Progressive Mainstreaming

Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters.

But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive mainstreaming accepts the frame, accepts the metrics, accepts the economy of extraction and then argues about distribution. It negotiates better terms with a machine that is killing us. That is not transformation, it’s managed decline.

The project of real change and challenge – the work the #OMN exists for – starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with people standing up and walking away. Walking out of the temple of the #deathcult we all live in, not in purity, utopia or comfort. But into mess, cooperation, unfinished tools, shared risk, and actual agency. This isn’t about better policies inside the system. It’s about building outside it, under it, alongside it – until the system hollowed itself out and no longer matters.

It’s about people picking up shovels, composting the wreckage, and growing something that can actually sustain life. This is simplicity #KISS #OMN

We have already seen the failures: lived through #Indymedia, the #NGO turn, the #dotcons capture, the #Fediverse repeating old mistakes. When we talk about #OMN, we’re trying to stop people from re-learning the same lessons by losing again. Silence would be complicity.

The #OMN is where critique becomes agency. It’s not about “promoting a project”, if we don’t talk about this without something like #OMN, critique collapses into doom, aesthetics, or personal exits. #OMN is a way to, act collectively, without lying about power, money, or governance.

Forgetting is how capture happens, the moment people stop naming alternatives, the space fills with managerial language, funding logic, and fear-based control. We talk about #OMN to keep the space open enough for something human to grow.

The #OMN is a path that resists #stupidindividualism, where most contemporary “solutions” reinforce isolation, personal brands, and individual safety strategies. #OMN starts from the assumption that survival and meaning are collective. We need to keep talking about this because almost nobody else does.

It’s unfinished – and that matters. It’s not about defending a polished system, instead, it’s about holding open a process. Talking about #OMN is how we invite others into the compost rather than presenting them with a finished product to consume.

We talk about #OMN because it’s a native way of saying: “We don’t have to repeat this. We can build differently, together, if we remember what already worked.”*

It’s not evangelism, it’s stewardship.

A few of us have been working on real, positive, horizontal social and technological solutions for over twenty years. Not hypotheticals, not vibes, things that actually work.

We know they work locally, we know they work socially. And after more than a decade building on the #fediverse, we know they can work in tech, at scale without going vertical, corporate, or authoritarian.

This isn’t speculative any more. Our creative task now – the #nothingnew work – is simply to combine what already works: Horizontal social practice, federated #openweb tech, trust-based governance. We already have a slate of projects waiting to be built: #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback and #makinghistory. What’s missing is not ideas, it is people willing to show up and implement.

And here’s the hard truth: every time we try to talk about radical or progressive language, power, or structure, people retreat into #blocking and ignoring. The same unresolved tensions get replayed endlessly, nothing is mediated, nothing is grounded. Bad will accumulates, the social commons rots.

This rot isn’t accidental – it’s structural – To work our way out of this mess, we need both #fluff and #spiky. We need broad categories to think clearly, the #mainstreaming #fashernista rejection of this isn’t sophistication – it’s submission. It’s a soft, polite form of #deathcult worship.

You don’t dismantle a #deathcult by being nicer to it, you dismantle it by stopping your participation and building something better.

So this is the question, not rhetorical, not theoretical: Are you going to help make this happen? Are you going to pick up a shovel? Or are you going to stay on your knees, arguing about tone while the ground burns?

There is such a thing as society -and the #openweb depends on it

There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂
Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” – is killing us.

Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to find information about most things that actually matter. This isn’t accidental; it’s a structural #dotcons problem. Extraction, advertising, and algorithmic manipulation have replaced human discovery, context, and trust.

The same sickness runs through much of today’s open-source and free software world. Its governance models are still rooted in medieval political ideas: aristocrats, benevolent dictators, kings and courts. That might have muddled through in the 20th century, but it is obviously useless for the world we now live in.

The last twenty years trying to mediate this with neoliberal #stupidindividualism has only made things worse. The result is towering piles of steaming #techshit, endlessly churned, rarely useful, and increasingly disconnected from any healthy social reality. This is the #geekproblem made in: code, silicon and concrete.

The #mainstreaming disaster driven by #dotcons is obvious. We don’t need to relitigate it every five minutes. For motivation and clarity, let’s put them to one side and focus on what we can actually change. Our own tech culture is still hopelessly mired in the #geekproblem. So yes, we need to compost a lot of our own mess.

The path out of both the #closedweb and the geek cul-de-sac is not new. It’s old, boring, and powerful: trust, shared responsibility, and human-scale democracy. If we are serious, the #openweb has to be rebooted with grassroots democracy at its core. Social tech needs social governance. Without that, we are just recreating vertical power with nicer licences.

This is where #OGB (Open Governance Bodies) matter. With real democratic process, it becomes relatively simple to push the #dotcons back out of spaces they currently dominate by default. Without democracy, they will always win, not because they are smarter, but because they are organised.

Right now, we are drowning in the #mainstreaming mess. And worse, we are still adding to it. Every pointless project, every ego-driven fork, every governance-free platform accelerates #techchurn and deepens the rot. We need to stop pretending this is neutral.

Yes, “open standards” are a mess, always have been, but they are the mess we must build on until enough of the #openweb is rebooted – including democratic decision-making – to rejuvenate and civilise the standards bodies themselves. Strong democracy changes the game. With it, enclosure becomes contestable. Without it, we just get louder arguments and faster failure.

If you care about this direction, add a statement of support here https://unite.openworlds.info/…/wiki/Statements-of-support You don’t need permission. You don’t need to convince everyone. You need to show up and help build.

And when people doing obviously stupid things can’t understand what the #OMN hashtags mean? Click the hashtags and think, or stand and shout, then hit the block button. You get to choose 🙂 This is not rudeness, it’s focus. And focus is how we stop adding to the mess and start composting it into something that might actually grow.

LLM`s and the openweb

The debate about so called #AI and large language models inside the #openweb paths is not, at its core, a technical argument. It is a question of relationship. Not “is this tool good or bad?” but how is it used, who controls it, and whose interests it serves.

This tension is not new, every wave of open communication technology has arrived carrying the same anxiety: printing presses, telephones, email, the web itself. Each was accused – often correctly – of flattening culture, centralising power and then when enclosed eroding human connection. And yet, each was also reclaimed, repurposed, and bent toward collective use when used within humanistic social structures. The #openweb path was obviously never about rejecting technology, it was about refusing enclosure.

On the #FOSS and the #openweb, we have always understood that tools are political. Not only because they contain ideology in their code, but because they embody power relations in how they are built, owned, governed, and deployed. The #OMN project grew from this understanding, it isn’t an anti-tech project, it is a re-grounding of technology in social process: trust-based publishing, local autonomy, messy collaboration, and human-scale governance. On this path we have to constantly balance the #geekproblem that servers mattered less than relationships, code mattered less than continuity.

#LLMs arrive into this tradition not as something unprecedented, but as something familiar: a tool emerging inside systems that are deeply broken. The danger is not that LLMs exist, the danger is that they are being normalised inside closed, extractive, #dotcons infrastructures.

What makes LLMs unsettling is not intelligence, they have none, It’s proximity. They sit close to language, meaning, memory, synthesis, things humans associate with thought, culture, and identity. When an LLM speaks fluently without being feed lived experience, then yes, it can feel hollow, verbose, even uncanny. This is the “paid-by-the-word” reaction many people have: form without presence, articulation without accountability. This discomfort is valid.

But confusing discomfort with real danger leads to the wrong response. #LLMs do not have agency, consciousness, or ethics, they don’t take responsibility, they cannot sit in a meeting, be accountable to a community, or live with the consequences of what they produce. Which means the responsibility is entirely ours. Just like with publishing tools, encryption, or federated protocols.

Much of the current backlash against “AI” is not about facts. It’s about vibe. People aren’t only disputing accuracy or pointing to errors. They’re saying: “This feels wrong.” That instinct is worth listening to, but it’s not enough. The #openweb tradition asks harder questions:

Who controls the infrastructure?
Can this tool be used without enclosure?
Can its outputs be traced, contextualised, and contested?
Does it strengthen collective capacity, or replace it?
Does it help people build, remember, translate, and connect, or does it manufacture authority?

An LLM used to simulate “wisdom”, speak for communities, and replace lived participation is rightly rejected. That is automation of voice, not amplification of agency. But an LLM used as:

an archive index
a translation layer
a research assistant
a memory prosthetic
a bridge between fragmented histories

…can work within in a humanistic path if it is embedded in transparent, accountable, human governance. The #openweb lesson has always been the same: you don’t wait for systems to fail – you build alongside them until they are no longer needed. On this path #LLMs will become infrastructure, the real question is whether they are integrated into: Closed corporate stacks, surveillance capitalism, and narrative control or federated, inspectable, collectively governed knowledge commons.

If the open web does not claim this space, authoritarian systems will. This is not about fetishising this so-called AI, nor about rejecting it on moral grounds. Both are forms of avoidance. The #OMN path is pragmatic:

build parallel systems
insist on open processes
embed tools in social trust
keep humans in the loop
keep power contestable

#LLMs can’t and don’t need to understand spirit, culture, or community, humans do. What matters is whether we remain grounded while using tools – or whether we outsource judgment, memory, and meaning to systems that cannot be accountable.

