Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

Let’s focus on being honest, the most exhausting and destructive habit in activist and alternative tech spaces is the blinded reflex to turn disagreement into personal conflict. Someone challenges an idea, and it becomes an attack, names a pattern of behaviour, and suddenly it’s a vendetta. Someone points at structural problems and gets accused of targeting individuals. This is #stupidindividualism in its purest form, and it’s #nothingnew.

It’s not only about difficult personalities or bad intent, it’s the result of forty years of #neoliberal conditioning. The #deathcult of “common sense” market logic has trained us to see everything as personal, personal responsibility, personal success, personal failure, personal conflict. The frameworks for understanding structural problems have been stripped away, so when structural problems are talked about, people fall back on the only tool they’ve been given – finding someone to blame.

The result is nasty and predictable, good projects collapse into personality clashes, needed critiques get dismissed as personal attacks. The real issues will be the systemic mess that needs composting, never get addressed, because everyone is too busy dealing with the drama. This is #deathcult doing what it’s designed to do – keep us fighting each other instead of the system.

So why do we struggle to see this mess, it’s mostly invisible to the people caught inside it as people feel like they’re responding reasonably to real problems, and sometimes they are. But the frame – “this person is the problem” – is almost always wrong as this mess runs like background software, it shapes perception before conscious thought kicks in. A structural critique goes in, a personal accusation comes out – not because people are stupid, but because that’s how they’ve been trained to interpret things.

This is why telling people to “be less defensive” or “think structurally” rarely works. Were asking people to change behaviour without changing the environment that produces it. Culture follows structure, if we want different behaviour, we need different processes, practices, and spaces.

How we actually compost this? It isn’t about perfection, it’s about having better tools – some practical shovels (like the #OMN) to use to name the pattern, not the person, when things start getting personal, we simply shift the frame. “This feels like it’s turning into a personal conflict, but the issue is actually how we’re making decisions” works better than “you’re being defensive.” One opens space, the other closes it.

Build processes before you need them, don’t wait for conflict to figure out how to handle it. Groups that survive disagreement usually have simple, visible processes in place: how decisions happen, how issues get raised, who mediates. This is what #4opens and #OGB are for – use them early.

Separate decision-making from chat as most drama lives in chat spaces – WhatsApp, Discord, comment threads are optimised for reaction, not reflection. If decisions happen there, we’ll get reactive, personalised outcomes. Move important decisions into slower, more visible, documented spaces.

Make structural problems visible as vagueness fuels personalisation – Clear statements like “our funding model creates dependency” or “new people can’t influence decisions” give people something real to work on. Without that clarity, frustration gets directed at individuals.

Actively grow a different culture, its slow, but it works. Model structural thinking by rewarding people who name patterns rather than blame individuals. Create spaces where “this process isn’t working” is normal. Over time, this shifts what feels like common sense.

Let people step back without drama, not everyone can work in structurally-aware, non-hierarchical spaces right now, that’s OK. If leaving a project becomes a crisis, everything becomes personal. Lower the stakes, reduce the pressure, and personalisation drops.

Compost failure publicly, when things go wrong, talk about what failed, not who failed.
The #openweb keeps reinventing broken wheels because we don’t compost our mistakes. Honest, structural post-mortems build shared learning.

The deeper work is that none of this is quick. The #deathcult didn’t embed itself over decades by accident, and it won’t disappear because of a few good arguments. People don’t think their way out of (stupid)individualism, they experience their way out.

What works is repetition of building spaces that function differently, showing that collective approaches work and sticking with it long enough for that experience to become normal. That’s the path of #OMN not only focusing on fixing people, not that only the right language solves everything. The path is #KISS, building open, trust-based, structurally honest systems – and composting the failures along the way – we slowly shift what “common sense” looks like.

The work is slow, practical, and unglamorous, the shovel is structure, the compost is honesty. The soil is what grows when we stop treating every problem as someone’s fault. Pick up the shovel, there’s a lot to get through.

#OMN #4opens #KISS #nothingnew

The Fluffy/Spiky Debate and the Trolls in Between

The fluffy/spiky tension is one of the oldest and least resolved arguments in activist and grassroots organising spaces. It’s real, it’s necessary, and it’s been exploited. Let’s name the grounding first.

The Fluffy Position

Fluffy politics is about inclusion, emotional safety, consensus, and non-confrontation. At its best it builds welcoming spaces, holds diverse people together, and prevents the macho posturing that drives people away from radical movements. Fluffy people are doing the invisible emotional labour that keeps groups functioning. Without them, most grassroots projects collapse into ego wars.

At its worst, fluffy becomes conflict avoidance dressed as principle. Real problems don’t get named,difficult people don’t get challenged. The group becomes a feelings-management exercise rather than an organising force. Nothing spiky – meaning nothing that actually confronts power – ever gets done, because confrontation itself has been pathologised.

The Spiky Position

Spiky politics embraces confrontation, directness, and a willingness to name uncomfortable truths regardless of who gets upset. At its best it cuts through bullshit, holds people accountable, and actually frightens the powerful rather than merely inconveniencing them. Spiky people often do the work nobody else wants to do – the hard conversation, the direct action, the refusal to pretend things are fine when they aren’t.

At its worst, spiky becomes machismo with a political justification. Aggression gets mistaken for radicalism, burning things down feels more satisfying than building. People who raise concerns about tone or process get dismissed as weak, co-opted, or bourgeois. The movement shrinks to whoever can tolerate the bad atmosphere.

The Debate

The genuine fluffy/spiky debate is worth having. Movements need both tendencies and the tension between them is productive when it’s honest. Fluffy without spiky produces nice shallow groups that change nothing. Spiky without fluffy produces effective alienators who also change little, just more dramatically. The balance is hard and context-dependent – what works on a picket line is different from what works in a community meeting, which is different again from what works online.

