What can we learn from the current mess. The protests didn’t fail because people didn’t care. They failed because the system is not built to respond to protest, it’s built to absorb it. We’ve marched for climate justice, taken the streets for peace, rallied for gender freedom, and now we mobilize for Palestine. The awareness is unprecedented. The turnout is historic. But what has shifted?
Police powers expanded. Fossil fuel extraction accelerated, Gaza burns. The truth is: awareness is not power. That’s a bitter pill for many on the #mainstreaming liberal left, who still believe that if we just scream loud enough, someone with authority will finally listen. But listen to what? A million voices chanting through state-sanctioned routes, wrapped in #NGO branding, monitored and shaped by our mobile devices?
This isn’t failure by accident, it’s design. Modern post #neoliberal governance has perfected the art of managing dissent, it doesn’t crush opposition, it curates it. It schedules protest, builds fenced-off “free speech zones” tallies engagement for annual reports. It makes this work by funding the same nonprofits it pretends to oppose to push protest as a pageant, a performance of resistance that never practically interrupt the flows of capital.
Worse than this, it trains us into harmless routines: march, chant, selfy, hashtag on the #dotcons, disperse, donate, repeat. It pacifies rage by channelling it into metrics, and then sells those metrics back to us as success. It offers us vacuous victories made of smoke and mirrors: a viral post, a headline, a panel discussion.
But to put this simply, real power doesn’t care how you feel, it cares what you can disrupt. And right now, they know we can’t disrupt much, because power doesn’t fear signs or slogans, it fears logistics. We know this from history. The Viet Minh didn’t defeat the French colonial army with slogans. The IRA didn’t survive the British Empire through branding. The Zapatistas didn’t hold territory in Chiapas by waiting for permission. These movements did not rely on protest. They relied on operations. On strategy. On adaptability. On patience and planning.
What do we need, to shift from affective protest to effective resistance? This doesn’t mean abandoning public protest entirely, but it means recognizing what it is: a signal, not a structure. It’s the spark, not the engine. And too often, we mistake the spark for the fire.
So what does this shift look like? Stop chasing virality. Build networks that don’t rely on platforms owned by billionaires. Organize in ways that can’t be throttled or shadowbanned. Don’t just protest; prototype. Create alternatives: cooperative farms, tool libraries, mesh networks, open media infrastructures (#OMN), community defence projects. Measure what matters. Track not followers or clicks, but mutual aid distributed, infrastructure built, people trained, tools replicated. Treat resistance like an ecosystem. Not wannabe famous (stupid)individuals shouting louder, but communities learning, adapting, and reproducing decentralized power.
In short, we need an operational culture, built not on outrage cycles but on daily commitment, iteration, and survival. This is prefigurative politics in action: we don’t beg the world to change, we build the new one inside the shell of the old. Yes, the current system will collapse. It is already collapsing. The question is no longer how to reform it, but at this stage, how to outlive it, and outgrow it.
This is where strategy matters, this is where affect must meet action. Because we aren’t here to perform resistance for an audience, we’re here to construct parallel systems in the cracks of empire. And that starts with understanding: protest alone is not enough. We must become ungovernable, not just in what we say – but in how we live.
The discussions on sovereignty at #NGIForum2025 make me wonder: what year are we in? It’s as if we’re rebooting grassroots conversations we’ve had for decades – but without the mess, memory, or movement that gave them meaning in the first place.
A breath of clarity came from @renchap, who said it plainly:
We need to focus our efforts on funding and supporting public value network infrastructure… THAT CANNOT BE BOUGHT. 💪
Absolutely. If that idea resonates with you, try starting with the #4opens – a pragmatic path to build tech with real accountability and openness. It’s not a utopia, it’s a filter designed to push out 95% of the #techshit we’re constantly drowning in. The rest? That’s the work: compromise, community, governance.
For those curious about mapping this stuff, I appreciate the attempt to formalize governance components of digital commons here: https://commons.mattischneider.fr/2-constituants It’s useful, but my take? Still not messy enough to reflect how real-world horizontal projects actually work. As the site rightly says:
“If you already have experience in operating commons, you or your organisation will probably have specific practices that are more appropriate to your context.”
Exactly, why context matters, and why real commons need trust-based governance, not just metrics and diagrams. Let’s remember:
Tools are only useful if people use them.
And that’s our real problem right now.
Take this audience question as a clear example: What should we do when a US company acquires an EU one – like Cisco buying Slido? It hits the core issue:
Centralized, vertical control is always the endgame of VC funding and the mainstream tech stack.
What’s the mainstream response? Push more AI. Push more “innovation.” Push more #stupidindividualism. This story is heavily funded and constantly amplified. Why? Because it keeps us distracted, divided, and demobilized. We need to compost this garbage.
Let’s stop pretending #opensource is the goal. It’s only useful if it lives in common infrastructure, owned and governed collectively, with embedded solidarity, not slogans. Yes, someone pointed out that:
"Open source licensing permits continued operation of the software with an EU provider."
That’s technically true, but in practice, how many such transitions actually happen? How many of these tools become hollowed-out ghost projects after the buyout? We need the EU to fund #4opens #FOSS and commons-native projects directly, not startups chasing exit strategies.
And yes, I’ll be blunt here:
There’s likely a whole class of people who should be prosecuted for fraud.
