We can’t do much about the hardened #fluffy crowd – so committed to comfort and respectability that no amount of evidence will shift them toward meaningful action. That is a real limit, and it’s worth being honest about it rather than wasting energy trying to convert the unconvertible.
But the hardened fluffy crowd is not the main problem. The more urgent challenge is the vast non-action bloc: the enormous number of people who are not hostile to change, not ideologically committed to the status quo, but who have simply stopped believing that collective action is possible, meaningful, or worth the cost. The culture of resignation that surrounds this bloc is one of the most significant political #blocks of our times, and it is almost entirely manufactured.
So how is resignation made, it’s not because people are stupid, but more that decades of #neoliberalism have done systematic work on how people understand themselves and each other. Isolation has been normalised. Cynicism has been marketed as sophistication. #stupidindividualism – the belief that you are fundamentally alone, that your choices are personal rather than political, that the market is more real than the community – has been embedded so deeply that it feels like common sense.
People are taught to see themselves as consumers, not citizens, as individuals navigating a system, not as communities capable of changing one. That teaching is not accidental as an atomised population is a manageable population. Resignation is not a natural response to difficult circumstances, it is a political outcome, produced and maintained by specific interests.
On coalitions? Some people argue we need to “build coalitions” with everyone – that the task is to be broad, inclusive, and endlessly accommodating. That pink haired instinct comes from a good place, but a coalition is not built by enabling anti-social behaviour, learned helplessness, or endless doom-scrolling. A coalition is not a waiting room where everyone gets to stay comfortable while somebody else does the work. A coalition needs people willing to act together – the only meaningful definition. Broadness is a means, not an end. A movement that is wide but paralysed is not a movement, it is a demographic.
These are two retreats that serve the same master – the real problem is not disagreement between people who want change, as disagreement is healthy and productive. The problem is the shared belief – held across otherwise very different political tendencies – that nothing can fundamentally change, or that someone else should be the one to change it. This belief takes two main forms, and both are dead ends.
#toxicIdealism retreats into fantasies of purity – waiting for the perfect conditions, the perfect movement, the perfect analysis before acting. It mistakes the map for the territory, the theory for the practice, the vision for the work. It can look like radicalism while functioning as paralysis.
Mindless cynicism retreats in the opposite direction – into excuses for inaction dressed as realism. Nothing works, nothing changes, everyone is corrupt, the system always wins. It can look like hard-headedness while functioning as surrender. Both #toxicIdealism and cynicism leave existing power entirely untouched. They are, in that sense, two faces of the same capitulation.
There is nothing in toxic idealism or mindless cynicism except fuel for the status quo, one retreats into fantasies of purity, the other into excuses for inaction, both leave existing power untouched. The actual task
The task is not to hate people who have been shaped by these cultures. Contempt for the resigned, the cynical, or the burned-out is both morally wrong and politically stupid – it deepens the isolation it claims to criticise. The people inside the non-action bloc are not enemies. They are, in most cases, people who have been failed by every institution that was supposed to give them a reason to act.
The task is to challenge the culture that keeps people powerless., to offer, concretely and practically, experiences of collective action that work – that produce real results, relationships, and evidence that things can be different. Not rhetoric about possibility, but demonstrations of it. Free people from isolation, show them they are not alone, that their situation is shared, that shared situations have shared solutions. Free people from cynicism – not by arguing against it, but by making it empirically wrong. Rebuild collective action, not as an ideal but as a practice: small, visible, cumulative, and real.
The #enclosure we are pushing back against is not only economic or digital, it is the enclosure of imagination – the slow fencing-off of the belief that collective life is possible at all. Reclaiming the commons begins with reclaiming the conviction that there are a commons to reclaim. That is political work, and it starts with the person in front of you.
When we erased copyright enforcement for AI systems, we finally completed the Internet's split into two distinct areas:
– The Free-For-All Quarry: Anything reachable by an HTTP request is now unregulated public domain for corporations. Authorship, metadata and reciprocal obligations have been stripped away by automated AI scrapers.
– The Gated Communities: Anything behind a login and a strict user agreement is still protected by contract or trade secret law.
The dream of the open web where we used to publish freely to each other or to the global common good — trusting that intellectual property law would enforce a fair social contract — has essentially disappeared.
This toot is a diagnosis of a small shift, but thinking it’s trapped inside a narrow, liberal property lens on what the internet is and was supposed to be. What’s being described as a “split” between a Free-For-All quarry and gated communities is what happens when you assume the web was primarily about enforceable intellectual property contracts in the first place. That framing already accepts the #dotcons worldview – that value is created by ownership, extraction, and legal enclosure.
From an #openweb and #OMN perspective, that was never the path. The early web (and the cultures that fed into it – FOSS, mailing lists, blogs, wikis) wasn’t held together by copyright enforcement. It was held together by norms: reciprocity, attribution, sharing, trust, and rough social accountability. That’s much closer to the #4opens than to IP law. Open code, open standards, open data, open process – not because the law enforced fairness, but because social relations did.
What #AI scraping has broken is not a legal equilibrium, but a fragile social one that the #dotcons had already been hollowing out for decades. They didn’t rely on “fair use” or reciprocity – they relied on enclosure, centralisation, and extraction, #AI simply accelerates that logic. So yes, “anything reachable by HTTP becomes fuel” is accurate – but the mistake is thinking the alternative is stronger copyright walls or more contractual gating, that deepens enclosure. The split you describe is real, but it’s not new, and it’s not caused by #AI, it’s the endpoint of a long enclosure of commons → platform capture (#dotcons), trust → contracts, sharing → surveillance + monetisation and public space → login walls.
The current AI mess is not the origin of this, it’s just a new layer of extraction sitting on top of the #mainstreaming mess. From an #OMN view, the interesting question isn’t how to reassert IP over scraping. It’s how to rebuild social and technical spaces where contribution, context, and reciprocity matter again – where value isn’t just extracted but circulated in ways communities can govern.