Every generation of the open tech faces this moment, and every time, the answer needs to be not purity, but practice. Not withdrawal, but responsibility. Not fear, but composting the mess and planting something better. #LLMs are just the latest shovel, the question is whether we use them to deepen the enclosure, or to help dig our way out.

On the #OMN and #openweb paths, the answer has never been abstract. It has always been: build, govern, and care – together.

What is not real is pretending that violence is secondary to discomfort over language

In my life, what is real is people being beaten and shot, blood on the walls, evidence fabricated, mass arrests, torture in prisons, borders closing, and fear becoming an everyday condition. Fear isn’t imagined. Fear is rational.

What is real is watching a police officer chat casually one moment, then flip instantly into an instrument of state violence the next. A human being turns into a mechanism: boots stamping, braking toes, batons smashing heads, cameras destroyed, people dragged away. Hundreds detained illegally. This isn’t abstract. This is lived experience.

This is what power looks like when legitimacy erodes. And this is not new. History is full of these moments – when states retreat from consent and rely instead on force, surveillance, and spectacle. When violence becomes administrative, repression is normalized and denial becomes #mainstreaming policy.

What is not real is pretending that this violence is secondary to discomfort over language. What is not real is prioritising hurt feelings, tone-policing, or abstract arguments about phrasing. What is not real is treating “uncomfortable language” as a greater harm than broken bones, smashed lives, and stolen futures. There is a profound mismatch here.

People are upset about words because words feel manageable. Words can be moderated, reported, debated. State violence cannot. It is harder to face. It demands courage, solidarity, and risk. So attention is redirected, from material harm to symbolic offence. This is how reality gets inverted, this is too much of the mess of the last ten years.

Talking outside someone’s direct experience is not violence. Naming systems of power is not oppression. Describing brutality is not the problem, the problem is the brutality itself. When repression becomes normal, discomfort becomes a distraction. It’s a luxury concern in a world where people are being beaten, imprisoned, and erased. Policing language while ignoring violence is not moral clarity, it’s moral collapse.

If we cannot distinguish between discomfort and domination, between harsh words and broken bodies, then we have already lost our grounding in reality. What is real is violence backed by the state. Everything else is noise, no matter how it makes you “feel.”

Yep, it’s a mess, that needs mediating for any outcome other than more mess to compost.

#Fashionista #postmodern #blocking #spiky #fluffy

Building, what comes next?

#mainstreaming people are wilfully blind and alt people tend to be pessimistic, it’s a problem. Historically, real social change doesn’t arrive by waiting for collapse. It arrives because people are active, they build alternatives in advance, strong enough to bridge the mess when existing systems fail and lose legitimacy. This isn’t theory. It’s how change has always happened.

If you are interested in a better outcome, we need to remember, build first, collapse later is the lesson that we keep forgetting. You don’t wait for the crash, you prepare, are ready to catch people when it comes.

Projects like the #OMN are currently blocked because capitalism, especially after forty years of neoliberalism, has poisoned our idea of individualism. We’re trained to see ourselves as isolated actors rather than members of a society capable of collective care and collective power. This keeps us passive while the systems hollow out around us.

One of the biggest blocks to change is the belief that politics is something done to us, rather than by us. People blame politicians for everything – climate breakdown, cultural decay, economic precarity – while avoiding responsibility for the systems we participate in daily.

In the working alt paths, we build parallel systems to make change happen. Revolutions don’t begin with a dramatic break. They begin quietly, when people redirect time, energy, trust, and care into structures that actually work. Gradually, those structures grow. Eventually, the old ones hollow out and lose relevance.

But we are society. It starts and ends with us. Learning how to help your neighbours now – feeding people, housing people, sharing skills, organising locally – isn’t charity. It’s practice. It builds the muscles, myths, and traditions we’ll need when systems fail harder than they already are. And they will fail. The only uncertainty is how badly.

This can start anywhere – including with shared tech infrastructure like the #OMN. You don’t need permission, mass consensus. You, simply, need commitment, continuity, and care.

Over the last decade, #techchurn has produced mountains of #techshit. Both mainstream and “alternative” tech piles need composting if we want to grow a more humane world. From a grassroots perspective, many past alternatives – anarchist, ecological, socialist – did work imperfectly, until they were eaten, flattened, or professionalised by #NGO, #fashernista, and #deathcult dynamics.

Stepping away from the tech mess means composting it. It’s good that people try not to push pointless tech projects. And let’s be honest: most new tech projects are pointless. In the era of #climatechaos, we don’t have the luxury of pretending otherwise.

That’s already happening, unevenly and messily, especially across the #Fediverse. The real question isn’t whether parallel systems will emerge. The question is whether the balance will be humane, democratic, and resilient, or authoritarian and exclusionary.

To figure out what’s worth building, we need to do #4opens reviews and publish them. This isn’t gatekeeping – it’s collective responsibility. Let’s build a shared culture of useful tech, together. The task now is to reboot what worked, using federated #4opens tech, and then innovate forward from there. This is where #OMN and #indymediaback sit: not nostalgia, but composted continuity.

In the era of #climatechaos, too many people are on their knees worshipping the #deathcult. We need to call pointless things pointless – clearly, calmly, without fear. If that idea scares you, ask why. Fear is how obedience is maintained. #fashernistas, get off your knees. Use the #4opens as a shovel. There are piles of techshit that need composting.

Collapse won’t be clean or total. It’s unlikely we’ll see a single cinematic moment. What’s far more likely is a long series of crises: recessions, austerity, market “corrections”, institutional decay, shrinking legitimacy. Capitalism isn’t stable. It’s inherently extractive and unsustainable. Growth has been artificially inflated to concentrate wealth upward, while the real ecological, social, and psychological costs are pushed downward. The illusion of growth hides the reality of extraction.

Power won’t step aside politely, as legitimacy shrinks, power concentrates. Smaller and smaller groups cling to control through coercion, surveillance, and force. History shows that entrenched power has to be pushed over, not waited out. That doesn’t mean chaos. It means having something better ready.

All thinking is critique. If you aren’t looking at faults, you probably aren’t looking at the thing at all. Don’t be afraid of that. Gardening requires digging. Lift your head, your shovel. Dig, and plant.

Without parallel institutions, collapse just creates a vacuum. And vacuums get filled by the worst actors. What actually matters doesn’t appear magically after a crisis. Community, care, knowledge, trust, culture, and shared infrastructure are built slowly, beforehand, by people who show up consistently.

The #Fediverse is an accidental #openweb reboot – a product of #fashernista energy, messy and decentralised. Herding cats is hard, but it’s not a flaw. It’s the material we’re working with. One path forward is #OGB – grassroots, DIY producer governance – building shared norms and flows without hard centralisation.

This isn’t apocalypse fantasy, it’s continuity. Waiting for the system to fall is a losing strategy. Protesting without building is noise. Commentary without construction is theatre.

If you want change: build alongside, build underneath, build beyond. That isn’t extremism, it’s history.

On the #openweb path, what “prat” means

On the #OMN and #openweb paths, when I talk about not being a “prat”, am not talking about a personal insult in the everyday sense, I am naming a pattern of behaviour that actively blocks collective work, let’s be explicit. A prat is someone who:

Performs critique instead of doing the work

They talk about problems endlessly but won’t touch the shovel. They judge seeds for not being trees. They dismiss unfinished work while contributing nothing usable themselves. This isn’t accountability – it’s avoidance dressed as intelligence.

Defaults to vertical thinking in horizontal spaces

They try to manage, gatekeep, or “correct” instead of co-creating. In #OMN terms, this is importing #dotcons logic into open systems.

Treats values as weapons, not commitments

They quote rules, codes, or ideals to hit people with, not to strengthen the commons or protect the vulnerable. A code of conduct, used this way, becomes a club. The prat believes they’re being ethical – while undermining ethics in practice.

Confuses identity with contribution

They think being right, being radical, or being aligned is more important than building something that works. This is #fashionista behaviour: aesthetic politics, purity signalling, zero tolerance for mess.

Can’t handle undefined space

They panic when things aren’t: Finished, branded, institutionally sanctioned, measurable in platform metrics. Because #openweb work is by nature undefined, they respond with fear, defensiveness, or hostility. This is where “VERY negative when challenged” shows up.

Redirects anger

Their frustration is often justified, but it gets aimed at: Other builders, messy experiments, imperfect allies. Instead of: Centralized power, enclosure, #dotcons capture, #deathcult economics. This is how movements eat themselves.

What “prat” does not mean

It does not mean: Someone asking honest questions, someone disagreeing in good faith, someone making mistakes, someone learning in public. Mess, failure, argument is allowed. Blocking isn’t.

Why this matters

The #openweb only exists if people are free to: Start badly, iterate publicly, cooperate loosely, build trust over time. Prat behaviour shuts this down by: Discouraging participation, freezing experimentation, replacing process with performance. That’s why we say it plainly, not to shame – but to clear the path.

