The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess

We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they’re sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn’t simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it’s understanding how they find their way back out again.

History suggests something important – entering crisis is often easier than leaving it – it’s a downhill path. For long periods, societies can appear stable. Institutions function, people get on with their lives, and conflict remains manageable, yet beneath the surface something changes.

Power concentrates.
Wealth accumulates upward.
Institutions begin serving themselves rather than the commons
Public trust erodes.

By the time these trends become obvious, society has already gathered momentum, think of it like a huge ball rolling down a steep valley, once it begins rolling, it becomes incredibly difficult to stop. This is where much of today’s #climatechaos, democratic decline and digital enclosure fit. They are symptoms of long-running structural shifts rather than isolated failures.

To understand this recurring mess, it’s useful to think about this is as a wealth pump. Healthy societies circulate resources, were unhealthy societies increasingly extract resources from ordinary people while concentrating wealth and decision-making power into ever smaller circles. Eventually this creates reinforcing problems – the growing insecurity for everyone else, competition between increasingly numerous elitists leads to weakening of public institutions, eventually the system becomes unstable. This describes much of the last forty years of #neoliberalism just as well as many earlier historical periods.

In #OMN language, this is one way of describing the growth of the #deathcult. Technology follows politics, so the same process appears online. The early #openweb distributed power, the #dotcons recentralised it. Open participation became algorithmic engagement, communities became audiences, citizens became products. This wasn’t a simple a technical change, it’s the same mess of concentration of power occurring throughout the wider society. Technology amplified existing political and economic trends, crisis created the possibility.

The encouraging part of history is that outcomes are not predetermined, although the path into crisis is narrow, the path out is surprisingly open. Once institutions begin failing, many futures become possible. Some societies descend into violence, some replace one ruling group with another while changing very little. A few manage genuine reform, the difference comes from organised social movements that are able not merely to seize attention, but to rebuild institutions capable of creating trust again. This matters as moments of instability are also moments when relatively small interventions can have disproportionately large effects.

This is where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not a project to seize power. It is a project to rebuild commons infrastructure. Instead of reinforcing extraction, it strengthens trust. Instead of creating new gatekeepers, it distributes responsibility. Instead of proprietary platforms, it builds open processes. Instead of replacing one monopoly with another, it supports federation and shared ownership.

This is why the #4opens matter, not as only ideological slogans. They’re much more useful as practical safeguards against rebuilding the same systems that created today’s crisis. Trying to engineer perfect systems produces new failures, complex societies never become tidy, so the useful goal is not perfection. Rather to create institutions capable of learning, adapting and redistributing power before crises become catastrophic. This is why #OMN emphasises mediation over control, commons over ownership, participation over spectatorship to push trust over extraction.

Building the next commons matters – if we accept that we’re living through a period of structural instability, then waiting for institutions to solve it is unlikely to succeed, the work we need belongs to communities.

Building archives.

Building media.

Building governance.

Building trust.

We can play a part in this by building technologies that reinforce this path rather than undermine it as history suggests that societies emerge from crises when they reverse the flows of concentrated power to begin rebuilding the commons, that’s the path #OMN is on.

#OMN #4opens #OpenWeb #Fediverse #Commons #DigitalCommons #Governance #MakingHistory #ClimateChaos #TechForGood #Oxfordboaters

Make the #4opens fashionable

The crisis of the #openweb isn’t just coming from the #dotcons. It’s also coming from us. Our #mainstreaming #fashionistas are dangerously consumptive, forever chasing the next platform, the next funding round, the next shiny self abstraction. Meanwhile, our alternative #fashionistas mirror exactly the same behaviour, endlessly reinventing tools that never escape their own echo chambers.

Both paths produce the same result: more #TechShit, more #TechChurn, less social value. We don’t need another clever framework, another protocol that nobody uses, or another startup pretending to be commons. What we do need is to change and challenge the social norms that reward novelty over usefulness to make the #4opens fashionable.

Reward open data instead of data hoarding.
Reward open process instead of closed decision-making.
Reward open standards instead of lock-in.
Reward open source instead of proprietary dependency.

And yes, this isn’t about technology, it’s about culture. As Oscar Wilde observed in The Critic as Artist:

“We live in the age of the over-worked, and under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”

In the current churning mess, that feels even more true today. We are producing more code, more platforms, more content and more noise than ever before, while creating less shared understanding and fewer if any useful durable institutions, structures or networks.

