The worst parts of people and society – fear, greed, envy, control – are self-reinforcing. They act as feedback loops in a broken sound system: shrieking, distorting, drowning out all nuance is the signal-to-noise issue we need to mediate. The problem is that some people feed on this noise. The media amplifies it. Social networks algorithmically reward it. This cycle of breaking – where outrage breeds more outrage, where mistrust deepens isolation, and where competition crushes collaboration – is an act of destruction. It corrodes relationships, communities, and in the end our capacity to imagine a better world.
We see this every day:
Clickbait headlines that fuel division because rage gets more views than reason.
Politicians who stoke fear to gain power, scapegoating the most vulnerable.
Tech platforms that extract attention through anxiety and reward extremism.
Economic systems that pit workers against each other, just to survive.
To compost this mess, we have to do the opposite to this current “common sense”: to normalize and nourish the best parts of people and society, trust, generosity, curiosity, empathy. When these values are much more visible, practiced, and shared, people can feed on hope instead of despair. This cycle of creation builds, it doesn’t break. It connects, it doesn’t divide. Examples of composting:
Mutual aid groups during crises, where strangers organize to care for one another without waiting for permission or profit.
Community-run media that uplifts real voices, telling stories not as commodities but as threads in a shared tapestry.
Free software movements built not on scarcity and control but on abundance and sharing.
Occupy kitchens, copwatch collectives, local food co-ops, and even open-source libraries — all rooted in the principle: we are stronger together.
The problem is capitalism, in its current form, is a system founded on the worst instincts, it glorifies greed, promotes fear, breeds control, and accumulates power in the hands of the #nastyfew. It at long last now be obverse that it is a system that thrives on destruction – of nature, of community, of meaning.
In contrast, socialism and anarchism, at their best, are grounded in trust, solidarity, and hope. They offer frameworks for cooperation without coercion, for shared abundance, for bottom-up resilience. These are not utopias – they are gardens. Messy, real, and alive. They root us in better soil – the kind where the seeds of collective flourishing can actually grow.
We do need to stand, together, shovels in our hands. The world is breaking, but we are not powerless. The mess is here, let’s not run from it, let’s work to compost it. Let’s build from the rot something rich, something wild, rooted, and real.
What do we balance this with? The #OMN projects – short for Open Media Network – are not a brand, not a platform, and not a startup. They’re a loosely coordinated, commons-rooted pathway emerging from the native #openweb trajectory. They’re aimed at building a livable media ecology, that grows from open-source ethics, affinity-based social organization, and federated infrastructure rather than enclosure, extractivism and spectacle.
Rather than falling into the traps of heroic dev culture or platform monoculture, #OMN treats tech as an ensemble process: modular, collectively maintainable, and explicitly oriented toward mutual coordination and deliberation, not content flow or engagement metrics. It’s tech that refuses to pretend it’s neutral.
The point is not digital for digital’s sake. These networks are meant to scaffold on-the-ground, hybrid practices – to support real-world collective activity, embedded presence, and the messy, rhythmic back-and-forth of embodied organizing.
Unlike most open-source projects that depend on the labour of isolated overcommitted maintainers (and collapse when they burn out), #OMN foregrounds shared stewardship and viscous governance – avoiding the trap of what is aptly called #stupidindividualism. This is code with a metabolism, not code as artifact.
Philosophically, #OMN differs from most “tech for good” efforts by refusing to detach “technology” from semiotic infrastructure. Defaults, interfaces, metaphors, these aren’t just UI choices; they’re interpretive compressions that shape how collectives think, decide, and remember.
So the stakes are high. Latency pressures, whether social, cognitive, or computational, have to be designed for, not ignored. That means systems that scaffold deliberation, not shortcut it. That means treating the commons as composed, not given, building stacks that help ensembles hold interpretive tension instead of collapsing into fast consensus or false clarity.
In short: #OMN is infrastructure for the kind of world where #4opens matters. It’s a path to build tech that metabolizes collective meaning-making under conditions of mortal constraint. Not because it’s ideal – but because it’s necessary.
#Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic system, it’s a cult of self-enclosure. Its superpower? #stupidindividualism, turning people inward, away from shared life, into isolated fragments clicking, swiping, and scrolling through ruins. It disconnects us from collective being, and then sells the pieces back as “individual freedoms.” This isn’t an accident. It’s the plan, a trick of enclosure, take a concept of civic breakdown and turn it into a moral failing of the person, not the system. A classic #deathcult move.