The problem is this debate rarely gets had with any honestly, because of a third character type who poisons the the change and challange path.

The Passive-Spiky Fluffy Troll

This is the one that needs naming clearly. This character tends to presents as fluffy. They speak the language of care, inclusion, and safety. They invoke consensus, call for kindness, and position themselves on the moral high ground of the group. But their actual behaviour is spiky in the most destructive possible way – not the honest confrontational spiky that names real problems, but a passive, weaponised spiky that:

Distracts – derails productive conversations with tone policing, and hurt feelings at strategic moments
Decides – makes unilateral calls while performing consultation, using the language of consensus to smuggle through their own blinded preferences
Destroys – systematically undermines people and projects they find threatening, always with plausible deniability, always from behind the shield of their own stated good intentions

They are, in effect, trolls. Not the obvious aggressive troll who can be identified and dealt with, but something more insidious – the troll wearing a fluffy third-bear costume, all warmth on the surface, all disruption underneath.

The Character Types

The Tone Policer – Never engages with substance, always has a concern about how something was said. Uses the language of trauma and safety to shut down challenges to their comfort or control. Allies with whoever seems most aggrieved at any given moment.

The Consensus Hijacker – Performs collective process while actually steering outcomes. Calls meetings, sets agendas, summarises discussions in ways that happen to always reflect their own narrow position. If challenged, expresses deep hurt that their commitment to the group is being questioned.

The Concern Troll – Agrees with the goal in principle, always. Just has concerns. So many concerns. The timing isn’t right, the framing is off, this might alienate people, have we really thought this through. Concern is infinite and self-replenishing, ensuring nothing ever moves forward.

The Moral Credentialist – Collects grievances and allyships like armour. Their identity and stated commitments make them immune to criticism. Any challenge to their behaviour becomes an attack on the community they represent. This is the most effective variant because it recruits others to their defence automatically.

The Exhaustion Engine – Doesn’t block directly, just makes everything take so long, require so much emotional management, and generate so much process overhead that the capable people eventually leave. Wins by attrition.

What To Do

Treat them as trolls. Not with hostility – that plays into their framing – but with the same basic approach you’d use for any bad-faith actor in a shared space:

Don’t feed the performance. Engaging earnestly with endless concern-raising rewards the behaviour.
Name the pattern, not the person. “This keeps happening and it’s blocking us” is more useful than “you are doing this deliberately.”
Keep moving. Don’t let process objections halt action indefinitely. Document, note the objection, proceed.
Protect the genuinely fluffy people. Real fluffy organisers are valuable and they’re often the first casualties of passive-spiky trolling, because they’re the most susceptible to guilt and the most invested in harmony.

The fluffy/spiky debate is needed, but the passive-spiky fluffy troll makes sure it never happens properly. Naming them is the first step to composting the mess they make.

Turning stress, conflict, and exhaustion into commons culture instead of mutual destruction

The #encryptionist detour

Let’s look back to before the #Fediverse, to be honest about the last two decades of #openweb failure, for a long time we got pulled off the path. Not only by enemies, but by a mix of fear, fashion, and half-understood technical “solutions” that felt right to fearful people at the time.

The rise of the dogmatic, blinded #encryptionist mindset came out of real conditions of mass surveillance revelations (Snowden era), common sense #neoliberal distrust of states and corporations and the real harms of our worship of the (same neoliberal) #deathcult of the #dotcons

Encryption mattered – and still does – private space matters, protection matters. But what happened next at this time is where things went wrong – we shifted focus from necessary tool to blinded totalising path. For the #geekproblem and its fashionista followers – encryption shifted from being a tool in the stack to the answer to everything.

Instead of asking what should be public? – what should be private? And how do we build shared, accountable space? We got a flattened answer of “make everything encrypted and trustless” that sounds good to the blinded fear filled crew as It feels “safe”. But if you are not blind, it obviously undermines the foundations of the #openweb we were working to reboot, the #openweb isn’t built on secrecy – it’s built on shared visibility, trust, and negotiation.

This was mess, enter #blockchain and #DAO – the peak of the detour, this is where the #fashionista layer really took over. Into this already confused path stepped #blockchain, #NFT’s and #DAO governance models of token economies. The mess making was wrapped in smoke and mirrors language of decentralisation, autonomy and trustlessness to “fixing governance”.

But look at what they actually did – financialisation of everything, instead of building commons, we got tokens, ledgers, “market” incentives leading to speculation. This is a very easy to see failed imagination of market logic reintroduced through the back door of wealth = power, not in any way new, it’s smoke and mirrors to hide the same old system the native #openweb path was supposed to move beyond. This detour directly contradicts gift economies, commons-based governance and trust-based collaboration, it was used to push this needed path out of sight.

It’s the normal mess of fear based #stupidindividualism – governance avoidance disguised as governance. DAOs didn’t in any way solve governance, they simply avoided it as real governance is messy, social, contextual, rooted in trust and relationships. DAOs tried and failed to replace this with hard voting mechanisms, token-weighted decisions and rigid rules. That’s not in any way useful governance, that’s automation of power to remove the human layer instead of engaging with it, its pure #geekproblem that our #fashionistas were to blind (or self-interested) to see past.

This is the same problem we are repeating today (still in embryo) with the current new crew taking over pushing the #openweb reboot – this time its not only encryption, but it’s the same mess of shifting focus away from what actually matters, the same distraction.

What can we compost from the last mess, to shine light on this path, back in the day people were busy writing whitepapers, launching tokens, debating protocol layers. Were they should have been building communities, maintaining infrastructure to grow trust networks to support real-world use #KISS This misdirection of focus, resources and energy is the recurring damage as attention is diverted away from the soil layer into tiny self-interested abstract cliques that never root.