The answer isn’t to work harder. It’s to work differently. The #OMN is a path to do that by stopping repeating the same mistakes by compost the failures of the last forty years, and rebuild the #openweb on social foundations that people can actually live with. If we can’t make this shift, we’ll simply keep rebuilding the same broken systems with newer code.

#OMN #4opens #openweb #TechShit #TechChurn #KISS #NothingNew

Europe’s digital sovereignty needs challenges

The #WSocial mess is about more than one failed platform, it exposes a deeper problem with the EU’s approach to digital sovereignty. If Europe is serious about sovereignty, it needs to stop confusing European ownership with digital freedom. A platform hosted in Europe built as a proprietary, venture-capital project recreates the same #dotcons model under a European flag. Changing the server location doesn’t change the underlying power relationships.

This matters because the European Commission has spent years promoting open standards, interoperability, user choice and open source through its own policy. Yet when it came to practice, it publicly embraced a platform moving in the opposite direction: closed development, identity verification, restricted participation and a business model built around enclosure rather than the commons.

This contradiction should not simply be criticised on social media. It needs to be challenged within the EU’s own institutions. The issue isn’t whether #WSocial succeeds or fails. The issue is whether public institutions are reinforcing closed corporate platforms while claiming to champion openness. That contradiction deserves formal scrutiny and, where appropriate, legal challenge.

The broader problem is cultural as much as legal. Too much European digital policy remains trapped in #mainstreaming thinking:

Replace American monopolies with European monopolies.
Replace Silicon Valley venture capital with European venture capital.
Replace one gatekeeper with another.

That isn’t digital sovereignty.

Real sovereignty (what every that means) comes from building digital commons that nobody owns and everybody can use. That’s why the #4opens matter: open data, open source, open standards and open process. These aren’t ideological preferences; they’re practical safeguards against the next generation of vendor lock-in.

The #Fediverse already demonstrates the path we need to be on. It’s messy, imperfect and decentralised, and those are strengths, not weaknesses. The challenge is to improve these commons rather than abandon it for the latest corporate platform wrapped in European branding.

Europe needs courage to defend the digital commons it already has. And perhaps the hardest truth is, successful European alternatives are unlikely to come from institutions alone. They will come from communities, public-interest developers, grassroots organisations and #FOSS projects building native #openweb infrastructure from the ground up, institutions should be supporting that commons.

When they don’t (and they won’t) then a three-pronged prodding attack to help balance this mess they make.

#FOSS alternatives, outreach and implementation.
Social activism both fluffy and spiky.
Legal challenge, to bring the threat of prosecution.

#OMN #Fediverse #OpenWeb #4opens #DigitalSovereignty #FOSS #EU #WSocial #TechPolicy

This was my thinking on the Fediverse a few years ago – building commons

The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy.

Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, culture, and governance. It’s often like herding cats. This can be frustrating, but it’s also what makes the network resilient. There is no single point of failure, no CEO to sell it, and no corporation that can simply shut it down. The challenge this leave us with is not eliminating the mess, but learning how to live with it productively.

The invisible problem that keeps blocking this path is in part the limits of “common sense”, what the #geekproblem refuses to see is that the difficulty isn’t primarily technical. For over forty years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what people experience as “common sense.” Competition replaces cooperation. Individualism replaces commons. Endless critique replaces collective construction. People absorb these assumptions without realising it, then push them over real alt paths.

When alternative ways of organising are introduced, many people instinctively react with hostility or retreat. Push too hard, and they disappear back into familiar habits, like snails retreating into their shells. This isn’t usually bad faith, it’s learned behaviour.

We have a project to mediate this mess, native governance without hierarchy. This is where the Open Governance Body (#OGB) comes in. The goal isn’t to control the #Fediverse or impose bureaucracy, the goal is to create lightweight, transparent ways for communities to coordinate, resolve conflict, share responsibility, and make decisions together.

Governance should emerge from the grassroots, not be imposed from above. That’s why #OGB builds on the principles of the #4opens:

Open Data
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Process

The last of these – Open Process – is the missing piece. Technical openness alone isn’t enough. Communities also need visible, participatory ways of building trust. What matters is creating processes that turn #mainstreaming failures into shared learning instead of endless conflict.

The future of the #openweb won’t be built by perfect software, it’s built by imperfect people who learn how to cooperate despite their differences. That’s the real work of #OMN and #OGB: not replacing the mess, but giving it enough structure to grow into a healthy commons.

#Fediverse #4opens #KISS #DIY #openweb

Why #FOSS matters socially

The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality.