Because the current “innovation” circuit is knowingly wasting public money on private gain under “our” banner of openness. It’s a con. A parasitic class living off the #countercultures they parasitise. So let’s call this out, not to “disrupt” for disruption’s sake, but to open up space for what actually matters:
Native projects with shared roots in code, care, and community.
Activism that isn’t tacked on for #PR, but central to the infrastructure itself.
Horizontal governance that embraces mess, rather than paving over it.
We don’t need more products, we don’t need more platforms, we don’t need more panels pushing safe #neoliberal “common sense.” What we do need is to build and protect infrastructure that can’t be bought, captured, or silenced. Because that’s the only way we’re getting through this era of collapse with anything humane intact.
It’s good to see events like #NGIFORUM2025 as it’s trying to be on the path of the #Fediverse and the wider #openweb reboot which are real forces for social good, messy, hopeful, and grounded in decades of grassroots digital culture, which we do need to support. BUT we also need to speak honestly, as these spaces are not healthy by default.
Too often, they are co-opted by #NGO and institutional actors who bring with them a dangerous kind of “common sense”, what I’ve long described as the parasite class. We see this clearly at #NGIFORUM and similar #NGO events. Despite the energy and good intentions, the dominant framing is stuck in a narrow, #neoliberal logic:
Endless discussion about scalability, compliance, branding, and “the market.”
Panels where “on-topic” needs reality-checking and “off-topic” is often the path to sense.
This is not the #openweb native path, and what we need is more shovels and composting, to grow the real grassroots native paths, with open projects from the messy soil of lived social experience. Not more polished “innovation theatre.” And crucially: we need to bring activism back into these spaces – not as token #fashernista crap, but as lived, rooted practice. We need to embed activist tech into the core of these events, not leave it in the hallway as is the current norm.
Because let’s be honest, too much of what’s being showcased is just more #techshit to compost. Take the role of NGI funding (Next Generation Internet): It could be a powerful tool to fund the future of a people-powered web. But right now? It’s structured to reward isolated hard tech with narrow deliverables, and punish anything messy, social, or disruptive. That’s upside-down.
The development side of open-source should be anti-commercial – in its process, not necessarily in its usage. That means public funding should support the huge social layer that keeps FOSS and #openweb projects alive:
Community organising.
UX design from lived needs, not compliance charts.
Onboarding and trust-building.
Accessibility work.
Documenting process for reuse and remix.
But currently these parts are entirely unfunded, and that is pushing us into the arms of the parasite class’s of all types. We are walking backward into the future, again, projects without people, users, and support are dead projects. No matter how elegant the codebase is.
One thing that the event brings up is that we need to shift policy, national governments and #EU to actively intervene in the monopolies running the current internet. Both mobile and fixed-line networks need to be opened up to allow for grassroots, peer-to-peer, and local hosting paths to flourish. The current centralised infrastructure is a block to the native #openweb, and we can’t “build better” on broken foundations.
The also needs to be a cultural shift, to unblock the #geekproblem. This is not a call-out – it’s a call-in. The feedback is there, i’ve personally been working on this issue for over a decade, what we’ve seen is a cycle: Working in a small way… failing in a big way… repeating.
It’s not personal, it is structural. And we can do better, if we compost the fear of doing things differently. A practical example, we need more points that are currently deemed “off-topic.” Because what’s “on-topic” in these spaces is just branding and polite theatre. And that’s exactly how the #dotcons rose to dominance in the first place.
We are at risk of simply recreating their culture in softer tones. Let’s not do that. Let’s take a breath and reflect on what we’re actually building, it’s not a rhetorical question. This is not abstract.
Because if we keep defaulting to #neoliberal “common sense,” if we ignore the reality of climate collapse, digital authoritarianism, and infrastructure lock-in, then we’re just dancing around the edges of a very real #deathcult.
Let’s do the real work, let’s dig, plant, compost, and build trust. Let’s reclaim the tools and shape the #openweb around care, not control. Because anything less? It is just another empty panel on a sinking ship.
“All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.” — Oscar Wilde
We’re living through a cultural shift. The #Fediverse, the #openweb, and grassroots tech projects like #OMN were born to challenge the values of the corporate web, not to reproduce them. But what are we doing instead? We’re seeing people attacked simply for linking to context and history. Linking is native to the open web. Attacking people for linking? That’s native to #dotcons. Take this example: When we post links to hamishcampbell.com, a site with over 20 years of radical media history, no tracking, no ads, no monetization, some people respond with hostility. Instead of engaging, they block, slur, and accuse.
Why? Because the link was shared on a #dotcons platform? Because it challenges their gatekeeping norms? It’s absurd. The truth is simple: #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. This site is part of a long history of grassroots movements. No one is selling anything. No one is farming clicks. Yet bitter, shrinking cliques still push to block it. That kind of behaviour? It’s at best compost – something to shovel through as we grow better soil.
If you don’t get why this matters, start here: Why linking on the open web matters. Not linking is a dangerous cultural regression. The act of linking is a kind of mutual aid: it’s memory, solidarity, and a way to keep the commons visible. When you attack people for linking, you’re actively damaging the infrastructure we need to resist the #deathcult of #neoliberal capitalism.
Here’s another angle worth reading: CrimethInc on mutual aid vs. charity. Mutual aid is not charity. Linking is not self-promotion. These are fundamental ideas. The #Fediverse is built on these values, it thrives when people share freely. But when we import #blocking behaviour and #dotcons paranoia, we replace trust with fear. We end up with closed circles, bad vibes, and petty gatekeeping.
