Tag: OMN

Why open infrastructure matters to the #OMN

It is about the Invisible Commons, every programmer – from hobbyists hacking together weekend scripts to the coders inside Microsoft, Google, Meta – relies on open-source software. It’s the compost layer under everything. Between 70% and 90% of every app, service, and system we use is built on shared, public #FOSS code. Nobody starts from scratch, everyone pulls from libraries on GitHub/GitLab, built and maintained by people who believe in the commons.

Developers spend two-thirds of their time adapting open code to their needs. This means when there’s a flaw in that shared layer, everyone is exposed, from the #dotcons: Apple, Meta, governments, banks, critical infrastructure., to native grassroots projects. That’s the reality, the real digital world runs on a fragile but beautiful commons.

The problem is the same old one, everyone depends on it, nobody feels responsible for it. This is classic #deathcult economics. Extract, use, profit, but don’t maintain the foundations because maintenance isn’t “exciting” or “competitive.” Just like bridges or water systems, nobody “important”, no elitists, cares until they collapse.

Open-source developers have been holding this mess together for decades in their spare time, after work, unpaid, because they care. That’s the horizontal path. But the vertical world -companies, governments, institutions – have been happy to feed from that commons without nurturing it.

This is where the idea of supporting projects like the #OMN comes in, to build out, public stewardship of the shared digital foundations we all rely on.

We as people need to wake up from our denialism of digital abdication fugue dispar, its common sense that software is infrastructure, as critical as roads, bridges, or power grids. Neglect it, and society festers and stumbles to collapse in slow motion. The #OMN has been saying this for 30 years.

To keep the digital commons alive, we need to become the forces pulling together. Volunteers and grassroots maintainers, the people who keep the foundations alive out of care, not profit. They are the heart, but they can’t carry the whole world forever. We need people and communities or action to grow to rebuilding public digital infrastructure from the bottom up. This is as much about cultural as it is about tech.

But culture needs code, needs maintainers, need support. And right now we’re still facing the same #blocking of all of these. People and funding are needed, not corporate capture, not venture capital, not #NGO “managed change,” but real contributors who care about public-first tech. What we need to say clearly, is that open source (#FOSS) is a global commons, everyone uses it, no one truly maintains it, vertical institutions, like the #dotcons, depend on horizontal labour.

Without care, this digital ecosystem will rot, so projects like the #OMN is one path to restoring balance. On the #maisntreamin paths, yes, regulation will come, It unthinkingly has to. Companies exploiting shared infrastructure without feeding it is theft – from the public, from the future, from the commons.

The message for outreach, is if we want digital tools that are public, trustworthy, sustainable, and resilient, then we must invest in the shared foundations. We must move from #stupidindividualism to collective stewardship. From extraction to maintenance. From shiny platforms to compostable infrastructure.

The #OMN hashtag story gives us a language, the codebases give us the tools, the community gives us the power, now we need the crew to sprout the seeds. Let’s build the public digital foundations before they collapse beneath us.

Manifesto for the Hashtag Commons

Outreach for the #OMN path, for the past year, the hashtag story has taken shape, not as branding, not as marketing, but as a shared language for navigating the mess we’re in. Each tag is compost: lived experience, memory of struggle, lessons from broken movements, glimpses of collective futures. Together they form a map of where we have been and the ground we are trying to rebuild.

This story is now done enough to act as a tool: a framework that connects all the projects, all the struggles, all the seeds of the #openweb still alive beneath the concrete of the #dotcons. It is the cultural layer that makes the technical layer possible.

But culture alone doesn’t run servers. Ideas alone don’t federate. And stories alone don’t build the future. We are at the point where the #OMN needs hands, skills, and messy collaboration to move from compost to sprouts.

Why this matters now, the last decades have been dominated by #stupidindividualism, a value system that believes progress comes from isolated actors, personal brands, and vertical structures. It produced a brittle world where resilience is outsourced, where every commons is pushed to monetise, and where the #deathcult logic of extraction is treated as “normal.”

Our work – the hashtag ecosystem, the #4opens, the #OGB, the #OMN – is a counter-current. Not a product, not an app, not a platform chasing hype cycles, it is a path toward:

  • Public-first networks
  • Permissionless publishing
  • Collective governance
  • Local autonomy woven into global flows

This isn’t nostalgia, it’s urgently needed #KISS survival. If we do not rebuild horizontal infrastructure now, the coming decades of #climatechaos will be shaped entirely by closed systems, proprietary protocols, and “solutions” that cannot be questioned.

The Hashtag Story as outreach tool, the hashtag system functions as a shared vocabulary, a way for people to step into the conversation without needing insider history.