The simple rule (#KISS)

If you’re not helping build, not helping others build, not protecting the space for building. Then stop throwing rocks, pick up a shovel, or step aside. That’s what we mean by “don’t be a prat” on the #OMN and #openweb paths.

We don’t need more mess, we need shovels

Most social problems aren’t conspiracies – they’re #fuckups, we’re only human. You could say “most social problems are caused by social issues”, but that doesn’t land the same way 🙂 The problem isn’t secret cabals, it’s accumulated dysfunction, bad incentives, and people defending their tribe instead of fixing the plumbing.

A practical example of this is the core of the #geekproblem. Everything we do in tech is built on standards. That part is unavoidable. The real problem is who defines them, how, and in whose interests.

Some people like building sandcastles. That’s effectively what you’re doing if you just make stuff up in tech and pretend it exists in isolation. In reality, anything you build already sits on top of a huge pile of standards – protocols, formats, conventions, governance models. Denying that isn’t radical, it’s fantasy.

And this is where things derail: instead of talking about tech practically, people slip into tribalism. They argue identity, ideology, vibes – not architecture, interoperability, or power flows. You see endless positioning, almost no engineering.

“Open industrial standards” get dismissed as nebulous or boring, but they’re actually where the value is. They’re the difference between shared infrastructure and enclosed fiefdoms. The #openweb worked precisely because of this boring, collective work.

Let’s look at this a different way – Nationalism is a similar kind of abstraction – a nebulous idea that people pour meaning into. And it’s also where violence tends to appear. Tribalism can be beautiful, grounding, and human, but it can also turn toxic when it replaces thinking.

Some #dotcons are now larger than nation states, so the metaphor isn’t stretched at all. They control territory (platforms), populations (users), economies (attention and money), and law (terms of service). Yet we still pretend this isn’t political. The geek “problem” is a very 20th-century dysfunction: a narrow tribal mindset that mistakes technical cleverness for social wisdom. And it’s damaging us all.

People are up for change. The frustration and anger are real. But we need to work ourselves past the current #blocking energies – the endless arguments, purity tests, and performative conflict.

On this needed move, short and sharp is often more ethical than long and drawn out. Say what matters. Build what works. Use #4opens to cut through the fog.

We don’t need more right-wing myths.
We need shovels.

Degrowth is unavoidable

Calls for #degrowth are becoming unavoidable, because the facts are unavoidable. We are in ecological overshoot. We have consumed too many resources and produced too much waste. #Climatechaos and social breakdown with collapsing biodiversity are not side effects, they are #KISS signals that the system is very out of balance.

Degrowth is not primarily a population problem, it is an overconsumption problem, concentrated in the global North and among the wealthy everywhere. How we talk about degrowth matters, some framings slip quickly from ecological limits into dangerous territory. Phrases like “the population needs to fall below two billion” are intended as ecological realism, but historically and politically they have horrific baggage. The idea of “surplus population” has always been used to justify violence against those least responsible for growth and extraction. It slides far too easily into genocidal thinking, even when that is not the speaker’s intent.

That is an ethical failure, not a rhetorical quibble. There is solid research – from Hickel and others – showing that it is technically possible to provide everyone on the planet with a humane standard of living using perhaps 30% of current global energy and material throughput, if resources are distributed differently and wasteful consumption is cut at the top.

This matters because it shifts the problem from how many people exist to how systems are organised. That doesn’t mean population decline is irrelevant. An honest ethics of degrowth has to address it, but carefully, explicitly, and without euphemism. Population change will happen through demographic transition, not coercion: lower birth rates, longer lives, ageing societies. This brings real challenges: fewer working-age people, care burdens, pension systems built on endless growth, and deeply unequal patterns of consumption that won’t disappear on their own.

The real challenge is simple, how do we draw down “standard of living” while maintaining and improving quality of life? That means separating wellbeing from throughput. Less energy and material use does not have to mean worse lives, but only if we redesign systems around care, sufficiency, public goods, and social infrastructure rather than accumulation and profit. Housing, transport, food, health, and culture can improve even as total consumption falls, but not within the current growth-obsessed economic #deathcult logic.

When we fail to do this deliberately, it very much not going to be a smooth transition. It is collapse: scarcity managed by force, inequality hardened, and a global replay of Europe’s dark ages, this time without a stable climate or functioning ecosystems to recover into. Degrowth without ethics becomes brutality. Ethics without real structural change becomes denial.

The task is not to decide who should disappear, but to decide what must stop, what must shrink, and what must be rebuilt so that fewer resources support better lives for everyone.

That’s the real work #KISS

Social value, personal value, and the chicken-and-egg problem

We still haven’t solved this. Looking back at a conversation from six years ago, what stands out isn’t disagreement – it’s how hard it is to even name the problem we keep circling.

Over the last 20 years, again and again, the discussion slips into the same dead end: personal value versus social value, framed through the language of #dotcons platforms, followers, influence, and business growth. What we need to learn from this is the confusion isn’t accidental, it is structural.

What we need is not only #socialmedia value, not engagement, not visibility. But offline value that exists between people, over time, as shared culture, trust, memory, and capacity. The chicken-and-egg problem, people ask: “What personal value do I get from this?”, “Will this help my business?”, “Can I use this without it using me?”

We need to compost, this messy common sense path. This is why the #OMN project was never about optimising personal outcomes. That #blocking framing belongs to platform logic, the idea that every action must be measurable in reach, influence, growth, or return. This is why the posts, like the one embedded above, people found “hard to understand” weren’t speaking that language at all. It were articulating what the #mainstreaming was #blocking and thus missing from our tech culture: social value.

What is hard to communicate is that social value doesn’t work like our current common sense thinks it does. You don’t extract it first and then decide whether it was worth it. Social value only emerges after people act collectively, without clear personal payoff in advance. Yes, personal value does flow from social value. Skills, relationships, meaning, resilience, opportunity. But it’s indirect, uneven, and slow. That makes it almost invisible inside systems trained to ONLY prioritise immediate, individual reward.

That’s why the conversation keeps short-circuiting, one of the early questions was whether the posts were meant to “influence followers”. That already assumes a vertical model: speaker → audience → outcome.

But #OMN thinking starts from a different place. It’s not about influencing people. It’s about creating conditions where different kinds of interaction can happen – horizontally, over time, without a central controller. That’s why the work often looks vague, unfinished, or “omelette-like”. Cultural values can’t be shipped as a product. It has to be grown, maintained, and defended collectively.

#Facebook was a comfort trap in hindsight. In the thread, several people describe using it pragmatically: staying in touch, organising events, maintaining real-world relationships. All true, and still kinda true today. But the counter-point raised then has only become clearer since: you don’t get to opt out of being used, no matter how carefully you think you’re using the system.

The lock-in effect (“everyone is on it”) was already obvious. What was less visible to meany people than was how disastrously deeply this would shape behaviour, politics, culture, and attention – and how hard it would become to imagine alternatives once that infrastructure was taken for granted.

Why this was hard to hear at the time? This conversation shows how difficult it is to talk about non-market value inside market-dominated spaces. Language itself becomes a barrier. People reach for familiar metrics because they have no shared vocabulary for anything else. So the discussion stalls. People get frustrated. It feels circular. Someone says “find out for yourself”, another hears that as dismissal. Nobody is wrong in isolation, but the frame itself is broken.

What we can learn now? Six years on, a few things are clearer: Social value is real, but it’s slow, collective, and hard to quantify. #dotcons platforms systematically erase the conditions needed for social value to emerge. Personal value derived from social value is indirect, not extractive. You can’t explain this cleanly inside systems optimised against it. This wasn’t a failure of communication. It was an early signal that we were trying to grow an open, cultural infrastructure inside environments hostile to its very existence.

Now is time to work on the unfinished path… #OMN project was – and still is – about creating space for social value to exist again: shared media, shared process, shared governance, shared memory. That was hard to see then, it’s still hard to see now. But the confusion in this old thread isn’t embarrassing. It’s instructive. It shows exactly where the fault lines are, and why the work has always been hard, messy, slow, and necessary.

Some things only make sense after you start doing them together #KISS

The impulse, it’s not wrong. What is wrong is how often that anger gets misdirected sideways, inward, and downward instead of upward, toward actual power.

A lot of people who think of themselves as “radical” aren’t being radical at all. They’re being assholes with better language. Cancel culture in 2020 played a similar role to political correctness in the 1990s: a way to signal virtue, police behaviour, and avoid confronting real power.

An example of this – done right, a code of conduct isn’t a weapon. It’s not a piece of paper you use to beat people with. It’s a declaration that you will protect the people who actually need protection – from harassment, abuse, and structural harm.

Done wrong, rules become clubs. People pick them up and hit each other with them. The wording becomes vague, moralistic, and performative. The enforcement becomes selective. And suddenly “safety” is being used to silence any disagreement rather than defend the vulnerable.

That failure creates space for bad actors, conservatives step in and pretend they’re “speaking truth to power” or “defending free speech”, when what they’re really doing is exploiting the mess to protect the normal hierarchy and privilege. They’re not wrong that something’s broken – they’re wrong about what and why.