AI is not an existential threat to the #openweb, it’s an asshole amplifier inside an already broken system. The real loss we need to compost isn’t only copyright protection, it’s the erosion of the social commons that made openness meaningful in the first place.
This is a mess we are finally starting to move away from. For over a decade, #failbook was one of the main organising spaces for progressive activism. On the surface it looked useful: easy groups, fast sharing, broad reach. But structurally it was never neutral. It was built as a #dotcons attention machine, optimised for engagement, conflict, and dependency. That design matters.
Platforms like this don’t just host activism – they reshape it. They push people toward reaction over reflection, outrage over organisation, and constant presence over sustained collective work. As we now recognise, they breed argument loops, emotional exhaustion, and political burnout. Not because activists are doing it “wrong”, but because the environment is engineered to reward exactly that behaviour.
From an #OMN perspective, this sits inside a wider enclosure cycle: grassroots online energy gets poured into #dotcons corporate infrastructure, that infrastructure extracts value (attention, data, control), and movements quickly become dependent on systems structurally hostile to long-term collective growth.
This is where the critique of the #deathcult becomes useful – not as a slogan, but as a description of how #neoliberal “common sense” gets embedded into everyday tools. If everything is individualised, reactive, and algorithmically amplified, then solidarity becomes very hard to sustain.
So yes: a huge amount of activist energy over the last 20 years has been absorbed into producing “empty” reach and visibility inside the #dotcons, rather than building durable autonomous spaces outside them. That has consequences, it weakens movements over time, even when it feels productive in the moment to the blinded #fashionistas. Simply it was a dead end.
Finally, we are now seeing something important – fatigue and recognition. Many groups are realising that #dotcons are no longer reliable organising spaces – but not only because of corporate control, but because of rising right-wing trolling, algorithmic hostility, and the general degradation of signal into noise. This has helped trigger a shift toward #openweb projects like the #Fediverse over the last few years.
Some parts of the activist ecosystem are beginning to look back toward federated tools and slower, more resilient forms of coordination. This is where the #OMN argument becomes practical rather than theoretical: if we want movements that last, we need spaces designed for cooperation, not capture.
The lesson is simple, even if uncomfortable – if you organise inside systems designed to fragment you, you should expect fragmentation.
The next phase is not louder posting, it’s building elsewhere. Every time someone shares an article about how terrible the world is, my first question is simple – What are you doing about it?
Outrage without action is another form of consumption, doomscrolling isn’t organising, sharing isn’t building, knowing isn’t enough.
The world won’t change because we comment on the mess. It changes when we create alternatives, challenge power, and work together to build something better.
The European Commission has published its new Tech Sovereignty Plan. On the surface this sounds promising. Europe talks about reducing dependence on foreign tech giants, strengthening digital autonomy, and supporting open source. These are all things many of us in the #openweb world have been arguing for decades.
But when you look at where the money and attention actually go, a different picture emerges. The plan allocates vast resources to semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, AI, and data centres. Open source gets a much smaller slice of the pie, and native #openweb like the #Fediverse barely registers at all. The one notable mention is support for decentralised social media, highlighted through the Commission’s continued use of Mastodon. (Digital Strategy)
The problem is that this isn’t new, as the European Commission has already been running a Mastodon server for years. Extending account creation to more EU institutions is not a strategic breakthrough, it is clicking a button that could have been clicked years ago. If this is the flagship example of support for social communication sovereignty, then the ambition is criminally limited.
The issue is that the Commission still does not understand that social infrastructure is infrastructure. We hear endless noise about sovereign AI, sovereign cloud, sovereign chips, and sovereign data centres. Yet the FOSS code and communities through which citizens actually communicate, organise, publish, collaborate, and build are treated as an afterthought.
The result is a contradiction – Europe recognises that depending on foreign cloud providers is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign AI companies is a strategic weakness. It recognises that depending on foreign semiconductor supply chains is a strategic weakness. Yet dependence on a handful of US-owned social platforms for public discourse apparently remains acceptable. Who needs sovereignty over communication anyway?
The #openweb blind spot is the normal long-running #geekproblem in institutional form. Policymakers see infrastructure as technical systems. Servers, processors, storage, networks. But the real value of the internet was never the hardware, it was always the social layer built on top. The #openweb succeeded because it created shared public spaces based on open standards. Email. RSS. Blogs. Forums. Early independent media. Later, federated systems like ActivityPub.
The Commission’s sovereignty agenda focuses on plumbing while ignoring the public spaces that the plumbing exists to support. Without investment in #4opens social protocols, community governance, and public communication infrastructure, Europe is building sovereign pipes that still carry people back into the same #dotcons corporate platforms.
Open source without communities is the unspoken problem. The Commission talks about open source as a strategic asset for European competitiveness and sovereignty. That’s welcome as far as it goes. But open source is not simply a collection of code repositories, it survives because communities maintain it.
The danger is that Europe treats open source as a procurement strategy rather than a social ecosystem. Buy some software, fund a few projects, write a strategy document, then assume the problem is solved.
Real digital sovereignty requires long-term investment in communities of use, admins, mods, maintainers, governance, interoperability, and public institutions that can steward shared infrastructure over decades. Even many open-source advocates point out that procurement rules, short-term funding cycles, and “open-source washing” continue to undermine the ecosystem. (FSFE – Free Software Foundation Europe). You cannot buy sovereignty off the shelf.
From an #OMN perspective, the weakness in the Tech Sovereignty Plan is that it remains trapped inside an industrial understanding of technology. Technology is not just hardware, technology is not just software, technology is social relations embodied in tools. If Europe wants genuine digital sovereignty, it needs to invest in:
Open social protocols.
Federated communication infrastructure.
Community-owned media.
Public digital commons.
Open governance.
Long-term stewardship of shared resources.
The social institutions needed to keep these systems alive.
Without this, “tech sovereignty” is another industrial policy aimed at creating European versions of existing #dotcons platforms. That may reduce dependence on Silicon Valley, but it does not necessarily increase freedom.
