Tag: mainstreaming

Who are the #nastyfew?

They are the people who always rise to the top when #mainstreaming takes hold. You see them on TV, in parliament, running #NGOs, managing #dotcons tech projects.

On the surface, they don’t always look bad – in fact, they often present as competent, articulate, even charming. But scratch that surface and the pattern is clear: their drive is not shared flourishing, it’s possession and control.

This minority #nastyfew, from a historical view, are today’s bourgeoisie. Marx outlined (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie), that the bourgeoisie historically gained their power through ownership of the means of production – factories, land, capital – while the working class had nothing but their labour to sell. The bourgeoisie used their control over wealth and coercion to keep society in balance, a balance where they stayed on top and everyone else stayed dependent.

The same dynamic runs through our present, the #nastyfew work to preserve a status quo that serves them. They exploit labour (waged or unwaged), capture resources, and use subtle or blunt coercion to suppress any change or challenge.

Those who hold power – social, technical, financial – remain the #nastyfew unless we actively work to compost them.

Then, in our cultural circles, we have our own “common sense” #blocking, the “parasites” who feed from progressive paths.

  • #fashernistas – chasing visibility, hashtags, and trends instead of substance. They drain energy by endlessly cycling the latest buzzwords while ignoring the compost underneath.
  • #Blinded dogmatic liberals – well-meaning perhaps, but so trapped in their own ideology that they block radical change without even seeing it.
  • The wannabe #nastyfew – those who orbit power, adopting the habits of control in hopes of rising up themselves.
  • Neo-liberals in disguise – the most dangerous, because they consciously wear the clothing of other paths: climate, diversity, openness… while quietly feeding the #deathcult of enclosure, growth, and control.

Some of these act blindly, reproducing harmful patterns without much thought. Others are deliberate: they know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it to consolidate control.

The unthinking #mainstreaming majority are shadows of the above. They’re not directly malicious, but they absorb the surface story: They repost the slogans. They nod along with “common sense” solutions pushed by the #dotcons and NGOs. They go with the flow, even when the flow is a sewer. Without working composting, they become the mulch for the #nastyfew to grow stronger.

The “nice liberals”. Not all liberals are destructive. Sometimes they play a healthy role: They keep projects afloat by doing practical work. They can mediate between radicals and the #mainstreaming. They often mean well, and can be allies if they’re not left holding the steering wheel all the time. They’re not the compost, they’re more like the worms: sometimes useful, sometimes wriggly, but part of the soil cycle.

And beyond, there are what has value, the progressive radical paths – both #fluffy (trust, care, openness) and #spiky (confrontation, defence, rupture). That’s another layer of the compost pile, and deserves its own focus. The key point: the #nastyfew and their parasites will always try to rise up in any fertile ground. The progressive trick is to compost them early – recycle their energy, block their possessiveness, and keep the soil rich for new seeds.

To recap, let’s look at some history. When the #openweb reboot began about a decade ago, it was rooted in grassroots values: #4opens, federation, collective governance, affinity trust networks. But as soon as the energy started to gather, the #mainstreamin pushed in:

  • #Dotcons pivoting into the space – Facebook rebranding as “Meta” and trying to swallow the Fediverse through the #Threads/ActivityPub move. This is enclosure dressed up as “openness”.
  • Standards capture – The #NGO actors increasingly gatekeeper the “neglected” #W3C processes, pushing, more corporate-driven priorities while blocking messy grassroots paths that did the shovelling to grow the reboot during the seedling years.
  • Control of resources – a few “elitist” individuals began hoarding power over infrastructure, domain names, and repos, reproducing the same top-down model we’re supposed to be escaping.

The result? We are seeing the #mainstreaming channeling energy away from collective growth into more controlled, branded silos. The Fediverse started as messy, small-scale, radical. But the same pattern repeated:

  • SocialHub degeneration – once the buzzing hub for ActivityPub, it decayed into a handful of blockers. The sometimes competent-and-charming surface masks a deeper instinct for control. Threads stagnate, dissent is suppressed, and the soil turns barren.
  • Mastodon centralization – while #Mastodon has been vital, its dominance has also let a single dev-team shape the Fediverse “common sense”. That concentration of reputation and technical control looks very much like a wannabe mini-bourgeois class rising.
  • #NGO incursions – funded NGOs present themselves as allies, but bring managerialism, paywalls thinking, and “stakeholder” logic. Instead of composting conflict, they plaster over it with workshops and careerism. Then #block the people who complain.

This is the #Fediverse version of “workers remain workers, employers remain employers”: contributors remain contributors, gatekeepers remain gatekeepers. We face the issue of possession over collaboration – we see that collectives fracture when individuals cling to admin roles, mailing lists, funds, and leadership positions. Possession rots trust and then groups wither.

The people who hold (and hored) resources, contacts, and media attention become more deadened than path, even if they started with good intentions.

The composting lesson, is that over and over, the #nastyfew and their parasites repeat the bourgeois pattern at scale: They present as competent and charming. They consolidate possession and control. They preserve the status quo by suppressing dissent.

And over and over, the solution is the same: compost them. Turn the piles of #techshit and #NGO mess back into fertile ground. Protect the seeds of grassroots tech trust, keep the social soil messy and alive.

The #OMN is based on
human beings doing the right thing.

And they will not,
and it will fail.

Human beings doing the right thing,
and they will not,
and it will fail.

And they will not,
and it will fail.

And will fail.

This is the challenge
in the era of the #deathcult:
A culture that feeds on fear,
on greed,
on possession.

Seeds are planted,
but the soil is barren.
Trust is offered,
but hands close into fists.
A path is drawn,
but the walkers scatter into shadows.

The #OMN is fragile,
thin green shoots
in a field of ash.

It asks the simplest thing:
Do the right thing.
Not once,
but again,
and again,
and again.

And if we do not?
It will fail.