Let’s call it what it is #stupidindividualism = the neoliberal condition of enclosure. A social operating system designed to lock us into self-referential survival while the commons burn.
We’ve all been forced into #stupidindividualism. The #dotcons enclose our attention. The gig economy encloses our labour. Even our friendships are enclosed in “encrypted” DMs, monetized by adtech. Public life? Gone, auctioned off to the highest bidder or locked behind paywalls.
We are encouraged to be good “idiots” in the ancient Greek sense – disengaged from collective power. This #deathcult under capitalism, is a feature, not a bug. They, the #nastyfew want “us” atomized, docile, and scrolling, not stepping away from the path to new norms. And so we rot in a swamp of aestheticized politics – “likes” over lives, vibes over values, empty radical branding over messy collective struggle.
Some symptoms of this sickness can be seen in commons destroyed: Libraries gutted, parks sold off, hospitals privatized. Nothing left to meet in. Social life enclosed: From Facebook groups to “creator economies,” all relations are branded and transactional. Fear replaces solidarity, precarity rewires our brains – everyone a competitor, every community a threat. Politics becomes content, no spaces for deliberation, only comment sections and algorithmic outrage. Under this path, “engagement” is a metric, not a practice. #stupidindividualism is the “normal” common sense path we currently walk down.
The left hasn’t escaped. We’re not immune. We’re infected. Too much of what passes for radicalism is just #stupidindividualism with better fonts. Buzzwords. Identity consumption. Internal drama cycles. Empty memes. Most leftist language itself has been enclosed into performative radicalism, saying the right things in the right tone to the right audience – but nothing changes. It’s a ritual, not resistance. Aesthetic replaces action: Solidarity becomes merch. Mutual aid becomes charity. “Revolution” becomes content marketing.
This is all the “common sense” #mainstreaming by another name. It’s simply #stupidindividualism on the left. And we can’t win if we keep playing by the #deathcult’s dogma. So how do we compost this? We grow living language from real ground. No more floating hashtags. No more semantic bubbles. Here’s the path, embed language in practice, political terms should come from mutual aid kitchens, picket lines, and assemblies – not Slack threads or Twitter feuds.
Don’t just “speak truth to power” – speak truth to each other, if we want to build a better world, we need collective life again. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s survival. We’re in a fight against a system that thrives on isolation. #Neoliberalism has turned us all into (stupid)individuals, and then blamed us for it.
Let’s be clear, the opposite of #stupidindividualism is not intellect, it’s interdependence. So let’s plant words in soil again. Let’s grow meaning from shared struggle. Let’s compost the #deathcult and sprout something real. On this path, just say no to self-enclosure. No to semantic drift. No to aesthetic radicals trapped in content loops. Instead, let’s get our hands dirty.
Economics (neoliberal edition): “Humans only value things that can be measured in money.”
Sociology: “Uh… I don’t. Most people don’t. Parents raising kids, communities helping each other during disasters, activists building mutual aid networks – none of that is monetized, but it’s clearly valuable.”
Economics: “Rational agents always act in self-interest, maximizing utility through a calculated internal decision-making process.”
Psychology: “That’s… not even close. People are emotional, irrational, communal. Ever heard of trauma? Or love? Or collective identity? Most behaviour doesn’t follow game-theory dogma.”
Economics: “Ah, but the market is the ultimate form of truth. If it’s not priced, it doesn’t matter. Let us privatize clean air, forests, and even your health! Innovation!”
Ecology: “Excuse me? You’re externalizing planetary collapse for profit. See, mass extinction, soil depletion, collapsing fish stocks, #climatechaos.”
Economics: “But don’t worry, my models predict endless exponential growth! Just look at the #GDP!”
Physics: drops teacup “Growth forever? On a finite planet? That’s thermodynamically impossible. Energy in, energy out. You can’t eat quarterly profits.”
History: “And every time someone builds a system based on endless extraction and inequality – slavery, colonialism, neoliberalism – it ends in crisis, collapse, or revolution.”
Anthropology: “Plenty of human societies existed without money. Value can be social, symbolic, spiritual. You just forgot 99% of human history.”
Ethics: “You’re optimizing for profit while ignoring justice. People die because they can’t afford insulin. Billionaires hoard while others starve. This is monstrous.”
Economics (sweating): “But the stock market is doing great!”
Reality: leans in, calmly “Your model is broken. Time to compost it.”
