Compost “digital sovereignty”, build working commons

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 build working commons.

This matters because much of the #EU “digital sovereignty” conversation is simply more churn inside the same #neoliberal #mainstreaming logic that created the problem in the first place. Europe spent decades outsourcing infrastructure, privatising public space, undermining local autonomy, and feeding the #dotcons.

Now the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore, dependence on US platform monopolies, fragile infrastructure, imperialist surveillance capitalism, cloud centralisation, shrinking democratic accountability, and growing geopolitical vulnerability.

So suddenly everybody is talking about “sovereignty”, but what do our chattering class of institutional actors mean by sovereignty? Too often they mean procurement contracts, compliance frameworks, consultancy ecosystems, defence posturing, startup hype and fashionable funding narratives. The same old structures wearing a new outfit.

This is where the #fashionistas rush in to cash out of the latest cycle of #techshit, every crisis produces a new branding wave #Web3, #AI, #blockchain, smart cities, trusted identity and now digital sovereignty. The words change, the consultants were the same clothes, to push funding applications with different buzz words. But underneath, the social relations to often stay exactly the same. This is why so much “innovation” produces so little durable social value, the energy and focus gets consumed by branding, positioning, institutional competition, and funding capture.

The #OMN approach is to compost this mess rather than feed it. Composting means recognising that some parts of the existing system still contain nutrients technical knowledge, infrastructure, institutions, legal frameworks, public funding, developer skills. But these need breaking down and re-rooting into commons processes instead of simply reproducing the same dead structures.

The #KISS approach is important because complexity is often used as a control system, the more complicated the governance path becomes the harder it is for normal people to participate, the easier it is for insiders to dominate, and the more power flows to the parasite class managing the process. People then confuse institutional complexity with competence, but most healthy social systems are not built this way, healthy systems tend to be transparent, iterative, federated, participatory, and grounded in practical trust.

That’s why the native #openweb worked when it worked, people built things together directly like mailing lists, forums, blogs (bit more messy), federated publishing, open protocols, community hosting, shared standards. Messy? Yes. Human? Yes, but functional. The current “digital sovereignty” debate ignores this history because acknowledging it would undermine the need for the giant managerial layer now feeding on the crisis.

A lot of the current policy noise is about preserving institutional power during systemic decline, that’s why signal-to-noise matters, most of the noise performs concern, manages perception, protects careers, and absorbs dissent into harmless process. Signal is rarer, it’s about building actual commons’ infrastructure, creating durable trust networks, supporting federation, sharing governance openly, and keeping paths simple enough that communities can understand and maintain them.

This is one reason the #4opens remain central, without these, “digital sovereignty” simply becomes another enclosure strategy under a different flag. European-owned silos are still silos, state-managed platform capitalism is still platform capitalism. Replacing Silicon Valley landlords with Brussels landlords is not liberation.

The real challenge is rebuilding public digital commons, that means the hard part is cultural, not only technical. People are deeply trained by #mainstreaming to look upward for solutions to governments, corporations, experts, influencers, NGO etc. But commons culture grows sideways instead, through participation, trust and through practical collaboration, yes this is slower at first, but far more resilient over time.

That’s the real #KISS secret, ignore much of the spectacle and quietly build the alternative underneath it. Less noise, more compost – Less branding, more commons – Less #techshit.
More grounded infrastructure. That’s how you compost the #mainstreaming mess instead of endlessly feeding it.

Sophists – From Ancient Greece to the current #mainstreaming

“Being in #Oxford today, I popped into the #OxfordUnion to use a room. Glancing through the term card, it’s absolutely vile – and has been consistently so for the two years I’ve been back in the city. It’s a useful, if deeply dispiriting, exercise in reading the people and place. This is where parts of the next ruling class form their opinions and sharpen their instincts. Judging by what they’re platforming, we are not heading for a good time…”

One useful term about this mess on the #OMN path is “Sophist”. Historically, the Sophists were traveling teachers in Ancient Greece during the 5th and 4th centuries BC. They taught rhetoric, politics, philosophy, and persuasion to the sons of the ruling elite. In many ways, they were the media consultants, communication strategists, and public intellectuals of their time. Their ideas were, and still are, deeply useful to elitist power. Truth was treated not as something to strive for, but as something relative to perspective and circumstance. Protagoras summed this up with the phrase “Man is the measure of all things.”