#stupidindividualism, #openweb, #deathcult, #climatechaos, #OMN, #OGB, #4opens, #techshit, #nothingnew. These are not memes, they’re a lexicon for agency. The next phase is to combine this cultural layer with working codebases. Once one of the #OMN implementations is stable, the hashtag-combination tools will become transformative. They allow:

  • networked meaning-making
  • distributed editorial processes
  • peer governance
  • cross-platform, public-first publishing
  • local instances that connect into a wider commons without central control

This is the infrastructure the last generation of movements never had. What is blocking? People and Resources, yes, the same old story, funding and people. Here in Oxford, the search for a tech crew hasn’t turned up much yet. The bigger truth is that many potential contributors are scattered, burnt out, or trapped inside the #dotcons economy where every hour of labour must be monetised.

But there are people out there who still believe in the commons. People who want to build rather than brand. People who understand that open infrastructure is not optional.

This manifesto is an invitation to those people. If you want to #KISS work on:

  • federated, non-corporate publishing
  • governance without gatekeepers
  • open metadata and community sorting
  • tools that strengthen movements instead of extracting from them
  • infrastructures that grow like ecosystems rather than like empires

Then the #OMN path is open, we are not looking for heroes, we are looking for collaborators,
for people who can work in the open, for people who understand that messy is healthy, for people who know that compost is more valuable than hype.

If that’s you, step forward. Bring code, or time, or testing, or critique, or even just curiosity. The groundwork is laid, hashtags are seeded, what we need now is the crew to grow the next layer.

Let’s build the commons. Let’s reboot the #openweb. Let’s make the #OMN real.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag+story

We are not suffering from a shortage of “great leaders”

What we are suffering from a shortage of collective pathways. The crisis we are walking into isn’t caused by a lack of charisma or vision at the top. It’s caused by the cultural trap we’ve built around individual solutions to systemic problems. #stupidindividualism – the obsession with personal leaders, personal brands, personal genius – is going to kill millions and displace billions over the next 20 years. Not because individuals are inherently harmful, but because individualism is the wrong tool for a collapsing world.

Vertical thinking can’t see horizontal realities. If your whole value system is built around leaders, ranks, and “key figures,” you will be blind to the commons, to networks, to peer processes, to messy collective agency. And this blindness is not neutral, it accelerates #climatechaos, feeds the #deathcult, and locks us into the same extractive paths that got us here in the first place.

The way forward isn’t another charismatic savior or another “hero innovator.” What we need is to balance collective pathways built from the ground up. Any working future needs:

  • Networks, not heroes. Because no single person can hold the complexity ahead.
  • Practices, not brands. Because technique and culture outlast personalities.
  • Open processes, not closed hierarchies. Because transparency is the only antidote to captured systems.
  • Shared governance, not managed optics. Because appearance won’t save us, but participation might.
  • Messy, compostable infrastructures, not shiny hype machines. Because real change grows from what we renew, reuse, and reimagine, not what we market.

This thinking points toward the #OMN, not as a product, not as a platform, not as “the next big thing,” but as a path. A way of organising, publishing, coordinating, and governing that is native to the horizontal world we actually live in. A way to compost the #techshit and grow something more real.

We don’t need better leaders, we need better collectives, we need spaces where the horizontal becomes visible again. And we need them now.

The #mainstreaming has a crap story, they say that the crisis of communication – the noise, the chaos, the misinformation, the anxiety – can only be solved by “returning to trusted sources.”
They will argue that decentralized media is dangerous, that the “wild internet” must be cleaned up, that only vetted, official voices should have reach.

They will say that decentralized paths, all horizontal spaces are inevitably viral cesspools, and that our #openweb native podcasts, newsletters, open blogs, fedi servers are similer unregulated contamination. The growing fascism, in the end, will push that non-institutional voices are a threat to public order. That public conversation must be brought back under professional management, them.

The line will be simple: “Let the experts speak. Everyone else, sit down.” This is the predictable response of a broken society that lost control of its own narratives. And yes, they are right about one thing, that Big Tech is a sewer. The #dotcons profit from rage, division, algorithmic sewage, and emotional manipulation. Their business model is engineered disinformation. They are the factories of mess we live in.

But the establishment’s mistake, or more accurately, their strategic convenient lie, is pretending we, the #openweb, are the same, we are not. The #fediverse is not Facebook, Podcasts are not TikTok, Blogs and newsletters are not X, the #openweb is not #AlgoMedia.

We are: human-scale, chronological, transparent, open-process, community governed, non-addictive, non-manipulative. Decentralized media is not chaos – it is plurality. The messy public – not the polished elitists – speaking in many voices.