The #geekproblem and the #NGO loop feed this mess, as the fashionista class capture does not happen in isolation. It is amplified by two reinforcing dynamics – the #geekproblem – preference for technical certainty over social mess, belief that systems can replace relationships, discomfort with ambiguity and lived complexity. The #NGO layer with its need for fundable, legible “solutions”, preference for clean frameworks – over messy reality, career pathways built on producing narratives, not outcomes.

Put these together, and you get complicated “solutions” that look impressive, but don’t work in practice. Back then we had a decade of drift we need to not repeat now. Back then we ended up with over-engineered systems nobody uses, governance models disconnected from lived communities and fragmented efforts chasing the next “solution”. This weakened focus on building actual alternatives, meanwhile, the #dotcons carried on consolidating power.

The reality check for today is we built a pile of #techshit, and we are doing the same now with the current takeover crew of the #Fediverse. The last time because we failed to compost the accumulated outcome of the mess of abandoned projects, broken promises, conceptual clutter we still have the current confused direction. We need to now compost this historical mess, as keeping pretending this is fine is part of the problem, it’s not fine. But – and this matters – this “shit” doesn’t need to be useless, it’s compost.

The native path we didn’t take (but still can), was always simpler, and still is, to build in public (#4opens), separate public and private space (#KISS), focus on trust, not “trustless”, grow from real communities, not closed cliques.

We need to develop governance as lived practice, not only code, this is what #OMN and #OGB are pointing toward – human networks first, tech as support, not driver, openness as default for shared knowledge, privacy where it actually matters. If we’re serious about a future – it is to stop chasing totalising tech fixes, stop “common sense” financialising community, stop pretending governance can be automated and start growing from the soil up. And most importantly shift from control → collaboration, from abstraction → grounded practice to shift from narrative → lived reality.

The point is the #encryptionist turn wasn’t (only) evil as it was a reaction to real harm. But it became a dead end when it tried to replace the social with the technical. What we need to lean from this to shift the current mess is if we want a real #openweb we don’t need more “solutions”, we need to get our hands dirty again to compost the mess to make soil to plant something much more real that can grow.

#openweb #4opens #OGB #OMN #geekproblem #techshit #KISS

The Crew – Paths to Growth?

So what path should we be focusing on to balance this current oligarchy mess. The #OMN (Open Media Network) is decentralized, grassroots, focused on an “open process” rather than a fixed, top-down control structure, it’s a governance model:

Continuous ecological process, as navigation through lived memory rather than a set of static rules.
Decentralized & community-driven, from users, producers/creators, and admins, aiming to balance out central authority.
Federated coordination, strong transparency were no one has to agree, but reasoning and actions are publicly visible to produce accountability for public mess making.
The #4opens Principles – building on open data, open source, open standards, and open process.
Emergent structure, grows organically through “lived collaboration” and social federated tech flows #OGB (Open Governance Body).

The #OMN is a path to growing an alternative to corporate-controlled platforms (#dotcons), a “public-first” digital commons.

People resist is visible structure

The Crew – Paths to Growth?

These people are a problem, the group of people who took over running the #Fediverse from us first wave crew. The problem is that they are liars – not out of malice, but in a blinded, dogmatic way. They arrived in this native #openweb movement already carrying this mindset, and it’s only deepened since. That doesn’t make them personally nasty, but it does make them dangerously incompetent. Why? Because they generate serious signal-to-noise problems, misallocate resources, misplace competency, and shift focus away from what actually matters.

The problem with https://www.blog-pat.ch/moving-sideways-paths-to-growth/ isn’t that it’s wrong – it’s that it emerges from a closed loop of “truthy” ideas that feel insightful but don’t engage with #openweb material reality. That’s where the blind, dogmatic lying comes in, not malicious, but structurally embedded. It recycles a familiar narrative, classic signal-to-noise inflation, where old ideas are dressed up as insight.

This group of people abstracts away power and material constraints. “Growth” is framed as an individual mindset or path choice, when in reality sideways movement is shaped by structural limits – the very things the #OMN project is addressing: lack of upward mobility, organisational bottlenecks, precarity, stagnation, and misallocation of labour. That’s the “blind lie”: turning systemic limitation into a personal growth narrative. Not evil, but deeply misleading.

What we see is the individualist path (#stupidindividualism), centres on the individual journey – your path, your growth, your mindset – with no sense of collective structures, shared infrastructure, governance, or power relations. This is the failure mode we should be composting, instead, the current mess drags “open” thinking back into #neoliberal self-optimisation culture. Rather than asking how we build systems that enable meaningful growth, it asks how you reinterpret your path as growth, that’s a dead end.

It also contributes to resource and focus drift. This kind of thinking has real consequences for projects like #openweb and #OMN as it encourages endless reframing instead of building – validates drift that weakens focus on the native outcomes and infrastructure we actually need. In practice, it leads to misplaced competency, misallocated effort, and degraded signal. That’s the “dangerously incompetent” part – not personal failure, but systemic impact.

The deeper issue is that these aren’t bad people, it’s that they are aligned – unthinkingly – with #deathcult thinking by individualising systemic issues and amplifying noise in already fragile spaces. They arrived with this mindset, and the environments they shape reinforce it.

A grounded approach would ask harder questions: how do we build collective structures that make sideways movement meaningful? Without that, this is just narrative smoothing, smoke and mirrors.

So to sum up: the post linked above isn’t wrong, it’s worse than that, it’s harmless-sounding, blinded ideology that recycles known ideas, strips out material context, reinforces individualist framing, and adds noise where clarity is needed. In a healthy ecosystem, this would be background chatter, in a struggling one – like the current open social web space – it becomes actively damaging.