Beyond “sovereignty” is the deeper question – not whether Europe controls its technology stack. The deeper question is whether citizens control the systems that shape their lives. The Commission is slowly beginning to recognise the importance of open source. That’s a positive step. But as things stand, social communication sovereignty remains a tiny footnote in a strategy dominated by chips, cloud, AI, and data centres.
For the #openweb, that is the wrong way round, the future of “digital sovereignty” is not simply owning the infrastructure, it is owning the public spaces built on top of it.
The problem with the #EU Eurocracy on social and tech issues isn’t usually only malice, it’s institutional incompetence. They struggle to understand grassroots digital culture, the #openweb, commons-based governance, and the social realities of how technology actually works.
That leaves us with a choice. We can try to engage, push, educate, and help them become a little less incompetent. Or we can focus entirely on tearing down existing institutions.
The danger with the second path is obvious. Vacuums rarely stay empty. If progressive and grassroots voices walk away, the people most ready to fill the space are the nationalist, authoritarian, and right-wing forces already waiting in the wings.
This isn’t just an #EU issue. It applies to most #mainstreaming institutions. They are often failing, slow-moving, and trapped in outdated assumptions. But abandoning them entirely doesn’t automatically lead somewhere better.
The challenge is to build alternatives like #OMN and the #openweb while also applying enough pressure, education, and challenge to stop existing institutions from becoming even worse.
Not a comfortable path, but likely the least dangerous one.
For most people, the crisis feels recent. Housing costs. Energy bills. Food prices. Debt. Insecure work. Growing inequality. Endless wars. Ecological breakdown. The #mainstreaming story is that these are separate problems with separate causes. COVID. Ukraine. China. Immigration. Technology. Bad politicians. The reality is simpler, these crises grow from the same roots – the moment things changed, one graph tells the story.
From the end of World War II until roughly the early 1970s, productivity and wages rose together. When workers produced more value, they received a larger share of that value. This was not charity. It was the social settlement that emerged from the disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Governments understood that if ordinary people could not afford the goods they produced, capitalism would repeatedly collapse into crisis. The answer was public investment, strong unions, social housing, public infrastructure, public healthcare, education, and rising wages.
This was what some people now call the “golden age” of capitalism. Workers bought homes. Families survived on a single income. Public infrastructure expanded. Living standards generally improved. Then the trend broke, as productivity continued rising, but wages stopped. For the last fifty years, workers have produced more and more while receiving proportionally less and less. The wealth didn’t disappear, it moved upward.
Saving capitalism from itself – The original US New Deal wasn’t created because elitists became generous, it emerged because the system faced a legitimacy crisis. Mass unemployment. Mass poverty. Growing labour movements. Strong socialist alternatives. Faced with these pressures, governments invested in public works, strengthened labour rights, regulated finance, and redistributed wealth. The lesson was simple, if people have money, they buy goods, if people buy goods, businesses survive, if businesses survive, the economy functions. This wasn’t radical, it was practical as the state acted to stabilise society.
The neoliberal turn – by the 1970s, a different ideology was waiting in the wings. The solution offered by thinkers such as Milton Friedman and institutions such as the Chicago School was to reverse the post-war settlement. Privatise public assets, break unions, cut taxes on wealth, deregulate finance and reduce social spending to treat everything as a market. This project became government policy under Reagan, Thatcher, and much of the Western political class. The promise was freedom, the result was enclosure. Public wealth became private wealth, collective institutions were weakened, corporate power expanded, the bargaining power of workers collapsed.
The result was clear, the graph above tells the story, productivity kept climbing, compensation stagnated. The gains increasingly flowed upward. For the workers debt replaced wages, the old social contract was based on rising incomes, the new one was based on borrowing. If wages no longer rise fast enough, people still need homes, education, healthcare, transport. The gap was filled with debt: Credit cards, Student loans, Mortgages, Personal loans. Instead of sharing productivity gains directly, people borrowed against their futures. This worked for a while, until it didn’t.
A resent example of this mess is 2008 – The financial crash – exposed the reality, when ordinary people face crisis, they are told to tighten their belts. When financial institutions face crisis, public money appears instantly. Millions lost homes, lost jobs. Meanwhile, banks received vast bailouts. The lesson was clear. The system still knew how to mobilise resources, it simply chose who to save.
This is why we use the harsh hashtag #Deathcult. Composting this mess is where the #OMN idea of the #deathcult becomes useful as neoliberalism is not simply a set of economic policies, it is a cultural common sense. It teaches a “common sense” path that markets solve everything and that public solutions are inefficient. That society does not exist, that individuals succeed or fail alone. That endless growth on a finite planet is normal. That every commons must become a commodity.
This invisible ideology is now so deeply embedded that many people cannot imagine alternatives. The system creates crises and then presents more market solutions as the answer. Climate collapse becomes carbon trading. Housing crisis becomes investment opportunity. Community becomes #dotcons platforms. Citizens become consumers. The cure is always more of the disease.
In this mess we need to remember what we have lost, the biggest loss wasn’t economic, it was social. The institutions that once balanced private power were weakened: Trade unions, Cooperatives, Mutual aid, Community media, Public ownership, Local democracy, Shared stewardship, The commons. These weren’t perfect, but they gave ordinary people collective power. Without them, people are pushed into isolated competition. What #OMN calls #stupidindividualism. Everyone struggling alone against systems too large to influence individually.
Building beyond the mess, is not about post-modern nostalgia, the post-war settlement was deeply flawed. But what is built can be rebuilt, this means on a progressive path creating commons rather than commodities, governance rather than management, participation rather than consumption and community media rather than corporate platforms to grow cooperation rather than extraction.
As social infrastructure, the #4opens provide one practical foundation for this work: open process, open data, open standards and open licences. Because the real challenge is not technological. It is rebuilding the social relationships that make alternatives possible.
To sum up the graph of productivity and wages is not simply an economic chart, it is a map showing where the wealth went. And once we know where it went, we can start asking a more useful question: #KISS how do we build something different?