The behaviour being criticised isn’t a tribe. It’s a mode of thinking, a widespread, unspoken #postmodernism that still dominates contemporary discourse. A style of politics where everything is relative, language replaces material reality, and moral positioning matters more than any outcomes.

This thinking eats movements alive, it fragments people, replaces strategy with signalling, and turns accountability into spectacle. Most importantly, it redirects energy away from those actually using power. This is a dangerous moment because we no longer have a shared baseline of reality. The #mainstreaming narratives are designed to divide, distract, and trigger – pulling attention away from concrete demands and real accountability.

That didn’t come from nowhere, forty years of #neoliberal economics hollowed out material security. At the same time, generations were trained in postmodern academic frameworks that are excellent at critique but terrible at building shared ground. Strip out material analysis, strip out class, strip out power – and you’re left with vibes, identity skirmishes, and endless internal conflict.

That’s what #OMN has always been pointing toward: rebuilding social truth, shared process, and horizontal power in a culture trained to fragment itself. Without that, we keep fighting each other – and the #deathcult keeps winning.

What Did We Learn from Web3, Crypto?

Looking back from the mid-2020s, the arc of #web03, #NFTs, and blockchain culture is very clear. What once promised (lied about) decentralisation, liberation, and a break from corporate capture now looks like the same, mess, #techcurn pattern repeating itself, yes it had new language, new branding, but it was easy to see it had the same underlying mess making dynamics.

As these #geekproblem projects hollowed out, the signs became hard to ignore. The technical optimism faded, the user bases thinned, and the economic logic exposed itself. What followed was totally predictable: spin. Makeup and perfume slapped onto decaying projects to hide the smell of rot and exploitation. Rebrands. New narratives. New demographics. Same extraction. This was the outcome of building “liberation tech” on foundations that still centred virtical money, speculation, and power concentration.

With these projects we are now in the zombie phase, projects kept moving, kept talking, kept selling – long after the animating ideas had died. Influencers and promoters continued to perform belief, even as any substance drained away.

This is a few years when #fashionista culture met #encryptionist ideology – aesthetics and technical absolutism snogging the undead remnants of a failed #deatcult vision. The result wasn’t in any way decentralisation; it was a simply a new enclosure. People weren’t being freed, they were being financialised, the money problem #KISS

At the core was a simple structural truth: #dotcons feed on money. Put money in, influence comes out. That logic doesn’t disappear just because you wrap it in cryptography or decentralised rhetoric. “Bad actors” weren’t anomalies – they were following the incentives as designed. Aany social good becomes just collateral damage. This is why the lie collapsed in te end.

The deeper harm and problem with #techcurn is each wave claims to have fixed the problems of the last. But each wave reproduces them, because this is what works when worshiping a #deathcult. This isn’t just a failed tech trend, the #techcurn disparity, driven by extraction systems cause enormous human harm, displacing livelihoods, concentrating power, and amplifying inequality at planetary scale.

These systems don’t fail harmlessly, they fail onto people. That’s why the call isn’t just to “be critical,” but to step away – and help others step away too. Not through purity exits or individual moralising, but through collective paths back to technologies built for people rather than profit, life over zombies

There has always been another path: the #openweb. Messy, imperfect, slower, less glamorous, but grounded in shared infrastructure, social trust, and human-scale governance. The #OMN approach doesn’t promise salvation. It offers compost instead of speculation. Process instead of hype. People over tokens.

A note on hashtags: And yes, the hashtags matter. Click them., search for them. They cut sideways through algorithms – small back doors into less mediated, less controlled ways of seeing. Not a solution, but a crack in the wall.

The current #Ai hype bubble is repeating this mess with a little more useful #LLM functionality, but on top of this is a huge mess of #techchurn, which will need composting.

Observation: some people go into news to speak truth from power – using institutions to legitimise the status quo and defend the worship of the #deathcult.

Others speak truth to power – using journalism to expose, question, and challenge unequal power and its consequences.

Only one of those serves the public interest #KISS

A fashionista culture addicted to surface can’t change

Most of what the #fashionista fights and campaigns for, and expends endless energy on isn’t liberation, it’s unthinking equality in worshipping the #deathcult. The argument isn’t about whether the path is destructive. That’s quietly accepted ignored, inevitable, “just how things are.” The fight is about who gets included on the path, who gets representation, who gets a seat at the table – not about whether the table should exist, or whether it’s crushing everyone underneath it.

In this #mainstreaming, success means being allowed to participate in the same extractive systems, the same growth-at-all-costs economics, the same surveillance platforms, the same attention-harvesting tech, the same environmental destruction, as long as access is more “equal”, It’s little to do with emancipation, rather its about equal opportunity complicity.

This is how too often radical language gets emptied out, structural critique is replaced with branding. Power isn’t challenged; it’s redistributed symbolically. The mess keeps spreading, just with better covers and more diverse faces unrolling it.

The #fashionista mindset treats inclusion as the goal, rather than a first step for dismantling what is actually killing us. It can’t imagine stepping outside the current “safe” path, because its common sense value structure depends on recognition within it. The outcome? Dissent gets flattened into lifestyle, resistance becomes performance, politics becomes aesthetic alignment. And anyone who questions the underlying mess is treated as naive, impractical, or “not serious”.

But when the altar is poison, equal access to worship before it doesn’t make it less deadly. Real change means refusing to kneel to the altar itself, and that requires mess, conflict, loss of status, and building alternatives that don’t look good on a CV.

That’s why the #OMN path feels uncomfortable, unfashionable, and slow. It doesn’t offer better branding, it offers a way out. And in a culture addicted to surface, people can’t change, and thus refusing the #deathcult looks like heresy.

Chatsworth Rd: Stalls and Code

A DRAFT story about markets, misfits, and taking back the commons (Tagline: “They came for the avocados. They left with revolution.”)

by Hamish Campbell

Outline

THE MARKET STIRS

Chatsworth Rhythms

Setting the scene: It’s a Saturday in East London. The smell of jerk chicken, sourdough, and incense wafts over Chatsworth Road. A young stallholder, Luna (17), sells upcycled clothes and zines with radical poetry. Her best mate Jaz (18) roasts coffee in a converted horse trailer.

The street market has always been the soul of the area, but rent hikes, council interference, and #NGO co-option have worn everyone down. Traders are being squeezed. Street teams from the council show up to enforce arbitrary rules. One old vendor has a panic attack and is carted off.

A new app quietly arrives via a local anarcho-sysadmin named Mo, who says: “If you don’t write the rules, someone else will. Time to fork society.”

Enter the #OGB

The Open Governance Body app isn’t flashy – it’s command-line chic – but it gives people a voice and power through messy consensus-based decision-making.

At first, Luna is skeptical, more tech? More admin? But when she sees how traders start voting on layout, fees, and security, she joins. The app federates with other tools she’s already using, se is a bit of a geek (Pixelfed for promo, Lemmy for discussion).

They tag the system with #OGB, calling their movement “Open Trader Network” #OTN.

A new energy flows. People start collaborating across stalls. Rota for clean-up? Done via the app. Newcomer priority stalls? Voted in. It works. It’s messy, but it’s theirs.
THE SPRAWL

Nodes Spread

Other markets – Brixton, Ridley Road, Chapel – start installing OGB instances. Local flavours, same base. Word spreads via the Fediverse. A hashtag storm of #OMN blossoms across PeerTube vlogs and Mobilizon events.

Local food traders begin direct-networking across markets. No middlemen. No rent-seekers. One market hosts a “Reclaim the Tomato” day after a supply chain collapse – 1,000 people show up.

They aren’t waiting for permission any-more.

Media Panic

A Murdoch-owned paper runs a headline: “Markets Hijacked by Extremist App: ‘Digital Anarchists’ Threaten City Order.”

Talking heads say the traders are anti-business, anti-modern, anti-safety. A Guardian columnist calls it “well-meaning chaos” and suggests NGO mediation.

The mayor calls it “a dangerous precedent for public space management.” A government white paper proposes a ban on “unauthorised digital governance.”

Luna gets doxxed. Her hacked Instagram DMs are read out on GB News. Jaz’s trailer is graffitied. Mo is arrested during a dawn raid.
THE STALLS STRIKE BACK

The Communing

Traders unite across London. “Reclaim the streets”. We built this with our hands, our sweat, and our beans.” They go on strike, not by stopping, but by refusing to recognize council control.

The Fediverse lights up. Mastodon servers amplify local voices. A livestream on PeerTube shows a giant puppet of the mayor being pelted with rotten bananas.

Instead of retreating, people start federating public spaces. Parks, squats, skateparks, each with their own federated #OGB nodes.

Councils panic. The government attempts a DNS take down of #OGB. They don’t understand federation. Nothing central to ban.

Trust vs Control

Luna speaks at a huge public forum, “The Town Hall of the Streets,” organized via Mobilizon. “You can’t run a market on fear. You can’t govern people who trust each other. You can only try to sell them back what they already have.”