This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) matters. The “free” in #FOSS is about freedom, the freedom to use, study, modify and share the tools that shape our lives. Those freedoms create something much more important than software, they create #4opens social power. Open code means community accountability.

Instead of trusting #closedweb corporations, we can build “native” trust through transparency. That changes how communities work as closed platforms create consumers, open projects create participants. The community doesn’t just use the infrastructure, it becomes in part responsible for maintaining it. We can exit to a more #DIY path, were anyone can inspect, improve, challenge and adapt to disparate community needs.

This isn’t always the fastest path as open collaboration is often messy. Consensus takes time, criticism can be uncomfortable. But these are social strengths, not weaknesses. Diverse communities find problems earlier, reduce hidden bias and create paths and systems that are more resilient because they are shared.

The #OMN approach builds on this real world path and body of ideas. That technology can strengthen communities rather than replacing them, code can support human trust rather than algorithms deciding everything. Infrastructure should belong to the commons rather than becoming another private enclosure.

Today’s #closedweb social media platforms are digital landlords. Yes you may build a following, create value and invest years of work, but you’re still a tenant. The rules can change overnight, your reach can disappear, your community can be fragmented at the click of a button.

The #openweb offers another path were we have control of identity and content to connect through open protocols instead of closed silos. We need this more than ever to building communities that can survive the failure – or hostility – of any single platform.

We can’t keep repeating the same mess, this composting matters even more in the age of #AI. If the software, models and infrastructure are closed, then a handful of companies determine how knowledge is created, filtered and shared. If they are open, communities can inspect them, improve them and govern them together.

The future isn’t simply open source software, it’s open source society. That means investing back into the commons we depend on. Maintaining infrastructure, supporting contributors, building institutions that outlast individuals. Planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.

That’s what #OMN is about. Not simply writing better code, but helping build a better social fabric for the #openweb. Because freedom isn’t something technology gives us, it’s something communities build together.

A #mainstreaming video looking at this.

The current common sense of #neoliberal worldview replaces trust with greed as the social motivator. The problem is that every successful society is built on trust. When you undermine trust, you build a #deathcult. Climate breakdown, inequality, social isolation and failing public institutions are not accidents – they’re the predictable outcomes.

When people recognise the problem, ask them what the solution is. Most will instinctively reach for the same neoliberal “common sense” that created the crisis. That’s the moment to gently point out that those ideas are part of the #deathcult, not a way out.

The alternative starts with rebuilding trust, commons and community, #FOSS needs to become a core to this.

Why Stories Matter on the #OMN

Facts matter, technology matters, governance matters. But people rarely change because they read theory, a specification or a list of features. People change because of stories, this is why storytelling is central to the #OMN path. A story gives people somewhere to stand, it connects ideas to lived experience.

Instead of explaining the #4opens as an abstract framework, tell the story of a community escaping a #dotcons platform by building trust on the #openweb. Instead of arguing about governance, tell the story of how a group solved a conflict through #OpenProcess. Instead of listing technical features, tell the story of someone who regained control of their community tech after years of platform lock-in.

Stories carry values, the last forty years of #mainstreaming have been held together by stories about competition, consumption and individual success. These stories have normalised the #deathcult, making extraction and enclosure feel like “common sense.” We now need better stories about cooperation instead of competition, commons balancing ownership, about trust instead of surveillance. Stories about building rather than consuming.

The #Fediverse itself is a story, an accidental reboot of the #openweb that proves another internet is possible. It isn’t perfect, but it demonstrates that people can build social infrastructure without billionaires directing the conversation.

The challenge is that the academics or the #geekproblem tell stories only to other, academics or geeks, technical and academic paths are important, but they don’t inspire people to act, so we need stories that people can understand:

A neighbourhood rebuilding local media.
Boaters organising to defend the waterways as a commons.
Communities escaping the #dotcons.
Volunteers composting #techchurn into useful tools.
Ordinary people discovering that they can build infrastructure together.

These stories become shared memory, shared memory becomes culture, culture shapes “common sense.” and changing common sense is how lasting social change happens. So don’t just build software or academic theory, tell stories that help people imagine themselves as part of a healthier #openweb.

#OMN #FOSS #openweb #4opens #ActivityPub #Fediverse #commons #DIY #makinghistory

Online Chat is a social problem, not just a technical one

People often ask which messaging platform they should use. Matrix? XMPP? Signal? Something else? The honest answer is there is no perfect option.

