#Nicenasty the hidden power of soft obstruction

This mess is something we need to compost – in movements, communities, and alternative projects, we need language to describe the different forces shaping what happens, without shared vocabulary, patterns remain invisible. People experience the same problems repeatedly, but each incident looks like an individual conflict rather than part of a wider social mess making. Within #OMN hashtag story, we already have some useful terms.

  • #nastyfew – power from above. The #nastyfew are the obvious actors who concentrated power of tech, business, political, and institutional elitists. The people who shape systems through money, ownership, influence, and formal authority. They are easier to identify because their power is visible. The #nastyfew don’t usually pretend not to have power, their influence comes from controlling resources, platforms, laws, infrastructure, and narratives. This is the traditional problem of hierarchy.
  • #fluffy – conflict avoidance, the comfortable side of activism and community organising. The people who want harmony, inclusion, and safety – often good things – but always at the cost of avoiding difficult conversations, uncomfortable truths, or necessary conflicts. The fluffy crew are not the enemy, we need this side as movements without care become brittle, aggressive, and unsustainable. The problem is when #fluffy becomes a substitute for action, and keeping things pleasant becomes more important than addressing what is actually happening.

#fluffy – comfortable, non-threatening, conflict-avoiding activism. Well understood in context. #spiky – confrontational, direct, willing to cause friction. Debate – is the thing that is to often missing, and holds the power.

But there is another pattern we need to compost, that does not fit either category. Something more subtle, the missing category is the weaponised nice person. There is a difference between being kind and using kindness as a tool of control. There is a difference between creating a welcoming space and using the language of welcome to #block challenge. This is the person who performs niceness while quietly enforcing conformity.

These people are in every movement, every activist camp, they use, politeness rules, social reputation, community trust, emotional pressure and claims of protecting the group …as mechanisms to block criticism, avoid accountability, and preserve existing power. They are not the #nastyfew as they are not openly dominating from above, and often appear as the opposite, they look caring, sound reasonable.

They say “We need to be constructive.” “We don’t want conflict.” “That isn’t the right way to say it.” “We need to protect the community.” Sometimes those statements are valid, but often they are used as a shield against anything disruptive, challenging, or genuinely new. This is where we need a #hashtag for.

The gap is specific: the person who performs niceness or fluffiness as a weapon – who uses social respectability, politeness norms, or community goodwill as a way to enforce conformity, block challenge, and protect their own position. Not the #nastyfew (they’re openly powerful) and not simply #fluffy (that’s just timid). This is the vile fluffy – nice on the surface, actively harmful underneath.

Maybe #nicenasty describes the contradiction. Nice on the surface, nasty in effect. The problem is not kindness, the problem is when kindness becomes a performance used to maintain control. A #nicenasty dynamic appears in spaces that claim to be open: activist groups, community organisations, open source projects, alternative media spaces and wider social movements. The language is horizontal, but the behaviour becomes quietly hierarchical. Instead of “you cannot do this because I have power”, it becomes “you cannot do this because you are harming the community.” The result can be the same – blocking change. #nicenasty -. Has rhythm, easy to remember, does the job. The inversion is the point.

#velvetblock – the mechanism, describes the process itself, a velvet surface hiding a hard barrier. The door is not slammed, people are not openly excluded. Instead, they are slowly redirected, delayed, discouraged, or socially isolated until the challenge disappears. The damage remains polite, the outcome remains the same. #velvetblock – soft surface, hard obstruction. More descriptive of the mechanism.

#fluffygate- implies gatekeeping behind a fluffy front. A bit clunky.

#pratocracy – the rule of prats. Funny but loses the specific nice/nasty dynamic.

#softpower – already taken in international relations, would cause confusion.

#vilefluff – pairs well with #nicenasty tag, keep it in the vocabulary for the spiky people.

#nicenasty is maybe the strongest – it’s immediately, has no baggage, and does what a hashtag should do: compress a complex dynamic into something people recognise and use to organise the movement. The question is whether one tag or two. #nastyfew for power from above, #nicenasty for obstruction from within the community itself, #fluffy for the timid. A clean three-part vocabulary?

