Social value, personal value, and the chicken-and-egg problem

We still haven’t solved this. Looking back at a conversation from six years ago, what stands out isn’t disagreement – it’s how hard it is to even name the problem we keep circling.

Over the last 20 years, again and again, the discussion slips into the same dead end: personal value versus social value, framed through the language of #dotcons platforms, followers, influence, and business growth. What we need to learn from this is the confusion isn’t accidental, it is structural.

What we need is not only #socialmedia value, not engagement, not visibility. But offline value that exists between people, over time, as shared culture, trust, memory, and capacity. The chicken-and-egg problem, people ask: “What personal value do I get from this?”, “Will this help my business?”, “Can I use this without it using me?”

We need to compost, this messy common sense path. This is why the #OMN project was never about optimising personal outcomes. That #blocking framing belongs to platform logic, the idea that every action must be measurable in reach, influence, growth, or return. This is why the posts, like the one embedded above, people found “hard to understand” weren’t speaking that language at all. It were articulating what the #mainstreaming was #blocking and thus missing from our tech culture: social value.

What is hard to communicate is that social value doesn’t work like our current common sense thinks it does. You don’t extract it first and then decide whether it was worth it. Social value only emerges after people act collectively, without clear personal payoff in advance. Yes, personal value does flow from social value. Skills, relationships, meaning, resilience, opportunity. But it’s indirect, uneven, and slow. That makes it almost invisible inside systems trained to ONLY prioritise immediate, individual reward.

That’s why the conversation keeps short-circuiting, one of the early questions was whether the posts were meant to “influence followers”. That already assumes a vertical model: speaker → audience → outcome.

But #OMN thinking starts from a different place. It’s not about influencing people. It’s about creating conditions where different kinds of interaction can happen – horizontally, over time, without a central controller. That’s why the work often looks vague, unfinished, or “omelette-like”. Cultural values can’t be shipped as a product. It has to be grown, maintained, and defended collectively.

#Facebook was a comfort trap in hindsight. In the thread, several people describe using it pragmatically: staying in touch, organising events, maintaining real-world relationships. All true, and still kinda true today. But the counter-point raised then has only become clearer since: you don’t get to opt out of being used, no matter how carefully you think you’re using the system.

The lock-in effect (“everyone is on it”) was already obvious. What was less visible to meany people than was how disastrously deeply this would shape behaviour, politics, culture, and attention – and how hard it would become to imagine alternatives once that infrastructure was taken for granted.

Why this was hard to hear at the time? This conversation shows how difficult it is to talk about non-market value inside market-dominated spaces. Language itself becomes a barrier. People reach for familiar metrics because they have no shared vocabulary for anything else. So the discussion stalls. People get frustrated. It feels circular. Someone says “find out for yourself”, another hears that as dismissal. Nobody is wrong in isolation, but the frame itself is broken.

What we can learn now? Six years on, a few things are clearer: Social value is real, but it’s slow, collective, and hard to quantify. #dotcons platforms systematically erase the conditions needed for social value to emerge. Personal value derived from social value is indirect, not extractive. You can’t explain this cleanly inside systems optimised against it. This wasn’t a failure of communication. It was an early signal that we were trying to grow an open, cultural infrastructure inside environments hostile to its very existence.

Now is time to work on the unfinished path… #OMN project was – and still is – about creating space for social value to exist again: shared media, shared process, shared governance, shared memory. That was hard to see then, it’s still hard to see now. But the confusion in this old thread isn’t embarrassing. It’s instructive. It shows exactly where the fault lines are, and why the work has always been hard, messy, slow, and necessary.

Some things only make sense after you start doing them together #KISS

The impulse, it’s not wrong. What is wrong is how often that anger gets misdirected sideways, inward, and downward instead of upward, toward actual power.

A lot of people who think of themselves as “radical” aren’t being radical at all. They’re being assholes with better language. Cancel culture in 2020 played a similar role to political correctness in the 1990s: a way to signal virtue, police behaviour, and avoid confronting real power.

An example of this – done right, a code of conduct isn’t a weapon. It’s not a piece of paper you use to beat people with. It’s a declaration that you will protect the people who actually need protection – from harassment, abuse, and structural harm.

Done wrong, rules become clubs. People pick them up and hit each other with them. The wording becomes vague, moralistic, and performative. The enforcement becomes selective. And suddenly “safety” is being used to silence any disagreement rather than defend the vulnerable.

That failure creates space for bad actors, conservatives step in and pretend they’re “speaking truth to power” or “defending free speech”, when what they’re really doing is exploiting the mess to protect the normal hierarchy and privilege. They’re not wrong that something’s broken – they’re wrong about what and why.