This is not how we build shared infrastructure. This is not how we win. So please: Let’s stop slurring people for sharing knowledge. Let’s stop policing links with fear. Let’s link more, think more, and rebuild grassroots, networked culture rooted in trust, not control. Because without this? We’re just another branded platform, with nicer avatars and the same old decay underneath.
For more than 40 years, the default #mainstreaming path has led straight into worshipping of what can only be described as a #deathcult. This isn’t just metaphor, it’s literal. We’ve watched the ecosystem collapse, inequality explode, communities fragment, and culture rot under the weight of corporate-controlled sameness. And through it all, the one thing we haven’t been allowed to do, culturally, politically, or economically, is to imagine an alternative.
Since Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” the world has been locked in a feedback loop. Fukuyama told us it was the “end of history.” Blair polished the same lie in softer tones, calling it a “post-ideological society.” What they all meant no matter how broken, no matter how brutal, it’s this, or “chaos”.
This ideological mess, our progressive chattering classes, call capitalist realism. The imposed feeling that everything else has failed, that even critique itself must operate within the narrow #neoliberal system, never against it. That anything outside is too utopian, too dangerous, too naïve to be worth considering. The result is generations raised not to debate capitalism, but to tweak it around the edges. And when the tweaks fail, when the system cracks the official line is always: “That’s just how capitalism works. And this is a capitalist country. What else do you want?”
But the truth is, there were alternatives. There are alternatives which keep being crushed, ignored, and parasitized at every turn. This is why we need to talk more about the parasite class and the memory hole. Every time a genuine alternative surfaces, every time a counter-current starts to build, there’s a swarm, a parasite class gathers. Not to support, but to feed, to suck the creativity, the vision, the life out of resistance and repurpose it for the status quo. This is the essence of #mainstreaming, it cannot generate ideas, only feed off of them.
Just look at any radical movement over the last four decades. Greenham, Climate camps, Digital commons, #Occupy, #BLM, The Fediverse. Each time, there’s a surge of energy, messy, collective challenge to the dominant #mainstreaming stories and paths. And each time, the #NGOs, institutions, think tanks, and media players show up, not to amplify the challenge, but to smooth it over, make it palatable, safe, marketable.
Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work, building networks, holding the line, defending autonomy get sidelined. Then forgotten, or worse, written out of the story entirely. The result is activist history rewritten by the least effective, most self-promoting voices. The messy, thus vital truth gets buried under branding and bureaucracy. The stories of resistance become content for the same system they were fighting against.
This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN (Open Media Network) exists to break this pattern, by holding open spaces for the stories that matter. To surface the compost, not the plastic packaging. It’s not about building a new platform for ego. It’s about building a garden for alternatives to grow. We’re trying to reboot history here, document from the bottom-up, not top-down. To give focus back to the people who said “don’t look at me,” and ask them to please speak, because if they don’t, the parasites will write the ending. Again. We need open tools with shared protocols, trust-based networks that isn’t just reactive, but generative. Not perfect, not polished, but messy and alive, like all growing alternatives must be.
What we don’t need is a healthy #deathcult, the #NGO crew have little understanding of this needed negative imagination. Let’s be blunt, we don’t want the #deathcult to be healthy. We don’t want to be its lifeblood. We don’t want to be mainstreamed. We want the current mess to collapse under its own contradictions. And it will, it is, but feeding it while it failes is not helping.
Only if we remember that our job isn’t to improve capitalism, but to compost it. Not to brand rebellion, but to build real, rooted alternatives. We’re 45 years deep into a dead-end story. It’s time to write a different one. And that begins, as always, with remembering what they told us to forget.
Because current #mainstreaming, centrism, comfy pointless political “maturity” worked out so well, the last time we had a hard shift to the far right in the 1930s. Those “well-meaning” liberals at the time were patted on the back for their reasoned takes and rewarded for their civility right before it ended in a world war. That’s the dirty compost of history we’re all standing in today.
Fast-forward 100 years and today’s centrist are pretending not to smell the rot, their “middle path” has been disintegrating for the last 40 years. The old #mainstreaming legacy parties are crumbling into irrelevance, the dried leaves of the 40 years of #neoliberal wind. In the US, the corporate Democrats are led by animated corpses propped up by PR necromancy, while the #MAGA right eats their roting corpses, dresses in their cloth and steals their path, and without a blink of “common sense” gets away with calling it a revolution.
Meanwhile, people, the compost for real change, are screaming about inequality, rent, inflation, broken healthcare, unusable digital #dotcons infrastructure, and corporate theft of public services. But centrists hear all this and mutter: “Hmm, interesting. Now what could the problem be?” Western centrists stare into the rising far-right tide and scratch their heads, “shocked” that a decade of ignoring propaganda and letting fascists organize on #dotcons led to… #fascism. A real surprise outcome… Who knew that letting lies shout louder than truth in the “free market of ideas” might be a real problem?
Into that empty vacuum steps the hard right, waving ethnic nationalism and promising a future soaked in nostalgia and fear. What we need to say clearly is this is just another side of the same #nastyfew elitists hoarding wealth while selling fascism to the angry and disillusioned.