Why this matters for #OMN – The #openweb and grassroots organising depend on the ability to challenge, fork, experiment, and build alternatives. But communities can reproduce the same problems as institutions. They can create informal gatekeepers, they can protect status to confuse stability with success. The challenge is not just resisting the #nastyfew, it is also recognising the internal patterns that stop movements growing. A healthy ecosystem needs all three understandings.

#nastyfew – Power concentrated at the top.

#fluffy – Care, connection, and social glue, but with the risk of avoiding necessary conflict.

#nicenasty – Soft power used internally to block challenge while appearing caring.

This gives us a #KISS story path. Because not every barrier looks like oppression, sometimes the strongest walls are built out of good intentions. The answer is not to reject kindness, more its is separating genuine care from control disguised as care. Any native path needs both:

#fluffy to keep people connected.

#spiky to challenge what needs challenging.

And the awareness to recognise when #nicenasty is #blocking

A bit of theory on how this mess comes about – puppets dancing on strings – how consent is manufactured rather than just how force is applied, ideology isn’t only ideas floating free, it’s rooted in real social and economic structures. let’s look at some views of this:

Lukács – reification and false consciousness, how capitalism makes its own social relations appear natural and inevitable, like facts of nature rather than human constructions.

Gramsci – hegemony, how ruling class ideas become “common sense,” absorbed so deeply into everyday life that they no longer need to be enforced, because people enforce them on themselves.

Althusser – ideology and ideological state apparatuses, how institutions (schools, media, religion) reproduce the conditions that make capitalism feel like the only possible reality.

So where does the current dead #postmodernism confusion comes from – this rotten path also talks about constructed realities, fictions experienced as truth, and the critique of “grand narratives.” So there’s surface overlap. But the difference is Marxism says ideology can be exposed and overcome through collective understanding and political struggle – there’s a real underneath the false consciousness. Postmodernism says there’s no stable real to appeal to – all truths are partial, constructed, and contested all the way down so would be far more sceptical about whether “exposing” ideology gets you anywhere.

Compost or rot – you choose, we need a spade #OMN

The dogma of one path: why alternatives, diversity and linking matter more

This toot sparked off some thinking – A blinded assumption of modern Western liberalism has been that there is an automatic connection between free enterprise, liberal democracy and economic and technological progress. The story was simple that open markets create wealth, wealth creates a middle class, the middle class creates democracy, technology and progress naturally follow the same path. This became more than an economic theory, it became a “common sense” worldview – a belief that every successful society would eventually converge on the same path (this nasty mess is 50 years of #deathcult worshipping).

The assumption was that countries like China would either fail to catch up, or that if they did catch up economically, they would inevitably become more like the West politically. That assumption has now been challenged in the #mainstreaming thinking, not only by China’s rise, but also by the internal crisis of Western systems themselves. The rise of oligarchic politics, authoritarian movements, and the return of far-right nationalism inside liberal democracies has exposed something uncomfortable:

What we learned in the past and what we are learning today is that capitalism does not automatically produce democracy and that economic power can concentrate into forms that undermine democracy. The history of the early 20th century already showed this pattern, that in periods of crisis, concentrated wealth and political instability produce authoritarian outcomes rather than democratic renewal. It should by now be easy to see that the #mainstreaming mythology was always more fragile than it appeared.

The blindness of a single story – The problem was not only that the West misunderstood China. The deeper problem was the inability to imagine different paths. The dominant “common sense” story said “There is one successful model, everyone else is either behind or secretly becoming like us.”

This made it difficult to see what was actually happening. China’s development strategy did not emerge from copying one simple Western formula. It drew from multiple sources, one influence was the experience of the Soviet Union’s industrialisation. The Soviet five-year plans brutally transformed an agricultural society into an industrial power. The human costs were enormous, but the speed of industrial growth challenged Western assumptions during the 20th century.

The shock of events like the launch of Sputnik was not only technological, it was the fear that a different economic and organisational path was capable of producing rapid scientific and industrial progress. A second influence came from observing East Asian development, countries often presented as examples of “free market success” were much more complicated. South Korea’s industrial rise had strong state direction, industrial planning, protected markets, and coordinated investment. Singapore – often misunderstood in Western political debates – developed through a path of authoritarian public ownership, state planning, and strategic intervention.

The lesson is not that one system is automatically superior, the lesson is that reality is always messier than blinded invisible ideology. Successful societies have always borrowed, adapted, experimented, and mixed approaches.