From this flowed a power-based philosophy – if truth is flexible, then gaining and holding power is less about discovering what is true, and more about learning how to persuade people effectively. Sophists became famous for teaching students how to win arguments regardless of the facts, make “the weaker argument appear stronger,” and manipulate rhetoric and perception for advantage.

This is why philosophers like Socrates and Plato attacked them so fiercely. Classical philosophy, much like the modern scientific ideal, was supposed to be a search for truth, ethics, wisdom, and understanding. The Sophists instead treated philosophy as a competitive social tool for gaining status, influence, and power.

That conflict has never gone away, when we look at the last 40 years, it becomes obvious that we now live inside a revived Sophist culture. Under neoliberal #mainstreaming, politics, media, academia, branding, and online culture have steadily shifted away from questions of shared reality and toward competitive narrative management.

The central questions are no longer what is true? what is just? and what works for the commons? Instead, the “common sense” questions become what performs well? What wins attention? What controls the narrative? What protects the brand? What keeps the funding flowing? And finally, the #stupidindividualism of, what keeps the career safe?

This is the culture the #dotcons perfected, were algorithms reward emotional reaction over understanding, public relations replaces public reasoning, identity replaces grounded collective politics so that communication becomes performance instead of dialogue. Truth becomes aesthetic.

That is in part why so many people now experience a constant feeling of unreality, we are swimming in rhetorical systems optimized not for understanding, but for engagement, manipulation, and market positioning. The modern “post-truth” condition is not accidental, it is the logical outcome of self-interested #postmodern Sophist culture merged with #dotcons platform capitalism feedback loops.

What do we have to balance this, the #OMN path matters because it tries to push against this drift. The goal is not some fantasy of perfect objectivity, humans are always partial, messy, emotional, and socially situated. But there is still a huge difference between collectively searching for grounded truth together, and treating all communication as strategic manipulation. The first builds commons – the second destroys trust. This is why the #4opens matter:

Open process,
Open data,
Open standards,
Open licences.

These are not only technical principles, they are social tools designed to reduce hidden manipulation and rebuild shared trust. Visible process matters because invisible power breeds Sophistry. Open discussion matters because branding culture hides contradictions behind managed messaging. Shared media matters because without public memory, every conversation resets into manipulation and spin.

The danger of endless rhetoric is that a society trapped in Sophist culture loses the ability to act collectively. Everything becomes performance, positioning, optics, career management, and endless dead-end symbolic conflict. Meanwhile the real flowing crises deepen, #climatechaos, enclosure, collapsing infrastructure, rising authoritarianism and the destruction of public life. People are trained to argue endlessly while losing the ability to build together.

This is one of the many reasons the #openweb matters, yes, native #openweb culture is imperfect, messy, and chaotic, but it is also rooted in a stronger relationship between communication and shared reality. People built infrastructure together, they argued, but they also created commons, this spirit still survives in fragments across the #Fediverse path.

We need to use these tools to compost the Sophist mess – not through purity politics or ideological certainty, because that simply creates another closed rhetorical system. The path is to reboot cultures where truth matters again, evidence matters, lived experience matters, dialogue matters, and collective accountability matters. This needs focus because the current system trains exactly the opposite habits.

The #OMN path tries to compost this mess instead of reproducing it – with less rhetorical theater and more grounded process, less manipulation, more trust, less “winning the argument,” more building shared understanding strong enough to support collective action. That is the underlying conflict beneath much of today’s social and political confusion – the struggle between communication as manipulation and communication as commons.