The only serious force that still tries to push back? The #fashernista fragmented, much-smeared left. In Germany, in France, even in the UK (before being gutted by #NGO centrists). What do our liberal centrists do? They blow smoke and mirrors, equating the left with the right: “One wants to redistribute wealth and build homes; the other wants to criminalize poor people and deport anyone not white. Clearly, both are equally extreme.” This is simply more mess to compost
So what’s the current centrist path? Steal the far right’s policies – but do it “sensibly.” In the UK, Starmer’s “Labour” has become Farage’s reform UK in a red tie. Deportations, austerity, privatisation, all served with a smug banal centrist grin. The outcome, voters, seeing no real alternative, just go for the real fascists instead of the fake centrist “liberal” remix. More mess to compost.
Macron did the same in France by burned his own coalition to stop any shift to the left, claiming they’re just as bad as Le Pen’s mess. Why? Because one side wants public housing and the other wants a racial purge. Yes the same.
So, why won’t centrists move left? The answer is simple, billionaires fund the centre. The left wants to tax them, so the rich choose death – not their own, of course, but ours. A sacrifice the 1% #nastyfew are happy to make from both the right and the “centre”. This is more than mess to compost, the old solution was a guillotine, do we have a different path this time?
Another alt centrist path? Imagine if grassroots parties dared to compost the past instead of embalming it. Imagine if they moved left, rebuilt public services, reversed neoliberal theft, and honoured the postwar social contract, you work, you live with dignity. This is in part what the #OMN is about: composting the #deathcult, seeding native projects with #4opens, growing radical alternatives in the cracks.
What everyone can now see is that the old centre is collapsing. What comes next? People urgently need to see is that we don’t need to move right with the claps of the centre, what we do need is to dig down, get messy, and grow something new – rooted, trust-based, and open. Because we’re not choosing between liberal decay and fascist fire. We’re making compost. And from compost, the future grows.
We are now past the point where the #mainstreaming crew have effectively given up on mediating #climatechaos. What we’re seeing now is ONLY the performance of action – flashy, expensive, technocratic distraction designed to keep business-as-usual afloat a little longer. It’s no not about preventing catastrophe, or even mediating catastrophe, what we have now is managed #PR and keeping in place elitist continuity as this small #nastyfew and their sycophants visibly retreat from the growing mess.
Solutions? Take this example: https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to-cover-its-own-emissions/ Climeworks, a flagship carbon-capture initiative, is so inefficient it fails in offsetting its own emissions. This is the #techshit path they’re backing to get us through the next few centuries? This is beyond a mess, it’s ideological collapse. These fake solutions are the logical outcome of continuing with #mainstreaming#neoliberal ideology, where systemic change and thus challenge is avoided at all costs, and techno-fixes are sold to us by #PR as silver bullets, the #deathcult in action, profit-driven stalling wrapped in light green branding.
Let’s be clear on this: Carbon capture is currently not scalable, not ethical, and not even functional. It is not a climate solution – what it is, is a delay tactic, a hedge for polluting industries. It’s backed by the same #nastyfew class of institutions that told us markets would fix inequality, that endless growth was compatible with ecology, that privatization would bring prosperity. The truth is simple, they, the #nastyfew we keep putting into power, have no real plan. They are playing at engineering the social and ecological collapse while, at this final stage, simply pretending to be managing it.
So what do we do? We #KISS hard stop trusting in any elitist-managed futures. We collectively refuse to be spectators in the mess of the current # mainstreaming path. Instead, we compost these lies and build #4opens, rooted, local, horizontal networks of resistance and renewal. Projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) don’t pretend to “solve” everything, but they create space for people to act together, share knowledge, mediate and hold power to account, and thus build trust outside the collapsing verticals.
This isn’t about hope in the abstract, it’s about practical solidarity in the spreading ruins. No one is coming to save us, but maybe we can still save each other. Let’s build the seeds of the next world, before this one burns everything down around us.
A bitter taste – the kind you get when you realise you’re seeing a power grab in real time. Our #neoliberal elitist are shifting, the poster figures for market-friendly economic orthodoxy, are starting to shift their tone. There’s something new in the air – old-school #neoliberals are beginning to talk like state socialists. But please don’t be fooled that this isn’t a shift in values, it’s not, rather a repositioning of the same elitist interests to dominate the new economic order that’s growing from the rot of the old one.
The current #neoliberal pivot, from market to managed, is “our” old crew who push competition economics and consistently advocating for market-driven solutions, even when those markets were clearly broken. With this shift, we need to keep focus that their reputation was built within the framework of capitalist orthodoxy. But now, some of these people are stepping into new territory, talking about state intervention, industrial policy, and even strategic autonomy. These used to be the language of the left, of social democracy, of planned economies. So what is pushing this change?
It’s not that this cohort have discovered justice or ecological sanity, rather it’s that the ground has shifted beneath them. #Neoliberalism as a political project has lost legitimacy, the #deathcult is now exposed, and the wannabe ruling class is scrambling to reassert control over the new opening terrain, it’s a power grab.
This is agenda capture in motion, with industrial policy playing as elitist tool, Industrial policy was a dirty phrase in neoliberal circles just a few years ago – but it’s now being repurposed, not to serve the public good, but to maintain statues in a world where market mechanisms are crumbling.
Take the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act or Inflation Reduction Act. They pour billions into infrastructure and green tech, but who benefits? U.S. corporations, defence contractors, and the same fossil-capital interests that got us into this mess. In the EU, we see “strategic autonomy” used to justify subsidies and state intervention – but always within a closed circle of corporate lobbyists, elitist economists, and blind technocrats.