The establishment wants a return to vertical media because they cannot see horizontal people. Their value system literally blinds them. They believe discourse must be orderly, top-down, fact-checked by institutions that have long since been captured by the #deathcult of capital and careerism.

The problem is not that too many people speak, the problem is that too few people have been allowed to listen. The #OMN is the seedling of the opposite vision, many small voices, widely distributed, human editorial networks, community amplification and messy compostable infrastructure. The fedi, podcasts, blogs, newsletters – these are not the disease. They are the immune system emerging in response to the disease.

The establishment sees disorder, we see a rewilding,

They see danger, we see a necessary correction.

They see fragmentation, we see a path back to collective agency.

Not only that, but the current #mainstreaming are desperate to recentralize the narrative because decentralization breaks their #deathcult monopole on truth, framing, and attention. The people do not need saving from themselves, they need saving from the system that hijacked their voices. They need a native path that is open, messy, federated, to push compostable public media, where trust is earned through transparency, not authority.

#KISS

The Bloody Days of Genoa

The Genoa G8 Summit protests, held from July 18 to 22, 2001, were a turning point in the global justice movement. More than 200,000 people converged on the medieval port city to block the summit and challenge the concentrated power of the world’s richest nations. A gathering of the #deathcult ideology, grinding the planet into dust for profit.

For many of us, the G8 represented everything wrong with the world: an unelected body shaping economic and social policy for billions without legitimacy, accountability, or consent. We travelled to Genoa not as isolated activists but as a living ecosystem of movements, anarchists, trade unionists, farmers, climate campaigners, media collectives, migrants’ rights groups, students, pacifists, the lot. We were there to resist and to build alternatives in the cracks.

Arriving in a besieged city, Genoa a few days before the demonstrations to help set up the Media Centre, for grassroots reporting. Genoa, though, felt nothing like a holiday town. Police were everywhere. Riot vans on street corners. Helicopters thudding overhead. The convergence centre was being built on the beach; just 100 yards away from the stadium, where police forces were massing in their thousands. Walking around felt like moving inside a tightening fist.

We slept in the camper van that first night, tucked beside a half-built marquee. At dawn, we joined the organisers at the Diaz school, the building that housed both the Genoa Social Forum and the Media Centre.

We requisition two PCs from other rooms, installed video editing softwer, and turned them into the only two shared editing stations in the building. One was upgraded with a new hard drive and FireWire card for DV footage, not that it mattered, because it broke on day two and never recovered. The analogue capture system we had brought did most of the work that went online.

On one of our first reporting trips, filming outside the police barracks beside the convergence centre, we were detained by undercover cops. More arrived. Then more. Ten or twelve by the end. They demanded our tapes. I refused. They checked our documents, questioned us for hours, and released us without charge. I secretly filmed some of them; two would resurface later outside the IMC on the night of the raid.

Driving around the city to document the expanding “red zone” – the militarised area blocking off the summit – we were detained twice more. Civil rights meant nothing here. The police behaved like a sovereign power unto themselves. That Orwellian twinge – the sense that you are inside a lawless machine – grew stronger every day.

When the City Turned Red. Then one protester, Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead by police. Fear rippled across the city. The IMC became a space threaded with arguments about what to do. People drifted away, hour by hour, some deciding the risks were too great. By midnight the centre had half emptied.

Then the screams came: “THE POLICE ARE COMING!”

Looking out the window, I saw nothing at first. Panic surged anyway, people barricading doors, grabbing bags, racing up staircases. Marion moved the archive tapes to the hiding place I’d scouted earlier: the water tower on the roof.

From the rooftop I filmed carabinieri smashing into the building next door, the Diaz Pertini school, with vans and sledgehammers. Chairs were used to break windows. Tables became battering rams. It was happening fast, shockingly fast. Then I saw them entering our stairwell.

The Diaz Raid: Running for Our Lives. I headed downstairs to check if the Media Centre itself was being stormed. Turning the stairwell corner, I came face-to-face with a fully armoured carabiniere charging upward, truncheon raised, panting with adrenaline. I spun and bolted. Two flights up, shouting, “They’re in the building!” I sprinted to the roof and slipped into the tower.

Inside the darkness, I whispered for Marion. No answer. I crept through the corridor of water tanks, lit only by the IR beam from my camera. Finally a small, terrified voice: “Turn the light off.” She had hidden behind the last tank, clutching tapes and equipment.

For hours, three, maybe four, we lay silent as the helicopter’s spotlight swept the windows. Police boots thudded across the roof. Below us, the city echoed with screams, crashes, and the chanted word “ASSASSINI.”