And right now, the commons desperately need rebuilding, and this matters for both the #openweb reboot and the #OxfordBoaters struggle. Both are fundamentally fights over who controls reality, narrative, legitimacy, and public memory. The landowners’ push in Oxford is a small-scale example of modern Sophistry in action. The issue is not simply “facts” about moorings, river access, safety, or management. The battle is over framing of who gets presented as “reasonable,” who gets framed as “problematic,” whose voices count, whose history becomes visible and who’s gets erased. This is how eliteist power works – not only through visible force, but through narrative management, institutional framing, bureaucratic process, selective legitimacy, and most importently control of communication channels.

The boaters to often fail to engage with this power because of the atomized #stupidindividualism that dominates our lives. Yet they are precisely the people with lived experience, practical knowledge, and deep historical connection to the river, metaphor and real.

Instead, the conflict becomes nastier than it needs to be because it shifts away from solving shared problems and toward managing perception. That is modern Sophistry in practice, the same thing happens across the wider internet. The early #openweb was messy, but it was rooted in participation, shared infrastructure, transparency, and collective building. People made websites, forums, federated systems, community media, and open tools together. There were arguments, conflicts, and failures, but there was also visible process and public memory.

The rise of the #dotcons replaced much of this with managed perception systems optimised for engagement, advertising, behavioural manipulation, and social control. Communication shifted from dialogue to performance, from publishing to branding, from communities to audiences,
from commons to platforms and from participation to passive consumption. Again, this is Sophistry – communication not for understanding, but for influence and control.

This is why the #OMN path matters. The project is not simply about “better media” or “better activism.” It is about rebuilding the social conditions where grounded collective understanding becomes possible again. For the #openweb reboot this means rebuilding commons infrastructure, restoring public conversation, protecting shared memory, creating transparent governance to resist platform manipulation.

For the #OxfordBoaters struggle this means creating our own media stories to document lived reality, preserving collective memory, make hidden processes visible. This is why the #4opens are practical anti-Sophist tools – Open process counters hidden manipulation – Open data counters selective framing – Open standards counter enclosure – Open licences protect shared social knowledge from privatisation. Without these, power disappears into invisible structures while presenting itself as neutral management.

One of the deepest problems today is that many people now trust polished institutional narratives and #dotcons tools more than messy lived experience. Boaters should already understand this because they directly experience the gap between official language and material reality. The boat struggle and the #openweb struggle are connected because both are about defending commons against enclosure: river commons, communication commons, social commons and democratic commons. And both are being undermined by the same Sophist culture of managed perception, institutional branding, bureaucratic abstraction, and invisible power.

So the task is not simply to “win arguments.” That is the Sophistry trap. The native path we need is rebuild is gthe environments where truth emerge collectively, trust grows, so conflict can become productive instead of performative, and people can act together in the real world.

In short, the fight is not just against bad policies or bad platforms. It is between communication as manipulation and communication as commons. And if we do not consciously rebuild the commons side of that divide, both the rivers and the web will continue disappearing into managed enclosure #KISS

#powerpolatics #mess #compost

The exhaustion of thinking out loud, why engagement matters

The pattern we need to compost – You write something rooted in years of experience and practical work, you try to make it accessible. Someone responds immediately with an objection that shows they haven’t read let alone followed the argument yet. Or they react to the tone, the hashtag, or one phrase instead of engaging with the substance.

Sometimes the response is sincere but rushed, sometimes it’s performative, often it’s shaped by the habits we’ve absorbed from #dotcons culture, where speed of reaction is rewarded more than depth of thought. And then comes the difficult choice do you explain everything again? Do you spend energy untangling misunderstandings? Or do you move on because there’s already too much real work waiting?

This is not about wanting agreement or avoiding criticism, good disagreement is useful, serious challenge helps sharpen ideas. What becomes exhausting is the absence of engagement underneath the reaction.

So why does this matter beyond personal burnout? It affects the quality of collective thinking itself as social movements need spaces where people can develop ideas slowly enough for them to become useful, they need room for reflection, experimentation, disagreement, revision, and learning.