This is an old-failed path of state socialism without democracy. And yes, this is likely to look more like the war economy of the Soviet Union than anything rooted in the emancipatory traditions of the progressive 20th-century. I am not arguing that we don’t need this “war economy” in the era of #climatechaos, but we need to do this better, learning from the failed paths rather than simply repeating them, we need emanatory, rather a period of emergency capitalism and permanent crisis management. The climate emergency will demand massive state action, but without genuine democratic governance and accountability, this action will be captured and centralised in the normal authoritarian structures.
Think: Centralised rationing systems controlled by corporations – Surveillance-enabled “efficiency” models – Green militarisation under the guise of resilience – Digital ID and biometric control for access to services. This change won’t be call “socialism” – but functionally, it mirrors the command economies of 20th century wartime economics.
The difference is that profit remains intact. The commons are still enclosed. The decisions are still made in boardrooms and policy panels, not town halls. From think tanks to tech panels: The same faces with new masks. It’s worth looking for where this shift is happening:
Former neoliberal economists are rebranding as “climate realists” or “strategic planners.”
Think tanks like the Centre for European Reform or Bruegel now host panels on “industrial strategy” filled with the same voices that once evangelised deregulation.
Policy influencers like Larry Summers or Ursula von der Leyen are flipping scripts — talking about “resilience,” “reducing dependencies,” and “national missions.”
The same control, reframed to fit a shifting world of crisis. These people have already failed so we need to be sceptical of them being the solution in this shift, some might have changed, the majority have not.
What we actually need is to clearly step away from this mess, we need, compost, not co-option. We need to be clear-eyed and unapologetic, this elitist pivot is not a win. It is an attempt to capture of the necessary transition. It is not enough to shift the language from free markets to state planning. We need democratic control, radical transparency, and genuine ecological justice. We need the #4opens – not just as a tech principle, but as a social and economic one.
Found this on the subject
Because if we don’t fight for it, we will end up with a high-tech version of Soviet centralism run by BlackRock and Amazon, a closed system dressed in green, where the people remain voiceless, and crisis justifies every control. This is aggressively stealing the agenda. If we’re serious about real change, we have to call this out. Loudly. Early. And with enough compost under our boots to grow something better.
I just was at a talk from the Oxford University. The rise of economic nationalism and the return of state power – While the speakers skirt around key terms like socialism and justice, the implications of what’s discussed are clear, the #neoliberal era is ended, and what comes next is still being shaped.
For the current #mainstreaming the rise of Economic Nationalism is a reaction to the rise of China, the talk explores how China’s rise has catalysed a shift across the rich world – from the free-market dogma of the last 40 years to a new age of “industrial policy”. In essence, the old exploitive game of “global competitiveness” is giving way to nationalist state planning, even if the elitists are reluctant to call it mixed economy, social democracy or even socialism.
In the U.S., this has taken the form of tariffs and export controls, which, let’s be honest, function as subsidies for American corporations. In the #EU, there’s similar movement, more tentative, but real. One key example is the #ReArm Europe military initiative: a push toward industrial resilience, framed through the lens of security but rooted in state-led economic intervention. An example is https://cristinacaffarra.blog/2025/02/03/we-have-to-get-to-work-and-put-europe-first-but-we-are-late-terribly-late/ in tech.
This Western new wave of competitive protectionism benefits the rich nations who already have resources, capital, and infrastructure. Developing countries? They’re simply left behind, again. But, we might actually be on a different path, this time, China’s alternative model is working, the Global South is watching, and in some cases, benefiting.
The result? We’re seeing cracks in the global order that’s been in place since the 1980s – a system that privileged Western elitists while systematically extracting from the rest. A new international economic order may be emerging, and it might – on balance – benefit the South more than the North?
In the USA we see two faces of the same coin, it’s worth noting that both Biden and Trump have walked similar paths. Biden sells this industrial policy as justice-driven, future-focused action. Trump dresses it in nationalist bluster. But the outcome is largely the same: a shift away from free markets and toward controlled, strategic planning – just with different elitist backers benefiting behind the thin curtains.
This opens up the #deathcult for a need for reckoning. Here’s where we need to be blunt: the last 40 years of #neoliberalism – of #mainstreaming market worship – was a mistake. A disaster. A #deathcult. It failed to deliver for most of the people in the west, and was a disaster for the rest of the world. And now, with #climatechaos accelerating, that failure is no longer academic – it’s existential. The current shift to state-led green transitions is a tacit admission that capitalism, cannot handle any future. To shift this, we need strong, progressive states, and we need them fast.
Yet nowhere in the talk does the word socialism come up, despite the obvious trajectory. Nor do we hear the word justice, even though that’s what’s at stake. This silence says a lot about #mainstreaming transitioning. But here’s a constructive provocation: where are the academic voices of responsibility?
On this subject I have a plan – Think Globally, Act Locally – in Oxford and similar elitist institutions, generations of economists, political scientists, and technocrats trained the youth to believe in the religion of markets. Now this mess making is over, can we now ask – kindly but firmly – for these same institutions to stand up and apologize? Not in shame, but in honesty.
Apologize for worshipping failed ideologies. For pushing a worldview that has brought us to the edge. And crucially, explain why they were wrong and what they’ve learned. This act alone could unfreeze some of the apathy among the youth – many of whom intuit the coming crisis but feel trapped in a world still pretending business-as-usual is viable.
