Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
Let’s focus on being honest, the most exhausting and destructive habit in activist and alternative tech spaces is the blinded reflex to turn disagreement into personal conflict. Someone challenges an idea, and it becomes an attack, names a pattern of behaviour, and suddenly it’s a vendetta. Someone points at structural problems and gets accused of … Continue reading Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end
Freedoms are not given, they are taken.— Peter Kropotkin This post comes from real life experience with #Oxfordboaters, but I am going to address it as a tech problem as it is the same mess we need to work on composting in our social tech projects. People don’t actually hate structure, what they tend to … Continue reading People resist visible structure
Let’s look back to before the #Fediverse, to be honest about the last two decades of #openweb failure, for a long time we got pulled off the path. Not only by enemies, but by a mix of fear, fashion, and half-understood technical “solutions” that felt right to fearful people at the time. The rise of … Continue reading The #encryptionist detour
Signal, Noise, and the missing ground – We have a signal-to-noise problem, that if we’re serious about “paths to growth,” we need to be honest about the paths and people pushing us down paths we’re actually walking. The problem was never just the #dotcons platforms. It’s what we build instead – and more importantly, how … Continue reading The Meta-Mess of the “Open” Social Web
For years, the #fashionista #openweb conversation has been stuck in a loop of naming villains: surveillance capitalism, the #dotcons, Zuckerberg, Musk, “the algorithm.” But focusing on enemies only gets you so far. The creative question isn’t what we’re against – it’s what we’re actually building together to replace it. That’s where the #OMN takes a … Continue reading The Problem Was Never Just the Platforms – It’s What We Build Instead
These people are a problem, the group of people who took over running the #Fediverse from us first wave crew. The problem is that they are liars – not out of malice, but in a blinded, dogmatic way. They arrived in this native #openweb movement already carrying this mindset, and it’s only deepened since. That … Continue reading The Crew – Paths to Growth?
Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the … Continue reading Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN
#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of … Continue reading #OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)
From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording – it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority – … Continue reading “Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost
From the towpath at dawn to moonlit moorings at dusk, Oxford’s boating community is not a curiosity, it’s part of the city’s living fabric. Generations of people have chosen to make their homes on the water, creating a culture rooted in community, care, and independence. This is a quieter Oxford, rarely captured in guidebooks but … Continue reading What we’re growing at Oxford Boaters is simple
A recent essay on deadSimpleTech makes a point the #openweb community should hear: the biggest problem in technology is not only the tools, it’s also the culture behind them. For years the tech world has operated under a form of narrow “tech empiricism”: the belief that if something produces results quickly, then it must be … Continue reading The Tech “Empiricism” Problem
There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence – high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education – leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold. This is one of … Continue reading Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford