Let’s be clear, the current #mainstreaming was never a social justice path. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s documented history, the archive is public. But when we forget history, propaganda works better. When people and communities challenge dominant economic arrangements – resource control, industrial policy, alignment with rival powers – they enter dangerous territory. And this matters, because fear feeds myth, and myth feeds compliance.
This matters for the #OMN as the battle is not military or economic, it is informational, when #mainstreaming agencies master social media aesthetics and narrative framing, the line between media and propaganda blurs further. There is no neutral “information environment.” in the #dotcons, there is infrastructure, and whoever controls it shapes perception, It’s why #4opens media matters, why memory matters. That’s why the #OMN is not only about publishing tools, but about resisting amnesia.
We live in a mess, on a planet with 8 billion people, we produce enough food for far more, yet billions are hungry – not because of scarcity, but because of distribution mediated by money. If markets fail to meet basic human needs at planetary scale, insisting that they will eventually fix themselves becomes its own form of idealism. Calling that out is not naïve utopianism, it’s structural realism.
Compost the bad myths, we don’t study history to marinate in resentment, we study it to understand power. #dotcons glamour does not erase violence, inclusion does not erase intervention and rebranding does not erase mandate. If we want an open future, we have to defend it.
Memory against amnesia, infrastructure against capture and media against propaganda. There is no such thing as “independent media” floating above power, there is media aligned with structures of power and there is media that challenges them. #OMN is a path to build the latter.
