Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
This is a mess we are finally starting to move away from. For over a decade, #failbook was one of the main organising spaces for progressive activism. On the surface it looked useful: easy groups, fast sharing, broad reach. But structurally it was never neutral. It was built as a #dotcons attention machine, optimised for … Continue reading OMN history note: Failbook, activism, and the enclosure of organising
#Identitypolitics, is what happens when liberalism turns inward and fragments – call it mad liberalism. #Culturewar is what happens when that same liberalism hardens and lashes out – bad liberalism. Both look like opposites, but they come from the same place. The uncomfortable part is both were pushed onto the “left” as the way to … Continue reading The End of the “Peace Dividend” and the Return of History
For a long time the focus has been on solving two linked problems – both of which are actually #nothingnew. The first is grassroots publishing and organising. The second is network coordination between communities. Neither of these problems started with the internet, and they certainly didn’t start with Silicon Valley. Projects like #Indymedia and community … Continue reading A bit of #OMN history and where the current paths come from
The lesson from the Leonid Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union is simple but brutal that stability is not strength. From the outside the system looked powerful – armies, rockets, space stations. But internally it had stopped being able to correct itself, criticism became dangerous, information was distorted, and the leadership focused on maintaining control … Continue reading What projects like #OMN can learn from history
Looking back at the old TubeMogul stats – the archived page from 2011 – I had a jolt:18 million verified views, and when you added the torrent distribution, RSS syndication, video CDROM redistribution, and all the edge-case channels we seeded into, the total was closer to 34 million views. These were big numbers back then. … Continue reading The History of visionOntv: What We Built, What We Lost, and Why It Matters Again
The scent of damp soil and half-forgotten futures, a version that flow, a sourcebook for day-to-day life and activism from a time when the local living alternatives were not theory but everyday life, in a small English town https://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/ It’s an archive now, a time capsule you can wander through. If this current generation is … Continue reading Oxford radical history, biography
The story of the 1990s in #Russia is not just a local tragedy. It is the cornerstone of the modern #deathcult order. December 25th, 1991. The Soviet flag lowered for the last time. The West declared victory. The Cold War was over. “Democracy” had won. But for millions of Russians, that night was not liberation. … Continue reading A small history – Russia
Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away. We put a class of media into the commons, governed … Continue reading The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths
For thousands of years, the demands of the oppressed have remained startlingly consistent: Erase all debts, Burn the records, redistribute the land. These weren’t radical demands. They were and are common sense for those crushed by the weight of extraction, enclosure, and empire. Compare that to today’s to often #fashionista “leftist” rallying cry of “Tax … Continue reading History has a lot to say on the peasant revolt vs. liberal half-measures
All activist history is soaked in struggle, not just against the oppressive systems we set out to confront, but also internally, against the deep currents of sectarianism that fracture our own movements. The history of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp offers a vivid example. The colour-coded gates, yellow, red, blue, were more than navigation markers. … Continue reading Telling Our Stories: Activist History and the Parasites of #Mainstreaming
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 … Continue reading Dev test work for Makinghistory application
To start to make things better this is a mess that we constantly need to compost, over the last ten years, it’s wild how people barrel into grassroots tech projects like #OMN behaving like blinded paranoid #fuckwits, wreaking havoc and then scampering off to nurse their self-inflicted wounds. This nasty pattern repeats so often it … Continue reading To remember our own history