The danger is the belief that there must be one correct path. This is the same cultural problem we see across technology, politics, and social organising. A single dominant path becomes so normal that alternatives appear impossible. But societies are not machines, they are ecosystems, they grow through relationships, institutions, culture, trust, experimentation, and shared knowledge. Diversity is not weakness, the value of alternatives is not simply that one alternative will “win”. The value is that diversity creates resilience.

A forest with one species is fragile, a network with one path is fragile, a society with one accepted model is fragile. Different communities, different approaches, and different experiments create the possibility of learning. This is one of the core lessons of the #openweb. The power does not come from control, the power comes from linking different nodes together.

#4opens federation works because diversity is a feature, different servers, different communities, different cultures – connected through shared protocols. The alternative is the #closedweb model: one platform, one algorithm, one owner, one business logic – that is efficient for control, but fragile for society.

The future needs linking, not convergence. The mistake of much modern politics is searching for the final answer. The better question is, how do we create systems where many answers can coexist, communicate, and improve each other?

This is the #OMN approach, of not replacing one dominant ideology with another, to create another closed system, But building networks where alternatives can exist, connect, and evolve.

To come back to china, the lesson from history is not “capitalism failed” or “state planning succeeded”. The lesson is that no single path owns progress. Human creativity comes from diversity, the future will not be built by everyone becoming the same. It will be built by creating the conditions where different paths can connect, learn, and grow.

OMN #openweb #4opens #alternatives #federation #diversity #nothingnew

Build it permissionlessly and let it loose

One of the uncomfortable truths of activism is that, given a choice between anarchism and anarchy, many anarchists choose anarchism. The ideology, identity, culture, meetings, and certainties feel safer than taking a genuinely risky step into the unknown of stateless liberty and self-organisation.

It’s easier to belong to the subculture than to build the social relationships and trust needed to live without the structures there critiquing. A lot of radical politics gets stuck at this point: defending the identity instead of creating the reality.

From an #OMN perspective, the challenge is not proclaiming freedom, but building the social infrastructure that makes freedom possible.

Been working with #mainstreaming people recently. The experience has been eye-opening, and not in a good way. What strikes me isn’t that they are bad people, most aren’t. The problem is that many seem completely unaware of how badly the culture they inhabit behaves. Gatekeeping is normal. Careerism is normal. Status games are normal. Endless #blocking of ideas, projects, and people that fall outside established comfort zones is normal. Then, they wonder why meaningful change never happens.

The pattern is everywhere. New ideas are treated as threats rather than opportunities. People spend more energy defending positions than solving problems. Institutions become focused on preserving themselves rather than the purpose they were supposedly created for. When challenged, the response is confusion – then #blocking – the behaviour is so deeply embedded that it has become invisible.

This isn’t just a problem of NGOs, public bodies, academia, media organisations, or corporations. It’s a broader cultural issue. The incentives point in the wrong direction as most people choose jobs primarily for income, security, status, and benefits. That’s understandable, we all need to survive. But when entire systems are built around those motivations, contributing to society becomes secondary, something to be mentioned in mission statements rather than lived in practice.

The result, a society full of people managing problems rather than solving them. You can see this in every sector, from the highest levels of management down to the lowest-paid positions. The forms differ, but the logic is the same: don’t rock the boat, protect your position, follow the approved path. This is one reason why grassroots projects struggle, as they are trying to solve problems directly, while mainstream institutions are organised around managing risk, preserving legitimacy, and maintaining existing structures.

From an #OMN perspective, this isn’t only a problem of individual morality, it’s a problem of social systems rewarding the wrong behaviour. The answer is not simply to denounce people, that feeds the cycle, the challenge is to create spaces where different values can actually function:

  • collaboration over competition
  • stewardship over careerism
  • openness over gatekeeping
  • social usefulness over institutional self-preservation

Some people respond by working less, consuming less, and choosing employers whose purpose is broader than profit. Others build grassroots projects outside the mainstream. But, neither path is easy, both come with costs.

The question is not why change is difficult, it is why we keep organising society around incentives that actively discourage it. With this mess in mind in both tech and activism, if your politics is talking only to people who already agree with you, it’s probably a hobby, not a movement. The #OMN path starts with building bridges between different groups, needs, and cultures, as this is how collective power grows.