And if we do?
Perhaps,
seeds will take root,
and grow beyond the compost,
beyond the #deathcult,
into the messy, open,
living forest.

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

Smiling-faced vileness: How enforced politeness becomes a weapon in grassroots paths

All too often, the ugliness we face in grassroots spaces wears a smile. It’s smiling-faced vileness: pleasant, agreeable individuals who wield control by blocking dissent, sanitizing movements under the guise of compromise, and maintaining the illusion of consensus. This is especially true in spaces overly tolerant of #NGO-style protocols – those bureaucratic, #fashionista postmodern traps that slowly erode the spark that makes radical communities thrive.

From my work across decades – from protest camps to #openweb projects – I’ve seen this pattern again and again. Projects like early #Indymedia were messy, radical, and fiercely autonomous. That edge, that wildness was slowly excised until what remains is either safe, bland, and powerless or locked down and paranoid, both smother the naive grassroots paths.

At late era #climatecamp i’ve witnessed activist planning groups that masquerade as open and inclusive, but doom radical ideas by policing language. If someone speaks candidly about power or inequality, they risk being labelled as “derailing.” Not unlike what I describe on the Fediverse: “a consensus ritual where insiders quietly veto contentious proposals, pushing them offstage.” The effect is chilling – the bold, and meaningful, get diluted and then silenced.

I’ve also seen “horizontal” groups adopt soft authoritarianism: a handful of insiders subtly side-line contentious voices with endless calls for care, safety and more research or structure, this is simply polite gatekeeping, in those quiet pauses, power consolidates. These practices don’t just kill energy, they devour possibility. They cannibalize the chance for communities that are both fluffy (nurturing) and spiky (radical).

Smiling-face vileness is not satire – it’s #fashionista postmodern gaslighting. It slowly smothers life with calm care and precision. The task of the grassroots is to replant what’s been stomped. That means cultivating friction -mess, disagreement, negotiation – because that is how community grows, trust is built, and real alternatives emerge. Let’s embed this friction into our code, our community practices, our shared care. Let’s compost the #NGO and fashionista chokeholds so we can grow radical, tender, collective futures #KISS

A lot of the “smiling-faced vileness” comes from a mix of personal psychology, learned behaviour, and the systemic incentives that shape #NGO, institutional, and #mainstreaming culture. It’s not usually deep evil – it’s something more banal, entrenched, and self-justifying. Examples of this mess makeing:

  • Fear of losing control when change threatens the structures they know how to navigate, so they subconsciously (or consciously) try to stop it. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil idea applies here: harm is done by “ordinary” functionaries protecting their turf “The real danger is not that people will rebel, but that they will acquiesce in doing what they know is wrong.”
  • Cognitive dissonance management, as they see themselves as “the good guys,” so any action – even blocking positive change – must be reframed as “responsible” or “prudent.” #Postmodern self-protection: everything can be justified with enough narrative spin, “No one is the villain of their own story.”
  • Status preservation, NGOs and funding orgs reward stability over creativity, hierarchy over challenge. If your position, funding, or reputation depends on maintaining the current order, you will fight disruptive change, even if it’s obviously better “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
  • Incompetence + insecurity, breeds paranoia. If you don’t know how to manage real change, you start to fear those who do. The façade of competence becomes more important than actual results, “When a man’s only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
  • Groupthink & conformity pressure, #mainstreaming cultures reward going along with the majority, even if the majority is wrong “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

This is why these people who take a cling to “power” often look “nice” on the surface while quietly gutting or neutralising anything spiky, challenging, or any change of path. It’s not just personal malice, it’s a cultural immune system against change, fuelled by fear, vanity, and comfort.

When, the tiny few of these people “secede” in #mainstreaming media (and the history it writes) it is not neutral, it’s a kind of #PR machine. It launders power and polishes away dissent. The smiling faces and “respectable” voices are just the velvet gloves over the iron fist. It’s fake history as PR – it isn’t history as lived memory or contested struggle, it’s official narrative, a “storybook” written to flatter the winners and confuse the rest. That’s why it feels vile and pointless: it distracts, pacifies, and reframes mess as inevitability.

The people who produce this are not innocent. Yes, many are clueless functionaries who internalize the system’s values without question. Others are parasitic aspirants, desperate to climb into the #nastyfew, copying their methods. Even when they do “small goods” (a sympathetic article, a cultural puff piece), in the larger pattern they still serve the mainstreaming machine.

The compost metaphor is about instead of raging endlessly at the mess, take what can be siphoned off (attention, fragments of narrative, disillusioned individuals) and redirect that flow into the alt systems (#OMN, #4opens, Fediverse, grassroots histories) then compost the rest: let it rot, break down, and become the fertilizer for something alive and grounded. Because otherwise we get stuck in their cycle: doom-scrolling their fake stories, wasting energy on reacting instead of building. The challenge is mediation, not just rejection. Spot the toxic flows, tap them for useful nutrients, and feed the roots of alternatives.

#KISS

The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths

Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away.

We put a class of media into the commons, governed openly through the #4opens: open data, open process, open source, and open standards. That means no one can close it down, hoard it, or fence it off for profit. The value comes from the shared pool, not from gatekeeping.

This is the heart of #KISS in the #OMN: make the flows work first, in ways people can understand, and build trust on top of that. The tech exists to serve these flows, not to dictate them. This isn’t about perfect crypto or hard lockdowns; it’s about commoning media so that everyone has the right to read, share, and build on it.

Yes, the #mainstreaming mess will eventually follow us – as it always does. But the plan and hope is that by the time it catches up, the habits, culture, and expectations we’ve grown around open media will have shifted society enough that the old traps won’t work the same way. If we’ve done our job, the default will be more open, collaborative, and accountable, not locked down. That’s the #KISS path: simple, resilient, and grounded in the commons.