When the helicopter finally left, we emerged. The rooftop was scattered with stunned survivors. Downstairs, the destruction was total. Computers smashed. Hard drives ripped out. Doors hanging loose. The walls of the Diaz school across the street were painted with blood. Skin and hair stuck to corners. Piles of clothing soaked red. People moving like ghosts.

The Carabinieri had left their calling card.

What happened inside that school, was not policing. It was torture, humiliation, and fascist ritual. Ninety-three sleeping demonstrators were beaten so badly that the floors resembled a slaughterhouse. People hiding under tables or sleeping in bags were clubbed unconscious. A 65-year-old woman’s arm was broken. One student needed surgery for brain bleeding. Others had their teeth kicked out. One officer cut clumps of hair from victims as trophies.

Those who survived were taken to Bolzaneto detention centre, where the abuse continued: beatings, stress positions, pepper spray, threats of rape, and forced chants of “Viva il Duce!” and “Viva Pinochet!” A systematic, organised brutality. This wasn’t loss of control, it was ideology.

Aftermath: Truth in the Ruins. The Italian state tried to bury it all. But survivors, lawyers, journalists, and prosecutors fought for years. The European Court of Human Rights eventually ruled that Italy had committed grave human rights violations. But almost none of the officers served jail time. Politicians escaped entirely.

The police weren’t out of control. They were following a logic, the logic of protecting eliteists power against democratic dissent. The logic of the #deathcult. The logic that treats people as obstacles, not citizens. Genoa showed the world what happens when movements gain too much momentum: the mask drops.

And still, in that chaos, seeds were planted – #indymedia, #OMN, the global justice movement, the early #openweb – messy, hopeful, compost for future uprisings.

Diaz up in the water tower

“We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”?

Trump and Putin are the figureheads of the #deathcult and 3ed rate people like Staner are puppets. The #nastyfew, mostly invisible in the smoke and mirrors of #mainstreaming media, are the ones who push the “we”. And they also invest in a part of our “progressive” paths, always much less affective than they need to be, let’s look at this from the latest #AI tech the #dotcons and more importantly our own #NGO crew.

The core of the #NGO mess: they claim to represent everyone, while foreclosing every other possibility. “We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”? Meanwhile, the parasite class in tech has spent twenty years destroying the social fabric of the internet, turning everything into grift, extraction, and precarious dependence. There is every chance that this new wave of #AI/#NGO/#dotcons fusion will be just more mess for us to compost.

As I said, let’s look at these people who are in bed with the #dotcons, sucking at the teat (LINK) of the #nastyfew. It should be easy to see, at best they’re a warm blanket, precisely when we need a shovel. They always smother real change and real challenge while claiming to “scale impact.” and other buzzwords.

Working within the system and working outside it both have effects – and yes, we need to balance these paths. But let’s be honest: the “inside” path is 98% parasites, and the “outside” path is full of fashionistas hiding insider routes behind radical posturing. So the balance point isn’t where we think it is. It has to be pushed far, far back from the centre we’ve been trained to accept.

Yes, there is some value in their affective progressive-tech narratives, but it is a tiny force against the power of global capital. They love the idea of the “bridging node,” the mythical middle ground where nothing is actually bridged and nothing is actually changed. Soft, persuasive, endlessly consulting, the #NGO path is a warm blanket to snugal when you should be getting up to work. It comforts, it reassures, and it is collectively ineffective. In the end, that blanket is all they have to offer: a feeling, not a transformation.

And then there’s all the #AI, most of it #techshit witch we need to be clear, is not intelligence, just more civic control in the hands of the #nastyfew. LLMs, image recognition, all of it: tools with some utility, but zero real intelligence. What they do enable is more vertical power, refined manipulation, more subtle control, more extraction of attention, behaviour, and labour through the constantly spreading #dotcons.

With our ongoing #openweb reboot we need a real democratic steering wheel again, actual power to change, not ONLY warm blankets and #PR funding. This is why the #OMN, the #4opens, and the slow work of composting matter. Because every other path on offer right now leads straight back to the same smothering, stagnant centre – the place where nothing grows.

#OMN

The #OMN Path: Openness as Revolution

This is about revolution as regeneration, not only destruction. In an era built on tech dependency, revolution isn’t only about smashing the machines, it’s about liberating them. Turning tools back into commons, not commodities. It’s composting the toxic monoculture of the #dotcons into fertile ground for the #openweb to grow again. Revolution means reclaiming agency, not blindly rejecting technology, but re-rooting it into light, human-scale, transparent, and accountable relationships.