But current online cultures work against this, they reward immediacy, certainty, and social positioning over-curiosity and understanding. The result is that careful, grounded thinking gets buried under waves of noise over signal. Meanwhile, the people willing to do the slower work of connecting history, practice, and lived experience quietly burn out or retreat, a real loss for movements trying to survive let alone challenge these difficult times.

On a positive note meaningful engagement still happens – and when it does, you notice it immediately. Someone reads carefully, they respond to what was actually written. They disagree thoughtfully, ask useful questions, or add experience that deepens the conversation. Suddenly the exchange becomes productive instead of draining, a resent example:

“Thanks for sharing this. It’s funny, but I have no idea how we’re connected, even though we have been since 2008 and, given your off-grid existence, we live in very different worlds.

I’ve been following the Fediverse world tangentially for some time, and I’m not surprised by your observation. The frictionless pervasiveness of corporate control is inescapable, and most people have no concept of #openweb.

Safe travels”

Those moments matter more than they might seem, because real engagement changes the social atmosphere around ideas. It creates space where people can think out loud together without conversations collapsing into noise and defensiveness, it reminds us that collective intelligence is still possible. And importantly, thoughtful engagement does not require expertise, it mostly requires attention and good faith. Simple things help:

reading fully before reacting,
asking clarifying questions,
responding to the core argument rather than the easiest target,
and being willing to sit with discomfort long enough to understand it.

That’s commons culture, and we need more of it.

Composting the mess – A lot of what we’re struggling with right now comes from broken communication environments. The platforms most people use are designed for engagement metrics, not understanding. Over time that shapes how we think, organise, and relate to each other.

But we are not trapped inside those habits forever, we can consciously grow slower conversations, more curiosity, less instant certainty, stronger trust, and more willingness to build on each other’s thinking instead of competing for attention.

Yes, this doesn’t magically fix the systemic problems, but it does create spaces where useful ideas can survive long enough to grow into practical action. The work ahead is difficult, we need people capable of thinking carefully, critically, and collectively about the mess we’re living through. We need spaces where difficult ideas can be explored instead of instantly flattened into social performance.

So the ask is #KISS – Read carefully, respond thoughtfully, disagree well to help build conversations that leave everyone understanding the issue a little better than before. That’s how we keep our shared work alive, and honestly, that’s how we keep each other going too.

Composting the mess of digital security in activism – We need to talk about this, offline

The online tools we “common sense” rely on for organising and campaigning are genuinely dangerous, and I find that paralysing. This isn’t paranoia, it’s a practical reality that urgently needs addressing. Until we do, offline working groups are one of the few reliable ways to unblock the mess.

Where we actually are now… Disappearing, encrypted chat outside the #dotcons is one of the few spaces that feels even marginally safe. But even then, safety depends entirely on who’s in the room, which means those spaces need to stay small, focused, and constantly tended. The moment trust becomes uncertain, the space becomes a liability.

The result, for me personally, is that I currently have no viable online tools left for outreach. Everything leaves traces, so all that remains is slow, word-of-mouth. The legal reality we need to talks about offline, almost everything posted on #dotcons platforms leaves a digital fingerprint – metadata, timestamps, IP addresses, connection logs, account linkages. In practical terms, nowhere on these platforms is truly safe to post anything sensitive.

The specific danger that doesn’t get named often enough is this: if someone who was loosely connected to a campaign later commits a crime in the name of that campaign, the person who posted most visibly can end up legally exposed – even if they had absolutely nothing to do with what happened. The evidence trail is strong, easily misinterpreted, and the legal system is not neutral, it has historically been used as a tool of repression by those with power and resources against those without. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a pattern with a long, well-documented history.

This means high-volume posting, public organising on corporate platforms, and mixing open campaigning with less legal internal discussion in the same spaces isn’t just tactically sloppy, it has destroyed people’s lives.

Two paths: closed and open, people have been campaigning on digital security in activism for years, and the basic framework is straightforward – there are closed paths and open paths, and we need both working without the current aggressive #blocking that creates so much damaging mess.