At the #OMN we’ve tried running #XMPP servers for years. From a #4opens prospective it’s probably the strongest foundation. Socially, though, it’s still trapped by the #geekproblem, despite years of outreach, we never found any implementation simple enough for normal communities to adopt at scale.

#Matrix is in meany ways worst, but for different resigns. Its governance and development have drifted towards an #opencore and #NGO model that doesn’t sit comfortably with grassroots #openweb values.

#Signal is the best of the bad options. It’s centralised and reproduces many of the patterns of the #dotcons. But people will actually install it and, sometimes, keep using it. That’s worth something.

The point is that these aren’t just technical choices, they’re social ones. Too much of the conversation gets trapped in feature comparisons, cryptography debates and protocol wars, while the real challenge is helping ordinary people communicate, organise and build trust together. That’s why #KISS matters.

Simple tools people actually use are often more valuable than technically perfect tools that remain confined to narrow inward looking communities.

The same lesson applies across the #Fediverse. We have seeded good technology, but we’re allowing the #fashionistas and chattering classes to dominate the conversation while practical grassroots organising gets pushed to the margins.

This is a recurring pattern, and one we need to compost. The future of the #openweb won’t be decided by having the cleverest protocol. It will be decided by whether we build communities around tools that ordinary people can understand, trust and participate in.

Technology matters, but social process matters more. That’s the path we’re trying to grow with #OMN and the #4opens.

The is a hierarchy of good/evil in chat

A hybrid p2p look at the OMN

#OMN is not trying to replace servers with #P2P, that’s never been the idea. The interesting architecture is hybrid, where each layer does what it is good at – #P2P isn’t the answer. It’s a tool. Browser-based P2P has hard limits, a browser isn’t a database, phones aren’t reliable servers, people go offline, storage is limited, connections are intermittent. If you build a system assuming every device is always available, it simply won’t work. The path we need is that #OMN isn’t trying to replace servers, it’s trying to change what servers do.

Servers are good at availability, are online all the time, easy to reach. They’re ideal for caching, indexing, discovery, search and temporary message retention. They’re also cheap enough that communities can run them. Trying to eliminate them is mostly ideology rather than engineering.

#P2P shines at resilience and autonomy, your phone is your primary editing environment, it stores your drafts, your identity and trust relationships. It can synchronise directly with nearby peers or trusted nodes whenever they’re available. That doesn’t mean every post has to live only on your phone forever.

Think “edge first”, not “server free” the #OMN architecture is closer to Git than to BitTorrent, many copies, many caches, many paths. No single point of failure, servers cache because they’re convenient. Peers synchronise because they produce the data, archives preserve because history matters, these are different jobs.

#ActivityPub already points this way, the Fediverse demonstrates the pattern when instances cache remote posts, users move between servers and archives exist independently. Nothing says there has to be exactly one canonical copy.

OMN simply pushes this idea a little further – Storage is a social problem as much as a technical one. The biggest mistake engineers make is assuming technology alone solves trust, it doesn’t, communities preserve history, archives preserve movements. Servers preserve availability, but people preserve the meaning. The goal isn’t to eliminate hosting, the goal is to avoid dependence on any single host, this is where the #4opens become architecture rather than philosophy.

Open Data means your data can move.

Open Standards mean different storage methods interoperate.

Open Source means anyone can build another client or server.

Open Process means communities decide how long things are retained, what is archived, and who they trust.

The path isn’t pure #P2P or pure client-server, it’s a federation of caches, archives, peers and communities, each doing what they’re best at. That’s a much more resilient model than pretending one technology can solve every problem.

The #OMN insight, that distinguishes the path from most “P2P” discussions is the primary object isn’t the file or the message – it’s the trust network. Content can be cached almost anywhere, but trust (identity, moderation, reputation, governance) is what needs to remain under community control. That shift – from moving data to maintaining trust – is where #OMN differs from most previous #P2P projects.

Resources for current #P2P

https://openhaven.net/prototype

https://www.localfirst.fm/landscape

Our failure to mediate the mess

The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content.

Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs.

The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the #deathcult, where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking (and acting on) questions the tech industry never asks.

This is where the #OMN approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems.

This mess is a part of our long-standing #geekproblem, that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless #techchurn: one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power.

We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these #techshit outcomes. The #4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the #nastyfew.

That’s the work of the #openweb, and the path of #OMN.

