Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
Let’s look at this. #ActivityPub is not a product. It’s not even really a “protocol” in the narrow, rigid sense that vertical tech likes to imagine. ActivityPub is a shared vocabulary, a public language for moving meaning and connection across the #openweb. It gives you nouns and verbs, and the community defines the grammar through … Continue reading Why the #OMN works with #ActivityPub – And why we need a bridge to #p2p
#P2P projects keep failing socially because adoption is tiny. The #Fediverse succeeds socially because it keeps social #UX familiar. The path forward is a half-step strategy: bridge #fediverse + #p2p in real, usable ways until decentralised clients are socially relevant. We need: Bridges & killer apps, seamless UX that makes federated + p2p content feel … Continue reading Talking about p2p as a tool to use today
Published Date 3/29/16 1:22 PM There are lots of sites down, lots of fake files etc. A colleague Richard Hering has posted a number of music videos to YouTube. As these contain a synchronised score of complex music, they have unique educational value. Sony recently blocked a number of these in no less than 244 … Continue reading Is client server p2p torrent infrastructure failing
#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)
We need to have a clearer, more grounded conversation about “security” and what it actually means in the context of the #openweb. There is a long history of thinking in #FOSS spaces that security is something we can solve purely technically: better encryption, better protocols, better architectures. But in everyday life and practice, people need … Continue reading A Note on “Security” for the #FOSS Crew
For progressive and radical people, one of the central political questions of our time is simple to ask but hard to answer – Why is it so difficult to rebuild the institutions that were destroyed in our #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s? And more importantly why does the impossibility of rebuilding them make … Continue reading OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons
I’ve been working at the heart of this space for more than 30 years, funded and unfunded. In that time I’ve seen hundreds of alternative tech projects start with energy and good intentions. Most of them wither on the vine, a very small number flower. After watching this cycle repeat for decades, one thing has … Continue reading A note to #FOSS funders
From a #mainstreaming point of view, what people call “piracy” is not a simple moral failure, it’s rather a signal of systemic #dotcons failure. Again and again, across decades, people have shown a simple truth: When access is fair, affordable, and humane, people pay. When systems become extractive, people route around them. This is not … Continue reading Mainstreaming: Piracy is a symptom, not a crime
A DRAFT story about markets, misfits, and taking back the commons (Tagline: “They came for the avocados. They left with revolution.”) by Hamish Campbell OutlineTHE MARKET STIRS Setting the scene: It’s a Saturday in East London. The smell of jerk chicken, sourdough, and incense wafts over Chatsworth Road. A young stallholder, Luna (17), sells upcycled … Continue reading Chatsworth Rd: Stalls and Code
Fighting #fashionistas with fashion. We have an app outline for that: iPhone or android. Not as a lifestyle tweak, not as wellness branding, not as another individual “better habits” story. These proposed apps and the wider projects have nothing to do with self-optimisation, productivity hacks, or personal purity. Framing it that way is already defeat … Continue reading Digital Detox Is Urgently Needed
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
Let’s think outside the normal paths. This is about revolution as regeneration, not only destruction. In an era built on tech dependency, revolution isn’t only about smashing the machines, it’s about liberating them. Turning tools back into commons, not commodities. It’s composting the toxic monoculture of the #dotcons into fertile ground for the #openweb to … Continue reading The #OMN Path: Openness as Revolution