The #openweb as infrastructure for freedom, isn’t just a technical architecture, it’s a social contract. Revolution means re-establishing that contract through the #4opens. When we build networks this way, we decentralize power, not just servers. The #KISS act of publishing, federating, and remixing information freely is itself revolutionary in a world where everything is locked behind paywalls and algorithms.

Tech as commons, not commodity, We’ve learned that “innovation” under capitalism means enclosure and surveillance. Revolution in this context looks like refusal of extraction: creating cooperative infrastructures that are not driven by profit but by maintenance, care, and shared use. Think of community built #p2p mesh networks, open hardware, peer-to-peer storage, and federated #ActivityPub publishing as revolutionary paths – not add-ons, but foundations.

Cultural and cognitive shifts, shifting the cultural narrative from “user” to participant. From “consumer” to custodian. The real struggle is against the #deathcult of endless growth and the #geekproblem of technocratic detachment. It’s about re-learning how to think together, rebuilding trust, and balancing the #fluffy (care, empathy, collaboration) and the #spiky (truth, resistance, boundaries).

Direct action in the digital today looks like:

  • Practicing digital mutual aid – sharing skills, hosting, dev, and care.
  • Bridging online and offline organising, connecting digital tools to local struggles for housing, food, land, and rights etc.

Above all, any real revolutionary network – like the #OMN – has to strip away the old skins of power. No hierarchies. No hidden structures. No property games. No fetishizing of tools, status, or “official” etiquette.

If we’re building something new, we can’t carry the unconshuse ghosts of the old world with us. That means not just saying we’re open, but being #4opens. Open in decisions, and open in how decisions are made. Transparent in process, not just in outcome. Coherent theory is practice, and practice is theory.

Everyday life has to reflect the world we want to grow. That means composting the commodity mindset, no trading social trust for personal gain. It means building through shared assemblies, through community, through small and self-directing circles that stay alive to change and challenge.

The structure of the #OMN should always be simple, transparent, and direct, so that anyone can walk in, understand it, and shape it. No special knowledge required, no gatekeeping. Thousands of “unprepared” people able to join, act, and make it their own. That’s what #4opens means, a living culture of clarity and participation.

Only when a movement reflects the decentralized, self-organizing community it wants to bring into being can it avoid becoming another elitist shell, another bureaucracy pretending to be radical.

When the #OMN does its work right, it doesn’t stand above the revolution, it dissolves into it, like a thread into a healing wound, leaving behind not an organization, but a living network.

That’s the path: community, openness, trust, and the messy joy of self-organization.

At best, the old #mainstreaming was about equality in worshipping the #deathcult

The old #mainstreaming was only in a limited way about freedom, so we now need to focus on more on what it was about, equality in obedience. Equality in our blinded worship of the #deathcult: growth, consumption, competition, endless mess on a dying planet.

That’s why #fashernista liberal progressivism is always a dead end problem, it plays radical, says radical, but composts nothing. At best, it sells rebellion as a lifestyle. It’s equality inside the system, not about freedom from it.

We’ve seen this play out a thousand times. Movements rise, fresh and alive, then get polished into campaigns, reports, and consultancy slides. Grassroots becomes “stakeholder.” Vision becomes “strategy.” Change becomes “branding.” All form, no compost. All language, no shared life.

Any real change, living change, means turning the dead weight of institutions, egos, and fear into fertile soil. It’s messy, collective, risky. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t chase funding and #NGO approval. It grows because it has to.

That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) path is about – composting the old #techshit, the #dotcons, and the NGO decay into something living again. Media that belongs to no one but serves everyone, built on the #4opens.

So the real question is simple. What does real change and challenge look like to you? How do we build it together, in the open, without falling back into the same polite obedience that killed everything before?

The #OMN and the #4opens aren’t abstract ideas, they’re tools for action. If we’re serious about composting the old world into something living, we need hands in the soil, not just words in the air. Here’s how people can start now, from wherever they stand:

#FOSS coding: Build the #openweb, not the #closedweb. Work on #Fediverse tools – join existing native #fashernista projects like Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, Funkwhale, or the more useful #OMN itself. Fix bugs, improve UI, write docs, or just help test and report issues.

Use the #4opens in practice: No private repos, no hoarding, public decision-making, everyone can use it. Compost old code: take abandoned projects and adapt them. Don’t build shiny new tech for ego points, fix what’s already here. If you’re practical, run small community servers: self-host media, blogs, Fedi instances. Learn how networks breathe.

Then we have social activism, keep it social, messy, and grounded. Form local affinity groups around #openweb media – film nights, repair cafés, public jams. Document everything: record protests, community stories, forgotten spaces.

