Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
YOU can’t do social change or challenge without annoying people If you think you can, you’re probably play-acting – and part of the problem – does that annoy you? If it does… maybe sit with that. 🙂 Food for thought, #4opens is a shovel for composting. The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural … Continue reading The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb
Today there are a lot of dishonest people – it’s become the default. Finding someone who is actually truthful is rare. So with this in mind, let’s stop being polite about this, what we’re living inside online right now isn’t “social media.” It’s a managed enclosure – a system designed to extract value, shape behaviour, … Continue reading Growing the #openweb – Notes for Composting the #dotcons (and growing an #OMN)
It’s obvious to everyone paying attention that the relentless push of #mainstreaming over the last forty years has not made society healthier or more stable. Quite the opposite, the result has been accelerating social disintegration and the rapid expansion of #climatechaos. When the current trajectory continues, the consequences are catastrophic. Over the next fifty years … Continue reading Shovels, Hashtags, and Revolutions: Roots of the #openweb
Recently I’ve been doing media interviews – one mainstream piece for a #boatingeurope article coming out in traditional media, and another for the Cherwell student paper in Oxford focused more on biography. Both journalists said the same thing: “It was surprisingly hard to find information about you online.” Around the same time, a boater friend … Continue reading Disappearing from Search: A personal story about visibility, #dotcons, and the shrinking #openweb
Treating the Fediverse as #stupidindividualism is a kind of blindness, yes, individuals matter, but the #Fediverse only works because of shared culture, shared norms, and collective responsibility. Without this social layer, federation becomes fragmentation – lots of voices, but little shared direction to hold together. Since the #twittermigration of a few years ago, many of … Continue reading The #twittermigration, signal vs noise, for rebuilding #openweb culture
We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world. … Continue reading The #openweb is the soil, #OMN the seeds
Let’s look at an example of how belief systems shape political reality. Some people still deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This confusion isn’t neutral, it shapes how discussions are framed, who gets silenced, and which political paths remain possible. Let’s be clear: Much of the current framing is not about honest thinking, it is about … Continue reading Composting the myths: power, hidden religions, and why the #openweb matters
There is a familiar voice resurfacing in today’s debates about the future of the web, its measured, reflective, earnest, often grey-bearded., and it has funding. These are the people who were there in the Web 2.0 era. The #Flickr builders. The early platform designers. The conference speakers who once talked about “community”, “social objects”, and … Continue reading The greybeards and the second sell-out of the #openweb
There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” – is killing us. Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to … Continue reading There is such a thing as society -and the #openweb depends on it
The debate about so called #AI and large language models inside the #openweb paths is not, at its core, a technical argument. It is a question of relationship. Not “is this tool good or bad?” but how is it used, who controls it, and whose interests it serves. This tension is not new, every wave … Continue reading LLM`s and the openweb
On the #OMN and #openweb paths, when I talk about not being a “prat”, am not talking about a personal insult in the everyday sense, I am naming a pattern of behaviour that actively blocks collective work, let’s be explicit. A prat is someone who: Performs critique instead of doing the work They talk about … Continue reading On the #openweb path, what “prat” means
If you need a working definition of the #geekproblem, it’s the habit, no, the reflex, of putting the social side of tech outside of tech. It’s the behaviour of someone sticking their head in the sand and mumbling, “That’s not my department.”It’s “I just write the code.”It’s “We’re neutral tools.”It’s “Let’s keep politics out of … Continue reading Why #NGO and fluffy #openweb tech events should include radical real grassroots projects