Let’s be clear about something, the commons are not an academic concept waiting to be discovered by economists or policy wonks, not a diagram in a textbook, not something that needs a queen, a government, or a management consultant to bring into existence. The commons are what people have always done when they are left alone to organise their own survival with neighbours they trust.
Peasants managing grazing land across medieval Europe. Indigenous communities stewarding water, forest and fishery for generations. Canal boat communities building informal mutual aid along waterways. Squatters running collective houses. Hackers building free software together. #Indymedia collectives publishing grassroots news from the bottom up. The digital commons – open source, creative commons, the #fediverse, the #openweb – already existing right now, built by thousands of ordinary people, not by any institution.
This is worth saying clearly because the #mainstreaming story about the commons almost always starts in the wrong place – with Garrett Hardin’s 1968 “tragedy of the commons” paper, which blamed collective ownership for environmental destruction and was used for decades to justify privatisation. The paper was ideologically loaded, historically illiterate, and largely wrong.
On the other side of mainstreaming we have Elinor Ostrom who spent her privileged career documenting why, eventually winning a Nobel Prize for showing that communities routinely manage commons successfully under the right social conditions. Her work, it is full of peasants, fishers, farmers and irrigators, not governments or corporations, let’s try and balance pointing at the top by point to the source
The real tragedy is not the commons. It is what #neoliberalism does to the social fabric that makes commons possible. As I have been arguing for years at hamishcampbell.com, the #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t just privatise assets – it broke the institutions and the relationships that made collective stewardship possible. Hyper-individualism doesn’t just make people selfish, it makes cooperation feel unnatural, even threatening. That is not an accident, it is a classic divide-and-control strategy.
The path back is not top-down – it never was – it is horizontal, rooted in trust, built through repeated small acts of mutual accountability. It is turning stress and conflict into commons culture rather than mutual destruction. It is rebuilding journalism as a commons rather than a product. It is composting “digital sovereignty” branding and just actually building working commons tech instead. The #4opens – open process, open data, open standards, open licences – are not abstract technical principles, they are social trust infrastructure, the modern grounding the commons grows from.
Thatcher said there is no such thing as society – the commons, everywhere it has ever worked, is the practical, lived refutation of that claim. Not a government programme, not a think tank report. Peasants. Boaters. Coders. Neighbours. People organising their own lives together, horizontally, with accountability to each other.
That is where we start, that is where we always started.
This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but they gave them state power, institutional infrastructure, and ideological legitimacy.
What they built was not simply a set of policies, it was a social programme we are still trapped inside more than forty years later. The push was simple and devastating citizens became “taxpayers,” public services became “handouts,” collective investment became “inefficiency,” and the commons became a problem to be solved through privatisation.
Decades of postwar social infrastructure – built on the understanding that some things are too important to be left to markets – were dismantled, defunded, and handed over to private interests -the very same interests funding the political projects carrying out the dismantling.
This is what #OMN means when we talk about enclosure. Not just land enclosure, but the enclosure of everyday life itself: Water, housing, transport, education, healthcare, communication and culture. Everything turned into a commodity.
Neither Thatcher nor Reagan created this mess, the project was carefully engineered. Reagan established a President’s Commission on Privatisation which drew up extensive plans to strip public assets and services. Thatcher pushed through mass privatisation of utilities, council housing, and national industries while selling the process as “popular capitalism.”
Behind them stood an entire ideological machine of the Heritage Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Reason Foundation, and countless university economics departments and corporate-funded policy groups.
Their role was to make radical upward redistribution sound like neutral common sense, and they succeeded. Even the language changed “tax burden,” “efficiency,” “choice,” “reform,” “flexibility.” Every word quietly carrying the ideology.
The method itself was brutally simple – cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Create public deficits. Use those deficits to declare public services “unaffordable.” Privatise the resulting wreckage. Transfer wealth upward. Starve public institutions until they fail, then point at the failure as proof they never worked.
The cruelty was not accidental, it was structural. Thatcher’s Chancellor openly described mass unemployment as “a price worth paying.” Reagan’s administration treated social devastation as collateral damage in the restoration of elitist power.
The results were not abstract, from 1948 to roughly 1979 in the United States, productivity and worker wages rose together. After Reagan, productivity continued climbing sharply while wages largely stagnated. Workers produced more wealth than ever before, but a growing share of that wealth flowed upward into capital accumulation rather than wages or public goods.
The mess this created was Labour’s share of national income steadily declined while housing costs rose, debt exploded, unions collapsed, and public infrastructure deteriorated. Debt became the mechanism keeping society functioning: mortgages, credit cards, car loans, student loans, payday lending. Daily survival increasingly depended on borrowing. Higher education shifted from a public good into a privatised commodity. Healthcare became financial extraction. Housing became speculation rather than shelter.
The language was “freedom.” But the freedom being expanded was the freedom of capital. None of this was racially neutral. Reagan’s “welfare queen” narrative deliberately racialised poverty to fracture working-class solidarity. The actual fraud case behind the story was tiny compared to the propaganda built around it, but the myth worked politically because it redirected anger downward rather than upward.
The so-called “War on Drugs” targeted Black communities while harsher sentencing laws entrenched mass incarceration. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic was ignored for years because many of the people dying were treated as disposable by political elites. Thatcher’s government supported sanctions-busting trade with apartheid South Africa while denouncing the ANC and treating Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.
These were not side issues, the neoliberalism story required enemies: welfare scroungers, criminals, radicals, immigrants, trade unionists, the “undeserving poor.” Every enclosure needs someone to blame for the damage enclosure causes.
In the rich west the programme attacked wages, unions, and public services. Abroad it was openly violent. Reagan’s administration funded and armed the Contras in Nicaragua despite international condemnation. US-backed regimes across Latin America carried out massacres, disappearances, and systematic repression while being framed as defenders of “freedom.” Thatcher supported Augusto Pinochet long after the scale of torture and repression was well known.
The noise was consistent and on going as liberation movements became “terrorists,” dictators aligned with Western capital became “allies,” and democracy mattered only when it protected existing power. The same logic still dominates global politics today.