For closed working groups – small, trust-based, sensitive – use whatever, non #dotcons tool the group agrees on and trusts. Signal is the obvious everyday choice: it’s not perfect, but it’s practical, easier to understand, and good enough for most internal communication when used carefully.

For open working groups – anything involving outreach, public-facing organising, and building broader community – the answer has to be #4opens common tools. Not a fragmented collection of proprietary apps that each create their own data trail and dependency. The digital splintering of activist spaces across dozens of incompatible, corporate-owned tools is itself a security problem, as well as an organisational one. #KISS.

As our lives are more directly touched by repression what we need is real conversations – across campaigns and communities – about #4opens web security in practical activism. Not a geek seminar, not a jargon-heavy toolkit nobody reads, but an honest, accessible discussion about:

What the actual risks are and who they fall on
Which tools are appropriate for which purposes
How to keep open organising genuinely open without handing surveillance infrastructure a dangerous map of our work
How to support the people most exposed – those who post publicly and visibly – so they’re not carrying legal risk in isolation.

The #geekproblem here is real, too many of the existing resources are built by and for technically confident people, and leave everyone else either confused or falsely reassured. We need socially safe security culture that works for normal people doing necessary work.

On a side note: I wish people would stop blaming me for the problems they create themselves LINK

People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it’s a fair point

People ask why the articles are hard to follow without background, it’s a fair point, but a distraction as these are not stand-alone hot takes, they are all a part of a long flowing story about how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it.

So, focus, please share this and the other posts if we’re going to recover focus and direction on the #openweb path. What happened over the last ten years on the Fediverse wasn’t random. It was a slow drift away from the native path that worked, and toward a confused mess of branding, #NGO careerism, platform thinking, and endless social noise.

What happened over the last ten years on our Fediverse path

The problem is most people now arrive in the #Fediverse with no memory of the culture that built the #openweb of trust networks, grassroots publishing, the messy but functional commons, the #4opens, the idea that media belongs in public and the understanding that social process matters more than shiny tech.

Instead, people arrive carrying the assumptions of the #dotcons – branding over community, engagement overtrust and control over openness. Leading to assumptions of private chat over public knowledge and algorithmic mediation over human responsibility. Then they push focus to rebuild the same broken structures again and again while calling it “innovation”.

That’s the real story of the last ten years, we inherited working social and technical traditions, then forgot why they worked. Now we’re drowning in signal-to-noise, fake “governance”, performative moderation, invisible power structures, startup logic and endless #fashionista churn.

The answer is probably much simpler than people want – public media, open processes, visible governance, trust networks, federation, and rebuilding commons culture from the ground up #KISS. Start reading the story flow https://hamishcampbell.com/stories/ and if you like semi hard definitions you can dip in here https://hamishcampbell.com/hashtags/ and for a bit of history of the #OMN path the Fediverse piece https://hamishcampbell.com/what-happened-over-the-last-ten-years-on-our-fediverse-path/

And yes, this matters beyond tech culture, because while people are busy polishing identities and building another pointless #techshit platform layer, the world is burning – #climatechaos, collapsing public infrastructure, rising authoritarianism and corporate enclosure of every part of public life. So yes, we need “alt sense” – alternative common sense – or we are genuinely beaten, not only in an abstract future way, but in ten years in a “rubber truncheons and floodwater” way.

Make the effort to understand the path built from alt common sense history, or we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes until there’s nothing left worth defending.

A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

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). This tech mess illustrates, if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb – it’s #closedweb in a mask, when people ignore existing commons is easy to see the red flag.

Why is this a mess? Existing working systems: #Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon), RSS, open standards, were ignored or dismissed as “non-scalable” or “non-monetizable” so there plan is reinventing the wheel → badly. With “scaling” used as an excuse for control with claims that the #fediverse “can’t scale” and “needs monetization”. The simple reality is scaling here is an old story of centralising control + extracting value.