We live in an age of #stupidindividualism where everyone broadcasts and few connect, so build bridges, not bubbles. This matters because most people are up shit creek without a paddle, yet keep looking in the same places that got them there. Apathy and laissez-faire “common sense” have become normal. Decades of #neoliberalism taught us to think as isolated individuals rather than communities capable of acting together.

One barrier is that people still don’t see the need to move beyond the #feudalism that shapes much of the tools we need. As a result, huge amounts of energy go into defending existing structures and #blocking alternatives before they have a chance to prove themselves. That’s why the #OGB project approach is simple: build it permissionlessly and let it loose. People will see the value, or they won’t #KISS

The goal isn’t convincing a handful of gatekeepers, the goal is empowering a larger group of people to participate in activism, technology, build consensus, and push the social agenda they actually need of less permission, more practice, less management, more participation.

This is also why so much campaigning, #NGO and alt-tech events can be frustrating. The official conversations are dominated by career paths, institutional interests, branding exercises, and carefully managed narratives. Lots of noise, not always much signal – The useful stuff usually happens elsewhere, in corridors, over coffee. That’s where bridges get built, where ideas get tested and where trust grows. The social layer matters more than the stage.

The #OMN lesson is simple – Technology alone doesn’t solve social problems, we need
movements grown by connecting people, governance grown by participation,
commons grow by use. If we want a better world and #openweb, we need to spend less time protecting silos and more time building bridges. That’s where the signal still lives.

But when documenting moments and movements like this It’s important to focus on what actually matters not only the normal surface mess.

Watching this video reminded me how much activist history gets distorted by sectarianism. At places like #Greenham, divisions formed around the “colour” of the gates – different ideologies, identities, and political cultures. The trouble is that the loudest and most conflict-driven voices end up telling the history afterwards.

The people saying “look at me” get remembered, while the people saying “don’t look at me, I’m busy, look at the issue” are usually too busy doing the actual work to document it.

This leaves us with a skewed activist memory, where internal drama becomes history and the slow, collective labour that made things happen fades into the background.

It’s not just a problem of the past. We keep reproducing the same mess today.

Who controls the story of harm? Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and institutional anti-racism

A reaction to this post – From an #OMN perspective, the current conflict around #antisemitism, anti-racism, and protest politics is not a simple moral disagreement. It is a systems failure in how truth, trust, and harm are processed across society. We are not dealing with one issue, we are dealing with a layered collapse where institutions, media, and platforms struggle to maintain a shared reality that different communities can recognise as valid. The result is not just disagreement, it is fragmentation

At the most basic level, antisemitism is real, rising, and harmful. Anti-Muslim racism is also real, rising, and harmful. These are not abstract categories – they shape everyday safety, belonging, and dignity. Most people in both Jewish and Muslim communities are not engaged in ideological hatred. They are living ordinary lives while pushed pulled into wider conflicts shaped by our shift to the hard right, state policy and geopolitical struggle, media framing and selective amplification, algorithmic social media dynamics and institutional attempts to push public perception

In practice, Muslim–Jewish relations are often functional, cooperative, and nuanced than public discourse suggests. That reality is the “fluffy layer” – the lived social fabric that rarely appears in institutional paths. The problem begins when this complexity is flattened, when harm does not simply get reported – it gets framed, sorted, and weaponised. In recent years, “anti-antisemitism” has functioned as a dominant moral framing inside Western institutions, often positioned as the leading edge of anti-racism.

However, in practice this is a distortion – Critiques of state policy can be recorded as racial hostility so genuine antisemitism becomes entangled with political disagreement. Other forms of racism, particularly anti-Muslim racism, are normalised as institutional responses become selective and politically aligned.

This is not necessarily the result of a conspiracy. It is more a #mainstreaming process: institutions simplifying complex realities into manageable narratives that preserve stability and authority. The effect is predictable – The more a discourse becomes institutionally central, the more it becomes a tool for managing dissent rather than understanding harm. This is where the history of the fluffy–spiky model becomes useful.