On the #OMN with #indymediaback and #makeinghistory paths – We’re not talking about a single bridge, but a federated ecosystem, with the current example of both #DAT and #ActivityPub running on the same server, sharing a common database of media objects. As the data flows, text and metadata are redundantly stored in the open (#4opens). That way, if one server gets hacked, it can simply be rolled back and restored from the wider pool. #KISS

The P2P side works much like #nostr in that it can have a list of flows in and out to servers and can use any of these to publish and receive media on the #openweb. The advantage of the #p2p app side is that each local app in a backup for the online servers (see #makeinghistory), which as critics say can be, and will be, taken down some times. Also, they will work in their own right for people who need a more locked down path, and this will be needed in more repressive spaces and times. The clear advantage is this still gives them outflows to the wider #mainstreaming client server media outreach, to what matters, effect, so it ticks both boxes.

We aim to solve technical issues with human-understandable social paths, not hard tech for its own sake. Yes, in a minority of cases hard tech will be needed – but that’s for the #geeks to solve after the working social paths are clear, not before.

We fix problems through #KISS social processes and #4opens transparency, not by defaulting to encryption and lockdown. Hacking is outside the focus scope of the #OMN. What we’re building is about trust and flows, not code as an end in itself. Hacking belongs on the #geek paths – useful, but only after the trust and flows are established. The code should be there to secure what’s been built, not to block it before it exists.

Without trust and working flows, there’s no value at all, no matter how secure, encrypted, or elegant the tech stack. If the campaigns, activism, and people aren’t using it, the system is pointless. And being pointless is something we need to be more honest about. Building for the sake of building, while ignoring the social, community layer, feeds the #geekproblem and starves the movement.

So, what can people actually do in the real world to make this path happen?

  • If you have resources, you can help fund the development work – keeping it in the hands of the people actually building the open commons, not some corporate gatekeeper.
  • If you’re technical, you can code the applications and servers that power the flows. We need builders who understand that trust and usability come first, not shiny tech for its own sake.
  • If you work in UX or testing, you can make sure what we build is something real people can actually use and trust – simple, clear, and accessible.
  • If you do media, you can tell the story. Write, film, photograph, blog, podcast – whatever it takes to spread the word. The more people hear about an alternative that works, the more chance it has to grow.

Whatever your skills or resources, the important thing is to get involved in the flow. This is not a spectator sport, and the is unlikely to be pay, it’s #DIY so the commons will only be built if we build it together. #KISS #4opens #OMN

Rebalance, by shifting focus from tools to cultures

Appropriate technology in activist tech means tools built for our real contexts, not for Silicon Valley fantasies or bunker-dwelling paranoia. It’s about lightweight, repairable, understandable systems that communities can actually run, adapt, and share. Right now, the #geekproblem pushes us toward shiny, #dotcons shaped over-engineered toys that serve developer ego more than people and community need or bloated encryption stacks nobody understands, federated protocols that collapse under complexity, and endless half-finished “next big things” with no grounding in actual social use.

We need to drag the conversation back to fit for purpose, tech that works in the messy, underfunded, real world of activism, where trust and openness are the foundation, and security is woven in without becoming a fetish that locks us away from each other.

The #fedivers #openweb reboot of the last ten years is a good first step, but it embeds meany of the #mainstreaming issues and has the deep #geekproblems embedded into its culture and tech stacks. A second step away from this is, the social understanding, that security doesn’t come from code alone, it comes from the community that surrounds it. Without a living, visible, and shared culture, the best tools are just dead weight.

The path starts with embedding our tools inside open, self-documenting, collective cultures. If you can’t see how decisions happen, you’re just replacing one opaque power structure with another.

Forget the myth of the “perfect” platform. What we need are messy but resilient spaces, a diversity of nodes, loosely connected, each carrying its own part of the load.

Build commons-first infrastructure, to re-anchor our work in openness, federation, and trust-based networks baked in from the start. The baseline is #4opens – open data, open source, open standards, open process – non-negotiable.

On this path, the #OMN (Open Media Network) can be the publishing spine: a trust-based network where stories, actions, and knowledge move between activist spaces without corporate choke points and #blocking.

We must bridge into existing real-world struggles – unions, climate justice, housing fights. Tech that only talks to other techies is just another dead end.

Stop digging the same hole, we stop wasting energy on projects that make us smaller and weaker:

No more encryption fetishism. Encryption is the lock on the door, not the whole house.

No more closed, invite-only dev silos. If you can’t talk openly about the work, it’s either the wrong work or the wrong space.

No more “founder cult” projects that collapse when one person burns out or drifts off.

Security is not enough, survival is not victory, we can be safe and irrelevant – or vulnerable and changing the world by breaking corporate dependency, by building the infrastructure of a post-#dotcons world. This isn’t about perfect software, it’s about building the cultures that can use it – and win.

Stories on this subject:

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory/wiki/Story+-+Oxford%3A+Going+with+The+Flow.-

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/Out+reach+short+story+-+Stalls+and+Code.-

What is it that blocks this needed change and challenge? #Geekproblem is about when the “solution” Is the problem. One of the most frustrating things is how often its defenders mistake their narrow fixations for universal solutions, or worse, offer them up in bad faith to derail the real conversation.

You’ll raise an issue – social, political, cultural – and instead of engaging with the messy, human, collective work needed to address it, the geek brain rushes to replace it with a neat technical patch. The tool, the workflow, the protocol. As if the complexity of human trust, governance, and solidarity can be debugged into submission.

This isn’t just misunderstanding; sometimes it’s sabotage. By framing the “solution” purely in terms of tech or procedure, they strip the problem of its social and political context. What remains is something sterile, depoliticised, and ultimately unfit for purpose.

It’s why I keep bringing this up. Because if we don’t name the #Geekproblem for what it is, we’ll keep circling in the same loops, patching over social fractures with shiny but hollow code. The answer isn’t more complexity; it’s #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple in the sense of clear, human-first, and grounded in open, accessible processes.