Let’s look at this from a native view of grassroots scale = trust, diversity, human limits vs corporate scale vs control, extraction, surveillance. They are different processes → different outcomes with ID verification = anti-commons architecture. What this creates is exclusion, surveillance, and power asymmetry. This shallowly hidden #dotcons path flips the #openweb model from permissionless participation to controlled access and tracking. It’s not a public space – it’s “smiling” infrastructure for governance and policing.

Let’s look at how the media failed as it’s a part of the problem, journalists repeated press releases with no technical or cultural literacy, leading to the #mainstreaming mythology of “first European network” unchallenged, this cultural memory hole is a recurring mess we need to compost. The outcome is every shallow reboot looks “new”.

This feeds the real divide in tech vs culture. You see the same split again on the dev side: forks protocols, builds platforms → ignores social process. And on the activist side: understands community → stuck in Facebook/Slack. Without combining both you either get silos or you get capture. One useful way of seeing this is to follow the money, to see the outcome of investor-driven, marketing-heavy teams with “Monetization” as a core requirement. Funding-first projects don’t build commons, they build exits, leverage and control systems.

It should be obviously – nobody should be surprised that this liberal pushing of “Sovereignty” is being hijacked, using #EU branding as legitimacy. This is the #eurowashing of #dotcons models we touched on at the start. Real “sovereignty”, what ever it means, lives in open protocols, distributed governance and local autonomy. Not in a branded platform, or the nation state any more – thus the danger is confusion. People will still join because “it’s European”, “it’s new” and “it sounds ethical”. Thus, the problem isn’t only evil actors – it’s signal-to-noise collapse.

What this means for projects like the #OMN (the actionable bit). This whole story reinforces the core path – that we focus on stopping building “new platforms” to start composting what already exists. A common’s strategy using existing protocols (#ActivityPub, RSS), rooted in grassroots trust networks. Keep processes open (#4opens) to accept human-scale limits then scale by federate for reach, not control.

The #WSocial mess shows exactly what happens when you strip the #openweb of its culture and replace it with PR, funding, and control. Our native path is the opposite, growth from the commons. Its #KISS or you just recreate the problem.

The Smile

By William Blake

There is a Smile of Love

And there is a Smile of Deceit

And there is a Smile of Smiles

In which these two Smiles meet

And there is a Frown of Hate

And there is a Frown of disdain

And there is a Frown of Frowns

Which you strive to forget in vain

For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core

And it sticks in the deep Back bone

And no Smile that ever was smild

But only one Smile alone

That betwixt the Cradle & Grave

It only once Smild can be

But when it once is Smild

Theres an end to all Misery

People resist visible structure

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.
— Peter Kropotkin

This post comes from real life experience with #Oxfordboaters, but I am going to address it as a tech problem as it is the same mess we need to work on composting in our social tech projects.

People don’t actually hate structure, what they tend to resist is visible structure – the kind we need to make visible so we can see, question, and challenge. At the same time, they’re always perfectly comfortable inside invisible structures – because they feel natural, neutral and just “the way things are.” This is the blinded social mess we’ve inherited and now need to focus on composting for rebalancing.

Invisible structures are things like platform algorithms shaping what we see, informal hierarchies deciding whose voice carries and cultural norms that reward some behaviour and sideline others. Because these aren’t named or surfaced, they don’t feel like control, even when they are. That’s why the #dotcons path works so well, controlling power is everywhere, but hard to point at.

Visible structures, on the other hand – mythos, traditions, governance, open processes – feel uncomfortable. They can look rigid, political, or “too much”, but they’re also the only place where accountability can actually exist. If you can see the structure, you can change it.

This is the tension at the heart of the current #openweb mess we need to compost. When we avoid visible structure, we don’t get freedom – we just default back to hidden power of informal gatekeeping replacing explicit governance, were influence concentrates quietly, the same “common sense” patterns reappear, just harder to challenge.

So if we’re serious about #OMN, we need to flip this instinct by making structure visible, keeping it simple (#KISS), keeping it open (#4opens) and accept the discomfort that comes with that, because that discomfort is where real participation lives.

The work isn’t to eliminate structure – it’s to surface it, soften it, and make it accountable. That’s the composting process, taking the invisible, unspoken mess and turning it into something we can actually grow from.