“I headed up to Oxford to a Marmalade Festival event: The World Works on WhatsApp.”

I’m in Oxford, and I saw that event listed. My reaction was: I can’t stomach that. Still, I probably should have gone, it would have been useful to have that conversation in person.

The problem we now face is these people will #gatekeep… if the is no way in or out without there agreement we are going to fail, there is a long history of this mess making. I have seen the same problem people destroy numerous grassroots movements over the 40 years I have been working in this path.

The personal is not the political – Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

The goal is simple: build tools that serve people, not profit. #KISS

The End of the “Peace Dividend” and the Return of History

#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 fight #neoliberalism the very system that’s been tearing apart the social fabric for decades. Instead of building collective power, we pushed endless identity fragmentation, reactive outrage cycles and symbolic battles detached from material change the left is about.

Energy that could have gone into organising, building, and challenging power structures got redirected into managing discourse and fighting each other. That wasn’t an accident, it was the path of least resistance within a liberal framework that can’t actually confront the roots of the problem, because it’s part of the problem.

So while people were arguing over representation and language, the underlying mess – what we call the #deathcult – carried on concentrating wealth, hollowing out communities and locking in structural inequality. And now, that same system is producing a hard shift to the right, feed by anger without direction, backlash without solutions and reaction filling the vacuum left by the failure of the “left” to build alternatives.

So yes, the liberal centre made the mess, but the more important point is this we’re still stuck inside its framing, still reacting, still fighting on terrain that leads nowhere and still avoiding the work of building something that can actually replace what’s failing. Not to dismiss identity or culture – those matter – but to put them back in proportion, grounded in material reality and collective process. Because if we don’t do that, we stay locked in the loop of liberal fragmentation → right-wing reaction → deeper collapse, and this loop doesn’t end well.

The question isn’t only who to blame, it’s whether we can stop playing the same game long enough to build something else. Let’s look at this from a much wider view.

For a long time, the dominant mainstreaming story has been that today’s instability is blamed on the anger of the “left-behind” in the West, a neat, comfortable narrative. But this is shallow, as long before discontent surfaced in the US or UK, entire societies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union went through something far more extreme.

The 1990s transition to #neoliberalism wasn’t just “reform” – it was a peace-time social collapse when life expectancy dropped, savings were wiped out and crime and addiction surged. This “history” matters now because it shows that what we’re living through isn’t new, it’s the long tail of our worshipping of the same #deathcult, that has been breaking societies for decades.

The illusion of stability from the early 1990s to around 2010, when the world looked unusually stable, even peaceful. Major wars between big powers disappeared, military spending dropped, trade and GDP surged – “Democracy” spread across the globe. This period was framed as success, some even called it the end of history. But this “peace” rested on smoke and mirrors.

#globalisation as control – economic interdependence was supposed to prevent war, the idea was simple if everyone is economically connected, conflict becomes irrational. What actually happened was production was off shored, labour was weakened in the West, global supply chains became fragile and unequal and wealth concentrated at the top. This wasn’t peace, it was #classwar.

The fig leaf of “democracy” was always market compliance, less about collective decision-making and more about maintaining economic growth. In practice governments served markets, institutions constrained popular power and politics became technocratic management. In #OMN terms, this is #mainstreaming – reducing real political choices into narrow, “acceptable” to the #nastyfew options.

The hidden cost was hollow societies, this system did produce growth. But hollowed everything out, communities weakened, industries disappeared, inequality exploded and politics lost meaning. People were told everything was fine, while their lived reality worsened.

So the anger we see today isn’t sudden, it’s delayed. The imperial layer is power without accountability at the global level, this system was held together by a dominant power structure. And here’s where the cracks deepen as rules applied selectively, international law was a tool, not a constraint, economic systems weaponised as needed. The result was a loss of legitimacy, as when rules are not applied equally, they lift the veil to stop functioning as rules at all.

We are now moving out of that world back to no longer having a single uncontested centre of power. Instead, we have competing blocs, regional tensions, fragile alliances and increasing militarisation. This is what’s called a multipolar world in #IR terms. Historically, these systems are unstable unless there are shared norms and limits, right now, those norms are weak or collapsing.

So we understand that the liberal #deathcult logic no longer works, globalisation is fragmenting, states are prioritising more self-sufficiency, supply chain control, strategic industries. The old idea of interdependence is now seen as a risk, not a safeguard.

Liberal ideas of democracy aren’t stabilising conflict, instead of reducing tension, elections amplify nationalism, reward confrontation leading to deepen division. The “#deathcult peace” is no longer holding, It’s a dangerous feedback loop, that without strong shared “rules”, the mess drifts toward proxy conflicts, regional wars, arms races and escalating mistrust. Even if full-scale war is avoided, instability becomes normal, and this instability feeds back into domestic politics – creating more fear, more reaction, more breakdown.

The deeper problem is #neoliberal exhaustion, we no longer treat the #deathcult as sacred and with #climatechaos and social break down our deaths are seeping closer. It’s now visible systemic exhaustion of the rule of the #nastyfew who built this era of #neoliberalism to prioritised finance over production, replaced politics with management, concentrated wealth and power and stripped away collective purpose.

This mess making didn’t resolve contradictions, it displaced them into culture wars, liberal identity conflicts and into abstraction. Now those social control is failing, we see the return of “history” where fundamental questions can’t be avoided anymore:

What is the purpose of the state?

Who benefits from the economy?

What do we protect and why?

How do we organise collectively?

This is uncomfortable, but necessary. As the previous era avoided these questions, this one forces them.