The truth is, solving problems in the #openweb isn’t about cleverness or code alone. It’s about people, and unless the geeks can learn to work with that, rather than overwrite it, they’ll stay part of the problem, the #geekproblem

Please, please try not to keep being a prat about this.

Smiling-faced vileness: How enforced politeness becomes a weapon in grassroots paths

Security comes from community rather than technological control

It turns out that what hackers yearn for is not raw power but security – not just the technical kind, but an emotional security that is harder to admit to, so it gets dressed up in the language and posture of technology.

Because many in these paths and spaces operate with narrow social and political horizons, shaped by individualist tech culture, a distrust of messy collective life, and little grounding in movement history, their insecurity rarely finds healthy expression. Instead, it gets channelled into #mainstreaming patterns: centralising control, hoarding decision-making, gatekeeping access. The feeling of safety comes not from trust, but from control.

This is why in so many “open” projects we see:

Root admin privileges treated like a personal bunker.

Technical gatekeeping replacing collaborative stewardship.

Social disagreements re-coded as “technical issues” so they can be “resolved” by force rather than dialogue.

The power they wield is a symptom, the insecurity is the cause, lack of balance is the disease. The problem is that command/control cultures make insecurity worse, they turn every challenge into a threat, every new contributor into a risk, and every disagreement into a test of dominance. Over time, this drives out the very diversity and collaboration that could create true resilience.

The #4opens – open data, open code, open standards, open process – is not just a governance checklist. It’s a practical, everyday discipline that forces a shift from control to collaboration. It changes the emotional terrain.

Open data dissolves the hoarding instinct, because nothing critical is locked away in one person’s vault.

Open code forces the bunker doors open, making it normal for others to touch “your” work.

Open standards create interdependence rather than dependency, reducing the fear of losing control.

Open process makes decisions visible, accountable, and shared, replacing the hidden backchannel with a transparent commons.

By practising the #4opens, even the most control-driven hacker can start to find a different kind of security, rooted in trust, redundancy, and collective stewardship rather than in solitary power.

The #4opens doesn’t magically fix emotional insecurity, but it creates a scaffolding of transparency and accountability where balance can grow. It turns projects from personal fiefdoms into shared ecosystems, and in doing so, helps people unlearn the reflex to seek safety only through domination.

The way out is not to strip hackers of influence, but to build cultures where influence is exercised in the open, with care, and where security comes from community rather than technological control.

A #fluffy view – Think of a self-hosted community chat platform, something small, privacy-focused, run by a handful of volunteer hackers. The core devs are brilliant, but they see every problem as a technical one: security means encryption upgrades, stability means more containerization, and governance means a GitHub permissions list.

When disagreements arise over moderation, they don’t trust open discussion. Instead, they quietly add admin-only tools that can hide messages or boot users without notice. From their perspective, this is “security”, keeping the platform stable and safe. But because the process is invisible and unilateral, it breeds mistrust. The community feels controlled, not cared for.

Now imagine this same project embracing the #4opens:

Open Data – Moderation actions are logged and visible to everyone.

Open Source – The code that runs moderation tools is public, so no hidden powers exist.

Open Process – Policy changes are discussed in a shared forum where everyone can contribute.

Open Standards – The platform can interoperate with others, so no one is locked in.

This changes the emotional root of the hackers’ insecurity: their “power” no longer depends on guarding the system against imagined chaos, but on participating in a transparent culture where the community itself holds the system together. Security is now mutual care, not technological control. The hackers still have influence, but it’s exercised in the open, grounded in trust, and shared with the people they serve.

A spiky view of this – The problem with too many hackers is that they mistake root access for moral authority. They wrap their emotional fragility in layers of SSH keys and sudo privileges, then strut around acting like benevolent dictators for life. You see it in the endless “code is law” sermons, in the backroom channel decisions, in the smug dismissal of “non-technical” people as if empathy were a bug. They lock down wikis “for security,” gatekeep repos “to avoid chaos,” and implement moderation tools that work like secret police. This is not liberation, it’s digital landlordism, the same power-hoarding rot we see in the #mainstreaming mess, just with a Linux hoodie instead of a corporate badge.

#KISS it’s best not to be either a dogmatic #fluffy or a #spiky prat about this need for balance.

Talking vs. doing in the #openweb

I often hear: “You post a lot, but what practical work have you actually done?” It’s a fair question, there’s far too much hot air in tech spaces, and the #openweb can’t be rebuilt on rhetoric alone. The critique goes something like this:

“You’re preaching an idealised ‘community’ that doesn’t exist. You criticise the mainstream (fair enough) but keep pushing alternatives without showing a tangible model that works. It feels like you’re looking for an audience, not a conversation.”

And here’s my side of this:

I was part of the team that got multiple governments in Europe to adopt the Fediverse — working on the outreach that took the tech to the European Union.

I co-ran 5 Fediverse instances with thousands of users in its early years. We eventually had to shut them down — an experience I now talk about openly because we need to make this work better next time.

I’ve worked on meany of #openweb projects going back to the birth of the WWW. That history is here: https://hamishcampbell.com

Projects include UK #Indymedia, #VisionOnTV, the Open Media Network (#OMN), the #4opens framework, and the #OGB — all aimed at building governance, infrastructure, and culture outside corporate control.

Here’s the crux: building outside the mainstream is messy, fragile, and uncertain. There’s no guarantee that any of this will “win.” But the alternative – doing nothing and letting every commons be enclosed – guarantees failure.

The work is #DIY culture. If you don’t want to build, you don’t have to. But if you do, you have to accept the risk, the mess, and the fact that you won’t get the same dopamine hits as shipping a VC-backed app. You also have to resist the slide into trolling when frustration builds.

The real challenge is cultural: how to support tech that walks outside the dominant paths long enough to make new ones. That means building infrastructure that runs on trust, openness, and care, not just control, profit, and scale. If we stop doing this, every alternative will keep collapsing back into the defaults.

