use #deathcult, not as an insult, but as a way of naming a system whose destructive logic has become so familiar that people struggle to imagine anything different. The challenge now is not simply to criticise that system, it is to build practical alternatives.
For those who like to believe in social democracy, this isn’t an argument against the gains it has won. Strong public services, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and democratic institutions have all made life better for millions. They matter, and they are worth defending.
But we should also recognise their limits. As long as investment and production remain under the control of capital, democracy stops at the workplace door. We get to vote for governments, but rarely over what our economies produce, how resources are used, or whose needs come first.
The next step is not simply kinder capitalism, but extending democratic principles into the economy itself. Building commons, cooperatives, public ownership where appropriate, community governance, and digital infrastructure that people collectively control. That’s the direction #OMN points towards: not replacing one elitist crew with another, but growing the practical foundations of economic democracy from the grassroots up.
Need to come back to this, as people still are not seeing the value or use. The #4opens is a simple, practical tool for evaluating and guiding grassroots technology, media and social projects. Rather than asking whether a project is simply “open source”, it asks a broader question – can people actually trust this project to remain part of the commons? The #4opens helps distinguish native #openweb projects from #closedweb platforms and projects that have drifted into corporate, bureaucratic or #NGO capture. It is as much about social trust as it is about technology.
The Four Opens:
Open data is the foundation. The content, metadata and information created by a project should be openly accessible, portable and reusable. People should be able to export data, archive it independently and move between codebases without losing years of work. Open examples: Wikipedia content can be copied and mirrored, Mastodon users can export their accounts and migrate between instances, RSS feeds allow content to flow between different tools. Closed examples: Facebook owns your social graph, Instagram traps your audience, TikTok keeps your community inside its walls. Open data prevents lock-in and keeps knowledge in the commons.
Open Source. The software itself should be available under a free software licence. Anyone should be able to inspect the code, improve it, fix bugs, adapt it for local needs or fork it if necessary. Open examples: Mastodon, PeerTube, WordPress, MediaWiki, Linux. Closed examples: Facebook, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams But #4opens goes further than #FOSS, open code alone does not create an open project.
Open Standards. Projects should communicate using open protocols rather than proprietary APIs. Open standards allow different communities to use different software while remaining connected. Examples include: ActivityPub, RSS, email (SMTP/IMAP), HTTP, HTML This creates federation instead of monopolies, a Mastodon server can communicate with a PeerTube instance, an RSS reader can subscribe to thousands of independent websites. No central company owns these conversations. Contrast this with: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord, Teams as each creates its own isolated island. Open standards create ecosystems rather than products.
Open Process. This is the missing piece. Many projects are technically open while socially closed. Open Process asks: Who actually makes decisions? How are disagreements handled? Can newcomers participate? Is governance visible? Can communities influence direction? Is power accountable? Without open process, “open source” becomes: founder dictatorship, hidden hierarchies, developer elitism, endless forks, NGO capture and corporate capture. Open Process keeps projects alive as commons rather than products. This is why #4opens adds the social layer missing from some traditional #FOSS thinking.
An example of how it can work – The #4opens deliberately keeps things simple, projects can roughly assess themselves, others can assess them – people aggregate the results.
2 Opens — Bronze
3 Opens — Silver
4 Opens — Gold
This is horizontal – point of this isn’t certification, it is encouraging projects to become progressively more open.
Examples:
Wikipedia
✔ Open Data
✔ Open Source
✔ Open Standards
✔ Open Process (imperfect but visible)
A Gold project.
Mastodon
Generally Gold. However, individual instances vary enormously, a technically open instance with opaque moderation becomes weaker on Open Process. Technology is only half the story.
PeerTube
Strong across all four opens as it provides decentralised video hosting without surrendering control to YouTube.
Excellent encryption, good open source, weak federation as governance remains centralised. Strong tool for private communication, but not a complete #openweb social infrastructure.
So why open process matters – Many grassroots projects fail here, the code is open, the data might be open. But decisions happen behind closed doors, so that power accumulates around: maintainers, foundations, funding, celebrities, NGOs. Eventually communities lose trust, people fork, energy fragments. Nothing grows, the technical project survives but the social project dies. The #4opens recognises this pattern.
