Going to an Oxford event tonight where the #mainstreaming people will be idealistic about cynical politics – while I’m going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My mission is to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build bridges across that gap. There is a useful conversation between idealism and cynicism: keep the ideals, but be realistic about how power actually works.
To get beyond people feeling lost and political debate becoming pointless, it helps to use a simple #KISS lens: fear and trust. The right mobilize through fear – fear of loss, outsiders, disorder and change. The left has been strongest when it builds from trust – solidarity, openness, cooperation and collective action. These are not absolute categories, but they can help us see some of the dynamics underneath political arguments. Fear creates cycles of control; trust creates the possibility of openness and collaboration.
This matters for the current #openweb reboot. What happens when #mainstreaming pushes projects away from trust and towards fear, control, exclusion and defensive code? Could we use this simple lens to highlight which direction our projects are actually moving in – regardless of what language games people play? And this leads to the sharper question: are we building systems based on fear, or systems based on trust? The fear loop is simple:
Fear the right → fight the right → feed the right → create more fear of the right → fight the right harder. Fear becomes the fuel, the response becomes the problem, the cycle feeds itself. You can end up fighting the politics you fear in ways that reproduce the fear, division and control that give those politics space. So the #KISS question to talk about tonight is, are we breaking the fear loop, or feeding it?
For the native #openweb path, that means building from trust, solidarity and collective capacity rather than letting fear set the agenda. This is also why I keep coming back to the practical work around #OMN, #4opens, #makeinghistory,#IndymediaBack and #OGB. The point isn’t to win another argument on the existing path, it is to grow working alternatives outside current assumptions.
The challenge tonight is to keep the bridge open, cynical about power, but not cynical about people, idealistic about the future, but practical about how we get there.
#Oxford, #Fediverse #mainstreaming #openweb #OMN #4opens #KISS