The #OMN perspective on this mess is compost, don’t collapse, that this moment is not just crisis – it’s raw material. The breakdown of the old system creates space, but we need to use the space, it’s why the #compost thinking matters – don’t deny the mess, don’t romanticise collapse, process it into something usable. Because if we don’t, the vacuum gets filled by reactionary politics, authoritarian control and deeper #mainstreaming mess.

The “end of history” wasn’t an achievement, it was a pause – built on unstable foundations. What we’re living through now is history restarting, messy, risky, uncertain. But also the first real chance in decades to build something that isn’t just a updated version of the same #deathcult logic. We might build a #lifecult if we can hold our nerve, and actually do the work.

So what comes next? We are moving from “stability” without meaning to instability with possibility. Yes, that shift is dangerous, but it also reopens agency, the question is no longer
“how do we maintain the system?” It becomes “what do we build instead?”

The #KISS choice is the #OMN path to grow new #openweb, grassroots, trust-based structures, or we default fall back into more centralised, extractive systems?

Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip.

In most social/political movements, the hard questions – how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve conflict – are deferred. If people think about this at all – First you win power, then you figure out how things will work. That “later” rarely comes, or when it does, it arrives shaped by hierarchy, bureaucracy, and control.

The #OMN paths flips this. It starts at the micro level of how do a group of people share space? How do they make decisions without bosses? How do they deal with conflict, mess, bad behaviour, uneven effort and how do they build trust that actually holds under pressure? These are not abstract questions, they are everyday problems.

And this path – at its best – has decades (centuries, really) of paths with real answers like messy consensus processes, affinity groups, mutual aid, horizontal organising, temporary structures that form and dissolve as needed. None of it perfect, all of it is grounded. This is why grassroots activism works in real situations: disaster response, grassroots organising, protest camps, community projects. Because it doesn’t wait for permission or perfect conditions. It already has tools for acting now.

The messy bit is it’s not magic, let’s not romanticise this. Horizontal organising is hard, it’s full of friction. You get informal hierarchies, dominant personalities, avoidance of conflict until it explodes and burnout leading to #blocking of uncomfortable but necessary conversations. This is the same “poisonous people” problem you see in every movement. #4opens grassroots activism doesn’t remove it – it exposes it – and that’s actually the point. Instead of hiding dysfunction behind formal power, horizontal spaces push it into the open where it has to be dealt with. Or not – and then things fall apart, which is also a kind of clarity. In #OMN language, this is #compost, the mess isn’t a failure. It’s raw material.

Why this matters for the #openweb – most digital infrastructure is built on the opposite assumption. The #dotcons model says to centralise control, extract value, smooth over conflict, optimise engagement, hide the mess. It “works” – but only by disempowering people and communities. The #openweb path, if it’s going to mean anything, has to go the other way:

decentralised

messy

trust-based

human-scale

and able to function anyway

That last bit is where we can learn from anarchist practice, because building federated, grassroots media (like #OMN, #indymediaback, Fediverse spaces) is not just a technical problem, it’s a social one. The tech already basically works, the people part doesn’t – yet. Micro practice is the missing layer – What we keep hitting is the gap between having tools (#ActivityPub, servers, platforms) and having cultures that can use those tools effectively

You can spin up a server in an afternoon, you can’t spin up trust, shared norms, or collective process nearly as fast. This is where activist/anarchist thinking helps – not as blinded ideology, but as a toolkit:

how to run meetings that don’t collapse

how to distribute responsibility without losing coherence

how to handle conflict without defaulting to bans or dominance

how to balance openness with resilience

These are the problems that keep blocking #openweb projects. It’s about the clash: horizontal vs “common sense”. One of the biggest tensions is this is people default to vertical “common sense” – someone should be in charge, decisions should be quick, authority should be clear. And in moments of stress, that instinct feels right, but over time, it reproduces the same power structures we’re supposedly trying to move beyond.

So we get a cycle of start horizontal, hit friction, fall back to informal hierarchy, burn out or fragment then repeat. Balancing this cycle requires conscious practice, not just good intentions. For #OMN, this isn’t theory, it’s practical. If we want a functioning, grassroots media network:

we need working horizontal processes

we need ways to mediate conflict and #blocking

we need to actively compost dysfunction instead of ignoring it

we need to balance “fluffy” inclusion with “spiky” clarity and direction

Otherwise, the social layer collapses long before the tech does. And then the #dotcons win by default, not because they’re better, but because they’re simpler in the short term.

The real opportunity here is to combine #KISS activist micro-practice (how people actually work together) with #openweb technology (how systems interconnect at scale). That combination is rare, and powerful. It gives us a path that is:

grounded (not abstract)

scalable (but not centralised)

resilient (because it expects mess)

and actually usable by normal people, not just #geekproblem specialists

This path isn’t useful because it promises a perfect future, it’s useful because it takes responsibility for the present. It asks – how do we make this work, here, now, with these people, in this mess? That’s the question the #openweb needs to answer, and if we don’t answer it, the answer we’ll get is more of the same, more #closedweb, more #dotcons, more #deathcult normality.

If we do answer it – even imperfectly – we start to build something else, something that grows not by control, but by practice.

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#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 prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky

#RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.