We used to run 6 #Fediverse instances as part of the #OMN project – thousands of users across them. Admin/mod work was done by volunteers, grounded in user reports, contextual judgment, and dialogue. No hard rules. Just common sense and solidarity. It worked for 4–5 years.
Then came the #Twitter liberal influx – intolerant, entitled, and completely disconnected from #mutualaid and community care. They treated our volunteer-run platforms as if they were corporate #dotcons, shouting into the void and demanding services with no reciprocity.
We tried to bridge the gap, repeatedly. It didn’t work. It drained us. After a year running at a huge loss, we had to shut them all down. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, it’s bad. But this is a normal pattern, resources are disposed of, culture gets flattened, energy gets burned out.
Alt-tech needs some resources, yes, far less than the #mainstreaming, but not zero. More importantly, it needs a culture that doesn’t throw itself under the wheels of liberal exceptionalism. We’re now working on rebooting this, with code that’s less friendly to “common sense” liberalism and more in tune with grassroots #4opens values.
Because, let’s face it, look at most tech news today and mutter with me:
Utterly pointless. Stupidly pointless. Dangerously pointless.
Naively evil. Innocently evil. Just plain evil.
…We need to do better in alt-tech.
The #dotcons built billion-dollar platforms on amplifying the worst of human nature. It’s long past time to return to the #openweb, and compost this mess making.
From my decades of real-world experience – especially in activism – I’ve found that self-professed #Postmodernists and Western #Buddhists have been some of the most useless and damaging people I’ve worked with. Not an exaggeration: I could probably count the genuinely good ones on one hand. This isn’t bitterness. It’s about composting a mess that has rotted for too long.
Important: This isn’t a call to lurch into the collapsing right-wing #shitheap either. It’s a call to stop adding to the mess, to pick up our shovels, and to get to work clearing space for new growth. Let’s not be prats about this, thanks.
The opening moment of the workshop on Methodological Strategies for Real-Life Theorising was unintentionally profound. A story of a seagull crieing above the glass façade of the Blavatnik School of Government – a building that stands as a temple to the #deathcult that shaped our lives for the last 40 years of #neoliberal change. In hindsight, that seagull metaphor may have been the wisest participant at the event.
The sessions that followed offered a painful reminder of just how entrenched and constipated academic political theory can be. Many of the speakers, well-meaning, no doubt, spoke in dense, self-referential language, seemingly unaware (or uninterested) in the world burning outside. We are living through accelerating #climatechaos, surging right-wing extremism, and widespread social fragmentation. Yet here, the main concern is career-building through opaque frameworks and method fetishism. One can’t help but wonder how many in the room truly believe they are doing good?
The crisis is deeper than any single workshop. The very career paths that brought these scholars here have been shaped, filtered, and “concreted” by 30 years of neoliberal funding models. The result is a form of political theorising that appears to want to find a way out, but only by squeezing itself through the tightest gaps in the #postmodern mess. And even then, only while clutching tightly to the privileges and assumptions granted by the current paths.
Constipated Language, Abstract Struggles
Throughout the first sessions, there was a recurring sense of people talking to themselves. Even the attempts to make theory “concrete” – to move into empirical territory – felt more like power grabs than inquiry. There was talk of “transient theory,” of “mid-level normative frameworks,” of “ethnographic insights”, but very little clarity on what any of this meant in real practical or political terms.
Instead of confronting the deeply ideological assumptions embedded in liberal academia, the speakers soft-stepped around them. One could sense them trying to smuggle ideology back into a discipline that’s been left hollow. The “heroic era of theory” is dead, and what we’re left with is a ritual performance of relevance. At one point, the liberal impulse to block discomforting inputs in public policy was laid bare. This is ethics as insulation, not action. There was repeated deference to “existing norms and frameworks,” – the very architecture of the #deathcult, now warmed up and served again as policy advice.
The Seagull Still Watches
By the end of the day, some fresh air drifted in. A few scraps of cloth were handed out to the otherwise naked theorists. There was genuine engagement with normative complexity. Questions like “what is mutable?” began to shift the conversation. “Engaged political philosophy” and talk of “normative judgments” began to inch the discussion closer to the ground.
The presentation on restitution, for instance, highlighted real political dilemmas. Who decides what gets returned, and why? Is it justice, diplomacy, or geo-political calculation? One question noted that giving back looted objects is not just about ethics, it’s about giving back the values they represent. But this was quickly hedged with talk of “choice.” Liberal hedging again. No one wanted to say: yes, do it, without compromise.