If we don’t do this, we just keep rebuilding the same hidden systems we say we’re trying to escape.

The #encryptionist detour

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 Meta-Mess of the “Open” Social Web

Signal, Noise, and the missing ground – We have a signal-to-noise problem, that if we’re serious about “paths to growth,” we need to be honest about the paths and people pushing us down paths we’re actually walking. The problem was never just the #dotcons platforms. It’s what we build instead – and more importantly, how and why we build it.

Right now, too much of the #openweb conversation is caught in narrative loops of reframing stagnation as growth, critique as progress and visibility as impact. That’s the “paths to growth” trap. The #fashionista movement where activity is presented as meaningful change, without asking what is materially shifting underneath. From an #NGO perspective, this should ring alarm bells – outputs are being mistaken for outcomes. This is where the signal keeps geting lost.

We don’t lack ideas, frameworks, or commentary, we have an abundance of them. What we lack is grounded, collective practice – work rooted in real-world use, trust, and actual need. Instead, we’ve built layer upon layer of people interpreting the #openweb, narrating it, funding it, branding it. Meanwhile, the “soil layer” – people running infrastructure, building communities, and holding things together day-to-day – remains underrepresented, under-resourced, and largely invisible. That’s where the “Open Social” ecosystem is currently quietly breaking down.

The #fashionista problem is friendly gatekeeping is still gatekeeping. This isn’t about bad intentions, it’s about institutional form. Who decides what counts as “important work”? Who gets visibility, funding, and legitimacy? Which version of the #openweb gets promoted? In NGO thinking, this is a question of agenda-setting power, when soft curation becomes quiet exclusion. Over time, this “problem” shapes the field, not only through explicit decisions, but through accumulated bias. The result is a narrowing of what is seen as valid, fundable, and worth paying attention to.

Let’s look at a current example of this mess we need to compost – This Jury is a Symptom. What follows isn’t a critique of individuals as people. It’s a mapping of roles within the ecosystem, and how those roles, collectively, skew the field.

Audrey Tang

“Prosocial digital tools” and civic tech, but operating within state infrastructure. A ministry is still a ministry when legitimacy flows from above. This is the #openweb translated into a form that fits government and #NGO logic: managed participation that stabilises systems rather than challenging them. Valuable in context, but not the same as bottom-up, native practice.

Mike Masnick

“Protocols Not Platforms” was useful framing. But with Bluesky, it became a foundation for the kind of product it critiqued. This is how #mainstreaming works: good ideas are absorbed, reshaped, and redeployed within existing power structures. From an #NGO lens, this is a classic case of co-option.

Laurens Hof

The Fediverse Report is useful journalism. But it’s still reading as observation from the outside. Analysis without embedded practice becomes detached – what looks like insight drifts into repetition. Even by his own admission, there’s fatigue. This is narrative acting as if it were ground truth.

Johannes Ernst

Advising organisations on “navigating decentralised platforms” sits squarely in the mediation layer. This is where translation happens – but also where capture creeps in. Spaces like #FediForum are structured, controlled, and legible to institutions. That makes them low challenge convening spaces, but also reinforcing the dynamics the #openweb is trying to move beyond.

Melanie Bartos

University-led open science communication. This is the institutional layer doing its best to adapt. Mastodon in a university context is a step forward – but the surrounding structures remain top-down. In #NGO terms: adoption of tools without a shift in governance or practice.

Robin Berjon

Operating at the standards and governance layer. Institutions like the W3C shape the infrastructure of the web, but participation is still dominated by well-resourced actors, often including #dotcons. This is reform from within, important, but with structural limits.

PublicSpaces

A coalition of public institutions building non-commercial alternatives. This is closer to the right instinct – moving away from pure market logic. But it remains institution-led. Public funding is valuable input (good compost), but it can still miss the lived reality of grassroots use.

Waag Futurelab

A long-standing critical tech organisation with roots in DIY culture. Over time, it has become embedded in #NGO and funding ecosystems. The work still has value, but the centre of gravity has shifted toward outputs that are legible to funders and partners. This is a familiar trajectory in NGO spaces.