#reboot is the necessary reset of the #openweb – stepping away from the dead ends of #techshit and #dotcons to rebuild human-centred, trust infrastructure using tools like #activitypub and the #fediverse, guided by the #4opens.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=reboot

#postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern

In the #OMN hashtag story, #Oxford is a grounded example of real-world contradiction – where elitist power (#mainstreaming, #NGO, #deathcult) coexists with genuine grassroots community, making it a test bed for grassroots #openweb organising and the #4opens path.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Oxford

In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA

In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p

In the #OMN view, #opensource is not just a licence – it’s a political commitment to transparency, shared ownership, and community control over code, data, and process.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opensource

The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb

#openprocess means decisions and governance happen visibly and participatorily – not behind closed doors, so people can see, challenge, and shape outcomes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openprocess

#opendata means data that is freely accessible and shareable – controlled by communities rather than locked inside corporate silos.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opendata

In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open

#OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN

The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB

In the #OMN story, #nothingnew reminds us that cycles of co-option and failure have all happened before – and ignoring this history is how we repeat mistakes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nothingnew

In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO

In the #OMN path, #neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of markets over people – normalising greed and eroding solidarity into the logic of the #deathcult.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=neoliberalism

#makinghistory is the practice of communities reclaiming storytelling – building open, living archives rather than leaving history to those in power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=makeinghistory

In #OMN usage, #mainstreaming is how radical ideas get absorbed and neutralised – keeping the language while stripping out real challenge.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mainstreaming

In the #OMN path, #KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a political stance against the #geekproblem – rejecting unnecessary complexity as a form of control.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=KISS

#indymediaback is a call to rebuild grassroots, community-controlled media as an alternative to both #dotcons and hollow #NGO media structures.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=indymediaback

In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag

#grassroots means bottom-up organising rooted in real communities – accountable to collective need, not institutions.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=grassroots

The #geekproblem is the tendency to replace human trust with technical control – embedding narrow values into systems that shape everyone’s lives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=geekproblem

In #OMN, #FOSS is a political commitment to collective ownership of technology – not just a licensing model.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=FOSS

In #OMN language, #fluffy describes feel-good politics that avoid conflict – prioritising comfort over any real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fluffy

#feudalism describes the emerging digital structure where platform owners extract value like lords from dependent users.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=feudalism

#fascism is what happens when the #deathcult drops its mask – authoritarian control to defend failing systems.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fascism

On the #OMN path, the #fediverse is practical #openweb infrastructure – decentralised, federated, and not owned by corporations.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fediverse

#encryptionist describes the tendency to prioritise technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Encryptionist

#dotcons are corporate platforms built on data extraction and control, presenting themselves as neutral while enclosing the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism – sacrificing social and ecological survival for short-term fear drivern greed.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN story, #compost means breaking down failure and mess into fuel for new growth.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN, #closedweb is controlled, extractive digital infrastructure where users have no power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

#climatechaos describes the accelerating breakdown driven by the #deathcult, beyond manageable “climate change.”
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing conflict between the #nastyfew and the communities they exploit – often hidden by #mainstreaming narratives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the dominant system turning everything – relationships, nature, culture – into “profit”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In #OMN, #block is the reflex to shut down challenge – preventing the messy work needed for real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded is being unable or unwilling to see beyond #mainstreaming and #dotcons logic.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes performative activism that prioritises appearance over substance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

#dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.

These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure

#openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam

#4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default

#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.

The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.

#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

#dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

#closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

#classwar – underlying structural conflict

This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.

The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.

#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.

Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.

#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

#block – reflex rejection of challenge

#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.

The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.

#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

#activitypub – the protocol glue

#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

#p2p – people-to-people first, tech second

#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.

Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.

#OGB – structured, open governance

#openprocess – again, because it’s that important

#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.

Practice & Direction (how we move).

#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.

Grounding Example Layer

#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.

The Meta Layer (how to use this)

#compost – break down failure into growth

This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:

bad behaviour → learning

failed projects → patterns

conflict → structure

Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.

The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.

The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point

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 is also the #geekproblem.

The hashtag ecology we’ve been growing over the last decade is designed to be messy. Not as a failure, but as a feature. These tags are not rigid definitions; they’re handles – entry points into ongoing conversations. They hold space rather than close it down. Different people can use the same tag slightly differently, argue over it, stretch it, even misuse it. That friction is not a bug. It’s the composting process.

This is where the #geekproblem shows up hard. The default technical mindset is to treat language like code: define variables, eliminate ambiguity, enforce consistency. In living social systems, that approach kills more than it fixes. You don’t get clarity – you get dead structure. A taxonomy that excludes instead of invites.

But – and this matters – pure chaos doesn’t work either. If everything is noise, only insiders can hear anything. New people can’t find a way in, and the whole thing collapses into a closed loop. The compost stops producing anything useful. So the question isn’t “mess or order?” It’s how to grow balanced living structures.

Dead structure says: this is the correct meaning, this is the right way to use it, anything else is wrong. Were living structure says: here’s how this is being used, here are examples, come play and meaning emerges through use. That’s the difference between a locked-down platforms and the #openweb. One enforces clarity from above, the other grows understanding from below.

Think of it like ecology. Compost isn’t just random waste – it’s a process. Layers, breakdown, transformation over time. Healthy systems have patterns and flows, but they’re never fixed. Forests change. Rivers shift. Nothing is static, but nothing is completely formless either.

The same applies here we don’t need to “clean up” the hashtag mess. We need to use it better by repeating patterns, so people can follow threads, tell stories that embody the tags, let contradictions surface and be worked through and resist the urge to prematurely close meaning. This is basic #KISS, but it’s a hard lesson. Keep it simple doesn’t mean make it simplistic. it means don’t over-engineer what needs to stay alive.

So yes, the mess has value. It creates space for people to build differently, to step outside the rigid frames of the #dotcons and their algorithmic control. It’s how we hold open a commons instead of collapsing back into platforms.

But remember, if everything is compost, nothing grows. If everything is fixed, nothing lives. #OMN sits in that tension, not cleaning up the mess, not drowning in it – but composting it into something people can actually use to make change.

“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

The servent of the #nastyfew wispering in the ear of the #deathcult ists liberals

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 – concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy for the #mainstreaming crew to reuse the language without friction. When they launch something like a “Sovereign Tech fund,” they’re not inventing a new narrative, they’re tapping into one that was already compatible with their narrow worldview.