Even here, markets remained the baseline. The dominant “common sense” is still economic flow. Value is defined by trade, not meaning. Discrimination itself can to easily be reframed as a market distortion, another cost to be corrected, not a systemic condition to be fought. The anti-market perspective, grounded in actual social justice, in living memory, in reparative truth, is invisible to meany people until it becomes a threat. At that point, the strategy shifts to distraction and buying off. That’s the logic of #neoliberal containment.
From Political Theory to Political Theater
What we witnessed was not just a methodological workshop, but a staged performance of institutional survival. Theories were dressed up, displayed, but never walked out into the street. Real political agency remained absent. The political philosopher, once imagined as a public actor, now hides behind peer-reviewed paywalls, while the world asks different questions entirely.
Still, by the end, perhaps there were reasons for the seagull to hold off its stone throwing – for a while. A few voices showed signs of life. A few questions struck true. But it will take more than scraps of normative cloth to cover the nakedness of political philosophy today.
The event: Many political philosophers theorise not only for the sake of pure theory, but also because they want to convince citizens and policymakers to bring about changes in the real world.
Such policy-oriented research often draws on interdisciplinary methods, integrating empirical insights and normative and conceptual arguments. This, however, raises methodological challenges of its own. For example, how to deal with the fact that the social sciences are fragmented and different disciplines work with different paradigms and methodologies? How can philosophers, who bring their own normative assumptions openly to the table, deal with the – sometimes implicit – normativity that is also inherent in many other lines of research? What level of abstraction of normative arguments, eg basic normative theories or mid-level overlapping principles, should philosophers draw on when discussing with policymakers? And how to deal with the fact that in the current political climate in many countries, distrust towards “experts” also extends to philosophers? Workshop agenda
Day 1: Thursday 24 April 2025
Methodological Strategies for real-life theorising
Chair: Jonathan Wolff, Blavatinik School of Government
Liron Lavi, Bar-Ilan University and Nahshon Perez, Bar-Ilan University: Conceptual Concretization in Empirically Informed Political Theory: What Makes a Concept Applicable
Carmen E Pavel, King’s College London: Mid-Level Theories of Justice and Public Policy
Kian Mintz Woo, University College, Cork: Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy
Theorising between values and cases
Chair: Daniel Halliday, University of Melbourne
Rouven Symank, Free University, Berlin: Integrating Ethnography with Political Theory in Policy-Oriented Research: Challenges and Insights from Cultural Restitution Debates
Florence Adams, University of Cambridge: Discrimination as an Object of Social Science
Erika Brandl, University of Bergen: Measuring the justice of architectural development policies:debates on temporal scopes and indicators in the Hillevåg plan
My notes on this event:
The seagull is perhaps a good metaphor for nature fighting back against the last 40 years of human #deathcult culture that this building is temple of.
The language is constipated, a growing feeling that these people are pissing funding and focus against the wall while the world burns from #climatechaos and hard right social breakdown.
I wonder how many people here think they are doing good?
The problem on this career path is that it has been shaped by #neoliberalism for the last 20 years, funding and status have both been ground through this mess, and now reflect it.
After the first session I feel they are trying to squeeze themself out of this post modernist mess. By going back to basics, but it’s so constipated it’s hard to see if there is any value in this.
Looking at them talk and answer questions, you can feel them being lost. It still feels like they are talking to themselves.
A power grab, by making theory concrete, to build empirical research. They dodge this by saying the theory is transient.
If this is a bios? They fix this by making the bios visible. They find this question hard to answer as its a root issue.
They are “soft” sneaking ideology back into the current dead Political Science and theory world they work in.
The heroic era of theory is challenged for making public policy. They argue that we should start from the existing norms and frameworks. This from the #deathcult we get wormed up #deathcult worship as policy. Mess. Of course liberal rights have priority in the end, “we must also include institutional facts”.
The seagulls at the start of this event might be the wisest one here. The rest have no cloths, and the language is so constipated that the smell is likely off putting for any real outreach that they need in the scrabbling for coverings to continue their careers.
The liberals start to talk about #blocking the inputs that make them uncomfortable. In ethical public policy making.
From a working insider view, the people doing this don’t have the skills or knowledge if we focus on philosophy and theory only.
Good question, what is given, what is mutable is very mutable. So the Liberal “common sense” is likely a strong #blocking on the path of the change we need.