Techno feudalism what changes

What part can you play? The #openweb is one place to start, keep it simple (#KISS), build commons, compost the mess. The political centre created this mess. Four decades of neoliberal “common sense” deepened inequality, weakened democracy, privatised public goods, and pushed us beyond ecological limits. Yet much of the centre still offers only more of the same: better management of the #deathcult rather than a path beyond it.

That leaves a dangerous vacuum. If progressive movements cannot offer practical alternatives, the far right will continue to grow by presenting itself as the only force willing to confront the crisis. Their answers are built on fear, exclusion and authoritarianism – but they resonate because they acknowledge that the old system is failing, while the centre too often pretends it can be repaired.

Simply defending the status quo is not enough. Nor is retreating into abstract radicalism disconnected from everyday life. We need practical, grassroots alternatives that people can participate in and build themselves.

This same pattern appears in technology. Our #geekproblem isn’t primarily bad code – it’s a culture of arrogance and ignorance. Technical communities often reproduce the assumptions of the wider society without questioning them. They celebrate disruption while recreating centralisation. They mistake individual freedom for collective liberation, reproducing #stupidindividualism while unconsciously serving the logic of the #deathcult.

This isn’t usually malicious. It’s a feedback loop. The culture produces the technology, and the technology reinforces the culture. The answer isn’t to reject technology. It’s to mediate it socially.

The #4opens offer a simple path:

Open Data keeps knowledge in the commons.
Open Source keeps tools accountable.
Open Standards prevent enclosure.
Open Process ensures communities – not just developers or investors – shape the progress.

We need to use this to composting 40 Years of “Common Sense”, For the last 40 years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what passes for “common sense” in #mainstreaming society. Their influence runs so deep that many assumptions now feel natural rather than ideological. When these assumptions are challenged, people react defensively, not because they’re bad people, but because their worldview feels under attack.

This isn’t just a mainstream problem. Activist spaces reproduce the same patterns. The result is endless circular arguments, performative politics, and fragmentation rather than solidarity. Our task isn’t simply to oppose this culture, it’s to mediate it, to compost the mess rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Composting means taking the waste of the last forty years – failed assumptions, captured institutions, #techchurn, #fashionista politics, and individualism – and turning it into fertile ground for something better.

The worrying trend is that the grassroots signal is being submerged beneath an echo chamber of #mainstreaming voices. On many #fashionista threads, noise overwhelms practical action. We spend time performing politics rather than building the infrastructure movements need. That requires empathy, patience, and practical organising. It means creating spaces where people can step outside inherited “common sense” without feeling they have to defend it. It means building working alternatives instead of only criticising broken systems.

The answer isn’t to shout louder, it’s to build better spaces, better tools, and better processes. The signal-to-noise ratio can change again, but only if we do the patient work of mediation, trust-building and commons creation – The work of #OMN.

The hidden costs of worshipping the #deathcult

One of the successes of neoliberal capitalism has been convincing us that we’re paying less while actually paying more. They promise lower taxes, then they privatise the services, health insurance becomes a private tax, car finance becomes a transport tax, rent becomes a housing tax, student debt becomes an education tax. The electricity surcharge for AI data centres becomes another hidden tax.

You voted to reduce taxes, but all that happened was public taxes became private payments to corporations. A vote for “tax cuts” too becomes a vote for hidden taxes. The same trick plays out across the digital world. We’re encouraged to embrace platforms and AI systems that consume enormous amounts of energy, degrade the quality of public knowledge, undermine independent publishing, harvest our personal data, and concentrate even more power in the hands of a handful of tech oligarchs.

We’re told this is innovation, but it’s mostly enclosure. The latest scandals around Elon Musk and his political networks aren’t the real story. They’re symptoms of a deeper problem. Billionaires don’t simply own companies, they increasingly shape media, public debate, infrastructure and politics itself.

This is what the #deathcult looks like in practice: private wealth buying public power. One path we can take is not simply replacing one billionaire with another or one political party with another, it’s rebuilding the commons. Public goods instead of private monopolies, community media instead of billionaire media, the #openweb instead of the #dotcons and economic democracy instead of oligarchy.

That’s why #OMN exists – not simply to criticise the mess, but to build practical alternatives to mediate the mess as the next crisis arrives.

Why we use the #deathcult hashtag

Why we use the #deathcult hashtag

People sometimes ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult. It isn’t just a provocative label, it is to name the dominant political and economic logic that has shaped the last forty years. By #deathcult, I mean the era of #neoliberalism: a system that treats endless economic growth, privatisation and competition as unquestionable “common sense,” even when the consequences are ecological collapse, growing inequality and social breakdown.

