Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
The #WSocial mess is about more than one failed platform, it exposes a deeper problem with the EU’s approach to digital sovereignty. If Europe is serious about sovereignty, it needs to stop confusing European ownership with digital freedom. A platform hosted in Europe built as a proprietary, venture-capital project recreates the same #dotcons model under … Continue reading Europe’s digital sovereignty needs challenges
The European Commission has published its new Tech Sovereignty Plan. On the surface this sounds promising. Europe talks about reducing dependence on foreign tech giants, strengthening digital autonomy, and supporting open source. These are all things many of us in the #openweb world have been arguing for decades. But when you look at where the … Continue reading The EU tech sovereignty plan
The #KISS secret about the noise in “digital sovereignty” is very simple – Ignore most of this branding and build commons tech instead. That’s the path, not another layer of management, another funding bureaucracy for a glossy strategy document. Not another NGO conference circuit explaining why nothing can happen without another round of funding. Just … Continue reading Compost “digital sovereignty”, build working commons
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
For those of us who’ve spent the last twenty years working around alternative technology, grassroots media and activism, the hardest thing to watch has been how deeply the #dotcons have become embedded in the culture. We know the problems, we’ve been talking about surveillance, extraction, algorithmic manipulation, platform lock-in and the destruction of community for … Continue reading Living through twenty years of #dotcons addiction
For most people, the crisis feels recent. Housing costs. Energy bills. Food prices. Debt. Insecure work. Growing inequality. Endless wars. Ecological breakdown. The #mainstreaming story is that these are separate problems with separate causes. COVID. Ukraine. China. Immigration. Technology. Bad politicians. The reality is simpler, these crises grow from the same roots – the moment … Continue reading How we built the neoliberal #Deathcult
There’s no profit in this for me, the more useful question is: who benefits from #blocking these projects? When people ask “what’s the agenda?” they look for who is trying to benefit from building something. But the better question is who gains when alternatives never get built. The #openweb has always been about creating spaces … Continue reading The commons were never theory – It was always practice
This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but … Continue reading Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess
The story is simple once you stop looking at the green branding and start looking at social power. A powerless tenant farmer in the Cairngorms watches land his family has worked for generations sell for ten times what it was worth only a few years ago. Not because farming suddenly became more valuable, but because … Continue reading The everyday con: How the #deathcult turns crisis into extraction
You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I’m more than happy to be “left behind“. This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic – PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). … Continue reading A fluff view of current tech we need to compost
In every activist space, grassroots project, every loose collective, you get people who bring mess in the wrong way – sniping, backbiting, constant undermining. Call it ego, trauma, status games, burnout… it doesn’t matter. What matters is, this friction is normal, it’s part of the #mess we can’t avoid. The mistake is thinking we can … Continue reading A fresh look at the mess we need to compost
One of the constant pressures we face in #OMN and wider #openweb spaces is the urge to “tidy things up.” People arrive, see a messy landscape of hashtags – #geekproblem, #deathcult, #dotcons – and their first instinct is to fix it, define it, standardise it, make it neat and legible. That instinct feels sensible, but … Continue reading The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point