That’s the problem we need to keep composting – #mainstreaming language carries “common sense” ideological defaults. So what how can we shovel this mess – Liberals adopt a term to make ideas legible to institutions and funding. But obviously the term carries right-leaning assumptions (control, territory, hierarchy) – assumptions that quietly reshape the thinking and direction of projects. Then right-wing actors step in and feel completely at home using the same language.

At that point, it’s already too much mess, you’re not just “using” the language, you’ve internalised the worldview – “Sovereignty” is about defensive, fear-based framing (“protecting against others”) that clashes directly with #openweb values of networks over borders, trust over control and interoperability over enclosure. Our native world view is commons over ownership, so even if the intent is good, the term pulls thinking in the wrong direction. Its #KISS we need to shift focus from states → to people and communities, from control → to capability, from fear → to empowerment.

But here, #OMN pushes much harder – if you need mainstream policy language to explain what you’re doing, you’re already halfway into the #closedweb logic. The #openweb path doesn’t start from sovereignty, autonomy, or even agency. It starts from something simpler – shared standards, visible processes and trust networks (#4opens). That’s why the #OMN path matters, the more abstract the language gets, the easier it is to smuggle in ideology without noticing.

So what do we do with this mess? Yes, “digital sovereignty” is a dead-end term for open, trust-based politics. Yes, alternatives like “autonomy” are an improvement, but the real work is stepping outside that whole framing, instead of arguing over better words, focus on building systems that demonstrate openness, using language grounded in practice, not policy fashion.

Bluntly, this is mess we need to compost, it’s the normal mess of “blinded” liberals laying the groundwork – unintentionally – by adopting language that was never native to the #openweb. That’s the messy pattern – #OMN keeps pointing at, if you build with messy concepts, you will get messy outcomes. So yes – compost it. And next time, start from cleaner soil please.

The recurring theme is digital & social decay – A “trust collapse” resulting from bad faith and disempowerment online. The Goal is #KISS moving beyond individualistic #stupidindividualism, ” common sense to create a balanced collective, community-controlled alternatives.

The #OMN hashtag story is a shovel to “compost mess” to turn toxic digital decay into valuable, new growth rather than pretending the stinking mess doesn’t exist, the second step is acknowledging that disagreements are not to be avoided but used constructively to build stronger, more empathetic, and more transparent communities.

Do you notice a recurring theme and issue here? Read and use the hashtag story to help compost this.

The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point

People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea – people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively – is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible.

So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of the time, it’s the people – and, more importantly, the tools and cultures we bring with us. The path we need is simplicity underneath – #Oxfordboaters is doing three things:

Sharing information about what’s happening

Building a shared understanding of that information

Acting together based on that understanding

That’s it, strip away the noise, and that’s the whole system. It’s classic #actavisam: publish, discuss, act. You don’t need layers of management theory or complex governance frameworks to make that work. You need #KISS trust, visibility, and participation.

But we rarely get to operate at this level of clarity, the difficulty creeps in as people bring baggage – Everyone arrives with habits shaped by the #mainstreaming worshipping of the #deathcult that leads to the imposing of unthinking expectation of hierarchy (“who’s in charge?”) and fear of speaking openly (“will this be used against me?”) leading to the desire for control (“we need to manage the message”) this “common sense” mess leads to focus on avoidance of conflict (“let’s keep it positive and not rock the boat”).

These aren’t individual personal failings, they’re social learned behaviours, that distort simple processes into complicated ones. This mess is amplified by a second “common sense” problem, that the tools we use shape behaviour, the #dotcons platforms we “use” default push us in particular mess making directions:

Chat tools fragment conversations into noise

Social media rewards reaction over reflection

Instead of supporting collective clarity, these default tools amplify confusion, they make it harder to see what’s actually going on, and thus easier for misunderstandings to spiral. One tool we have is process but is it a tool or weapon? Process can either help people work together, or it can be used to block this work. Some processes are designed to:

Encourage participation

Make decisions visible

Build shared ownership

Others – often unintentionally – end up:

Slowing everything down

Creating gatekeepers

Hiding power behind “procedure”

You can see this easily when something urgent comes up – healthy process helps people respond quickly and collectively, were a broken one turns into endless discussion, deferral, and inaction. Same situation, same people – different outcome depending on the process.

At #Oxfordboaters, the work itself is straightforward: There’s an issue affecting the river community – People gather information about it – That information is shared – A response is organised. But what makes it hard? People are different – Disagreements about tone (fluffy vs spiky), uncertainty about who should act and fragmented communication across platforms leading to #blocking of action.

None of these are about the actual goal, they’re all about how people relate to each other and the structures they’re working within. The illusion of complexity is one of the biggest traps – mistaking this friction for complexity. When something feels hard, we assume the solution is to add more structure, more meetings, more rules, more #dotcons tools. But this “common sense” push to often adds another layer of blockage, it treats the symptoms, not the cause.

The reality is harsher the system is simple, but we as a community are messy. So how can we work better in this mess? The answer isn’t to eliminate the mess – that’s impossible. It’s to design processes that work with it instead of work against it. That means accepting disagreement as normal, making conflict visible rather than suppressing it. Keeping structures lightweight and adaptable, in the end it’s about prioritising clarity over control. In #OMN terms, this is where the #4opens come in:

Open data → everyone can see what’s happening

Open process → decisions aren’t hidden

Open source → tools can be adapted

Open standards → systems interconnect

These don’t remove human complexity, but they can mediate it from becoming opaque and blocking. So what do we mean by blocking vs enabling. You can tell the health of a project by a simple test – Does the process help people act, or stop them from acting? If people feel empowered to contribute → the process is working. Hesitant, confused, or sidelined → the process is blocking.