Jaz releases a viral zine: ‘We the Traders’ – a manifesto of federated life. It’s printed in three languages by Somali aunties on Ridley Road.
THE SHIFT

The Fall of the Gatekeepers

The mayor resigns after a leaked email shows collusion with private surveillance firms. A public audit reveals widespread misused funds and fake community consultations.

Instead of chaos, the federated markets flourish. An emerging culture of trust, transparency, and local flair grows to replaces the back peddling NGO management class.

Luna and Mo help to push the #OGB into schools and libraries. Jaz co-founds P2P hand to hand USB key decentralized delivery network using bike couriers.

New Normals

Final scene: Luna is now 21. She runs a stall at the market she helped free. The OGB screen is mounted next to her zines – open to everyone. A group of teenagers crowd around to vote on that week’s theme: Fruits, Freedom, or Future?

She smiles. The market hums. The commons holds.
Themes

StupidIndividualism vs #4opens #CollectivePower

Mainstreaming = control + fear Grassroots = trust + mess

Power is not seized, it is federated

If you can federate it, you can free it

The Story

Chapter One: Market Day

Luna arrived just after nine. Her stall was already half set up, two folding tables, a clothes rail, a crate of homemade zines, and a sign that read: Upcycled. Unowned. Unapologetic.

Chatsworth Road was busy. A steady flow of people moved past, hipsters, locals, tourists, and regulars from the nearby estates. The usual mix of food stalls, second-hand clothes, and bric-a-brac. A few of the traders nodded as she walked in.

She checked her phone. No messages. Good. She didn’t want a distraction. The last few weeks had been tense, rumours of new council inspections, talk of fees going up again. There was a meeting planned, but no one trusted the “consultation” process any more.

Jaz appeared from the stall opposite, a reused horse trailer turned coffee hatch. “Council are here,” he said, handing her a coffee. She looked down the street. Two officials in branded jackets stood near the fruit stall, checking tablets and talking quietly. They weren’t buying anything. “Third week in a row,” Luna said. “They’re looking for something to shut down,” Jaz replied. “Heard they’re targeting the people without formal pitch licenses.” Luna didn’t reply. She just took a sip of the coffee and turned back to her stall.

That’s when Mo showed up. No one really knew where he lived. He wasn’t a trader, but he was always around. People said he used to work in tech and walked out during the pandemic. He carried a laptop in his bag and ran a small, unofficial Wi-Fi network that half the market used without realising. He handed her a folded piece of paper. On it, a QR code and the words: OGB – open governance body – not an app – a process

“What is this?” she asked. “Tool for sorting things out. No bosses, no gatekeepers. You decide. You build.” She looked at him. “We already tried that. Committees. Petitions. Nothing changes.” “This isn’t for asking,” he said. “It’s for doing.” He turned and walked off. She scanned the code anyway.

What loaded was basic. A simple page, a login prompt, some instructions. Anyone with the link could register. Anyone could propose a change. Decisions were made collectively. Everything was logged and public. Later that day, someone proposed a rota for waste collection. Five people voted. Then ten. By the end of the day, the bins were sorted.

Luna didn’t say anything. But she noticed. Something had shifted.

Chapter Two: Something New

The next morning, Luna opened the stall before ten. Rain had passed in the night, and the tarmac still held patches of damp. She unzipped the plastic cover from her rail and checked the #OGB app on her phone. Six new proposals. Someone wanted to trial a shared delivery scheme. Someone else suggested swapping stalls once a month to mix things up. The waste rota from yesterday now had over thirty names. She didn’t say it out loud, but something felt different.

Jaz joined her a little later, dragging a crate of clean mugs and a half-repaired sandwich board. “People are talking,” he said. “Like, actually talking. Outside their stalls.” Luna nodded. She’d noticed too. Normally, people kept to themselves. Competition had a way of doing that – especially when everyone was fighting for a spot and a margin.

But today… She saw Fatima, who ran a fruit and veg stall at the corner. Usually quiet, head down, fast hands. She was standing with Andre, the secondhand tools guy, comparing stall layouts on their phones. Both were logged in to #OGB. “Fatima thinks we can make more space for walk-throughs if we stagger the setups,” Andre told her when she passed. “Easier for wheelchairs. More space for queues.”

“Is that on the app?” Luna asked. Andre held up his phone. “Second from the top. Vote’s still open.” On the other end of the street, Amina and her teenage sons, who sold hot food and chai under a big canvas awning, were chatting with Tom, who made hand-pulled noodles on a cart he wheeled in from Clapton each weekend. They were drawing lines in chalk on the pavement- marking a shared seating area.

By midday, the market felt different. Not louder, not busier. Just… more connected. Mo returned in the afternoon. He wasn’t alone this time. With him was Nari, a coder from the south side who ran a quiet Mobilizon server out of her housing co-op. She wore overalls, no expression, and carried a beat-up laptop covered in tape. “Looks like it’s working,” Mo said to Luna, glancing around. Nari added, “You’ll need moderation tools soon. Growth means friction.” Luna wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but she wrote it down.

Later, they held a loose meeting near the benches outside the community hall. Jaz made coffee. Someone brought leftover samosas. Luna recognised a dozen faces, but others were new, people from other markets who’d heard what was happening and wanted to learn more. “We tried this in Tower Hamlets,” said one, a woman named Grace who sold second-hand electronics. “Council shut it down in three weeks. Said it was ‘disruptive to existing partnerships.’” “We’re not asking this time,” Mo replied.

Chapter Three: federate and Spread

By the third weekend, the idea had started to move. It began with a quiet message from a stallholder at Ridley Road, posted in the OGB working group: “Could we copy this setup? Our traders are fed up too. Same rules. Same threats. We want in.” No one said no. That was the point. Mo added a note in the main thread: “Just install it. Each market’s a node. Connect when you’re ready. Shared values, local control.”

Within days, there were new #OGB instances in Brixton, Wood Green, and Walthamstow. Different template layouts, different needs, same code, same network. A delivery driver named Eli helped hook up the networks. He already had a route between Ridley and Hackney and started shuttling hardware and surplus goods between markets. “No middlemen,” he said. “No #dotcons apps taking 30%.”

Meanwhile, Tasha, a baker from Camden Lock, joined the Chatsworth group to learn how the app was being used. “We’ve had five layers of management and three rounds of ‘consultation’ this year,” she said. “No one’s actually listened to a trader since 2009.” At the edges of the council bureaucracy, a few people noticed what was happening. Ravi, a junior urban planning officer in Hackney Council, joined one of the #OGB meetings under his personal account. “This isn’t bad policy,” he said one evening, voice calm, camera off. “It’s just outside the frame they allow for. You’re building governance, not just feedback. That scares people.”

Luna watched the comments scroll. More users joined every day. She couldn’t always tell who was a trader, who was a tech, who was just watching. Then came the backlash. The first article appeared in a small industry newsletter: “Traders adopt rogue decision-making platform. Officials express concern over legality.” No byline. But it was picked up.

By the following week, a local tabloid ran a front page: “MARKET ANARCHY: Hackney Traders Reject Council, Use Shadow App” Inside, it quoted an anonymous “source close to the mayor” calling the movement “dangerous, divisive, and incompatible with good governance.”

A blog on a tech site posted screenshots from #OGB, mocking its “ugly interface” and “pseudo-utopian design language.” On Twitter, a property developer called it “the return of squatters with QR codes.” Then came the calls.

A reporter door steeped Jaz’s trailer pretending to be a customer. When he found out she was press, he shut the hatch and texted Luna: “It’s starting. They want a villain.”

Mo went dark for a few days. Nari added new permission layers to the Chatsworth instance. Luna started getting strange DMs.

But at the same time… more people joined. A group from a Sunday farmers’ market in Lewisham wanted advice. A kids’ clothes collective in Tottenham asked for templates. A new Mobilizon event popped up titled: “Decentralised Governance for Public Space: How To Not Get Co-Opted.”

Even a quiet email arrived, from a .gov.uk address. A policy advisor, asking for a demo.

Chapter Four: We Write the Story

The storm didn’t slow them down. If anything, it made things clearer. At the next open meeting – hosted outside the old library building – over 40 people showed up. Stallholders, musicians, artists, teachers, kids. Even two students who said they were “just here to help document.” Luna stood at the edge, watching as Nari connected her laptop to the projector powered by a battered solar rig.

The screen flickered to life: OGB – Chatsworth Node Active proposals: 14 Active users: 312 Linked nodes: 5

“This is not a platform,” Nari said, addressing the group without looking up. “It’s a process. A tool to federate trust.” She explained how it worked: Anyone trough trust paths can propose an action or change. The community decided what threshold of agreement was needed – majority, consensus, rotating moderation. Anyone could fork the process, by federation if trust brakes down. No lock-in, no central server. Every action is transparent and archived. You could see who voted, when, and how. Linked markets can share decisions, or stay autonomous.

“Messy? Yes,” Nari said. “But it’s our mess.” A few heads nodded. Others typed silently on their phones. Jaz leaned over to Luna. “Better than three forms and a six-week wait for someone to move a bin.” She half-smiled. Truth. And not just metaphorically.