What was lost was not only economic, the postwar social settlement – however flawed – rested on the idea that some things belonged to everyone and should be collectively protected:
healthcare,
housing,
education,
water,
transport,
welfare,
culture,
democratic infrastructure.
These systems were not gifts from benevolent elitists, they were won through the struggle by labour movements, cooperatives, mutual aid traditions, socialist organising, and community solidarity. Thatcher famously claimed:
“There is no such thing as society.”
This was not only rhetoric, it was a political programme. Destroy people’s belief in collective action and you destroy their ability to resist enclosure. This is where the #OMN critique of the “tragedy of the commons” matters. People are capable of managing commons collectively, history is full of successful examples, what neoliberalism destroys are the social conditions that make commons possible:
trust,
reciprocity,
accountability,
long-term stewardship,
community responsibility.
When competition replaces care, extraction replaces stewardship, hyper-individualism – what we call #stupidindividualism – erodes social fabric itself. The tragedy becomes real because the conditions needed to avoid it are systematically dismantled.
Understanding this matters not for nostalgia, but for navigation. The crises surrounding us now: housing collapse, ecological breakdown, inequality, democratic decay, loneliness, food insecurity, social fragmentation, mental health crises, are not random failures. They are predictable outcomes of forty years of #neoliberal wrecking. The mess this created is functioning largely as designed, prioritises elitist capital accumulation above any social wellbeing.
The liberal centre cannot solve this because it operates inside the same logic, technocratic management of decline is not transformation. Real alternatives require rebuilding #KISS commons-based infrastructure, not only as abstract ideals, but as practical trust infrastructure. This is the work of composting the current mess and growing alternatives from within the ruins.
Thatcher claimed there was no alternative, she was wrong. But building alternatives means being honest about what was destroyed, who destroyed it, how they destroyed it, and why the same logic still dominates today. This honesty is where rebuilding begins.
With this in mind, let’s recap on what Thatcher and Reagan built, its not just bad policy, not just inequality, its a full #deathcult – the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism so committed to short-term greed and #stupidindividualism that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations human life depends on. Forty years of hard indoctrination that doesn’t just fade away its – normal is walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.
The #nastyfew – platform owners, landlords, corporate lobbies, think tank networks – didn’t win through merit. They won the #classwar temporarily, by capturing institutions, rewriting rules, and flooding the #mainstreaming with their logic until it felt like gravity.
The #dotcons – Facebook, Google, X/Twitter and the rest – are the digital continuation of the same enclosure. Corporate platforms built on data extraction, presenting themselves as neutral public spaces while converting human attention and community into profit. The #closedweb is just privatisation with a friendlier interface.
And the #climatechaos bearing down on us is not a separate crisis. It is the #deathcult arriving at its logical destination.
Real alternatives are built from the bottom, not handed down from the top. The #openweb – internet infrastructure built on open standards, community control, and the #4opens (open code, open data, open standards, open process) – already exists as working infrastructure, built by thousands of ordinary people, not governments or corporations. Then we have the #fediverse, #activitypub, #FOSS, #indymedia – these are not utopian visions, already built, from the ground up, by people practising #DIY politics for real.
The #geekproblem is when this gets captured – when technical control replaces social trust, when complexity becomes a barrier rather than a tool, when #techchurn burns through community energy without building anything lasting. The antidote is #KISS – keeping it simple, human, and rooted in real relationships.
The #NGO path – professionalised, funder-friendly, managed dissent – is #mainstreaming with a radical badge on, it defuses rather than builds. The #fashernista tendency prioritising the look and language of activism over the unglamorous work of building lasting structure is #fluffy blocking in performance clothing.
What actually works is #grassroots organising grounded in trust, horizontal process, and the willingness to #compost failure breaking down what didn’t work into fuel for what comes next rather than hiding the mess or repeating it. As the #OMN path puts it: broken institutions need rebuilding as commons, not as managed services or branded campaigns.
The #deathcult is real, the mess is real, the #nothingnew reminder is useful – these cycles have happened before, and ignoring that history is how we walk straight into the same traps again. But so is the ground we already stand on, sart there.
The story is simple once you stop looking at the green branding and start looking at social power. A powerless tenant farmer in the Cairngorms watches land his family has worked for generations sell for ten times what it was worth only a few years ago. Not because farming suddenly became more valuable, but because carbon became a speculative asset. A corporation somewhere needs a green badge, farm land becomes the badge, our agriculture disappearing becomes the cost. This is not a “mistake”, its normal, this is the “common sense” system working as designed. #ClimateChaos under capitalism becomes another market opportunity, another asset class, another enclosure of the commons.
The mechanism of the #Carboncon, a corporation that has power can carry on almost exactly as before climate change became an issue: same factories, same flights, same extraction, same emissions, same growth ideology. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants trees on it, and announces to the world that it is now “carbon neutral.” If it wants more PR sparkle, it calls itself “carbon negative.” Nothing fundamental changes. The emissions are still happening, extraction is still happening, the destruction is still happening.
What changes is the accounting story, a piece of land somewhere else is converted into a tradable abstraction that launders the corporation’s image while allowing business-as-usual to continue. This is the logic of #neoliberalism applied to ecology – if there is a crisis, turn the crisis into a market. Our glaring current example of this is BrewDog and its greenwashing cycle, #BrewDog becomes a perfect illustration of the mess, in 2020 the company bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, partly funded through public grants, promising millions of trees and “carbon negative” operations.
Then reality hit a large number of trees died, peat disturbance has released stored carbon, regulators ruled the carbon-negative advertising misleading, the branding quietly disappeared, and the estate was later sold into the carbon-offset market. Public money in, #PR campaign launched, trees dead, farmer displaced, badge worn, land commodified and Carbon credits traded – Business continues as normal, round and round the #deathcult spins.
This should sound historically familiar: The Highland Clearances never really ended, the justification changed. Then it was sheep, now it is carbon. Communities are again being displaced by distant capital as land is consolidated into investment portfolios instead of living local economies. The mess is productive mixed-use landscapes are transformed into speculative ecological assets managed for investors, corporations, and global finance.