It is at root a tool for composting – the #4opens isn’t a purity test, nobody starts perfect, instead it asks – Which direction are we moving? Projects drift, communities drift, funding changes, people leave. The #4opens gives us a simple way to notice when projects are becoming enclosed. Instead of abandoning them, we can compost the mess, repair governance, open the data, document the process to replace hidden power with visible trust. The Open Media Network builds directly on the #4opens, the aim is not simply better software, it is social infrastructure that communities can actually #DIY themselves.
People can grow, infrastructure based on trust rather than surveillance, federation rather than monopoly, commons rather than platforms, participation rather than consumption and cooperation rather than extraction. Technology is simply the tool, the real project is rebuilding the commons.
A simple question to ask is, whenever you encounter a new project, ask four questions:
Can I get my data out?
Can I inspect or improve the code?
Can I communicate with other systems?
Can I see how decisions are made?
If the answer is “yes” to all four, you’re probably looking at a native #openweb project. If not, you’re probably feeding another #closedweb platform. The #4opens won’t solve every problem, but they do provide a remarkably effective compass for navigating the difference between projects that grow the commons and projects that quietly enclose it.
One of the biggest problems we face isn’t technology, politics or even money. It’s #stupidindividualism. By this I don’t mean individual freedom, freedom matters. I mean the habit of seeing every issue only through “my” immediate circumstances, with no memory of how we got here and no thought for the wider community. A small example from Oxford boaters illustrates this perfectly.
The generator argument – A discussion recently started about extending generator hours beyond the long-standing 8am–8pm convention. To new boaters this probably looks harmless “Why not be a bit more flexible?” “Surely we can make our own rules?” “My situation is different.” All perfectly reasonable, if you don’t know the history. But memory matters – ten to fifteen years ago, before cheap solar panels transformed life afloat, generator noise was one of the biggest causes of conflict on the waterways. Not occasional disagreement, years of arguments, neighbour against neighbour, boater against boater, and worst of all for our communities boaters against people living ashore.
There were shouting matches, threats, even physical fights. Eventually a rough consensus emerged across waterways: 8am–8pm, it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t law, it wasn’t even enforceable. It was simply a social compromise that people understood. Then solar arrived, people needed to run engines far less, the conflict quieten down as technology reduced the pressure while the social convention remained.
So why now reopen old wounds? Today people who never lived through those years, only see today’s circumstances. “My train gets in after eight.” “My batteries are low.” “There’s no housing nearby.” “My case is different.” Individually, every point makes sense. Collectively, they recreate the conditions that produced years of conflict. This is what #stupidindividualism looks like, every individual argument is reasonable, the collective outcome is a disaster.
This is about social infrastructure, the 8–8 convention isn’t really about generators, it’s about preserving social peace. It is community infrastructure, like, slowing down when passing moored boats, like helping someone through a lock, like not running a noisy stinky engine outside someone’s bedroom late at night. These customs aren’t primarily technical rules, they’re social technology to reduce friction before it starts.
Hard rules aren’t the answer, ironically, if we destroy informal agreements, people respond by demanding formal enforcement. This is exactly what happened in parts of London – Places that once relied on neighbourly agreement eventually became rule-heavy, regulated pay moorings because communities could no longer manage themselves. Conflict produced more bureaucracy, more bureaucracy produced less freedom, the cycle repeats.
This is why we need to keep talking – to composting conflict – the challenge isn’t to pretend disagreements don’t exist, more it is to stop turning small disagreement into a community-wide battles. Most issues can be solved by talking to your neighbours, emergencies happen, people can be understanding, courtesy works better than enforcement, but courtesy works when people understand the history that produced it, without that memory, every generation all to easily starts the same fights again.
The problem isn’t really about generators, it’s about forgetting that communities inherit solutions as well as problems. When we ignore the reasons those solutions exist, we spend years recreating conflicts that were already settled. That’s the cost of #stupidindividualism, we mistake inherited social infrastructure for arbitrary restriction so we tear it down. And eventually we discover – again – that rebuilding trust is far harder than preserving it.