We are In transition, yes the language in the talk is still dressed in #neoliberal garments, but the substance is moving toward planned economies, redistributed investment, and long-term thinking. It’s socialism in practice, even if not yet in name. So let’s get on with composting the ideology of the last 40 years. Let it rot, fertilize something new with what’s left. It’s past time to act. Not with nostalgia, but with clarity.
This spirit of the early internet and #WWW – sharing, remixing, collectively creating – is the heart of what we once called the #openweb. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a space of possibilities, commons, where you could take what you needed and leave something behind, hyperlink by hyperlink. The tools were open – #RSS feeds, #APIs, #XMPP, #indymedia were built to bridge between ideas and movements, not walls of monetized algorithmic sludge we have today.
But the #dotcons came. They fenced in the wild garden. What we’re living through now is a digital version of the enclosure of the commons, a #neoliberal land grab dressed in Silicon Valley T-shirts. Just like in 16th-century England, they drew arbitrary lines around our #4opens shared land (data, conversation, culture), declared it private property, and shut the gates. And we, the people, got algorithmic slop in return.
The comparison isn’t metaphor – it’s literal. Just as the landed gentry stole the commons to fuel the industrial revolution, the tech gentry stole our digital commons to feed surveillance capitalism. They did it through legalese, marketing BS, and brute force. We were left outside the firewalls, told to be thankful for “free” services while they harvested our metadata lives to sell back to us as advertisements and social control.
The #techbros didn’t invent this theft. They just updated the tools, the same ideological mess that displaced peasants from their land now displaces communities from their networks and platforms, kills independent sites, closes APIs, and locks away archives behind paywalls. Twitter’s 2023 shutdown of free API access? A textbook enclosure. Hundreds of # fashionista grassroots tools and bots vanished overnight, #Techshit at its most brazen.
And then there’s #RSS – the veins of the old web. Stabbed slowly. First by Facebook, then by Google. For the #fashernistas, the blade fell hardest in 2013 with the death of Google Reader, a quiet coup that pushed most of us into the fenced-off gardens of algorithmic consumption we live so much of our lives in today. The commons didn’t vanish; it was actively destroyed, under the smog of monetization, “engagement,” and corporate “safety.”
This isn’t #progress, it’s theft. The same kind that wears the mask of legitimacy because lawyers and lobbyists made it look neat on paper. The reality is old, it’s a #classwar fought with code instead of clubs, and it’s won because we stopped remembering what common “land” even looked like.
But not everything is lost. The #Fediverse, the #OMN (Open Media Network) still plants seeds in the cracks. #Wikidata, #OpenStreetMap, the #ActivityPub protocol, these are digital hedgerows that survived the scorched earth. They are messy, collaborative, and unmonetized. That’s their strength, that’s what the #fashernistas to often don’t get – they can’t sell what they can’t own.
The #geekproblem here is fatal, in both the grassroots and the #dotcons, too many technologists are blind to the politics in their code. In the #mainstreaming, they build better tools for corporations that destroy the commons. Over and over again. The solution? For the grassroots coders, compost the #techshit, seed something else, and reclaim what was always ours. As when we lift the lid, the #dotcons mess our unthinking #fashernistras, #NGO geeks call the internet is simply a thin veneer on top of what is actually ours, the #openweb
Let’s stop being polite about this. The #closedweb is a crime scene. The platforms we rely on are bonfires of common culture, feeding the engines of the next wave of control. If we don’t remember how we got here, we can’t get out. It’s time to say it plain: The privatized web is a #deathcult, and only a #4opens reboot can bring life back.
With the current hard move to the right let’s look at the current mess more clearly, we’re watching the slow-motion implosion of geopolitical sanity, driven by a feedback loop of paranoia, expansionism, and elitist delusion all round. I will use an example, the Russian neo-monarchy we installed with the fall of the #USSR is both authoritarian and insulated from reality, it harbours a deeply ingrained – but not entirely unfounded – fear, that the West wants to partition and neuter Russia, to finally break its imperial spine and sideline it permanently from global power.
The response to this is predicable, the wannabe Russian Empire moves to lash outwards. Expand. Destabilize. Subvert. Sabotage. Whether in Ukraine, Syria, Africa, or via bot farms and proxy networks, the strategy is the same, externalize the crisis, manufacture mess, weaken the “enemy”, and in doing so, fortify internal control. It’s a survival tactic wrapped in a brutal shell of historical grievance and nationalist myth-making.
But, what we do, in the West, in response is the real insanity, our response mirrors the very thing they fear. The West’s led by Washington #neoliberal hawks, Eurocentrists, and the ever-profitable security-industrial complex – isn’t, peace, trade, exchange, strategic clarity, de-escalation, or rebuilding multilateral resilience. No. It’s tit-for-tat sabotage, economic warfare, arms races, and public rhetoric that edges ever closer to advocating regime change, disintegration, and total subjugation. The wet dream of the #nastyfew think tank ghouls, a post-Russia carved up, pacified, and absorbed into the #closedweb of western corporate “freedom.” they tried it after the breakup of the #USSR, and now we repeat the same crap plan.
Do we really think it helps to become the very monster the Russians, are not without foundation, paranoid about, and already believe us to be? Yes, we do keep repeating this path of endless #fuckwittery feedback loops, imperial reaction and counter-reaction has been the geopolitics of the #deathcult for way too long. The world we have now is a paranoid empire meets a suicidal empire, Russia, trapped in its authoritarian echo chamber, acts from a place of imperial insecurity. It remembers the Cold War, NATO’s slow crawl eastward, the gutting of its economy in the ’90s under western advisors. Its fear is rooted in historical trauma, yes – but also in hard analysis. The West has pushed precisely the policies Russia fears.