“Engaged political philosophy” “normative judgments” as we go on they start to be more relevant. “where there is convergence and divergence”
The event starts naked and smelly but as it goes on the air clears at times and some scraps of cloth are provided.
Relevant information that is easily excessable,
The power in a committee is the appointment of the people sitting on the committee rather than the committee process it self. The answer to this is hesitant and bluff, and distaste to cover this.
A chair or witness roll is different in committees.
Why restitution, why now.
Liberal Justice
Reperatition is politics, not just ethical, geo politics and funding, based on former colonist will, is a tool for “ethical diplomacy”
Can any of these be seen as a reason not to do it. Don’t have an answer. Normative lessons.
When we give back objects that we value from our looting, we are giving back our values. We still chose.
My parents work is displayed in our #mainstreaming institutions, but these institutions are not interested in the objects, as they do not fit into there existing story’s and category. Subject archives will take them. But this is still shaping history.
Markets as the dominant “common sense” everything is economic flows. Value is defined by this.
Discrimination is contested with the hard shift to the right #DUI
Distortion in the market, function efficiently.
Discrimination is about greed, American greed, a moral dilemma. Liberal but not to liberal. Talk about the market path, let the market do its thing.
Markets aligned characteristics, money the logic of the #deathcult
As my work is anti market they can’t see any value, so put no resources and focus on the path in till it becomes a threat then distraction and buying off become the difficult paths.
Trump now is turning this neoliberalism around as discrimination. What is this, discrimination against nation states, rather than economics/market.
At the end the might be reasons for the seagull to hold off the stone throwing for a while.
The #makinghistory project is a decentralized, open-source archiving and storytelling network designed to preserve and amplify grassroots histories. It’s founded on the idea that history isn’t written by the winners – it’s made by those who resist, build, and care. Using digitized collections like the CampbellFamily archive as a seed, the project invites communities to reclaim their narratives through shared, federated networks. This isn’t just another data repository – it’s a living, breathing ecosystem where collective memory is gathered, enriched, and kept accessible for future generations and movements.
The application functions as a community-installable tool that allows anyone to host their own archive node. These nodes, whether local or remote, connect into a wider peer-to-peer network of storytellers, archivists, and activists. Core features include uploading and organizing digital files, enriching metadata flows, and linking material to broader narratives using human-created tags and annotations. The platform follows a participation-first path, encouraging affinity groups to contribute not just data, but context, weaving a rich web of interlinked histories.
But #makinghistory goes further than archiving. It’s a space for collaborative storytelling, publishing, and public exhibition. Its narrative layer draws from the archive to trace connections between people, places, and events, transforming scattered fragments into stories of solidarity, resistance, and change. These outputs feed both digital commons and real-world installations like the Resistance Exhibition, where history is brought to life in public, participatory spaces. This is the infrastructure for radical memory work, a composting system for movement knowledge. Developers are not just needed to build features, they’re invited to help shape the very flows and protocols that keep history in the hands of those who live it.
Implement a single-column interface that lists objects (text, image, link).
Set up two test instances that can post and sync objects between them.
Default view lists objects by most recent. Super simple.
Phase 2: Hashtag Columns
Add support for hashtag-based columns (inspired by Mastodon’s Tweetdeck interface).
Reuse and adapt existing open-source implementations where possible.
Phase 3: Story Objects
Introduce a new “Story” object that composes and links existing media objects, with added narrative context.
These stories are published through collective/community accounts (discussion needed on access/trust models).
Phase 4: Federation & Flows
Begin mapping and testing how edits, hashtags, comments, and objects flow across federated instances.
Align this with the #OMN trust model and the work from the #indymediaback reboot (estimated 90% overlap).
User Interfaces
Desktop: Use a Tweetdeck-style interface, similar to Mastodon’s current layout.
Mobile: Build a simplified UI with a single-column scroll. Objects open fullscreen with sideways swiping (like Tusky for Mastodon).
Every Object
Has edit capabilities (if user has login/auth).
Editable hashtags.
Comment threads.
All changes sync across instances via federation/trust flows (option 4).
The current test interface and images will need refreshing, as they’re based on early-stage mockups. But the concept remains: keep the interface minimal, usable, and focused on narrative composting. This project is both infrastructure and imagination, grounded in the old but reaching toward the new.
These images need an update as they were based on the dev work from back in the day. This is the very basic interface for testing. The mobile user facing interface is a flick sideways basic interface.