Compost the Chancers: How Careerists Kill Horizontal Tech Movements

It happens every time. A fresh grassroots project kicks off, chaotic, joyful, full of promise. The code is rough, the conversations messy, but the energy is real. People come together not for money or prestige, but because something needs doing and no one else will do it.

Then, they arrive, the careerists, the chancers, the opportunists who talk a good game of “community” and “values” while quietly positioning themselves for influence, funding, reputation. You know these people, they start “facilitating” things, pushing for “professionalism,” organising pointless panels, and – without fail – introduce hierarchical management logic dressed in pseudo-horizontal language.

Soon, the messy collective space becomes an application form, organic conversations shift to curated “working groups”, governance becomes gatekeeping, code becomes control.

Careerism is a cultural virus, OK, these people aren’t evil villains, they’re simply products of their environment, trained to extract value, shape narratives, and build CVs. But their impact is destructive, even if unintentional. What they bring with them is the #mainstreaming mindset, a default toward #NGO logic, safe liberalism, risk-aversion, and the slow suffocation of wild experimentation.

They start to block with niceness., they silence with process, they smother with “inclusivity” until there’s no air left to breathe. When people question this, then they start to become nasty, trolling, blocking and finally ignoring runs its predictable course…

Examples? Let’s name some very formiler patterns:

The Self-Appointed Spokesperson – Shows up late, speaks the loudest, builds a personal brand on the back of others’ labour.

The Grant-Whisperer – Always chasing the next funder, reshaping the project to fit what’s "deliverable" instead of what’s needed.

The Gatekeeping Ally – Claims to represent the marginalised, while shutting down dissent and complexity with soft authoritarianism.

The #NGO Zombie – Thinks every grassroots space needs a board, a charter, and a code of conduct before it needs trust or purpose.

The Pivot Junkie – Tries to steer the project toward startup land “just to be sustainable,” and ends up reinventing capitalism in #FOSS clothes.

These types thrive when horizontality lacks grounding. On the path we need to take, “cancel culture” is a cul-de-sac. Blocking them just makes them martyrs. Ignoring them lets them take over. The alternative? Compost them, let their bullshit rot in the open, call things what they are. Tech is political, values are not neutral. What to do? Compost, don’t cancel.

To reboot the #openweb and keep it rooted in the #4opens: Open Code, Open Data, Open Standards, Open Process. Rebooting needs resistance, we have to build spaces that are both porous and protected, we need, paths and spaces with membranes, not walls. Trust-based collectives with clear boundaries. If someone’s treating your community like a stepping stone, show them the compost bin. If someone’s building with care, humility, and rootedness, then share our tools with them.

This is not a purity test, it’s composting as culture, if something smells off, trust your nose. Because if we don’t get serious about this, the chancers will take over. They always do. Unless we make the path too muddy for them to walk it.

A core problem is that too many “open” tech projects try to model social relations after code workflows rather than shaping code to reflect healthy social processes. Ersatz writing, ersatz governance and the slow death of the #openweb. We’re living through a wave of fakery. The #AI hype machine spews endless streams of ersatz writing – grammatically perfect, stylistically smooth, and hollow. It feels like content but carries no lived experience, no rooted context, no risk. Unedited, it’s a shadow play of culture.

The same hollowness infects too many horizontal tech spaces. Here, we find ersatz governance – systems that borrow the forms of openness and collaboration, but replace the substance with tech bureaucracy. Instead of starting from lived social practice, they mimic software workflows: people reduced to issue tickets, trust replaced by “process,” culture swapped for sprint planning. The result is the same as with AI: the outputs are technically competent but socially dead.

When governance is reduced to process, the door swings open for the chancers, the careerists, and the #NGO climbers. They’re fluent in the language of inclusivity and consensus, but they’re not here to build, these people thrive in systems where nothing is anchored in lived trust or collective history. In such environments, appearances are reality, and they control the appearance.

The mirror needs to flip, healthy social production can inspire healthy code production, but trying to run human interaction like a Git repo produces brittle, alienating cultures. We see it in the #Fediverse right now: meetings full of procedure but no warmth; #PRs merged while communities fracture; polished governance documents for projects this pointlessness.

The #openweb was never meant to be safe for professional managers of openness. It was meant to be a living commons, messy, unpredictable, full of disagreements and breakthroughs. If we can root our governance in actual relationships rather than corporate abstractions, we can build tech that reflects community rather than forcing community to reflect tech. Otherwise, we’ll just have two hollow empires – AI’s Ersatz Writing on one side, and our own Ersatz Governance on the other – both looking open, both feeling dead.

A guide for staying honest and native

A community is only viable if enough people care enough to keep it relevant. In this era of #stupidindividualism, most people don’t lift a finger to make that happen.

This is the norm across many #4opens spaces: a near-total lack of interest in building or maintaining shared paths. It’s a textbook case of right-wing Tragedy of the Commons. Developers show up when it suits them, use the space for their narrow needs, then drift off without contributing to the upkeep. They treat community like free infrastructure – something passive they can extract from – rather than a living, tended path.

This same pattern plays out across the grassroots and #FOSS world. Devs focus on their code, their projects, their timelines. Rarely do they look up and engage with the broader ecology that their work depends on. In the #Fediverse especially, most developers ignore shared infrastructure, governance, and the standards they rely on, until something breaks. Then they complain.

Same social dynamics, same outcome: a mess that keeps repeating itself. And until we break that pattern, we’re stuck.

On the alt path, it’s fair to ask for clarity. When we talk about “#openweb projects,” we mean efforts grounded in the values of the early web commons: transparency, decentralization, collective ownership. This includes things like the rebooted #Indymedia, the #OMN (Open Media Network), and the #OGB (Open Governance Body). These aren’t about building shiny platforms, they’re about building the structures and relationships that allow real alternatives to survive and grow outside the #mainstreaming mess.

This isn’t just evangelism, it’s hands-on work: shaping frameworks for local and federated publishing (like the original Indymedia), and now modelling governance and trust systems that resist hierarchy and #NGO capture.

As for government institutions joining the #Fediverse – What we pushed was a bottom-up, native process rooted in people and practice, not imposed solutions. But as is often the case, after we laid the groundwork, the institutional #PR and #NGO crowd moved in and took over.

The “community” we speak of does exist, even if it’s fragmented, marginal, and ignored. You’ll find it in squats, permaculture collectives, activist media spaces, messy corners of the #Fediverse, and in the hands of people still building trust and tools outside the #dotcons. It’s not centralized or funded, so it’s not visible like capitalist platforms are. But it’s real. I’ve lived inside it for decades.

You’re right that real code is needed. But it’s not about one perfect tool. It’s about the network of trust and shared values that can hold many tools and projects together. That’s slower to build, less flashy to show off, but far more resilient and necessary.

The #Fediverse is a good first step. But let’s be honest: we’ve lost the thread when it comes to building tech that walks off the beaten path. Most #mainstreaming energy, and much of the #NGO outreach, still flows into reinforcing the same old ruts: centralization, enclosure, obedience to capital. Anything that doesn’t follow those routes is starved of support and often treated as a threat, a curiosity, or a waste of time.

But it’s exactly that off-path infrastructure we need, not just to resist the current system, but to outlast it. To still be standing when the old ways collapse. That means supporting tools and systems that aren’t profitable, aren’t convenient, and aren’t slick. They’re harder to fund, harder to maintain, but they’re what let us keep moving forward through the coming storm of #climatechaos.

If we don’t build and sustain these alternative tracks, the dominant ones will keep absorbing or destroying everything new. It’s a recursive trap: we need better systems to make better tools, but we can’t build those tools without some of those better systems already in place.

So we need to hold space – with care, mess, and trust – for that in-between.

That’s where projects like #OMN, the rebooted #Indymedia, and the #4opens live. Not trying to escape friction, but embracing it. Mediating it. Letting it guide us toward what’s honest, what’s native, what lasts.

The new litmus test isn’t “Does it scale?”
It’s: “Does it spread? Does it take root? Can it compost and regrow?”

It’s important to recognise that friction – the mess, the slowness, the need for constant negotiation – is not a flaw in native paths, it’s a virtue. It’s how trust, mutuality, and accountability are sustained over time. These are not bugs to be eliminated with slick #UX and #VC-funded convenience – they’re part of what keeps a community honest and rooted.

The problem arises when less-native, often externally imposed systems (driven by capitalist or institutional agendas) treat these messy, friction-full spaces as broken or backwards. This is the classic dynamic of imperialism and settler colonialism: imposing order, “fixing” things, extracting value, and in doing so erasing the lived, relational logic of native systems.

If you look through the lens of native/western histories – indigenous struggles vs colonial modernity, the same pattern plays out again and again: the native path is degraded, disrespected, overwritten. In tech, it’s no different. You see it when horizontal, trust-based networks get steamrolled by #NGO capture, institutional gatekeeping, or #VC-funded platforms that sell convenience and control.

So the real work is mediation. Not purity, not retreat, but balancing these tensions in practice: holding space where native paths can grow without being co-opted or crushed, while still reaching out to shift the wider terrain.

We need to stop seeing native approaches as “immature” or “inefficient.” They’re often the only thing holding the line against complete enclosure. The question isn’t “How do we fix the mess?”, it’s “How do we stay with it, tend it, and let it teach us how to do this differently?”

It’s an old but urgent problem: how do we support tech that walks outside the dominant paths long enough to clear new ones? Infrastructure that can challenge the mainstream only survives if we build support systems that reflect different values — trust, openness, and care over control, profit, and scale. Right now, we’ve stopped thinking seriously about this. If we don’t return to this work, building the path as we walk it, we’ll be stuck cycling through the same traps, watching each alternative collapse back into the old defaults.

People keep asking for my history, so a link https://hamishcampbell.com/introduction/

We Don’t Need More Liberal Techno-Utopianism

We need to start saying this more often, and without apology: there is a moral difference between left and right. Not just a difference in opinion, or strategy, or culture, but a real difference in the kind of people and world each side fights for. Left-wing politics, reflects our better human instincts: generosity, compassion, mutual care, sociability, conviviality, and courage. These are the values that hold communities together, that push back against cruelty and isolation, that imagine a world where no one is left behind. In contrast, right-wing politics are the organised expression of greed, selfishness, ego, bigotry, and fear. They hoard, they divide, they scapegoat, and they dominate.

It’s time we stop pretending this is just a polite disagreement and call it what it is: the left is the political force for good, and the right is the political expression of evil. Naming this clearly matters – because when we blur the line between solidarity and selfishness, we lose the ground we need to stand on. And note we need to put much of the hierarchical left on the right spectrum, it’s important to say this often as well.

Then on the centre path there’s a lot of #fluffy around these days. Take books like Abundance – dressed up as bold new visions, but really just more of the same old liberal centrism with a shiny, tech-friendly finish. It flirts with Marx at the end, but only to dress up in borrowed credibility. At heart, it’s not socialist, it’s a manifesto to reassure the #mainstreaming chattering class that everything will be OK if we innovate harder and manage smarter. This is blinded feel-good “supply-side liberalism” for the TED Talk crowd.

Let’s be very clear: the “problems of the modern Left” exists. Identity tokenism, #NGO capture, and aimless cultural navel-gazing have turned real struggle into performance art. But the answer isn’t to step back into the arms of liberalism or #techbro ideology – it’s to push further and deeper into balancing the path of radical collective politics. Not less left, but more grounded and grown-up socialism?

Because the actual problem isn’t scarcity, or inefficiency, or bad design. The problem is capitalism. Let’s spell it out: Capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work. That’s how it makes money. You think landlords want more housing to be built? Of course not. Flood the market with affordable homes and they lose their grip on rent extraction. Same with developers, they make their money by building just enough to keep prices high. It’s not a bug, it’s the core business model. We need to see this for what it is #miseryeconomics.