The local sanitation crew, led by a bin worker named Kev, who’d grown up nearby – started attending meetings in plain clothes. He said the market folks were easier to work with than “the suited managers upstairs.” “We just want to know the plan,” Kev shrugged. “If your app tells us where the blockages are, saves us wasting time, why wouldn’t we check it?”

Soon after, Luna spotted a uniformed officer, PC Daoud, off-duty but listening quietly by the coffee cart. He was local. Born three streets over. Later, he reached out through a private chat: “They’re watching you from HQ, but… not all of us think this is wrong. Safer with eyes on it, than locked out.”

Meanwhile, Ravi, the junior urban planning officer who’d joined under a pseudonym, kept feeding small insights back. “Your bin heatmap tool? We copied it at the council. Quietly. Everyone thinks it’s one of ours.”

A local Green councillor, Tanya Okeke, asked to speak at the next open forum. She didn’t try to claim credit. She just said: “Look, we’ve been told this is insurrection. But if the system doesn’t listen, it’s not treason to talk to each other. It’s survival. You’re building what we’ve only talked about.” Her speech was posted to PeerTube, captioned and translated into three languages. The title:“Commons, Not Chaos.”

As pressure mounted in the press, the group shifted strategy: stop reacting – start broadcasting. Zey, who ran a handmade electronics stall and freelanced in media activism, suggested reaching out to the Fediverse project @indymediaback@fedi.town. “They’ve been tracking grassroots stuff – library occupations, community gardens, Palestine solidarity encampments. If they cover us, we get a different signal out.”

Mo sent the message. Within 24 hours, the story appeared on a Mobilizon event and in a long-form post on Lemmy:

“London’s Markets Are Forking Power: How #OGB Is Building the Next Commons” re-posted on Mastodon, PeerTube, WriteFreely. Translated into Spanish and Somali overnight

The response was instant. People from Glasgow, Bristol, even Milan and Athens boosted the post. Small markets in other cities started federated instances. A public librarian in Sheffield messaged: “Could we use this to run our building? The council wants to close it.”

Within days, Luna noticed a shift in tone online. Instead of only backlash, there were now defenses. When trolls came for Jaz on the #dotcons, people linked to their #OGB instance logs. When tabloids mocked the process, someone posted a PeerTube video:“A Day in the Market: Democracy Without Permission.”

It went semi-viral. Not huge. But enough.

The new #Indymediaback project started running updates daily – short, factual, sometimes poetic:

No central server to ban. No single leader to smear. No funding stream to freeze. Just 500 stalls and a growing idea: You don’t need permission to care for your commons.

Even Luna’s mum forwarded it to her. “Did you really build this?” she’d texted. Luna didn’t reply straight away. She just walked back to her stall, opened the app, and voted on a new proposal: Shared Childcare Tent for Saturdays. proposal by: Ana Status: Under Discussion

She tapped yes.

Chapter Five: Dirty Hands in Clean Suits

They should have seen it coming. The tabloids had been circling for weeks, sniffing for a headline. But nothing prepared them for the full-page hit in the Daily Spectacle:

“LONDON MARKETS TAKEN OVER BY ‘DIGITAL ANARCHISTS’ – IS YOUR NEIGHBOR A CYBER-COMMIE?”

Beneath the headline: a grainy photo of Jaz, pouring coffee. Under it, the caption: “Suspected organiser of secret tech cell controlling local economy via encrypted app.”

By midday, it was everywhere. Morning radio shows. Facebook rants. A YouTube grifter livestreaming outside the market, yelling about “foreign influence and crypto-fascism.”

Zey laughed bitterly. “We built a rota system. They think it’s a coup.”

But the damage was calculated, not random.

Kev, the bin crew lead, got called into an HR disciplinary. Accused of “coordinating with unauthorised software.”Ravi’s council account was suspended. PC Daoud disappeared from group chat. Silent.

Worse: a rumour started spreading that the #OGB app was foreign-funded. A #AI disinformation video, made to look like a BBC investigation, appeared on multiple right-wing Alt-news channels. It claimed the Chatsworth node was a front for “globalist collapse networks.” The comment wars were endless.

Then came the real blow. The Council filed a cease-and-desist against the “unauthorised operation of a parallel governance system.” A legal attack – framed in the language of cybercrime. It felt ridiculous, but real. Meetings got quieter. Some traders unplugged from the app. A few pulled out entirely, scared of losing their stalls.

That night, Luna stayed up redrafting a new info page on their WriteFreely site. Simple questions. Plain answers.

Is this legal? Mostly. We’re exercising coordination rights.

Is this funded? No. It’s free software, run by volunteers.

Is this dangerous? Not compared to rent increases, evictions, and ignored flooding protocols.

Meanwhile, Tanya Okeke – the Green councillor – stood up in the local chamber. She named names. Quoted logs. Challenged the smear. “This isn’t lawlessness. It’s governance. Just not yours.”

Clips from her speech hit the Fediverse hard. Boosted by thousands. Translated again and again. One remix turned it into a sound collage set to ambient loops. Zey uploaded it to PeerTube with the title: “Not Yours. Not Theirs. Ours.”

But behind the scenes, the team realised they needed to outpace the attack. Nari inviting the voices of linked markets to strategies. They met inside the app: voice, chat, notes, no hierarchy.

The Tottenham node suggested creating a #OMN redundancy both client server and p2p backup – so if one #OGB instance was taken offline, others could host its decisions and links. Peckham proposed a “data mirroring agreement” – a kind of mutual aid treaty for code. Brixton offered safe hosting outside the UK. Someone from Berlin, unknown but kind, added:

“We’ve seen this before. They attack what they can’t centralise.” The network shifted. Morphed – like roots growing deeper, not taller. They weren’t building a protest any more. They were building infrastructure. And infrastructure doesn’t panic.

Chapter Six: The Glitch Spreads

At first, it was silence. Jaz closed her stall for the first time in four years. Said it was “temporary.” Said she needed to repaint the sign. But the truth was – she couldn’t face the constant stream of customers, each one asking with cautious eyes, “What’s going on with the market thing?”

Nari’s hands shook every time her phone buzzed. She stopped answering unless it was from Zey or Mo. Even then, it took her a few seconds to breathe through it.

Luna, usually the glue, barely slept. The pressure to hold everything together crushed down hard. She’d started avoiding the app entirely – dreading what new node might go dark, what legal thread might appear next.

Mo was the only one who tried to keep spirits up. He showed up to the remaining market days with a battered Bluetooth speaker playing irish toons. But even he moved a little slower. Like the weight of watching his friends break apart was catching up.

One by one, they all started drifting into the library #OGB node’s voice calls. No pressure. No cameras. Just people talking while they made dinner, folded clothes, or sat in the bath. If, the librarian, hosted most nights. Her calm voice grounding people like a soft metronome.

Then came the call from Brixton. A full-blown solidarity strike. Not just markets – garden co-ops, transit collectives, even a radical postal network built on cargo bikes. They didn’t ask for permission. They just paused operations for 48 hours and posted one shared message: “We are infrastructure. We are people. We do not consent to digital feudalism.”

The message rippled. Peckham’s print collective turned it into a broadsheet. A primary school teacher in Camden reworded it into a children’s chant. The remix scene on PeerTube exploded with glitchcore and spoken-word overlays.

Still, the state struck back. New legislation was proposed overnight: the Secure Networks and Commons Compliance Bill. The language was vague but brutal: all decentralised software operating in civic contexts had to be registered, monitored, and approved.

No app could be autonomous. No node could be unlicensed. No commons could exist without a gatekeeper.

Tanya, the Green councillor, sounded near-broken when she spoke to Luna on a late-night call. “They’re scared. Not of you. Of the idea of you. That people might govern themselves and… not miss the masters.”

The crew met again, properly, for the first time in weeks. Not in the café, not in the app, but in the back of Jaz’s shut stall. They sat on crates and pallets. Mo passed round lukewarm tea. Jaz: “We can’t stop. We don’t stop.” Zey: “They’ll ban it. The app, the nodes, all of it.” Nari: “Then we roll out the #p2p code based on #dat”

Luna looked at the group. “Let’s not fight them on their terms. Let’s remind people what this actually is. Let’s roll out the update and hope it scales. then we push out the archive Logs, decisions documenting the forks, mistakes. People can see for themselves.”

That night, they began the fdroid app updates everything to the public. #Indymediaback picked it up immediately. “A river of the real. Too messy to fake. Too decentralised to stop.” The story tipped.

One morning, Jaz opened her phone to find her stall tagged in a new post: Solidarity from Nairobi Street Markets “You gave us the code. We’re giving it breath. #OGB #CommonsRising”

And then another. Athens Free Libraries Federation: “We have adopted the OGB. The glitch lives here too.”

And another. Rio Food Collectives: “We don’t just consume. We decide.”

Then came the real shock. A direct message, unsigned but traceable to a junior policy analyst at the Mayor’s Office: “There are those inside who still believe in public good. Hold the line.”

Then the signal app buzzed. An unlisted call. Luna answered. A voice whispered: “They’re going to try something tomorrow. Big. Broadcast. Legal theatre. Endgame move.”

Luna didn’t speak. Just listened. And when the call ended, she turned to the crew, breath shallow. “They’re going to break us tomorrow.”