The next #Indymedia starts with people saying this matters. Challenge control where you see it growing – in meetings, projects, #NGOs, progressive spaces. Ask: is this open? Who holds power here? What’s being hidden? Compost negativity: don’t waste energy on flame wars. Turn frustration into content, conversation, and code.

Avoid the #NGO trap – don’t let money dictate the mission. Use micro-funding and co-ops:
OpenCollective, Liberapay, cooperative hosting. Keep the process/books open: publish budgets, donations, and decisions publicly (#4opens). Value labour differently, not everything needs to be paid. Shared work and mutual aid count as real economy.

Bridging to #NGOs and Institutions but don’t get eaten. Engage, but on your terms, use the #4opens as a boundary tool. If an #NGO don’t work openly, walk away. Offer bridges, not control. Help NGOs learn openness, federate, don’t integrate.

Bring culture into the conversation. Explain why open process and transparency are political acts, not technical choices. Stay autonomous: The moment an institution starts setting your agenda, compost it.

Build the commons, not empires. Everything we do should feed back into the collective soil.
* If you build a tool, make it usable by others.
* If you make media, licence it open.
* If you host something, teach others how to host too.

This is how we win: not through scale, but through replication. Small, self-organizing, composting networks connected through trust. Remember, revolution isn’t about blowing up the system. It’s about composting what’s dead, sharing what’s alive, and keeping the soil open for what’s next.

#openweb #nothingnew #techshit #OMN #fashernista #mainstreaming #deathcult

The Blockchain Socialist: Self-Destruction as Theory

The Blockchain Socialist podcast is the deluded self-destructive talking about the deluded self-destructive in tech. It’s a mirror of our time: intellectuals dissecting the ruins while still worshipping the same #deathcult gods that caused the collapse.

I am listening to an example of this Urbit – about a hardcoded, reactionary tech dream of order built on decentralization, doomed from the start. Not only because the code is bad, but because the culture is. Control disguised as liberation. Hierarchy dressed up as protocol.

This pointless conversation, like so many in the blockchain mess, shows the core #geekproblem: A culture so desperate to escape (old)capitalism that it rebuilds it, line by line, in smart contracts and hard tech algorithms. The people of the blinded tech #deathcult feed on this delusion. Which rewards cleverness over care, abstraction over community, and always, always mistakes power for freedom.

If we want a real alternative, it won’t come from this technocratic dystopias or tokenized cooperation. It will come from composting this mess, from projects grounded in the #4opens, from the living soil of the #openweb, from people who choose the path of trust over control.

Listen to this chattering on the dark enlightenment if you must, but listen as you’d watch decay: as part of the cycle. The old world breaking down so something new can grow.

#OMN #geekproblem #techshit #nothingnew #deathcult

The Open Media Network: Composting the Dead Systems

#FOSS and open source is always political. Let’s say that out loud, because it’s easy to forget. The very idea of open collaboration, of sharing code, ideas, and stories freely, was never a neutral stance. It was, and remains, a radical act of refusal. Refusal to privatize creativity. Refusal to turn cooperation into competition. Refusal to let the #deathcult of neoliberalism define what freedom means.

From the early days of free software and the #4opens, to the #openweb and #Indymedia, the roots of our digital commons grew from solidarity. People gave their labour not for profit or prestige, but because they believed we’d all be better off together, if we stopped rewriting the same bits of code in isolation and started building commons instead of empires.

That’s not apolitical – that’s revolutionary. But over time, the #dotcons wrapped this labour in corporate branding, turning our shared tools into their private profit. They renamed exploitation “innovation.” They turned our commons into capital. The result? A generation of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, and fear of change.

People see their talent, their work, their lives wasted, buried under managerial control, compliance, and hierarchy. This is not just a technical story; it’s a moral one. We need to work to stop this “common sense” apathetic path of waste. The #deathcult is the slow deletion of memory, looking back:

  • Think of #Indymedia – once a global blaze of collaborative media freedom, later smothered by internal bureaucracy and external hostility.
  • Think of #visionOntv’s attempt to reboot on #PeerTube – an echo of that radical history, only to see ten years of grassroots video quietly unfunded, deleted, shadowbanned, “de-prioritized.”

Bureaucrats, NGOs, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash. That’s what the suffocation of freedom looks like today, not yet jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory. The #deathcult doesn’t need to crush rebellion outright; it just needs to keep people afraid. It thrives on fear and hierarchy – the illusion that safety comes from control.

They call it “stability.” But as Ursula K. Le Guin warned in The Dispossessed, obedience doesn’t create stability – it creates death. The capitalist world of Urras ran on obedience. The anarchist world of Anarres survived on trust and mutual responsibility. We face that same choice today, every day: control or change, Urras or Anarres, death or life.