I call it a cult because, like any successful ideology, it becomes difficult to see from the inside. Its assumptions become so normal that alternatives appear impossible. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There Is No Alternative,” sums this up perfectly. The “death” part has become harder to ignore, due to movements like #XR (Extinction Rebellion), the reality of #climatechaos has entered mainstream discussion. We can now see that continuing on our current path means ecological collapse, mass displacement and the deaths of millions – and displacement of billions – of people over the coming century.

Of course, neoliberalism is not something entirely new. It is an extreme form of capitalism, and history has seen similar periods before. One example is Britain’s response to the Irish Potato Famine, where market ideology took precedence over human need, contributing to mass starvation, displacement and suffering.

After the Second World War, many countries moved towards forms of social democracy. Capitalism was softened by stronger public services, labour rights and welfare systems. These reforms were far from perfect, but they recognised that completely unrestrained markets created instability and injustice. In part this “liberal golden” era was held in place by there being an alternative of soviet communism.

From the late 1970s onwards, much of that understanding was forgotten. Deregulation, privatisation and financialisation became the dominant ideology once again. Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders represent attempts to move back towards that earlier social democratic settlement. Though this compromise path of social democracy is not a final answer, as it still operates within capitalism, but it is certainly preferable to the #neoliberal model that currently dominates. As radicals, though, we should aim higher. We need to build systems based on commons, cooperation, ecological responsibility and democratic participation, not simply manage capitalism more fairly.

This is where #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. The problems we face are not only economic, they are also about communication. Today’s digital infrastructure is dominated by #dotcons: corporate platforms that monetise attention, shape public debate and concentrate power. Facebook, Google, Apple, X and similar platforms have become essential infrastructure while remaining accountable only to capital rather than communities.

The answer isn’t simply better regulation, it’s rebuilding the #openweb. Like the #Fediverse, the #OMN is one small contribution towards this path: creating media and communication infrastructure based on the #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process – so communities can shape their own communication instead of renting it from billion-dollar corporations.

People also ask why I use so many hashtags, the answer is simple, the web is made from links. Hashtags are one of the few linking technologies that work across platforms. They allow conversations to escape individual silos and become discoverable across the wider web. They are not meant to replace ideas; they are signposts pointing towards larger conversations that matter. Yes, they can look cryptic, but every shared language starts somewhere. If we never create language for new problems, we remain only trapped inside the vocabulary of the systems we’re trying to change and challenge.

Changing language doesn’t change the world by itself, but it can change how we think about the world, and changing the conversation is often the first step towards changing society itself. That’s why I still use #deathcult, not as an insult, but as a way of naming a system whose destructive logic has become so familiar that people struggle to imagine anything different. The challenge now is not simply to criticise that system, it is to build practical alternatives.

One thing has shifted over the last few years: it’s becoming #mainstreaming to recognise that #neoliberalism is a #deathcult. Composting this mess is the path of #OMN, the #openweb, and the #4opens.

For those who like to believe in social democracy, this isn’t an argument against the gains it has won. Strong public services, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and democratic institutions have all made life better for millions. They matter, and they are worth defending.

But we should also recognise their limits. As long as investment and production remain under the control of capital, democracy stops at the workplace door. We get to vote for governments, but rarely over what our economies produce, how resources are used, or whose needs come first.

The next step is not simply kinder capitalism, but extending democratic principles into the economy itself. Building commons, cooperatives, public ownership where appropriate, community governance, and digital infrastructure that people collectively control. That’s the direction #OMN points towards: not replacing one elitist crew with another, but growing the practical foundations of economic democracy from the grassroots up.

#KISS

The #4opens: A Practical Compass for the #openweb

Need to come back to this, as people still are not seeing the value or use. The #4opens is a simple, practical tool for evaluating and guiding grassroots technology, media and social projects. Rather than asking whether a project is simply “open source”, it asks a broader question – can people actually trust this project to remain part of the commons? The #4opens helps distinguish native #openweb projects from #closedweb platforms and projects that have drifted into corporate, bureaucratic or #NGO capture. It is as much about social trust as it is about technology.

The Four Opens:

Open data is the foundation. The content, metadata and information created by a project should be openly accessible, portable and reusable. People should be able to export data, archive it independently and move between codebases without losing years of work. Open examples: Wikipedia content can be copied and mirrored, Mastodon users can export their accounts and migrate between instances, RSS feeds allow content to flow between different tools. Closed examples: Facebook owns your social graph, Instagram traps your audience, TikTok keeps your community inside its walls. Open data prevents lock-in and keeps knowledge in the commons.