Take energy, the whole history of fossil fuels is cartels, from the Seven Sisters to OPEC, it’s a game of controlling supply to keep prices (and profits) up. It’s not about abundance, it’s about engineered shortage. Try fitting that into your neat little supply-and-demand graphs.

Even beyond housing and energy, the entire financial system is tied to the constant rise in asset values. You don’t keep Wall Street humming by flooding the world with free and accessible goods. You do it by enclosing, bottling, and selling scarcity.

So when these liberal optimists talk about “unlocking abundance” without touching class power or property relations, they’re missing the entire point. Or worse, helping to hide it.

What we actually need is a radical shift, that builds on grassroots cooperation, trust, and open systems. Not more shiny ethical #dotcons platforms or visionary #nastyfew billionaires, but boring, solid, stubborn collective action. We need commons, not commodities. Federation, not feudalism. We need to compost the #techshit, not polish it.

This is where projects like the #OMN come in – grounded in the #4opens and decades of lived, messy, practical resistance. Built to share, not to own. Grown from the ground up, not imposed from on high.

We’ve seen what doesn’t work. Let’s stop pretending that liberalism with a few wires stuck in it is going to save us. It’s time to build something real, together, and you get to chose to take the left or the right path. And on this choice, try not to be “common sense” evil in your choice.

Here is a trilogy of stories you can use for outreach if you take the grassroots left path:

Oxford: Going with The Flow

Chatsworth Market: Stalls and Code

And story in process, the Berlin Bay

Why #NGO and fluffy #openweb tech events should include radical real grassroots projects

If you need a working definition of the #geekproblem, it’s the habit, no, the reflex, of putting the social side of tech outside of tech. It’s the behaviour of someone sticking their head in the sand and mumbling, “That’s not my department.”
It’s “I just write the code.”
It’s “We’re neutral tools.”
It’s “Let’s keep politics out of it.”

This isn’t just naivety, it’s a deep, culturally reinforced avoidance of responsibility. And it’s one of the key reasons why even alternative tech replicates the same failures and power structures as the mainstream.

Worse, this behaviour is too often mainstreamed in the alt-tech spaces themselves, turned into best practice by #NGO people who should know better. It becomes active #blocking of any progress on alternative paths. New governance? Too political. Radical accountability? Too messy. Grassroots involvement? Too slow. Let’s just build it and hope for the best.

We can’t afford this any more, in the midst of #climatechaos, rising authoritarianism, and the enclosure of digital commons, building better tools without building better relationships, better communities, and better politics is a dead-end.

This is the core of the #geekproblem, and if we’re serious about anything more than shiny toys, it’s something we must talk about at our conferences, meetups, and hackathons. Let’s stop pretending code is apolitical, let’s start with this: tech is social, or it is very likely more wortless #tecshit.

Let’s be blunt, “inclusive” tech/#NGO events talk about change but don’t platform the people doing the hard, messy work of building this path. This is a real problem, rooted in comfort, control, and careerism.

Radical grassroots projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN) exist precisely to challenge the #mainstreaming mess, not to dress it up. We aren’t here to repeat feel-good slogans and deliver polished #PR. We’re here to offer lived solutions grounded in the #4opens and decades of collective, hands-dirty work.

So why should OMN and similar voices be invited in?

  • We speak from the grassroots, not the conference stage.
  • We build tools that people have historically used, not just write funding proposals about.
  • We hold space for #DIY, for #p2p, for real change, not only the reform theatre.

If your event doesn’t include these voices, like almost all of them, it’s the #mainstreaming problem of locking out knowledge, networks, and resistance, which the events #PR claims to support. This clearly makes the people involved into hypocrites.

On a positive, #KISS, this doesn’t need to be a fight, let’s make events better together. Can you imagine real dialogue between grassroots builders and NGO funders? Imagine shared workshops where friction leads to function, messy, honest space that acknowledges power dynamics – and really then starts to do something about this mess.

Want a better event?

Put grassroots groups on the stage, not just in the audience.

Pay people for their time — especially those working outside institutions.

Focus on practice, not just policy.

Drop the gatekeeping.

Build open process into your event — make your own structure accountable to the #4opens.

But, remember, we aren’t going just to play nice, to be seen, we’ll come to compost the status quo, and plant something that might actually grow. Let’s try and maybe do this right, please.

The #nastyfew in the era of #climatechaos and social breakdown

In this accelerating collapse – where #climatechaos spirals and #neoliberalism guts the very idea of society – we urgently need to confront a painful truth: it’s simple, the #nastyfew are a parasite class. And that this class feeds on the very foundations of well-being, survival, and joy that the majority of the global population desperately needs. They are the ones who keep the engines of destruction humming, not out of necessity, but out of greed and fear of irrelevance. These people and their institutions flourish precisely because most of us are lost in the distractions of #mainstreaming and false hopes of reform.

The big picture is Capitalism’s global predation – Zooming out, this is the capitalist class – those who own, hoard, and manipulate the resources, labour, and attention of billions. They weaponise economics, push debt, drive resource wars, and now greenwash their way through #climatecollapse while investing in bunkers and surveillance. They bankroll right-wing populism and push for austerity, while lobby for tax cuts as profits soar.

The close-up: People you might know, zoom in, and things get messier. This parasitic drive isn’t only held by billionaire industrialists. In many cases, it’s people close to us, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes not. These are the minor functionaries of capital, the wannabe gatekeepers, and the careerists who believe that “playing the game” will protect them from collapse.

In tech, it is clearer, parasites wearing hoodies. The Bitcoin Bros: Obsessively libertarian, they fetishise decentralisation while promoting hyper-individualist economics that mirrors the worst of Wall Street. They talk about freedom but build systems of exclusion, greed, and extraction. If you spend your energy pushing #crypto as liberation while ignoring ecological and social costs, you are enabling the parasite class – and likely dreaming of becoming one.