The path we need to take is composting the #closedweb. The natural world already knows what we’ve forgotten: compost happens.

When something dies, it breaks down.
From that decay, new life takes root.

The same is true of culture and technology. The #closedweb and #dotcons are already rotting, bloated with ads, surveillance, and fear. For 20 years, they’ve trapped our creativity and turned every act of sharing into data extraction. We don’t need more “innovation” in this rot. We need composting.

That’s what the #OMN – the Open Media Network – is for. To take what’s broken and turn it back into living soil. A simple, federated network built on the #4opens – open data, open process, open code, open standards – to grow grassroots media ecology. Not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons. Because revolution is not only destruction – it’s also renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living can grow.

Choosing life, choosing change. Stands for the living side of that choice – open, messy, collective, and grounded. It can’t offer safety or stability. It can push growth, courage over comfort, collaboration over control.

As Le Guin wrote:

“You cannot buy the revolution.
You cannot make the revolution.
You can only be the revolution.”

Let’s be it, compost the dead systems and make space for what’s next, act on remembrance, rebellion, and renewal please.

Change is Freedom, Change is Life

You don’t get transformative change by building according to the incentives of the dominant system. A post inspired by rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as part of the Utopia Reading Group in #Oxford

“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Most people choose the easy path: they find a nice, safe hierarchy and settle in. They obey the rules, repeat the slogans, and mistake obedience for belonging. They stop thinking for themselves. They stop changing.

But change is freedom. Change is life.

Le Guin’s The Dispossessed captures the tension perfectly – between the anarchic, cooperative world of Anarres and the closed, hierarchical planet of Urras. It’s not only a science-fiction metaphor; it’s the current mirror of the #openweb we refuse to look into. The “open” world we imagine is already all around us, fragile, fragile seedlings buried beneath layers of control, ego, and fear.

This is the mess we need to compost, we see it every day. Talented people watching their work and lives being wasted. Good minds submitting to stupid ones. Strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change.

Looking back at web history, think of how #Indymedia burned bright for a moment, then was strangled by internal control and external hostility. Think of how the second reboot – visionOntv on PeerTube – tried to keep that radical history alive, only to collapse again under neglect, lack of support, and the dominance of #dotcons platforms. Ten years of grassroots videos deleted, shadowbanned, or “de-prioritized.” That’s oftern what the suffocation of freedom looks like, not jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory.

Everywhere, the potential for something living and new gets buried under the weight of control. When a grassroots project loses its edge because it’s easier to fit into “funding priorities.” When energy turns to exhaustion, creativity to compliance, rebellion to report-writing. This is the logic of the #deathcult – the slow suffocation of change.

The #deathcult thrives on fear and hierarchy, the illusion that safety comes from control.
It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that the system teaches them not to. Managers, bureaucrats, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash.

The banality of obedience. Le Guin warned us that the danger of obedience is not stability, it’s death. Urras, the rich capitalist world, runs on obedience. Anarres, the poor anarchist moon, survives on mutual responsibility.

You can’t get transformative change by operating according to the incentives of that system.
That’s why NGO culture and corporate-funded “innovation” projects always fail the real test.
They replicate the very control structures they claim to challenge.

The composting of culture, the natural world understands what our institutions forget: compost happens whether you want it to or not. What’s dead breaks down, and from that decay, new life takes root.

The same is true for culture and technology. The #dotcons and #closedweb platforms trap creativity and channel it into profit. They turn every act of sharing into data extraction, every connection into surveillance. They turn good minds into “content” and living movements into metrics.

We don’t need more “innovation” within this rot, we need composting. That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) is for, taking what’s broken and turning it back into living soil.
A simple, federated network built on the #4opens to grow real, grassroots media again, not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons.

Revolution is not destruction; it’s renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living may grow. Revolution is our obligation, our hope of evolution.

Choosing life over control, to choose change is to choose life. To cling to control is to choose decay. The #OMN is one path to life, open, messy, collective. The alternative is more of what we already have: talent wasted, good minds ground down, courage strangled.

Le Guin’s lesson still stands:
“You cannot buy the revolution.
You cannot make the revolution.
You can only be the revolution.”

Let’s be that change. Let’s compost the dead systems, and make space for what’s next.

#4opens #openweb #OMN #nothingnew #techshit #deathcult #TheDispossessed #UtopiaReadingGroup

Finding the Rainbow Gathering

How fascism actually works

How can we get people to see that #Fascism isn’t only about goose-stepping soldiers or dictators shouting from balconies – that’s the cartoon version. The current danger sits much closer to home. Fascism is the extreme end of a spectrum that runs right through our everyday lives: hierarchy, obedience, control, and fear dressed up as “common sense.”