At #Oxfordboaters, like many grassroots efforts, both dynamics exist at the same time. That’s normal. The work is to shift the balance toward enabling. So the hard truth is this the challenge isn’t building the perfect system, it’s growing the relationships that allow the #4opens path to function. That’s slower, messier, and far less comfortable than designing a neat process diagram, but it’s the only thing that actually works.

Keep it simple (#KISS) – when things get messy, the instinct is to add complexity. The better move is usually the opposite by striping things back to focus on what actually needs to happen. Make it easier for people to take part, because underneath all the noise, the work is still simple. People, talking to each other, deciding to act. Everything else is either helping that – or getting in the way.

We keep making mess, then wondering why everything smells

A big part of this is the language we use, when we unthinkingly spread #mainstreaming terms, we push the worldview that comes with them, and that worldview is usually rooted in fear, control, and market logic.

Take “digital sovereignty.” it sounds solid, sensible, progressive. But, it’s a made-up term trying to frame the internet in nation-state and market terms – ownership, borders, competition. It’s a liberal answer to a fear-based economy: “how do we control this thing so it doesn’t threaten us?” That framing is the problem, because the #openweb was never built on control. It was built on trust, shared standards, and open process – the #4opens:

open data
open source
open standards
open process

That’s the native soil, when we blindly shift to language like “sovereignty,” we drag in assumptions that don’t belong. We start thinking in terms of ownership instead of participation, control instead of collaboration. And that creates mess – conceptual, political, and technical Then we spend years trying to “fix” that mess, composting it.

But it’s much better if we don’t make that mess in the first place #KISS, by staying grounded in #openweb values. We don’t need to retrofit control structures onto something that was designed to work without them. We don’t need layers of governance theatre to simulate trust, we can build trust directly through open processes.

This is why clarity, clear language matters, if we keep pushing borrowed language from the #deathcult, we’ll keep rebuilding its logic, no matter how good our intentions are. So yes, we need to talk more clearly about stopping importing broken concepts, stop framing open systems in closed terms and stop making more mess we then have to compost.

Start from the roots, grow from there, please.

The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away

Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years – because that’s what it is – a con.

The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, capture, and profit.

The old #openweb got fenced in, and most people, especially polite liberal society, went along with it. So we need to talk about the return and the problem. Now we have a shift of the #mainstreaming is flowing back toward the #openweb, that should be a good thing. But there is a problem: people don’t leave the #dotcons behind when they move, they bring the culture with them.

What we’re seeing is a flood of the same patterns – extractive behaviour, ego performance, status games. Not from one “side,” but from everywhere. The habits built inside the #dotcons don’t magically disappear just because the platform changes.

So the real issue isn’t technical, it’s cultural. If we don’t actively mediate this influx, we won’t rebuild the #openweb – we’ll just recreate the same broken systems in slightly different code.

So why do I talk so much about compost, and mess not being the problem. Mess is necessary, but only if it composts – if it breaks down into something fertile. Right now, we’re mostly just piling it higher.

This is where projects like #indymediaback and #OGB matter. They’re not perfect, but they are native to the #openweb path: grounded in trust, process, and the #4opens rather than control, branding, and capture.

The question isn’t whether #mainstreaming is good or bad. The question is: how do we hold the cultural line so that what grows is something genuinely different? Because if we don’t, the #dotcons don’t need to defeat us. We’ll blindly rebuild them ourselves.

So why do I argue we can’t just leave the #dotcons? This is where people get it wrong, every time the #dotcons tighten control – censoring, tweaking algorithms, shifting rules – the reaction is the same: leave, build the #openweb.

Yes, build the #openweb, but the idea that we should stop organizing inside the #dotcons right now? That’s a trap, because billions of people are still there. The conversations, the communities, the movements, they haven’t magically migrated. Walking away doesn’t free those people, it abandons them, leaving the space to be shaped entirely by the #deathcult and the forces already in control.

This is #nothingnew. The #dotcons are #closedweb infrastructure. They serve power because they were built to serve power. Expecting anything else is misunderstanding the system. The real question has never been: are these platforms good? It’s: what do we do, given that this is where people are?

The #geekproblem and the exodus fantasy, is a persistent fantasy – a classic #geekproblem – that if we just build better tools, people will come. They won’t, not on their own. A clean exodus to the #fediverse or any #openweb space doesn’t happen because we post about it. Movement-building has never worked like that, people move through relationships, trust, and shared struggle – not technical superiority.

So if you abandon the spaces where people already are, you cut those pathways. The #OMN approach has always been simple to use the #dotcons as a bridge, not a home, seed organizing where people already are while focusing energy on building the #openweb in parallel to clearly keep your foundations in the #4opens.

This isn’t about purity, it’s about effectiveness, don’t fall into #stupidindividualism, the idea that personal withdrawal is more important than collective reach. This is about infrastructure and grounding, if the #dotcons can switch you off at any moment, they cannot be your foundation.

That’s why we need:

indymediaback as publishing roots
activitypub and the #fediverse as distributed infrastructure
OMN as a bridge between cultures and spaces

This is the practical expression of the #4opens: not just open code, but open process and open trust. Don’t build your house on someone else’s land, but don’t stop talking to the people still living there either. Stay in the fight, when the #dotcons clamp down, it’s not a surprise, it’s a signal of what they are, and what they’ve always been.

The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down, while continuing to show up where the people are.

Build the #openweb, stay in the fight, keep it simple #KISS

Gates vs Bridges: the obscure politics of the #geekproblem

In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.

RSS is a bridge.

Closed APIs are gates.

This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.

This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.

The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.

When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.

So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.

A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).

On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).

We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?

#openweb #4opens #OMN