Instead of “us” building genuine alternatives – non-aligned diplomacy, economic multipolarity, climate cooperation – we escalate. We double down. We treat their paranoia not as a challenge to deconstruct but a justification for more militarism, more sanctions, more media war, more fantasy of breaking the Russian state entirely. This is not a path to peace, this is not a path to any humanistic justice, this is mess-making on a planetary scale. And in the era of #climatechaos, where we face shared planetary collapse, it’s more than just dangerous, it’s become the hard right’s apocalyptic fantasy of civilizational suicide.
Let’s be very clear, this cycle is not driven by “the people.” It’s the #nastyfew, the hard-right elitists, ideologues, the nationalist technocrats and billionaire opportunists who feed on fear and profit from instability. In Russia, they wear the mask of Orthodox autocracy. In the West, they wear the suits of think tanks and boardrooms. But their vision is now the same, control through collapse.
They aren’t interested in saving the world, they want to own the wreckage. They’re building bunkers while the rest of us fight over ruins. They’re funding war while cutting climate adaptation, speak of “freedom” while mining the last drops of oil and blood. This isn’t realism, it’s delusion, this isn’t defence, it’s offence by inertia, this isn’t strategy. What it is, is the new #deathcult replacing the dead old one of 40 years of neoliberalism.
Where now? What we don’t need is more war games, we don’t need to break Russia or “win” against China. A key though is we don’t need to be right – we need to be alive, and for that we need radical de-escalation, grassroots diplomacy, and growing planetary solidarity. The answer to paranoid imperialism isn’t more imperialism – it’s compost. Yes, compost. We need to take this mess, this decaying structure of late-stage empire, and break it down into something fertile.
We need to stop thinking like empires and start thinking like ecologies. Build networks, not states, trust, not surveillance, infrastructure of care, not bombs, media for truth, not narrative warfare. We can’t outsource survival to failing nation-states, or hand over justice to militaries. What we need is a grassroots push to step outside the spiral. The #openweb gives us a glimpse of this possibility: federated, decentralized, trust-based networks that grow from the ground, not fall from the sky. What comes next depends on what we build in the growing cracks. Because we can’t keep feeding this mess.
The opening moment of the workshop on Methodological Strategies for Real-Life Theorising was unintentionally profound. A story of a seagull crieing above the glass façade of the Blavatnik School of Government – a building that stands as a temple to the #deathcult that shaped our lives for the last 40 years of #neoliberal change. In hindsight, that seagull metaphor may have been the wisest participant at the event.
The sessions that followed offered a painful reminder of just how entrenched and constipated academic political theory can be. Many of the speakers, well-meaning, no doubt, spoke in dense, self-referential language, seemingly unaware (or uninterested) in the world burning outside. We are living through accelerating #climatechaos, surging right-wing extremism, and widespread social fragmentation. Yet here, the main concern is career-building through opaque frameworks and method fetishism. One can’t help but wonder how many in the room truly believe they are doing good?
The crisis is deeper than any single workshop. The very career paths that brought these scholars here have been shaped, filtered, and “concreted” by 30 years of neoliberal funding models. The result is a form of political theorising that appears to want to find a way out, but only by squeezing itself through the tightest gaps in the #postmodern mess. And even then, only while clutching tightly to the privileges and assumptions granted by the current paths.
Constipated Language, Abstract Struggles
Throughout the first sessions, there was a recurring sense of people talking to themselves. Even the attempts to make theory “concrete” – to move into empirical territory – felt more like power grabs than inquiry. There was talk of “transient theory,” of “mid-level normative frameworks,” of “ethnographic insights”, but very little clarity on what any of this meant in real practical or political terms.
Instead of confronting the deeply ideological assumptions embedded in liberal academia, the speakers soft-stepped around them. One could sense them trying to smuggle ideology back into a discipline that’s been left hollow. The “heroic era of theory” is dead, and what we’re left with is a ritual performance of relevance. At one point, the liberal impulse to block discomforting inputs in public policy was laid bare. This is ethics as insulation, not action. There was repeated deference to “existing norms and frameworks,” – the very architecture of the #deathcult, now warmed up and served again as policy advice.
The Seagull Still Watches
By the end of the day, some fresh air drifted in. A few scraps of cloth were handed out to the otherwise naked theorists. There was genuine engagement with normative complexity. Questions like “what is mutable?” began to shift the conversation. “Engaged political philosophy” and talk of “normative judgments” began to inch the discussion closer to the ground.
The presentation on restitution, for instance, highlighted real political dilemmas. Who decides what gets returned, and why? Is it justice, diplomacy, or geo-political calculation? One question noted that giving back looted objects is not just about ethics, it’s about giving back the values they represent. But this was quickly hedged with talk of “choice.” Liberal hedging again. No one wanted to say: yes, do it, without compromise.
Even here, markets remained the baseline. The dominant “common sense” is still economic flow. Value is defined by trade, not meaning. Discrimination itself can to easily be reframed as a market distortion, another cost to be corrected, not a systemic condition to be fought. The anti-market perspective, grounded in actual social justice, in living memory, in reparative truth, is invisible to meany people until it becomes a threat. At that point, the strategy shifts to distraction and buying off. That’s the logic of #neoliberal containment.