Fluffy narrative (surface layer) is about the protection of minorities, inclusion and shared values, moral clarity and unity “we are defending communities”. Spiky reality (function layer) is the policing of protest and speech, selective moral outrage, geopolitical alignment and strategic framing to narrow critique. The contradiction matters, as what is presented as protection simultaneously produces new forms of exclusion and narrative control. This is how “anti-antisemitism” can be mobilised to delegitimise protest movements, while other forms of racism are treated as background noise. The point is not that protection is false, but that protection is entangled with institutional legitimacy management.

A different view

The deeper crisis is not disagreement – it is the collapse of shared ground. When every event is filtered through competing identity and institutional stories, we see facts selected to confirm group identity, automatic distrust of opposing accounts, collapse of shared standards of credibility and escalation of “moral performance” over any understanding. There is a persistent tendency to treat policing and security agencies as neutral protectors, attribute violence primarily to “extremist individuals” and underplay structural or systemic failures in prevention and response. This is amplified by #stupidindividualism and platform agendas, where meaning becomes personalised rather than collectively negotiated.

In this mess truth becomes fragmented, harm becomes narratively competitive and solidarity becomes harder to sustain across difference. The #OMN path avoids simple binaries, instead, we highlight that institutional systems often fail under complexity and pressure, prevention is primarily social, not purely technical and over-reliance on enforcement displaces investment in community resilience This matters because it shapes whether societies invest in prevention through social trust, or reaction through control systems.

The casualty of this entire mess is transnational anti-racism as a lived path for solidarity across difference. Instead, we get moral branding of anti-racism by institutions, fragmented identity-based interpretations of harm and competing narratives that cannot easily coexist. Meanwhile, Muslim communities experience intensified structural racism and surveillance and Jewish communities experience real antisemitism and insecurity. Both are drawn into geopolitical and institutional stories that do not serve any working grassroots solidarity.

The system does not remove racism, it redistributes and reclassifies it into politically useful forms. The problem is not “who is right”, the problem is how do we maintain conditions where truth, trust, and accountability can still be produced?

The response to this mess needs not to become moral purity, nor institutional deference, nor endless narrative warfare. It needs to be infrastructure – social and communicative by cross-community organising across identity boundaries, local mediation and conflict handling, reduction of algorithmic outrage amplification, resistance to institutional story capture and rebuilding trust networks outside state-managed “news”. This is both fluffy and spiky – #fluffy: keep people connected across difference and #spiky: resist capture, simplification, and instrumentalisation.

The danger is not antisemitism or Islamophobia in isolation, the danger is systemic: the breakdown of shared truth under pressure from institutions, #dotcons platforms, and political actors competing to control narrative meaning. If everything becomes a weaponised story, then nothing remains stable enough to build any solidarity on.

The #OMN path is not only to win the story war, but to rebuild the social conditions where narratives are no longer the primary battlefield. Without that, anti-racism becomes branding, protection becomes control, and truth becomes collateral damage. With it, we have a chance to restore something much more basic – the ability to understand each other without institutional translation layers distorting everything.

It’s the mess we need to compost.

The Fediverse’s growing signal-to-noise problem – and who’s causing it

People nowadays are soaked in #stupidindividualism, and the important word on this is hopeless. Not hopeless because people are bad, but because we’ve spent decades dismantling the social structures that gave us the ability to act together. We know how to consume, react, and perform as individuals, but increasingly struggle to cooperate, organise, and build collective power. A society of isolated individuals is easy to manage and hard to change.

There have been a lot of institutional prat moves on the #Fediverse over the last few years, we’re facing a growing signal-to-noise problem. As more NGOs, foundations, governments, media organisations, and corporate-adjacent actors arrive, they bring resources, visibility, and legitimacy. That’s the fluffy side of the story. More users, more funding, more attention, more recognition.

But #NGOs didn’t build the #Fediverse – and they’re not saving it either their bringing institutional habits that are often hostile to the native culture of the #Fediverse. Risk management replaces experimentation, branding replaces community, public relations replaces dialogue. Governance becomes something done for people rather than with them. The result is a lot of noise: endless press releases, carefully managed messaging, and performative consultation that produces little actual change.

This is where the spiky side comes in. The #Fediverse did not grow because institutions planned it into existence. It grew because messy communities built things, argued about them, broke them, fixed them, and kept going. The culture emerged from people doing the work in public. Much of the value came from precisely the things institutions find uncomfortable: openness, disagreement, rough consensus, and grassroots initiative.