It’s an old story of the #nastyfew controlling the many through managed fear. A dictator doesn’t rise from nowhere, they’re made possible by the people who go along quietly. Not because they’re zealots, but because they’re scared of losing their jobs, their status, their comfort, their lazy thinking.

That’s the quiet machinery of fascism: not just one man with a plan, but a whole system of compliance. Teachers, engineers, clerks, journalists, in the 1930s most joined the Nazi Party not out of belief, but because they had to in order to work. It wasn’t terror of death that ruled them, but terror of being left out.

And this hasn’t gone away, it’s still the mess we swim in. The #deathcult of #neoliberalism runs on the same fuel. The #NGO world, the corporate #dotcons, the mainstream media, all are built on quiet obedience and careerist cowardice. “Don’t speak up, you’ll lose your funding, your platform, your relevance.”

As Upton Sinclair said: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” That’s how evil becomes banal, not in the villains, but in the everyday silences that pushes systems over all of us.

So when people say, “I can’t speak up, I’ll lose my job,” I get it. But understand what that means, it’s the same mechanism that built the worst social systems in history. The real question is what happens after the first person speaks out. Because there always has to be a second, and a third. That’s how the wall cracks – not with one heroic act, but with collective courage.

This is what we’re trying to nurture with the #OMN – a network built not on fear or control, but of trust and openness. #4opens is our inoculation against fascism in tech. These are not only tech slogans, they’re social tools for courage, for rebuilding collective strength.

We need to compost the rot of obedience, turn it into soil for something alive again. The first one through the door often takes a hit, yes – but the rest of us can’t just stand there watching. Freedom isn’t found in silence or safety. It’s found in trust, in solidarity, in messy, shared action. We either move through that door together – or we stay in the dark alone.

We worshipped a #deathcult for 40 years

Freedom is not mine or yours. It’s ours, or it isn’t freedom at all

The illusion of modern society is that freedom is only individualistic, when our freedom is in truth interconnected with the well-being of everyone. This is one of the central pushes of the #deathcult – the mess of #neoliberalism we still live and work inside. It tells us that we are free as consumers, that choice equals’ liberation, and that personal success is the highest form of virtue.

But this is a hollow freedom. What kind of liberty exists when every interaction is transactional, every space is owned, and every so-called “community” is just a market segment waiting to be monetized? We experience this every day. The #dotcons sell us “empowerment” through sharing, but it’s sharing inside a cage. Their platforms reduce human connection to engagement metrics and ad revenue. Every “like” is data for their shareholders, not any gesture of solidarity.

The #NGO world isn’t much better. It preaches collective change and “amplifying voices,” yet operates like any other corporation, brand-driven, risk-averse, allergic to the messy, unpredictable reality of grassroots organising. Instead of networks of solidarity, they build vertical hierarchies of control. The people they claim to represent become “beneficiaries,” not participants.

Even in the alt-tech and “decentralised” spaces, this same illusion creeps in. Too often, we see projects confusing personal control with collective freedom, endless talk about privacy and autonomy without any grounding in social trust. A federation of silos is still a field of fences if the people behind them don’t share any values, practices, and care.

Real freedom isn’t about escaping others; it’s about building with them. The #openweb once embodied this, a commons of creativity, trust, and shared #FOSS tools. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked because people shared more than data; they shared intentions. The current #4opens are social principles first, technical structures second, path back to this.

25 years ago, seeded from the undercurrents video collective, we built #indymedia from this soil. Affinity groups came together to tell stories from the streets – direct, unfiltered, alive. You could see and touch it: the cables, the battered servers, the faces in the room lit by CRT monitors and endless tea. It wasn’t about perfection or control; it was about social connection.

Now we are knee-deep in mess, and need shovels to composting the Illusion, the challenge is to compost this #mainstreaming, to turn the rotting soil of #stupidindividualism into fertile ground. This is the work of the #OMN (Open Media Network): to regrow grassroots media not as a brand, not as a product, but as a living ecosystem of stories, links, and local action. Each part feeding the other. Each voice linked, not owned.

Where #dotcons feed on data extraction, we feed on compost, the messy remains of failed systems and burnt-out movements, broken down, rotted, turned into nourishment for the next cycle. Because our freedom doesn’t live in the self, it lives in the network, in the commons, in the trust between people, in the code and culture we share.

The individual without community is not free, only adrift. The collective without openness is not strong, only captured. Freedom is not mine or yours. It’s ours, or it isn’t freedom at all.

In the #mainstreamin tech path, this is a useful step:

Pluralistic: There’s one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech (01 Nov 2025)