From Political Theory to Political Theater
What we witnessed was not just a methodological workshop, but a staged performance of institutional survival. Theories were dressed up, displayed, but never walked out into the street. Real political agency remained absent. The political philosopher, once imagined as a public actor, now hides behind peer-reviewed paywalls, while the world asks different questions entirely.
Still, by the end, perhaps there were reasons for the seagull to hold off its stone throwing – for a while. A few voices showed signs of life. A few questions struck true. But it will take more than scraps of normative cloth to cover the nakedness of political philosophy today.
The event: Many political philosophers theorise not only for the sake of pure theory, but also because they want to convince citizens and policymakers to bring about changes in the real world.
Such policy-oriented research often draws on interdisciplinary methods, integrating empirical insights and normative and conceptual arguments. This, however, raises methodological challenges of its own. For example, how to deal with the fact that the social sciences are fragmented and different disciplines work with different paradigms and methodologies? How can philosophers, who bring their own normative assumptions openly to the table, deal with the – sometimes implicit – normativity that is also inherent in many other lines of research? What level of abstraction of normative arguments, eg basic normative theories or mid-level overlapping principles, should philosophers draw on when discussing with policymakers? And how to deal with the fact that in the current political climate in many countries, distrust towards “experts” also extends to philosophers? Workshop agenda
Day 1: Thursday 24 April 2025
Methodological Strategies for real-life theorising
Chair: Jonathan Wolff, Blavatinik School of Government
Liron Lavi, Bar-Ilan University and Nahshon Perez, Bar-Ilan University: Conceptual Concretization in Empirically Informed Political Theory: What Makes a Concept Applicable
Carmen E Pavel, King’s College London: Mid-Level Theories of Justice and Public Policy
Kian Mintz Woo, University College, Cork: Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy
Theorising between values and cases
Chair: Daniel Halliday, University of Melbourne
Rouven Symank, Free University, Berlin: Integrating Ethnography with Political Theory in Policy-Oriented Research: Challenges and Insights from Cultural Restitution Debates
Florence Adams, University of Cambridge: Discrimination as an Object of Social Science
Erika Brandl, University of Bergen: Measuring the justice of architectural development policies:debates on temporal scopes and indicators in the Hillevåg plan
My notes on this event:
The seagull is perhaps a good metaphor for nature fighting back against the last 40 years of human #deathcult culture that this building is temple of.
The language is constipated, a growing feeling that these people are pissing funding and focus against the wall while the world burns from #climatechaos and hard right social breakdown.
I wonder how many people here think they are doing good?
The problem on this career path is that it has been shaped by #neoliberalism for the last 20 years, funding and status have both been ground through this mess, and now reflect it.
After the first session I feel they are trying to squeeze themself out of this post modernist mess. By going back to basics, but it’s so constipated it’s hard to see if there is any value in this.
Looking at them talk and answer questions, you can feel them being lost. It still feels like they are talking to themselves.
A power grab, by making theory concrete, to build empirical research. They dodge this by saying the theory is transient.
If this is a bios? They fix this by making the bios visible. They find this question hard to answer as its a root issue.
They are “soft” sneaking ideology back into the current dead Political Science and theory world they work in.
The heroic era of theory is challenged for making public policy. They argue that we should start from the existing norms and frameworks. This from the #deathcult we get wormed up #deathcult worship as policy. Mess. Of course liberal rights have priority in the end, “we must also include institutional facts”.
The seagulls at the start of this event might be the wisest one here. The rest have no cloths, and the language is so constipated that the smell is likely off putting for any real outreach that they need in the scrabbling for coverings to continue their careers.
The liberals start to talk about #blocking the inputs that make them uncomfortable. In ethical public policy making.
From a working insider view, the people doing this don’t have the skills or knowledge if we focus on philosophy and theory only.
Good question, what is given, what is mutable is very mutable. So the Liberal “common sense” is likely a strong #blocking on the path of the change we need.
“Engaged political philosophy” “normative judgments” as we go on they start to be more relevant. “where there is convergence and divergence”
The event starts naked and smelly but as it goes on the air clears at times and some scraps of cloth are provided.
Relevant information that is easily excessable,
The power in a committee is the appointment of the people sitting on the committee rather than the committee process it self. The answer to this is hesitant and bluff, and distaste to cover this.
A chair or witness roll is different in committees.
Why restitution, why now.
Liberal Justice
Reperatition is politics, not just ethical, geo politics and funding, based on former colonist will, is a tool for “ethical diplomacy”
Can any of these be seen as a reason not to do it. Don’t have an answer. Normative lessons.
When we give back objects that we value from our looting, we are giving back our values. We still chose.
My parents work is displayed in our #mainstreaming institutions, but these institutions are not interested in the objects, as they do not fit into there existing story’s and category. Subject archives will take them. But this is still shaping history.
Markets as the dominant “common sense” everything is economic flows. Value is defined by this.
Discrimination is contested with the hard shift to the right #DUI
Distortion in the market, function efficiently.
Discrimination is about greed, American greed, a moral dilemma. Liberal but not to liberal. Talk about the market path, let the market do its thing.
Markets aligned characteristics, money the logic of the #deathcult
As my work is anti market they can’t see any value, so put no resources and focus on the path in till it becomes a threat then distraction and buying off become the difficult paths.
Trump now is turning this neoliberalism around as discrimination. What is this, discrimination against nation states, rather than economics/market.
At the end the might be reasons for the seagull to hold off the stone throwing for a while.