The problem is not that institutions are involved, the problem is when institutional logic starts drowning out community logic to create a growing signal-to-noise problem. The signal is people building infrastructure, running servers, writing code, creating culture, organising communities, and solving problems together. The noise is the endless churn of reports, branding exercises, stakeholder management, conference panels, and “engagement” processes that consume energy without producing any substance.

The useful framing here might be:

  • Fluffy: welcoming people in, building bridges, creating shared spaces, encouraging participation.
  • Spiky: defending native values, challenging bad practice, calling out capture, and maintaining boundaries.

The #Fediverse needs both, too much fluffy and everything gets absorbed into #mainstreaming culture until the original values disappear. Too much spiky and you end up isolated, talking only to people who already agree with you. The challenge is maintaining a productive tension between the two.

The real debate isn’t institutions versus communities. It’s whether institutions can learn to work within #openweb culture rather than replacing it with the same management culture that has already failed across much of the #closedweb. The signal is still there, the question is whether we can keep hearing it through the noise.

Mix this with the bigger picture of hard-right and #climatechaos feeding each other in a vicious cycle. Climate breakdown drives displacement, insecurity, and social stress. The right exploits that suffering to spread fear, hatred, and division. As they gain power, climate action is weakened to protect existing wealth and fossil-fuel interests, leading to worse climate impacts and displacement.

The result? More refugees, more scapegoating, more environmental collapse, and more authoritarian politics. Stopping #climatechaos and stopping the rise of fascism are not separate struggles. They are the same struggle viewed from different angles. The answer isn’t more noise. It’s rebuilding solidarity, strengthening grassroots alternatives, and creating collective solutions that challenge both environmental destruction and the politics of fear.

With this in mind – have the people fixated on #mainstreaming noticed how little change and challenge they actually achieve? A lot of energy goes into fitting in, managing perceptions, and staying respectable, while the problems keep getting worse.

We might finally get somewhere when more people notice this and start doing something different. So if you meet a dedicated #mainstreaming person, do thank them for helping demonstrate what doesn’t work. The real debate isn’t institutions vs communities – it’s whether institutions can learn to stop drowning us out

#stupidindividualism #Fediverse #OMN #openweb #4opens #mainstreaming #NGO #Fluffy #Spiky #KISS

The non-action bloc: resignation, cynicism, and the culture that keeps people powerless

“#Oxfordboaters – Some of the people have to lie to themselves as they blindly believe in private property and rule of law but squat on private property and brack the law by not moving. They try and pretend this is not true, if they do this pretending to strongly they will make us all homeless.”

A lot of people are up shit creek without a paddle, yet keep looking in the same places that got them there. On this apathy and laissez-faire “common sense”, we have a real problem, decades of #stupidindividualism have left people expecting things to somehow fix themselves while collective capacity withers. The answer isn’t wishing people were different, it’s building structures, cultures, and tools that reflect challenging take this reality.

There’s plenty of room for creativity in that work. So how do we start to compost this mess of people end up trapped this contradiction. They profess a strong belief in private property and the rule of law, yet in practice they occupy private property and rely on not being moved on. To avoid facing this contradiction, they tell themselves stories that make it disappear.

The problem is that reality doesn’t go away just because we refuse to look at it. The more tightly people cling to these comforting narratives, the harder it becomes to deal with the actual situation. And if they cling too hard, they risk creating outcomes that harm everyone, including making all us #Oxfordboaters homeless.

Yes, these stories can hold things together for a while, but when events threaten to sweep them away, the contradictions are exposed. What looked like certainty is revealed as wishful thinking, and people are left paralysed by indecision, unable to act because the assumptions they depended on no longer fit the world in front of them.

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.

This mess is almost entirely manufactured, so how is this 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.

#OMN #fluffy #neoliberalism #stupidindividualism #toxicIdealism #enclosure #commons #activism #collectiveaction #openweb

AI didn’t break the web. The dotcons did – AI just turned up the volume

Every few months another AI company executive suggests that their latest Large Language Model possess values, ethics, judgement, emotions, or even a form of consciousness. The latest example is claims around Claude, where discussion has drifted toward the idea that the system possess “a functional version of emotions or feelings.” This is a good moment to step back and look at what is actually happening.