Open Source. The software itself should be available under a free software licence. Anyone should be able to inspect the code, improve it, fix bugs, adapt it for local needs or fork it if necessary. Open examples: Mastodon, PeerTube, WordPress, MediaWiki, Linux. Closed examples: Facebook, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams But #4opens goes further than #FOSS, open code alone does not create an open project.

Open Standards. Projects should communicate using open protocols rather than proprietary APIs. Open standards allow different communities to use different software while remaining connected. Examples include: ActivityPub, RSS, email (SMTP/IMAP), HTTP, HTML This creates federation instead of monopolies, a Mastodon server can communicate with a PeerTube instance, an RSS reader can subscribe to thousands of independent websites. No central company owns these conversations. Contrast this with: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord, Teams as each creates its own isolated island. Open standards create ecosystems rather than products.

Open Process. This is the missing piece. Many projects are technically open while socially closed. Open Process asks: Who actually makes decisions? How are disagreements handled? Can newcomers participate? Is governance visible? Can communities influence direction? Is power accountable? Without open process, “open source” becomes: founder dictatorship, hidden hierarchies, developer elitism, endless forks, NGO capture and corporate capture. Open Process keeps projects alive as commons rather than products. This is why #4opens adds the social layer missing from some traditional #FOSS thinking.

An example of how it can work – The #4opens deliberately keeps things simple, projects can roughly assess themselves, others can assess them – people aggregate the results.

2 Opens — Bronze

3 Opens — Silver

4 Opens — Gold

This is horizontal – point of this isn’t certification, it is encouraging projects to become progressively more open.

Examples:

Wikipedia

✔ Open Data

✔ Open Source

✔ Open Standards

✔ Open Process (imperfect but visible)

A Gold project.

Mastodon

Generally Gold. However, individual instances vary enormously, a technically open instance with opaque moderation becomes weaker on Open Process. Technology is only half the story.

PeerTube

Strong across all four opens as it provides decentralised video hosting without surrendering control to YouTube.

Facebook

✘ Open Data

✘ Open Source

✘ Open Standards

✘ Open Process

A classic #closedweb platform.

Signal

Excellent encryption, good open source, weak federation as governance remains centralised. Strong tool for private communication, but not a complete #openweb social infrastructure.

So why open process matters – Many grassroots projects fail here, the code is open, the data might be open. But decisions happen behind closed doors, so that power accumulates around: maintainers, foundations, funding, celebrities, NGOs. Eventually communities lose trust, people fork, energy fragments. Nothing grows, the technical project survives but the social project dies. The #4opens recognises this pattern.

It is at root a tool for composting – the #4opens isn’t a purity test, nobody starts perfect, instead it asks – Which direction are we moving? Projects drift, communities drift, funding changes, people leave. The #4opens gives us a simple way to notice when projects are becoming enclosed. Instead of abandoning them, we can compost the mess, repair governance, open the data, document the process to replace hidden power with visible trust. The Open Media Network builds directly on the #4opens, the aim is not simply better software, it is social infrastructure that communities can actually #DIY themselves.

People can grow, infrastructure based on trust rather than surveillance, federation rather than monopoly, commons rather than platforms, participation rather than consumption and cooperation rather than extraction. Technology is simply the tool, the real project is rebuilding the commons.

A simple question to ask is, whenever you encounter a new project, ask four questions:

Can I get my data out?

Can I inspect or improve the code?

Can I communicate with other systems?

Can I see how decisions are made?

If the answer is “yes” to all four, you’re probably looking at a native #openweb project. If not, you’re probably feeding another #closedweb platform. The #4opens won’t solve every problem, but they do provide a remarkably effective compass for navigating the difference between projects that grow the commons and projects that quietly enclose it.

#KISS

Which Nature Are We Growing?

Today I was half joke about ducks and geese, but there’s something underneath the joke if you lift the lid. After Darwin, many nineteenth-century elitists became fascinated with cataloguing nature. Too often, though, they also saw their own society reflected back at them. Hierarchy, competition, borders and domination weren’t simply political arrangements any more, they were presented as “natural laws”. Social Darwinism grew out of this way of thinking, using selective readings of nature to justify existing inequalities.

Later, ethologists like Konrad Lorenz studied geese, ducks and other animals, revealing fascinating patterns of territoriality, dominance and aggression. The science itself mattered, but the mistake came when people stretched those observations into a claim about human society that this is simply how we are.