This is enclosure updated for the era of #climatechaos. Around half of Scottish estate sales in recent years have gone to investment funds, corporations, and large trusts rather than people intending to actually live on and work the land. At the same time local communities are priced out, young farmers are locked out, food production declines, rural life becomes hollowed out, and decision-making moves further away from the people directly affected.
The language changes, the extraction remains the same, the deeper problem is that people still expect the systems causing the crisis to somehow solve the crisis. But capitalism does not solve crises, it monetises them – when pollution becomes profitable, pollution markets appear, when climate collapses, carbon markets appear, when social breakdown accelerates, surveillance markets appear, when loneliness spreads, platform monopolies appear. The system feeds on crisis because crisis creates new opportunities for extraction #KISS.
This is why the #mainstreaming obsession with “green growth” is ideological theatre, infinite growth on a finite planet was always insane, adding green branding does not make it sane in any way. The carbon market does not reduce emissions, it redistributes responsibility while preserving existing power structures. The food grown by local farmers is real, the communities rooted in landscapes are real, the accumulated ecological knowledge is real. The carbon spreadsheet is an abstraction traded by financial actors who have little or no connection to the land itself.
This is where projects like #OMN matter, its path is about rebuilding the social infrastructure needed for collective action outside the control of #dotcons, PR agencies, NGOs, and corporate gatekeepers. Because right now, the stories people hear are shaped by institutions whose survival depends on preserving the existing system. The corporation has a marketing department, the local people usually does not, so the lies travel faster than the truth.
The #openweb matters because communities need their own media infrastructure to organise, communicate, document to resist enclosure in all its modern forms. Without this, even resistance becomes mediated through controlling paths designed to neutralise it. A society built on commodification will commodify nature, society built on extraction will extract from ecological collapse itself, society built on #stupidindividualism will struggle to defend commons and collective life in any meaningful way. This is why we need to become the change and challenge, not through current common sense purity politics, not through #fashionista performative consumerism, and definitely not through corporate-approved and funded activism.
But through rebuilding #OMN commons-based culture and infrastructure from the ground up, by compost not branding – our tools are shovels, not greenwashed investment portfolios. The future depends on whether we keep feeding the #deathcult or start growing alternatives.
One of the hardest things to hold in activism is that people are not fixed. Scratch a fluffy person enough and they go spiky. Bring a spiky person into real trust and shared purpose and they can soften. Repression, fear, insecurity, ego, trauma – these are universal. The point isn’t pretending the tensions don’t exist. The point is mediating them socially before they become destructive.
Without that mediation, movements collapse. Not because people are bad, but because unmediated conflict always drifts the same way – fluffy becomes avoidance, passive aggression and endless process; spiky becomes domination, ego battles and fragmentation. Both become dysfunctional when they lose connection to trust and collective accountability. We need to consciously compost this mess rather than just cycling through it.
On the practical side – I still think the “use and abuse the platforms” approach is right. Walking away from mainstream spaces entirely just means retreating into circles where nobody outside the already-convinced ever hears you. Caves are romantic but they’re not effective. The goal is using the existing platforms to seed alternatives and push counter-narratives, not surrendering to their logic, but not pretending we can ignore them either. Strategic infiltration while building something better underneath.
The bigger picture matters here too. A lot of political thinking still assumes liberal democratic stability will just continue. That assumption is increasingly detached from reality. The paths ahead are likely to diverge sharply – authoritarian nationalism, corporate techno-feudalism, fragmented collapse, or something genuinely commons-based and cooperative. The liberal centre doesn’t have the tools to respond meaningfully because it’s still inside the same logic that created the crisis.
So simply defending the status quo isn’t enough. We need alternative social infrastructure, built now, before things get harder.
And the biggest trap – reactive politics. When the mainstream agenda sets the emotional weather and we just respond to outrage cycles, media narratives and algorithmic churn, we end up trapped inside the logic of the system we’re opposing. Reaction reproduces the problem. The alternative is slower but stronger – building our own paths, trust networks, media, relationships, culture. Not isolation. Strategic autonomy.
The commons path is worth saying plainly too. The “tragedy of the commons” framing is ideologically loaded and largely wrong — humans have managed commons well throughout history. But inside the social conditions neoliberalism creates, the tragedy often does happen, because the trust, relationships and shared accountability needed to sustain commons get systematically destroyed. The answer isn’t abandoning commons thinking. It’s rebuilding the social fabric capable of holding it.
Being the change isn’t individual morality. It’s collective transformation. Learning to cooperate, share power, mediate conflict, build trust. Almost everything in current society trains the opposite habits. So yes, people become difficult under pressure – that’s human. The question is whether we build processes capable of working with that reality rather than being destroyed by it.
This is an important tension to think through carefully, because there is a long activist history here, and a lot of current movements are stumbling into it half-consciously. The 20th century modernist imagination was heavily shaped by engineering thinking – identify the problem, build the system, apply the fix, and scale the solution.
That mindset gave us massive infrastructure, industrial production, bureaucratic governance, and later digital platforms. It also produced many disasters because human societies are not machines. A huge amount of modern activism inherited this engineering worldview without really questioning it. So every crisis became a platform problem, a governance mechanism problem, a moderation problem, a voting system problem, an algorithm problem, or a policy architecture problem.
The instinct became “If we design the correct system, good outcomes will emerge automatically.” But decades of activist and social movement experience show this does not work, as the deeper issue is usually cultural, social, and relational. People carry power relations, fear, trauma, status games, career incentives, institutional habits, and ideological baggage into every technical system they build.
So the system to often reproduces the same mess in new language. This is one of the reasons projects around sortition, citizens assemblies, mutual aid, facilitation, restorative practice, federation, commons governance, and horizontal organising have become more important in recent years. Not because they are “perfect systems”, but because they focus more on relationships, trust, participation, legitimacy, dialogue, and collective learning. That is a very different worldview, that facts alone do not create change, technical reports alone do not create legitimacy, and institutional systems often absorb criticism without transforming.