They are software, very sophisticated software, certainly. Useful software, maybe. Sometimes surprisingly capable software, but software nonetheless. The current generation of LLMs works by processing enormous amounts of human-produced content and generating statistically probable responses based on patterns found in that content. What people mistake for intelligence is the reflection of our own intelligence. What people mistake for morality is often the reflection of our own moral language. What people mistake for emotion is the reflection of our own emotional expression. The machine is mirroring us.

The #geekproblem strikes again – a recurring problem in technological culture is the blinded tendency to mistake technical processes for social processes. If you spend enough time around code, it becomes tempting to imagine that social problems can be reduced to technical ones. That human complexity can be transformed into engineering complexity. That ethics can be encoded, governance can be automated, community can be replaced with platforms. This is not a new mistake.

For decades, we have watched technologists claim that algorithms can replace editors, platforms replace communities, markets replace politics, and code can replace governance. The result has been a mess. Now the same pattern is repeating with AI. Human judgement emerges from lived experience, social relationships, culture, responsibility, memory, and consequences.

Ironically, the real danger is not that these systems become conscious, the danger is that people increasingly behave as if they already are. The public relations narrative coming from many #AI companies encourages this confusion. The more human-like these systems appear, the easier it becomes to sell products, attract investment, and generate media attention. The result is a kind of digital anthropomorphism.

People begin treating software as trusted friends, therapists, advisers, teachers, and companions. Meanwhile, the actual human institutions that should provide these functions continue to weaken. This is a familiar pattern from the #dotcons, rather than building stronger communities, we build stronger platforms. Rather than strengthening relationships, we optimise engagement. Rather than supporting public institutions, we create private substitutes. The technology becomes a replacement for the social fabric it quietly helps unravel.

The deeper issue is that morality does not exist in isolation, ethics is not simply a set of rules, it emerges through social processes. People learn morality through families, communities, traditions, cultures, institutions, and struggles. We argue about values by negotiating differences. We face consequences for our actions. We inherit stories and experiences from previous generations. This process is messy, often contradictory. But it is fundamentally social.

An AI system can reproduce ethical language because ethical language exists in its training data. It can discuss justice because humans discuss justice. It can talk about compassion because humans write about compassion. But discussing a value is not the same thing as possessing it. Repeating ethical language is not ethical behaviour. Generating moral arguments is not moral agency.

From an #OMN perspective, the important question is not whether machines are becoming human. The important question is whether humans are becoming less social. The #openweb was built around the idea that people communicate with people. The current AI boom increasingly promotes a future where people communicate with machines that imitate people. That should concern us.

Not because the machines are evil, not because AI is an existential threat. But because every step in this direction risks reinforcing the existing trend toward isolation, atomisation, and #stupidindividualism. The challenge is not to fear AI, it is to keep social processes social. To remember that governance requires communities. That ethics requires accountability and culture requires participation. That intelligence without social context is simply computation, machine can generate words, but people can create meaning.

https://kolektiva.social/deck/@jpl99@vivaldi.net/116691642387749842

People add a lot of mess, this toot is a diagnosis of a small shift, but it’s thinking is 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.

OMN history note: Failbook, activism, and the enclosure of organising

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.

#KISS

The EU tech sovereignty plan

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 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.

“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

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.

Compost “digital sovereignty”, build working commons

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.

#OMN #OpenWeb #Fediverse #ActivityPub #TechSovereignty #EU #OpenSource #DigitalCommons #4opens

How we built the neoliberal #Deathcult

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?

#OMN #OpenWeb #4opens #Deathcult #Neoliberalism #Commons #MutualAid #FoodSovereignty #CommunityMedia #OpenGovernance #NothingNew #DIY #KISS

The commons were never theory – It was always practice

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.

#stupidindividualism is what we need to compost

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.

#OMN #commons #openweb #4opens #neoliberalism #deathcult #stupidindividualism #BuildingAlternatives

Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess

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.

Women taking about oppressors

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.

#OMN #Neoliberalism #Thatcher #Reagan #OpenWeb #4opens #Commons #MutualAid #FoodSovereignty #ClimateChaos #Mainstreaming #Deathcult #Dotcons #BuildingAlternatives