At the core of the #makinghistory infrastructure lies the Open Media Network (#OMN) – a trust-based, human-moderated, #4opens project that offers a decentralized, federated database shared across peers. What makes the OMN unique isn’t just what it does – but what it refuses to do. Rather than chasing complexity or abstract “AI-powered” solutions, the OMN focuses on simplicity and social cohesion, using technology to support and grow human networks. Its structure is purposefully minimal, with only five essential functions:
These core functions are: Publish (to share a story as an object into a stream); Subscribe (to people, pages, groups, or subjects); Moderate (to express trust or disapproval by pushing or pulling content); Rollback (to remove content from your stream based on trust flows); and Edit (to collaboratively change metadata across federated nodes where you’re authenticated). This framework serves as the back-end engine for building a grassroots, DIY semantic web. The front-end can take many forms: city-based or subject-specific sites like a modern reboot of Indymedia, regional storytelling platforms, or thematic archives like #makinghistory. Protocols like ActivityPub form the connective tissue of this system, the plumbing.
In practice, this means people can build meaningful media spaces that reflect local struggles and solidarities without being dependent on corporate platforms or NGO gatekeeping. The data cauldron of the OMN stores the shared knowledge, and every community holds a golden ladle – a way to draw out, remix, and republish what matters to them. If you’re interested in supporting this effort financially, you can do so via Open Collective. And if you’re ready to dive deeper, we need to make this #KISS project work. Let’s build tools for memory, not marketing, infrastructure for resistance, not careerism. Let’s be #makeinghistory together, not sit bord looking at a screen.
This #OMN path is “native” built on a simple, powerful truth: “This is the Internet”:
GET PUT POST DELETE –MERGE–
These basic actions — close to the core HTTP verbs every website uses — are all you need to create, share, remix, and grow. (From RFC 7231 and RFC 5789.)
Then you have the #4opens which are about reclaiming the grassroots social power of the web:
Open data
Open source
Open process
Open standards
No gatekeepers. No #dotcons middlemen. No closed silos. Just people, building together. This is what #openweb reboot looks like.
In tech, the last 20 years have been a mess of #fashernista trends and the ongoing #geekproblem, a compost heap of broken promises and abandoned projects. It’s obvious if you lift the lid and really look. The glossy hype fades fast, the rot underneath remains.
Much of what we call “innovation” ended up as #techshit – rushed, bloated, short-sighted code that needs serious composting if we’re going to grow anything real. #Openweb dreams have been buried under a #dotcons landfill.
The real challenge now isn’t just pointing at the pile (fun as that can be), it’s handing the next generation proper shovels – real tools, real critical thinking, real spaces for building rooted, resilient, open tech.
One of the most corrosive problems on the path to rebooting the #openweb is the nasty, unconscious blocking that seeps through all #mainstreaming and careerist #NGO spaces. It’s not usually overt, it doesn’t come with a clear “no.” It comes with silence, with being ignored. With polite nods and a quick pivot back to safe, fundable, middle-of-the-road ideas that don’t rock the boat. This is how real change is smothered, how compost we need becomes concrete we are trying to break up.
Whenever something grassroots or genuinely native pushes into these spaces, say, someone trying to move beyond the stale copycat platforms, or raising the obvious problems with #dotcons being repackaged as “innovation”, the response is a passive-aggressive wall of non-engagement. These spaces are deeply allergic to anything that makes the comfort of #mainstreaming uncomfortable.
And you don’t shut up? If you insist on making the mess visible and pushing for something that might actually shift the culture? That’s when it escalates.
Ad hominem attacks begin — you’re “angry,” “difficult,” “not constructive.”
Technical blocking follows — defederation, closed chat groups, funding gatekeeping.
Eventually, it cycles back to the default tactic: ignoring you again.
Because ignoring is easy. Ignoring doesn't threaten careers or grant cycles. Ignoring keeps the status quo safe.
But this leaves the real mess in place, the rot stays buried under layers of “positive vibes,” #PR-driven governance proposals, and performative inclusivity that actually excludes anyone who doesn’t play within broken systems.