The #mainstreaming talking about this “inside” issue

#Dotcons Executives: The Zuckerbergs, Bezoses, and Musks of the world are obvious examples. But look further down the food chain: the startup bros who pivot endlessly looking for #VC buyouts, the marketing execs who gut communities for ad metrics, the devs who code endless optimisations to squeeze more value out of users. If your business model depends on surveillance, addiction and enclosure, you’re the problem.

The careerist #NGO tech elitists: Yes, even the “good” sector can be captured. NGO professionals who endlessly hold conferences and produce whitepapers while blocking actual grassroots projects. They take seats at tables designed to exclude the people doing real, messy, transformative work. They don’t oppose the #nastyfew; they stabilise their control.

This is the #dotcons algorithm

So what do we do? First, see clearly, name the parasitism. Understand that systems don’t just fail; they are designed to benefit the few and contain the many. Second, build bridges away from this mess – rooted in the #4opens: open data, open source, open process, and open standards. This is the beginning of composting the parasite class. Third, support native projects: not the VC-funded copies or the corporate-friendly NGOs, but the messy, local, collaborative tools and networks that build resilience and joy from the ground up. Projects like #IndymediaBack, #OMN, and others pushing against the tide are places to start.

Because in the end, the parasite class only exists as long as we feed it.

Let’s stop, please.

W3C How this fits into #OMN the Shared Origins and Intentions

Let’s look at this from a prospective, both the W3C statement and the #OMN recognize that the early web was built with open sharing, decentralization, and public good in mind. The #W3C calls for a web “respectful of all participants,” which aligns with the #OMN goal of building an open media infrastructure based on the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process.

Where this W3C #mainstreamin alt path falls short (and why #OMN matters). The W3C vision speaks of “taking responsibility” and “addressing the impact of our work” through technical standards, but in reality, the current web’s architecture has been co-opted by centralized, profit-driven platforms (#dotcons) that dominate communication and content flow.

In reaction to this, the #OMN is grounded in the reality that technical fixes alone won’t solve these social problems, we need working activist cultures, grassroots governance, and federated media networks to actively challenge #mainstreaming and #deathcult values.

What #OMN brings is a social layer: W3C focuses on technology and ethics at the standards level. The #OMN focuses on the cultural and organizational infrastructure needed to build, sustain, and govern alternative media networks.

Scaling what worked: The W3C admits we’ve lost the “openness” to misinformation and data abuse. The #OMN is about bringing back what worked (e.g., early Indymedia, radical tech collectives) and scaling it using tools like #ActivityPub and the #fediverse.

Compost and regenerate: The W3C wants reform from within. The #OMN recognizes the need to compost the #techshit, grow anew, and create autonomous, federated spaces where community processes are native, not retrofitted.

A positive reboot (from within the #openweb), where the W3C gives us a narrative frame. The #OMN gives us a path to act. We can reclaim the web not only through better standards, but through working, lived alternatives – composting what failed, and growing based on what we know works.

We need bridging, if the W3C and groups like them are serious about rebuilding a humane web, then the #OMN path as much to offer:

  • A bridge to activist governance.
  • A working example of the Ethical Web Principles being practiced socially, not just technically.
  • A push for native, grassroots agency, not just safeguards built by the same #NGO centralizers who failed the first time.

Let’s do better, yes, but let’s also be native, that’s what the #OMN is about.

A thread on a different project on the same subject, “Open Source and Open Standards nerds like me ought to know by now that the protocol is the least compelling thing about a service. Who cares if your home is built using only Stallman-blessed tools, when the walls are full of rats?” https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/im-never-going-back-to-matrix

Dig, Plant, Grow. Compost the #Techshit. Repeat

This post is talking in the sense of structure rather than individual experience. Let’s be honest, much of the so-called “alternative” tech scene is still stuck. Yes, we fled the #dotcons for something better, but ended up with copies of the same broken models. The #Fediverse, with all its potential, is still as often dominated by “mainstreaming meta” chat (“Twitter refugees incoming!”) or conspiracy-laden, #fashionista rabbit holes. It’s little wonder that even the nerdy privacy crowd struggles to find meaningful content or community. And no, shouting “fuck the system!” isn’t enough.

If we’re serious about systemic change, we need to do much more. The question is not if people will come, some always will, the real challenge is what they’ll find when they get here. Right now? It’s messy, insular, and missing the tools people need to use for change and challenge, let alone feel at home. We must move beyond building clones of corporate platforms and start composting the path that got us here.

This is why we need a reboot, not from scratch, but from memory. Projects like #indymediaback aim to reclaim 20+ years of working grassroots media practice. With tools like #ActivityPub we now have scalable tech that can bring those old social processes – based on #4opens (open code, open data, open governance, open standards) – into the present. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is such a path: combining the solid tech foundations with the radical social methods that we know worked (but didn’t scale).

To move at all, we must change and challenge the toxic norms of the #mainstreaming #deathcult, and yes, this means building real alternative identities and spaces that don’t live in the shadow of big tech. Being “alternative” used to mean something, and it can again, if we stop ONLY copying the mainstream and instead focus on nurturing something more strongly rooted and real.

This isn’t about being purist, #FOSS and Open Source already works in this way, the #OMN just brings this path to media and community infrastructure. It’s not utopian, it’s compost. And yes, that means dealing with hard questions, including our own funding. Let’s stop pretending we’re neutral when we’re not. Let’s build from honesty. It’s time to dig, plant, grow, and repeat.

#OMN #4opens #indymediaback #openweb #fediverse #techshit #KISS #NGO #deathcult #mainstreaming #altmedia #DIY

NOTE: the comments below are a useful example of #stupidindividualism, and remember this hashtag is about social groups and their #blocking of social thinking. The history matters, flaming is not a useful response.