Who is wispering madness in this kinda mess #4opens
This is a pattern well beyond #Oxfordboaters, it’s visible across the #openweb, activist organising, and politics generally. We inherit social norms that emerged through hard experience, then we dismiss them as unnecessary because we don’t know their history, to then end up recreating the conflicts those norms evolved to prevent. That’s why preserving collective memory is just as important as preserving freedom. Without memory, every generation repeats the same mistakes. With it, we can spend our energy building something better instead of refighting old battles.
In #OMN terms for the hashtag story this is #blocking. So the #CoCo (very bad name) is about “good conduct” rather than regulation. Let’s look at existing regulation to start from:
CRT: Terms and Conditions (which have legal force because of s.43 of the Transport Act 1962) 10.9.2 “… [you must] not use any electricity generator … between 8pm and 8am, unless you are moored in isolation, out of earshot of other people…”
EA Byelaws: General Construct 63(m) “use any … or any other electrical equipment … resulting in the … transmission of any noise … in such manner to give reasonable cause for annoyance to any person in upon or about the river or the banks or the towpaths thereof or adjacent land of the Authority.”
Memory matters – is why I oppose extending the generator stink, smoke and noise hours to 10pm. Not because there will never be exceptions. Life afloat is full of exceptions, and genuine emergencies should always be treated as such. But making the exception into the new normal needlessly reopens old wounds. We already know where that path leads because we’ve walked it before. Years of conflict finally settled into a workable compromise. Forgetting that history means we’ll end up repeating it.
Memory matters, boating isn’t simply about living on a boat. It’s about adapting your behaviour to live well alongside other boaters. Shared customs are part of that adaptation. They’re how communities survive without drowning in rules and enforcement. Yes, there are people whose work patterns make 8pm inconvenient, that inconvenience is real. But solving every individual problem by burning more diesel isn’t a direction that makes sense, socially or environmentally. The world is moving away from fossil fuels, not towards them. And we have bigger battles ahead, we will have to defend our right to use solid-fuel stoves over the coming years. If we normalise running noisy, smelly generators later into the evening, we weaken our position before those fights begin.
The point of the Code of Conduct (bad name, but I can compromise) isn’t simply to satisfy landowners or avoid complaints. It’s to make us better neighbours and a stronger community. That’s how we slow the pressure towards more regulation, more enforcement, and eventually fewer places where people can live afloat.
Sometimes it feels almost as though there is a conspiracy to stop us coming together around simple, common-sense solutions. I don’t actually think that’s what’s happening, I think it’s something more ordinary, and more dangerous. It’s a collective fuck-up, people naturally focus on their own immediate needs and lose sight of the bigger picture. That’s #stupidindividualism again.
The simple question is whether extending generator hours is the least damaging way of meeting those needs. Could we think more creatively? Portable battery packs. Shared charging. Better solar. Community support for people with difficult work patterns.
The first question shouldn’t be, “How do we burn diesel for another two hours?” It should be, “How do we solve this with the least noise, fumes, conflict and fossil fuel?” That’s the direction the world is moving, whether we like it or not. The hardest thing in any community is lifting our eyes from today’s inconvenience to tomorrow’s consequences.
Some have suggested making the Code of Conduct deliberately vague “Boaters agree to keep noise to a minimum and respect their neighbours.” That sounds attractive, until you remember why communities write things down in the first place. Vague agreements don’t resolve recurring conflicts; they postpone them. Every new disagreement starts from zero, every new arrival has to renegotiate the same issue, every argument becomes personal because there’s no shared understanding to fall back on. A simple, well-understood convention can hold a community together for years. A vague aspiration might last a season before the same arguments begin again. This isn’t about winning an argument, it’s about composting conflict instead of continually producing it.
We need to focus on the wider picture, not because everyone has to agree, but because if we keep reopening settled questions without finding better solutions, we’ll spend the next decade refighting the last one. That’s not community, that’s just making more mess, and we already have enough of that. #KISS