This creates perfect conditions for the rise of the #fashernistas, the well-meaning tech influencers, safe radicals, and trendy projects that suck up time, focus, and resources while producing little more than reheated versions of things that already failed. And the cycle repeats:
We’ve need to more loudly name this cycle for what it is, a defence mechanism for comfort and careerism, not care or community. And it’s antithetical to the kind of messy, living compost that grows something new. The #openweb needs real pushback, we need native tools, radical simplicity, open processes, and yes – a tolerance for discomfort. Because without discomfort, there is no transformation. Let’s keep making the mess visible. Let’s stop being “ignored” quietly. Let’s build outside the polite paths, where nothing changes.
After working in this area for 20 years, am tempted to list the people I have worked with, outlining good and bad paths they have pushed projects in. do you think this might be useful, not to punish the individuals, but to highlight and illustrate the groups we need to compost on going.
A hopeful note: some #fashernistas are starting to apologize and acknowledge the mess. That’s good compost material too. Let’s keep composting. Let’s keep planting.
We’ve got a new bunch of #mainstreaming tech devs flooding into the #Fediverse. Some from burned-out Big Tech, some from the academic funding circuits, some just looking for the next shiny project after the #AI hype wore thin.
Now, this could be good. IF even a few of them started working on native, grassroots tech – tools built for and by the communities who actually use them, not just more #dotcons platform clones.
Right now, we’re at a turning point. The first wave of the Fediverse was all about copying the #dotcons:
#Mastodon as “ethical Twitter”
#PeerTube mimicking YouTube
#Mobilizon as a Facebook Events replacement
#Lemmy doing Reddit but federated
All of this was necessary, it helped people jump ship and start imagining life beyond the dotcons. But that wave is peaking, and the second step is overdue. That next step? It’s about original, grassroots infrastructure. A federated trust graph instead of reinventing karma points or like-buttons. Protocols for local-first publishing, like the #p2p side of the #OMN or radical #4opens-inspired news and tools for community trust flows, moderation and accountability, rooted in values, not corporate TOS and PR management. Infrastructure for interoperability and redundancy, so projects don’t die when a maintainer burns out or a server goes down
But here’s the risk, if the new #devs only copy the #dotconsAGAIN, it’s a fail. Worse still, if they get sucked into the #NGO vampire nests, the slow, bureaucratic funding black holes of the worst paths of #nlnet and #NGI, we’ll just see more “safe” projects that burn grant money building tools nobody uses.
Let’s be clear, these institutions do some small good, on basic infrastructure, but their #NGO sides are hoovering up resources by pushing for risk-free deliverables, and ignore the actual needs of grassroots groups. This funding is way too often shaped by #mainstreaming politics and careerism, not lived practice. We’ve seen it before, and we’re seeing it again.
What we need now are tools that grow from compost, not code sprints. Tools built from social use, not tech fashion. We need radical simplicity, transparency, and flexibility, tech that can’t be easily co-opted by the forces we’re trying to move beyond.
So if you’re a dev stepping into this space, welcome. But please don’t make another Mastodon, but with more “privacy” or #AI features. Instead, work with those who’ve been composting here for years. Build with the messy, weird, and beautiful people who need to shape new paths, not, boringly, recreate the old ones with shinier branding.
#Mainstreaming talk about the internet generally completely misses the point, yep, it’s the FT so no surprise I suppose. The actual internet, the one we built before the takeover of the #dotcons, this is a culture of #4opens protocols, stitched together with moth-eaten mythologies and some messy traditions. It was never clean or pure, but it was ours.
What this guy in the article is describing isn’t the internet, it’s the #dotcons layer that’s been built on top of that original infrastructure. Worse, it’s very crap path that we helped build, by feeding it with our time, attention, and data. Yes, it’s a mess. But, the bigger problem is what we often do is add to this mess instead of composting it.
From “unstoppable slop” to “enshittification” to the idea of a “hostile internet”, all of these have explanatory power, but none really get to the root issues. The sickness isn’t just tech, it’s culture, warped by power and profit. What we’re living in now isn’t a broken system, it’s a deliberately built one. Designed not for us, but to extract from us. This #hostileinternet is not inevitable. It’s the result of a thousand bad decisions made by #deathcult tech and #VC backed greed, and not by accident but by design.
The FT piece ends up saying: “The internet makes us seem mad, always connected, always performing, always consuming – like streetcorner eccentrics amplified to global scale.” And yeah, it does feel like that. But that’s not the fault of the internet. It’s the fault of which internet we’ve chosen to feed. To fix this, we don’t need a new system. We need to remember the old one. Compost the current slop. Rebuild from the roots. Base it on native #4opens, community, and the culture that carried us before this #dotcons mess took over.