So we are now shifting toward social legitimacy tools like citizens assemblies, not because assemblies magically solve everything, but because they potentially rebuild collective ownership of decisions. The same thing happened in parts of the #Fediverse world, early federated governance conversations were often deeply “tech fix” oriented: moderation protocols, trust metrics, reputation systems, permission layers, safety tooling, formal governance stacks. Some of this matters, but over time many people discovered the real problems were social trust, burnout, informal hierarchy, hidden power, clique behaviour, conflict culture, and lack of shared norms. You cannot code your way out of those issues.
One #fashionista root to fix this has been the spreading of codes of conduct that emerged for good reasons to protect vulnerable people, to create safer participation, to challenge abusive behaviour long normalised in geek culture, and to make exclusion visible. That was and is often necessary, but there is also a danger when communities move from “shared social responsibility” toward “rule enforcement culture” because hard rules to often become weapons inside power struggles.
This mess is full on in activist history – absolutely full of this mess of factional purges, ideological policing, moral performance, bureaucratic punishment, public shaming, procedural manipulation, and social control carried out in the name of safety or justice. This is not new, religious movements, revolutionary movements, academic institutions, NGOs, party politics, and online subcultures have all repeatedly fallen into this trap.
The danger is that communities begin replacing trust, mediation, political maturity, lived relationships with formalistic enforcement mechanisms. Then conflict stops being something people work through collectively and becomes something people weaponise institutionally. This creates exactly the kind of Sophist culture talked about in the last post – performance over dialogue, positioning over understanding, punishment over repair, and fear over trust. The difficult question is – how do you empower vulnerable people without creating rigid bureaucratic enforcement cultures?
There probably is no perfect answer to this, but historically healthier movements relied more on strong social norms, visible process, distributed responsibility, mediation, restorative approaches, practical accountability, and cultures of participation. Rather than endless rule expansion.
That path is messier and slower, but it scales better socially because it keeps people engaged in relationships rather than retreating into institutional enforcement. This is one reason the #4opens matter as social process rather than tech dogma. Open process does not magically prevent abuse or manipulation, but it reduces hidden power by making decisions visible and contestable.
The goal is not “perfect safety through rules”. The goal is healthier collective cultures capable of handling conflict, absorbing disagreement, resisting manipulation, protecting vulnerable people, and continuing to function without collapsing into purity wars or authoritarian management. That is probably the deeper shift from 20th century “tech fixes” toward 21st century “social fixes”.
Not by abandoning technology, but understanding that technology only works well when embedded inside healthy social processes. And right now, many movements are still trying to solve cultural problems with administrative machinery, which is one reason, so many spaces feel simultaneously over-managed and socially broken.
DRAFT: Let’s look at this as an example of effective and ineffective activism. The mess we make and how we can compost it. Let’s start with an example outreach text that has not been sent out yet.
WHO WE ARE We are resident boaters living on a stretch of the River Thames near Donnington Bridge. For many years, people have made their homes here peacefully and continuously as part of a long-standing river community.
WHAT’S HAPPENING New signage already in place states that mooring, anchoring, or remaining stationary requires a licence in addition to the licence already paid to the river authority. Only a limited number of moorings may be available, and additional fees could apply for continuous occupation.
WHO IS AFFECTED Long-term residents, low-income households, people living with serious illness, and vulnerable members of the river community. For many people, the river is not a lifestyle choice – it is their home.
WHY PEOPLE ARE CONCERNED At a time of rising housing costs and increasing housing insecurity, these changes could reduce access to long-standing mooring spaces, push vulnerable residents out of the area, leave people without secure housing alternatives, reduce access to affordable river living, and undermine an established and historic river community.
WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR Protection for long-term residents, no forced removal of vulnerable people, fair and transparent consultation with all boaters, and respect for existing river communities.
BOATS ARE HOMES!
WE SUPPORT environmental protection, safe navigation, responsible shared river use, and respectful cooperation between all river users.
WE DO NOT SUPPORT loss of homes, exclusion of vulnerable residents, reduction of social diversity on the river, or the enclosure of historic river commons.
The first thing that needs to be said is this pathis pretty simple #KISS
Affectiveness is trust = speed and power, every action flows from this, so the obvious immediate actions:
Working Groups – activate, not just name. Fill the gaps (Moorings WG is missing people). Each group needs tasks and a timelines. Media, Environment, Legal, Moorings are the four pillars.
Summer visibility campaign. Litter picks were a start – now make them scheduled, social, and photographed. Visible care builds public sympathy faster than arguments.
Public messaging. Posters and leaflets with LINKED to online messaging. Creative subversion of public space – keep it warm and community-facing, not aggressive.
Media outreach – urgent. Contact sympathetic journalists now, before a hostile narrative sets in. Reach Green Party contacts, housing groups, environmental organisations, river users. Positive stories first, defence second.
Offline organising – sensitive coordination stays face-to-face in trusted spaces, not in public chats. Trust meeting prep for small delegations. Agreed talking points only. Anticipate reframing and deflection. Stay calm, stay on message, make clear asks.
Holding the physical space – Committed, confident people physically and socially present on the land
We are walking the horizontal path when groups strengthen: Working Groups coordinate laterally – not waiting for a centre to direct them. Visible action builds public trust, community care as the face of the campaign. Messaging stays simple and consistent, across all groups and channels. Relationships are built offline, where real trust and real decisions live. Institutions are engaged strategically, not reactively
What we’ve had so far is #BLOCKING and more BLOCKING.
The initial process needed to be simple: a short, wide consensus stage to build enough trust and shared direction for people to move together. This happened, but, that process got bogged down by aggressive fluffy and spiky pushing in different directions. What should have taken a short time stretched into months of churn.
The fluffy path kept smoothing over conflict with endless distractions, “feelings”, and disconnected “positive” non activity. The spiky path pushed outcomes through hard positioning and confrontation without the collective grounding needed to make this effective. Both ended up feeding the same result – paralysis of any action at all.
