Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
If you’ve spent time on my website, you’ve come across the term neoliberalism. It’s a word that’s used so much that its meaning has maybe been diluted. You might have a surface-level understanding: deregulation, privatization, tax cuts for the rich, the classic “trickle-down” nonsense where we’re supposed to believe that if the rich get richer, … Continue reading The #deathcult is neoliberalism
With the onrushing impact of current climate and systemic crises, it becomes realistic to see that #neoliberalism, free-market orthodoxy and the pushing of minimal state intervention, is fundamentally an inadequate path that is ill-equipped to address #climatechaos and social challenges we face. This failure means a radical shift in perspective and approach is going to … Continue reading The Path Beyond #Neoliberalism
The climate crisis demands urgent and radical action, yet #neoliberalism, with its dogmatic focus on markets and deregulation, falls well short of this. History tells us that activism is the path to take for the systemic changes necessary to save us from environmental and social degradation we face. The Inertia of the #deathcult refers to … Continue reading Neoliberalism Can’t Solve the Climate Crisis: We Need Activism
Over the past 40 years, humanity has created a complete mess of our society and environment. #Climatechaos, the degradation of the biosphere, and growing global inequalities are not separate issues but different facets of the same problem. This problem is the #neoliberal economic system that has spread across the world through globalization, promoting high production … Continue reading The Mess We’ve Made: Neoliberalism.
The hashtag #deathcult is a charged but precise characterisation of #neoliberalism – the political and economic ideology that has dominated the last four decades, fetishising free markets, deregulation, privatisation, and minimal government intervention while relentlessly prioritising short-term profit over collective and ecological well-being. The term was coined by Hamish Campbell (hamishcampbell.com) out of long experience … Continue reading #Deathcult: a metaphor for forty years of #neoliberalism
Our current working models of “governance” in #opensource are mostly: Monarchy – the dictator for life.Aristocracy – the devs.Oligarchy – NGOs/funders.And way out on the edge: Democracy – the users. We need better governance native to the #openweb. Let’s look at this at a more personal level before the normal wider social view. Yes, in … Continue reading Public conversation about public problems
The current wave of wildfires across Europe is not simply a natural disaster, it is also exposing a deeper mess, the failure of our information systems. Instead of explaining why Europe is burning, significant sections of the corporate media are either ignoring #climatechaos or distracting by blaming rewilding, net-zero policies and environmental protections. Rather than … Continue reading Media, the deathcult and climatechaos
We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they’re sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn’t simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it’s understanding how they find their way back out again. History suggests something … Continue reading The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess
The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy. Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, … Continue reading This was my thinking on the Fediverse a few years ago – building commons
The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t … Continue reading Our failure to mediate the mess
People sometimes ask why I use the hashtag #deathcult. It isn’t just a provocative label, it is to name the dominant political and economic logic that has shaped the last forty years. By #deathcult, I mean the era of #neoliberalism: a system that treats endless economic growth, privatisation and competition as unquestionable “common sense,” even … Continue reading Why we use the #deathcult hashtag
A lot of our current mess can be understood through the long transition from #modernism to #postmodernism. Not as an academic debate, but as a lived reality. Modernity was about progress. It believed that society could be understood, improved, and consciously shaped. Science, democracy, planning, industry, public institutions, trade unions, education, and infrastructure were all … Continue reading Rebuilding Shared Meaning in a Fragmented World