If you want your revolution to succeed, it’s a good to push and grow from mythos and traditions, and grow from shared histories. Yes, Marxism and European #anarchism are coming back into fashion as source code of radical politics. But if we are to actually achieve anything this time round, we need to see and act, in balance, a #KISS understanding that most of what they propose already existed in indigenous and non-Western cultures. Ideas like #mutualaid, communal land, anti-hierarchy, #dialectics – these aren’t Euro inventions. They were lived reality for societies built on relationships, protocols, obligations, stories, land.
The path that we so often miss in our activism is those indigenous systems were rooted in culture, not just politics. That’s why they could survive under centuries of attack from #colonialism and #capitalism. It wasn’t theory that held them together, it was the social infrastructure of caring.
Way too often our western left tries to reassemble this through ideology alone, in a culture already stripped of land, kinship, and tradition. That’s why left projects so often keep collapsing – #theory isn’t enough. You can’t build lasting community on politics without #relationalfabric. No story, no shared values, no “spiritual” grounding, and everything becomes a power game, a purity spiral, a mess of ego and disconnection.
Even where Marxism and Anarchism succeeded for a time: #CNTFAI, the #Zapatistas, the #USSR you can see that it was growing from existing cultural roots. The political theory sprouted from culture, it didn’t grow without it. And when that cultural roots got disrupted? So do the movement.
In meany ways, Marxists have dogmatically dismiss indigenous societies as primitive, when they already lived what meany of the western radicals dreamed of. That’s the core paradox, Maximists too often wants what they ignore. They reach for communal life while scorning the few people who still kinda live it. #Anarchism tends to follow the same path, beautiful ideas, but no soil to grow in.
You want your revolution? Start with compost. The #4opens, land, kinship, accountability, shared story. Don’t fight the #deathcult with manifestos, root your tech and your politics in #livingculture. We don’t need more theory. To balance the current mess, we need to remember what we already knew.
We’re living in the wreckage of the old 19th century social order. The so-called Four Estates, pillars of traditional power and authority, which 200 years latter are either rotting from within or already dead. It’s now past time to stop mourning and start composting this. Right now we are doing this at the #OMN we’re outlining and building horizontal social/digital tools to grow grassroots governance, aiming to replace what no longer serves us. These tools are based on tested activist process and being built out using current working federated technology through the Open Media Network (#OMN).
Before we get into that, let’s break down the old foundational history:
Lords Temporal – the elites, landowners, oligarchs. Fuckum. Their power is bloated and corrupt. From billionaires flying private jets to COP summits while the planet burns, to political dynasties laughing at austerity from gated compounds, they’re done, even if they don’t know it yet.
Lords Spiritual – organized religion as moral compass? Please. They long ago ceded relevance. As the Church clutches pearls over gender and culture wars, the people are elsewhere, building new values and solidarities.
House of Commons – dysfunctional, what was meant to represent the people now represents donors, lobbyists, and corporate interests. Labour and Tory are different shades of the same managerial grey. Real democracy? It’s not coming from Westminster.
Journalism – the one estate still standing, sort of. But it’s on life support. Mainstream media dances to the tune of its billionaire owners, or worse, chases clicks in the race to the bottom. The BBC parrots government lines and succumbs to culture war baiting.
So what’s next? Our mission is not salvaging old institutions, others can try that path. We’re building on different traditions and mythology. Right now, people are fleeing from the corporate-controlled web (#dotcons) and rediscovering decentralized platforms: Mastodon, Peertube and others built on #ActivityPub. These are important steps towards a federated path. But tech alone isn’t enough, we need governance. We need trust-based, horizontal, transparent tools that empower communities to organize, decide, and act together without traditional gatekeepers.
That’s where the Open Media Network (#OMN) projects come in. We’re designing and testing code to enable this shift, tools for publishing, moderation, and coordination that are rooted in the #4opens: open data, open source, open governance, and open standards. It’s messy, yes. But so is composting. And from that mess, we grow soil. Soil for new media, new movements, and new paths as the old crumbles.
We’re starting with the last two relevant estates: journalism and representative governance. Both are broken, but maybe still salvageable, not by patching them up, but by rebooting change and challenge from the ground up. Think of it as digital mutual aid, media gardening, and radical democracy rolled into one. We have project outlines, we have grounded flows and process. We just need more people who give a shit. This is an invitation, to join, and help build media and governance paths that actually works for the many, not only the churning #nastyfew.