What’s Missing Matters Most

Taken together, this jury represents the narrative, mediation, and funding layers of the #openweb ecosystem. What’s absent is the soil layer – People running Mastodon instances on minimal budgets, community organisers doing trust-based, messy work and practitioners dealing with moderation, governance, and sustainability in real time. In #NGO language: the implementing layer, the frontline, the lived experience.

This absence isn’t neutral as it shapes outcomes. The mess we need to compost is that the “Open Social Awards” will surface work that is legible to institutions, aligned with existing narratives and cleanly packaged and communicable. Meanwhile, the genuinely native work – the messy, relational, unpolished work that actually sustains the ecosystem – remains invisible. Not because anyone intends harm, but because of #blinded institutional common sense – systems reward what they can see, measure, and understand.

Compost, Soil, and Rebalancing

This systemic bias, if we’re serious about the #openweb, need to shift to be more practical:

Less talking about it
More building within it
Less curation from above
More trust from below

For NGOs, this isn’t (only) rejection, it’s a recalibration, a reminder that enabling ecosystems means resourcing soil, not just shaping the story. The key distinction metaphor here is between compost and soil.

A lot of the work described above has real value. It produces compost – ideas, funding, visibility, structure, that’s necessary. But compost only matters if it feeds living systems, if we keep mistaking compost for soil, we end up measuring activity instead of growth. And that’s the meta-mess we need to start composting.

The Crew – Paths to Growth?

Think I am starting to mix my metaphors – it’s the story I am telling 😉

The Problem Was Never Just the Platforms – It’s What We Build Instead

For years, the #fashionista #openweb conversation has been stuck in a loop of naming villains: surveillance capitalism, the #dotcons, Zuckerberg, Musk, “the algorithm.” But focusing on enemies only gets you so far. The creative question isn’t what we’re against – it’s what we’re actually building together to replace it.

That’s where the #OMN takes a useful path. Yes, the big platforms absorb resistance, repackage it, and sell it back to us, that cycle is real. But pointing it out, again and again, doesn’t break it. In fact, it can become part of the same loop – critique as content, outrage as engagement, nothing changing underneath. The issue isn’t just that the #dotcons are powerful. It’s that we keep rebuilding their patterns, even when we think we’re doing something different.

This is why the #OMN isn’t framed as a protest, a brand, or a “better platform.” It’s a collective path to build alternatives that don’t reproduce the same failures. Not through ideology alone, but through structure. The #4opens – open code, open data, open standards, open process – aren’t slogans here, they’re foundations. They’re how we walk paths that can be shared, checked, and reshaped collectively, rather than captured and enclosed.

The same goes for governance, the #OGB isn’t about replacing one centre of power with another, it’s about making sure power doesn’t quietly re-centralise through habit, personality, and convenience. If we don’t actively design for that, we drift straight back into the same patterns, and that drift is the problem.

People don’t arrive in the #openweb as blank slates. We’ve all been shaped by the systems we’re trying to move beyond. The habits of control, gatekeeping, branding, and individual positioning – what we call #stupidindividualism – come with us. If we don’t consciously challenge that, we just recreate the #dotcons in smaller, messier forms.

So the focus has to shift, from only critique to construction, balancing individuals to collectives and from blinded platforms to open processes. That means starting with the human network – trust, collaboration, shared purpose – and letting the technology grow out of that. Not the other way around.

It also means accepting that this work isn’t neat or fast. There’s no clean break, no single “killer app,” no moment where the old control simply disappears. What we have instead is a composting process: breaking down what doesn’t work, reusing what does, and slowly growing something more resilient.

That’s the revolt, not a personal mission, not a branded alternative, but a collective shift in how we build and relate. If we get that right, the #dotcons stop being the centre of the story, not because they were defeated, but because we’ve made them less relevant.

And that’s something they can’t easily absorb.

#OMN #4opens #OGB #openweb

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.