Then, just as when were finally beginning to move toward the next step – actual coordinated action through working groups – the same blocking pattern repeated itself. The working groups, which were there to move us past endless whole-group debate, got dragged backwards into re-running the original consensus arguments on continues repeat. So instead of moving from consensus, to coordination, to action, we got trapped in a loop:
process,
argument,
process again.
The result has been mess of ossification and prevarication for the last three months. At best, people scattered into redundant, uncoordinated fluffy actions of litter picks, isolated messaging, disconnected outreach, and individual goodwill projects with no shared direction or any cumulative strategy.
At worst, individuals entrenched themselves into blocking positions that lacked any collective backing, making attempts at movement all to easy to isolate, dismiss, and weaponise against the needed broader outcomes, dissipate energy instead of concentrating it.
This is the hard truth about horizontal organising that people often avoid saying out loud: a horizontal movement without functioning working groups is not horizontal, it is just flat. And flat structures spread energy equally in all directions until nothing gains traction.
Working groups are there to solve this problem, they are the mechanism that turns shared trust into coordinated action. But instead of empowering them, thus our selves, we allowed the unresolved tensions of the first stage to spill endlessly into the second.
The deeper issue is that people are still acting from the poisoned culture we are supposedly fighting of individual performance over collective strategy, emotional positioning over grounded coordination, symbolic activity over practical outcomes. This “common sense” mess is leading us to the normal #stupidindividualism of identity and ego in conflict with trust and process.
This is why trust matters so much, trust is not fluffy morality, it is practical movement infrastructure. Trust creates speed, coordination, resilience, and collective power. Without it, every decision reopens old arguments, every action fragments, and every process becomes another site of blockage. While meanwhile, the mainstreaming benefits from all of this, they gain time, they shape public narratives uncontested, they observe our fragmentation, and they plan strategically while we churn internally.
The frustrating thing is that the movements already understands the problems, the issue is less lack of understanding. The blocking is active – the inability to stop reproducing the blocking dynamics long enough to move collectively in any direction.
This is the mess we need to compost. Until we create affinity groups to break this cycle, the next three months of this campaign risk looking exactly like the last three months – more shrinking than inflating big meetings full of hot air and scattering outcomes leading to more frustration, and little accumulated power.
The path is actually simple, though not easy – stop reopening the foundation process, empower the working groups, coordinate action, build trust through doing, and focus collective energy where it creates leverage instead of churn. Otherwise, we remain trapped in performative movement culture at best or compleat mess at worst – while the real decisions continue being made elsewhere.
The #KISS secret about the noise in “digital sovereignty” is very simple – Ignore most of this branding and build commons tech instead. That’s the path, not another layer of management, another funding bureaucracy for a glossy strategy document. Not another NGO conference circuit explaining why nothing can happen without another round of funding. Just build working commons.
This matters because much of the #EU “digital sovereignty” conversation is simply more churn inside the same #neoliberal#mainstreaming logic that created the problem in the first place. Europe spent decades outsourcing infrastructure, privatising public space, undermining local autonomy, and feeding the #dotcons.
Now the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore, dependence on US platform monopolies, fragile infrastructure, imperialist surveillance capitalism, cloud centralisation, shrinking democratic accountability, and growing geopolitical vulnerability.
So suddenly everybody is talking about “sovereignty”, but what do our chattering class of institutional actors mean by sovereignty? Too often they mean procurement contracts, compliance frameworks, consultancy ecosystems, defence posturing, startup hype and fashionable funding narratives. The same old structures wearing a new outfit.
This is where the #fashionistas rush in to cash out of the latest cycle of #techshit, every crisis produces a new branding wave #Web3, #AI, #blockchain, smart cities, trusted identity and now digital sovereignty. The words change, the consultants were the same clothes, to push funding applications with different buzz words. But underneath, the social relations to often stay exactly the same. This is why so much “innovation” produces so little durable social value, the energy and focus gets consumed by branding, positioning, institutional competition, and funding capture.
The #OMN approach is to compost this mess rather than feed it. Composting means recognising that some parts of the existing system still contain nutrients technical knowledge, infrastructure, institutions, legal frameworks, public funding, developer skills. But these need breaking down and re-rooting into commons processes instead of simply reproducing the same dead structures.
The #KISS approach is important because complexity is often used as a control system, the more complicated the governance path becomes the harder it is for normal people to participate, the easier it is for insiders to dominate, and the more power flows to the parasite class managing the process. People then confuse institutional complexity with competence, but most healthy social systems are not built this way, healthy systems tend to be transparent, iterative, federated, participatory, and grounded in practical trust.
That’s why the native #openweb worked when it worked, people built things together directly like mailing lists, forums, blogs (bit more messy), federated publishing, open protocols, community hosting, shared standards. Messy? Yes. Human? Yes, but functional. The current “digital sovereignty” debate ignores this history because acknowledging it would undermine the need for the giant managerial layer now feeding on the crisis.
A lot of the current policy noise is about preserving institutional power during systemic decline, that’s why signal-to-noise matters, most of the noise performs concern, manages perception, protects careers, and absorbs dissent into harmless process. Signal is rarer, it’s about building actual commons’ infrastructure, creating durable trust networks, supporting federation, sharing governance openly, and keeping paths simple enough that communities can understand and maintain them.
This is one reason the #4opens remain central, without these, “digital sovereignty” simply becomes another enclosure strategy under a different flag. European-owned silos are still silos, state-managed platform capitalism is still platform capitalism. Replacing Silicon Valley landlords with Brussels landlords is not liberation.
The real challenge is rebuilding public digital commons, that means the hard part is cultural, not only technical. People are deeply trained by #mainstreaming to look upward for solutions to governments, corporations, experts, influencers, NGO etc. But commons culture grows sideways instead, through participation, trust and through practical collaboration, yes this is slower at first, but far more resilient over time.
That’s the real #KISS secret, ignore much of the spectacle and quietly build the alternative underneath it. Less noise, more compost – Less branding, more commons – Less #techshit. More grounded infrastructure. That’s how you compost the #mainstreaming mess instead of endlessly feeding it.