Chapter Seven: The Turning Tide

The broadcast hit at 9am sharp. Every major news channel, every tabloid site. The Mayor, flanked by top advisors, stepped up to the mic. Behind them: the seal of the City of London and a projection of the OGB interface – screen-grabbed and labelled like a crime scene.

“These so-called ‘commons apps’ are a threat to public safety, economic stability, and national cohesion. We are initiating emergency take down procedures effective immediately.”

The speech was surgical. Calm. Laced with that special kind of power-polish only years of spin could achieve. And for a while, it worked.

Federated servers running key hubs of the OGB infrastructure began going dark. Hosting providers were pressured, DNS entries revoked. Even mirrors went quiet. The central fedivers network affectionately called the (something outa the antiglobalisation movement) – collapsed under legal threats.

It was chaos.

Jaz stared at her screen. “Everything’s gone. Even the backups.”

Zey slammed their laptop shut. “No. Just the core nodes. Not everything.”

Because the p2p update had gone live.

Quietly, while the press spun stories of a digital insurgency, hundreds of nodes had been switching over to the new peer-to-peer version, built on DAT tech, now called ogb.glitch. Not flashy. Not fast. But immune to takedown.

The main interfaces failed, but the side-channels kept talking, which refilled the main channels. With the #OMN rebuilding from offline backups, all the history started creeping back in over #p2p flows.

Food moved. Stalls opened. People came. And then… reinforcements arrived. Not in tanks or protests. In voices.

Whistleblowers. Junior coders from city IT teams. Delivery drivers. Public sector workers who still had root access to blocked networks. They began helping, quietly. Restoring mesh links in routers. Leaking internal memos. Sharing legal drafts before they hit Parliament.

Inside the Mayor’s office, dissent flared. And then something unprecedented happened. A large bloc of Labor Councillors defected – publicly. In an emergency assembly livestreamed across the city, they announced their resignation from the party and joined forces with the Greens and a new wave of independent civic actors. Their statement was clear:

“This is not about politics-as-usual. This is about the survival of democracy at the roots. We’re joining the commons.”

Under pressure from the split, and fearing a total collapse in support, the Mayor began to back-pedal. A new press release appeared mid-afternoon: “We will open consultation with representatives from the community tech sector and ensure any future frameworks include space for secure, citizen-led platforms.” It wasn’t a full retreat. But it was a crack.

And then came the final blow of the day. A snap national election was announced. Leaked from within Westminster, the story ran that the central government wanted to force a mandate – betting that fear of chaos would swing voters back to the center.

But on the streets, the story felt different. Jaz opened her stall again. Nari reloaded the Chatsworth node log. Zey smiled for the first time in days. The OGB network was flickering back to life – not everywhere, but enough.

Luna posted a new message: “You cant kill the spirit. She is like a mountain. She goes on and on… You can’t kill the spirit…”

Chapter Eight: The Open Reboot

Nari was the first to notice it. She had left her node monitor running overnight, expecting another flatline. But by morning, the logs were scrolling too fast to read. Not just London. Not even just the UK.

“ActivityPub traffic’s exploding,” she whispered. “Look at this… Barcelona. Lagos. Detroit. Christchurch. They’re all lighting up.”

The Fediverse had caught fire, but not in the usual way. This wasn’t drama or celebrity implosions. It was coordination. Real-time.

The Indymedia nodes were leading the charge, stitched into the #OMN backbone. The vibe was different from the chaotic, scandal-hungry timelines of the old #dotcons socialweb. These feeds were dense with practical updates: water access, mutual aid, cooperative building, market logistics. Livestreams from collective kitchens. Meshnet maps scrawled with handwritten overlays.

No algorithms. No trending tab. Just relevance through #hashtag trust and federation flows.

Zey leaned over Nari’s screen, watching a stream from a collective farm outside Athens coordinate crop deliveries with a London market co-op via a shared calendar. “This is… not small,” they said, almost reverently. Jaz pulled her phone from her apron, scrolling through updates from the streets.

“Paris sanitation unions using OGB noids.” “Madrid school collectives switch to federated class planning.” “Buenos Aires: street markets double size with #4opens logistics.”

The old dotcons – Facebook, Twitter (or whatever it was called this week), Uber-style delivery platforms, felt suddenly… quiet. Like abandoned malls. Still shiny, still there, but irrelevant. Their hold broken.

Even the mainstream news had started to shift. Faced with plummeting engagement and embarrassing public walkouts – editors, field reporters, even weather presenters quitting live on air- several legacy outlets began syndicating from the Indymedia feeds. At first they laughed it off. Called it “citizen novelty content.” But views followed function, and soon those grassroots stories outperformed everything else.

Inside the Mayor’s office, the cracks deepened. A quiet resignation from their comms director. A leaked photo of mid-level staffers working on a community garden run entirely via OGB logistics. A memo, never meant for the public, outlining contingency plans for joining the Green coalition if the polls swung harder.

And swing they did. Not toward a party. Toward a way. OGB was no longer just a tool. It was becoming a nervous system – a messy, redundant, unpolished one – but alive. And more importantly, trusted.

New alliances emerged daily. Regional collectives began interlinking through shared trust agreements. The federated school system in Madrid synced timetables with similar networks in São Paulo and Cape Town. It wasn’t perfect. But it didn’t need to be.

Zey closed their laptop and stood up. “We need a new stall. Not for food. For onboarding.” “And a kids’ area,” Jaz added. “They’re all using it anyway. Might as well teach them how it works.” Nari smiled. “The school across the street already federated their lunch program.” Luna sent the updates, tagged simply: #OpenWebRising

Chapter Nine: The Grasping Hand

It began with meetings. Lots of them. Invitations rolled in – some polite, some not. Government task forces. EU think tanks. UN tech forums. Ministry of Culture round tables. Suddenly everyone wanted a word with the crew, or with whoever they could scrape up as a “representative” of the OGB network.

“They want to help us scale,” Nari said flatly, deleting another email flagged ‘URGENT – INNOVATION PARTNERSHIP REQUEST.’

“They want to define us,” Luna muttered. “Then box us in.”

Some groups accepted. Older cooperatives, city-level digital officers, cautious nonprofit administrators, people tired from decades of struggle who welcomed a place at the new table, even if the table was being carried into the old halls of power.

Others resisted. Young collectives in Naples and Glasgow. Feminist tech crews in Kerala. Rooftop data gardens in Seoul. They rewrote the invites into public callouts. Every attempt to co-opt became a meme. Every attempt to regulate sparked a protest.

Jaz read aloud from a new decree the UK government had just published: “All public-facing federated applications must adhere to the National Digital Standards (2026 Revised), under supervision of the Central Technical Authority.”

Zey spat their tea. “So basically, sign over root access or get censored.”

The backlash wasn’t just legal. Media narratives tightened like a noose. Stories started to appear on major channels: Are Kids at Risk in Unregulated Fediverse Zones? Markets or Mobs? A Deep Dive into OGB’s Hidden Influence. New Terror Frontiers: Decentralised Networks and National Security.

Nari traced the story metadata. Half were ghostwritten by PR firms with ties to legacy telcos and tech investment groups. One came from an ex-OGB supporter who had jumped ship to a consultancy firm, now touting “digital demobilisation strategies.”

Then came the leak. An encrypted drop dumped anonymously onto several Indymedia nodes, verified by multiple journalists. Internal documents from the Department for Digital Oversight. Operation MIDAS: a coordinated plan to infiltrate key nodes, identify moderators, coerce ISPs, and trigger selective service outages.

The plan was simple: make the #openweb look unreliable, chaotic, and unsafe. Kill it with concern.

But the OGB network had matured. Node redundancy flows kicked in. The client servers built on a cluster of tech donated by old mutual aid infrastructure – wobbled under pressure but didn’t fall. Peer-to-peer overlays picked up the slack.

And then the unexpected happened. One of the whistleblowers was a senior architect at the National Infrastructure Cloud. They published a post on their federated account: “I’m done. They want to break what works just to keep control.”

Within hours, more followed. An education official from Bristol. A Berlin public transport scheduler. A junior Labour MP.

Then came the move. Labour fracturing agen openly, with a sizable Green coalition forming in Parliament. The Mayor spinning in press briefings, suddenly praising the creativity and resilience of the very projects she tried to regulate.

“We’re not stopping,” Zey said, eyes fixed on the code syncing across the screen. “They came for the network, and now the network is everywhere.”

Jaz nodded. “So what’s next?”

Nari smiled, voice low but clear.

“Now, we govern ourselves.”

Chapter Ten: Patterns of the Possible

The election came and went, but this time, something stuck. Not just new parties in power or familiar faces in different suits. What stuck was the refusal to return to the old rules. A hung Parliament forced new coalitions, but the Fediverse didn’t wait for permission.

Instead, it started governing. Not by decree, but by social trust flows building affinity groups of action.

Nari had been helping coordinate a cross-continental working group: meshnet devs in Montreal, sanitation unions in Mumbai, childcare cooperatives from Lisbon to Dakar. Their shared thread? How to federate decision-making without creating another hierarchy.