You still hear versions of that today. “People are naturally selfish.” “You’ll never stop conflict.” “Communities always need strong leaders.” “It’s just human nature.” But humans aren’t geese, we’re also the species that build commons, mutual aid societies, libraries, volunteer lifeboats, free software, neighbourhood kitchens and countless forms of cooperation that don’t depend on domination. Human nature has always contained both competition and cooperation. The interesting question isn’t which one is “real”, it’s which one our culture encourages.

The #Oxfordboater community is a good example. Every year people help each other through floods, lend tools, tow broken boats, share batteries, pass on local knowledge, watch each other’s moorings and organise collective responses when outside pressure builds. None of that is compulsory, nobody invoices for it. Most of it happens because trust has been built over years. That is one expression of human nature.

But there is another, were every disagreement becomes a territorial dispute, generator hours, mooring space, who arrived first, who “belongs”, who gets to speak for the community, who broke an unwritten rule. None of these conflicts appear from nowhere, they’re amplified by the social environment we create. If every discussion becomes about winning, then people start behaving as though they live in a world where winning is the only thing that matters. The behaviour becomes self-reinforcing, like the geese.

One thing i have learned from practical paths is that infrastructure grows behaviour – this is one reason #OMN spends so much time talking about infrastructure. Not just technical infrastructure but social infrastructure. The customs, stories, shared memory and open processes that quietly shape how people behave. For boaters the old 8.00am-to-8.00pm running generator convention wasn’t simply about engines, it is social infrastructure to reduced conflict before conflict starts. The same is true of slowing down past moored boats, helping someone through a lock, sharing local knowledge with newcomers. These customs don’t eliminate disagreement, they make disagreement survivable. Without them, every generation starts again from zero.

The stories we tell matter – The #deathcult tells us competition is inevitable, that everyone is looking after themselves, that cooperation is naïve, that markets and hierarchy reflect reality. The #openweb and commons stories starts somewhere else, trust can be cultivated, commons can be built, communities can organise themselves. But none of these are guaranteed, they all require maintenance, just like our boats.

Looking out your window it should become obvious to you, we are not ducks, so a real question becomes how do we compost conflict – the challenge here isn’t eliminating disagreement – it is learning how to compost the mess disagreement leaves, like duck shit on our bordering planks. Taking the inevitable friction, the different lifestyles, the competing needs, and turn them into something that strengthens the community instead of poisoning it.

This path means remembering why customs evolved, it means asking not just “What works for me?” but “What helps us keep living together five years from now?” Because that’s ultimately what community is, not the absence of conflict, it is the ability to survive it without becoming geese 🙂

The main character of this post, presiding the ducks: “Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the Nazi regime. In his application for party membership he wrote, “I’m able to say that my whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the National Socialists.” His publications during that time led in later years to allegations that his scientific work had been contaminated by Nazi sympathies. His published writing during the Nazi period included support for Nazi ideas of “racial hygiene” couched in pseudoscientific metaphors.”

The subject of this post was an actual Nazi. Lorenz, becomes interesting not because he tells us what human nature is, but because he raises questions of how instincts interact with social infrastructure. If humans possess capacities for both competition and cooperation, then the important question becomes – which behaviours do our grassroots social structures and #mainstreaming institutions encourage?

Neoliberal culture rewards competition, extraction and individual greed.

Commons-based societies reward trust, reciprocity and mutual aid.

Human nature contains the potential for both. The infrastructure we build – technical, social and cultural – helps determine which paths become dominant. That’s why debates about boater culture, the #openweb, the commons and grassroots governance are ultimately debates about which version of human nature we want to cultivate, rather than which one is supposedly “natural.” This mess is the “common sense” we need to work to compost – just look at the ducks – to understand why.

#Oxfordboaters: The use of online plebiscites without deliberation is a prat move. Blocking democratic #4opens working-group structures creates this mess in the first place, another prat move. Then diluting the CoC (a terrible name, by the way) leaves us with a “victory” that’s shallow and probably temporary, yet another prat move.

Can you see the pattern? Given the people we’re all working with, perhaps this really is the best we could achieve. Fair enough. But I probably won’t be here when the same people have to go through exactly the same arguments again in a few years. The point, being prats has consequences, we either compost today’s conflicts into something that lasts, or we leave the same mess for the next people to inherit.

In the end, we are all the ones who have to live with those consequences.

Stupid Individualism: How We End Up Fighting Over Nothing