“Think grassroots, not top-down,” Luna said during a session broadcast on a rotating PeerTube instance. “Each node autonomous, but interoperable. Each accountable to the commons it serves.”

Cities joined not through deals, but through example. When Warsaw adopted the OGB stack to rebuild their transit planning, local fediverse nodes lit up with more nabourhood noids. Bangkok rewrote its urban flood protocols with open consultation channels, built directly into #Mastodon forks. A co-op in Johannesburg started exporting surplus energy via federated agreements, skipping their failing national grid entirely.

Jaz had started hosting live streaming (name of app?) weekly onboarding sessions at the old market stall – now more like a civic tech info booth. Kids ran federated games in the background while elders plotted data sovereignty campaigns between tea rounds.

“Feels like we’re writing a new horizontal constitution,” said Zey, watching a real-time map of global assemblies syncing through #OMN nodes.

But pressure still loomed. Old institutions tried to reassert dominance by offering ‘partnerships’ – always with terms. The World Bank launched a slick clone of the OGB platform called CivicBridge, complete with consultants and paywalled toolkits. Big Tech spun up their own “decentralised” pilots, riddled with telemetry hooks and dark patterns.

They underestimated the cultural shift. The new networks weren’t just tech, they were communities. Stories. Rituals of care and collective memory. Indymedia Globle ran a week-long series documenting how sewer workers in Mexico City and pirate radio collectives in Jakarta were in the face of #climatechaos federating disaster response protocols. Their slogan trended: “Infrastructure is Culture.”

Nari’s phone beeped, an alert from the assembly. Over 200 cities now federated under the wide #OGB commons protocols. Not aligned. Not ruled. Not centralised. Federated.

“We’re not exporting a model,” she reminded the crew. “We’re sharing patterns.” That night, under a protest-lit sky in downtown Berlin, Jaz took the mic at a solidarity gathering. “We said we’d take back the tools. Now we’re taking back the systems. Not to own them, but to share them.” The crowd responded, not with chants, but with synced updates. Nodes joining. Agreements forged. Decisions passed. Solidarity – not just spoken, but #4opens coded in.

Chapter Eleven: Friends in Strange Places

The billionaires didn’t know what to do with themselves. After a decade of preaching disruption, they now found themselves disrupted. No more keynote spots at summits that mattered. No new killer app – no app at all. Instead: a patchwork of community servers running software they couldn’t monetise, speaking in languages they hadn’t designed, powered by motivations they couldn’t understand.

Yet they tried. Burning Man came early that year. The usual desert cathedrals of ego and LED spiritualism, now rebranded as “decentralised renaissance zones.” A luxury dome near the core had a banner reading: “Protocols, Not Platforms: Sponsored by [REDACTED VENTURE FIRM].”

Two of the old tech bros flew in by private jet – posturing green. One of them, bearded and barefoot in designer hemp, had once founded a payment system that almost became a country. Now he waxed lyrical about “post-capitalist flows” while livestreaming to three million followers from a satellite uplink. “We really believe in empowering local nodes,” he said in a lavish conference panel. “That’s why we’re partnering with the new movement.” They weren’t.

Newspeak House in London – once a haunt for civic hackers and well-meaning technocrats, had become the scene of cautious negotiation. Some institutional figures, even legacy MPs, were genuinely curious. A few came humbly, asking real questions. Others came to shape, contain, co-opt.

Jaz was there one rainy Thursday for a panel: “Civic Tech and the Future of Infrastructure.” Zey sat beside her, arms folded. One of the billionaire emissaries stood to speak, a familiar face from old TED Talks. He gestured at the OGB graph on the wall like it was a product roadmap. “If we can integrate these primitives into an API layer, we could offer interoperability with enterprise cloud infrastructure. That way, everyone wins.”

Zey spoke before Jaz could. “You mean, you win. And we get eaten.” There was an awkward silence. “No thanks,” Jaz added. “We’re not here to scale into your stack. We’re here to compost it.”

Not everyone agreed. Some nodes, overwhelmed by demand or enticed by money and promises, signed conditional partnerships. These versions of the tools were slicker, smoother, branded, but neutered. Governance became consultation. #4opens paths closed. Trust mechanisms obfuscated.

Yet the originals held. Because the people did.

Burning Man ended. The jets left. Newspeak House emptied. And across the globe, the federated stack kept growing. Farmers in Kenya negotiating water rights. Street medics in Argentina syncing training protocols with ones in Oakland. Not corporate alliances. Not NGO frameworks. People-to-people federations.

And the tech bros? They tried to fork the culture. They built metaverse shells with fake local nodes and NFT-based “trust” metrics. But no one came. Not really. Because in a world rebuilt on shared care, scarcity wasn’t the incentive any more. Instead, the question was: who do you stand with? And in that question, the old guard had no real answer.
Chapter Twelve: Boring is Beautiful

By the third year, the #OGB was no longer a revolution. It was plumbing. Most people didn’t even think about it anymore, the same way they didn’t think about water or traffic lights – until they failed. But the #OGB rarely did. It became infrastructure, boring in the best possible way.

Neighbourhood assemblies ran housing cooperatives, not protests. Food systems got coordinated via federated databases. Bin routes were optimised by bin workers, energy flows managed collectively across districts. Boring.

The chaos of old politics still flared, of course, especially in the pockets that resisted federation. But the heat was moving elsewhere. One by one, the institutions gave in. First, local councils turned into administrative shells. Then national ministries started shifting budgets into federated pools managed by #OGB commons councils. These new councils weren’t elected in the old sense, they were sortated, accountable, traceable, transparent. Public because they were of the public.

The old moneyed institutions didn’t collapse – they became largely irrelevant. Legacy banks became pass-through entities, little more than number brokers. Governments still taxed, but now most of the flows went directly into regional UBI funds.

Yes, UBI.

That fight had taken years, and a hundred little cracks in the dam. A municipal pilot here. A federated pension scheme there. Arguments on Mastodon. Policy simulations in lemme forums. But then the German #OGB node rolled out full civic UBI through local OGB-led budgeting assemblies. The results were impossible to ignore.

Other cities followed. Amsterdam. Porto. Ljubljana. Then the flood came. Finland, the Basque region, parts of Scotland, then across the Nordics and beyond. Europe blinked and found itself running on mutual aid, solidarity, not scarcity.

The UBI model wasn’t controlled by a central authority. It was grassroots: managed at the scale of trust. Reputation networks ensured contributions and allocations stayed human. When people needed more, they applied – publicly, with dignity – and the working groups and assemblies debated. Some rejected the overhead. Others embraced the slowness, the care. Nobody called it innovation anymore. It was just… life.

But one challenge had always loomed: climate chaos.

At first, the federated stack was used to mitigate. Crisis mapping for floods. Open wildfire response networks. P2P air quality monitors in every city block. It started with adaptation, but shifted to action.

The OGB-led assemblies began coordinating beyond cities, beyond borders. Coastal regions aligned rewilding corridors. Mountainous communities bartered forest stewardship planting. Urban districts replaced extractive zoning with regenerative planning. And every change was federated, transparent, accountable, participatory.

Collective needs, not individual wants, shaped the path. The tipping point came when the South Pacific nodes federated with Arctic indigenous councils. Resource justice became planetary. And in the vacuum of failed global summits, the OGB stack quietly built an actual Earth Council – nothing symbolic, just sync’d infrastructure.

Jaz had stepped back from the frantic coordination. She now ran a community garden and handled seasonal budget meetings. Zey published oral histories of the uprising. Nari split her time between digital infra upkeep and playing chess with kids at the market.

“Feels like we made bureaucracy human again,” said Luna during a walk through what used to be city hall.

“Not bureaucracy,” corrected Nari. “Just… responsibility.”

Even the language had changed. Words like ‘user’ and ‘citizen’ blurred into ‘participant.’ Budgets weren’t funding lines; they were care trails. And no one talked about overthrowing power anymore. They just… rerouted it.

Epilogue: A Timeline of Change

2025 — First informal test of the #OGB prototype at Chatsworth Road Market. It works. People notice.

2026 — Federation spreads across local markets. Media backlash. Right-wing outrage. Solidarity deepens.

2027 — Fediverse tools interlink: IndymediaBack, Lemmy, Mastodon. Clinter servers falter, P2P survives.

2028 — Council staff, green politicians, and unionised workers adopt #OGB practices. Local budgets begin to federate.

2029 — Labour Party split. Early UBI experiments. Rise of regional assemblies and open public audits.

2030 — Climate response protocols. Flood and fire networks. Coordinated rewilding. First Earth Council node.

2031–2032 — Global federation gains momentum. Traditional parties hollowed out. Banks reduced to number brokers. UBI becomes policy across multiple states.

2033 — #OGB no longer a tool of rebellion. Now, it’s how we manage shared life.

And the spark?

A windswept Saturday morning. A broken-down council stall. A handful of stubborn traders, a tangle of extension cords. And an idea too obvious not to work:

“Why don’t we just run it ourselves?”

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory/wiki/Story+-+Oxford%3A+Going+with+The+Flow.-