The behaviour being criticised isn’t a tribe. It’s a mode of thinking, a widespread, unspoken #postmodernism that still dominates contemporary discourse. A style of politics where everything is relative, language replaces material reality, and moral positioning matters more than any outcomes.

This thinking eats movements alive, it fragments people, replaces strategy with signalling, and turns accountability into spectacle. Most importantly, it redirects energy away from those actually using power. This is a dangerous moment because we no longer have a shared baseline of reality. The #mainstreaming narratives are designed to divide, distract, and trigger – pulling attention away from concrete demands and real accountability.

That didn’t come from nowhere, forty years of #neoliberal economics hollowed out material security. At the same time, generations were trained in postmodern academic frameworks that are excellent at critique but terrible at building shared ground. Strip out material analysis, strip out class, strip out power – and you’re left with vibes, identity skirmishes, and endless internal conflict.

That’s what #OMN has always been pointing toward: rebuilding social truth, shared process, and horizontal power in a culture trained to fragment itself. Without that, we keep fighting each other – and the #deathcult keeps winning.

The Power of Film

The Godfather films, aren’t only stories about criminals, they’re stories about the world we live in: hierarchy pretending to be community, patriarchy pretending to be protection, capitalism pretending to be freedom, politicians pretending to be legitimate, family pretending to be love. It’s the #deathcult mythos in cinematic form.

They’re parables about how hierarchy rots everything it touches. Coppola and Puzo create a world where the mafia isn’t an aberration but a mirror of #mainstreaming power: patriarchal families, capitalist accumulation, politicians in pockets, and a state captured by private interests. It’s #deathcult logic wrapped in myth.

It opens not with the fake glamour of today’s action films, with none of the politically correct obscuring, but with real working people doing real life, it’s a view outside the current post truth polished mess. It’s about what’s behind the shiny surface blindness, you watch this film today to experience filmmaking and politics, like meany older films, the pacing is slow. Our attention spans are broken, good to keep this in your mind as you learn to see anew this ethnography of a pastime.

The Corleones aren’t only monsters from the shadows; they’re the real face of American power with the mask removed. Vito Corleone is an older, more honest version of the #neoliberal billionaire who buys judges today. The story’s “crime families” are stand-ins for competing capitalist blocks. The story is a metaphor for how power protects itself, how legitimacy is a costume, and how the violence of the system, hides behind talk of “family,” “business,” “respect,” and “tradition.”

The first two films critique the world we live in, a family built on the same contradictions that tear it apart. Quotes:

“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.”
→ the neoliberal worldview: harm without responsibility.

“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
→ the essence of capitalist coercion: “choice” backed by threat.

“We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”
→ capitalism’s real goal: monopoly masked as freedom.

“Just when I thought I was out…”
→ no exit from systems built on domination.

The films are showing us the mythology of the mainstreaming #deathcult. America as Mafia, Mafia as America.

The first film opens with a small man being crushed by the system: a father whose daughter is brutalized, and the courts shrug. This is how neoliberalism works: public services are defunded, fail, people are pushed into private “solutions.” Justice outsourced to a Don is no different from healthcare outsourced to a corporation: both sell what should be a right. Vito’s “friendship” is the same as corporate “philanthropy”, a mask over structural violence.

The “family” keeps up appearances – the bourgeoisie’s favourite hobby – while patriarchal rot devours everyone inside. Connie is beaten by Carlo, but the family shrugs because patriarchal norms demand they stay out of a “private matter.” The same system that fetishizes “protecting our women” abandons them whenever protection would inconvenience male hierarchy. It’s about too much control and not enough care.

Competition, crises, violence – the capitalist cycle – it is useful to see the mythology in #KISS terms, the Five Families aren’t criminals; they’re competing capitalist firms. Their war is a stand-in for economic crises. Clemenza even says these things happen “every ten years,” which is basically the capitalist business cycle.

The Tattaglias and Barzinis pushing heroin aren’t “more evil”, they’re the next stage of capitalism’s expansion, accumulation demanding new markets. Violence is “nothing personal,” which is how every predatory corporation sees the world.

Michael, capitalism’s golden child, was meant to be “legitimate” – a senator, a governor. A respectable frontman to maintain the illusion. Instead, he becomes the perfect neoliberal mess: calm, disciplined, efficient, emotionally repressed, willing to destroy anyone to maintain order. He is the patriarchal son weaponized. The obvious patriarchy flowing through the films is a useful reminder for some and insight for meany about what happens behind closed doors in the current hard right with their calling for “family values”.

By the end of the first film, when he wipes out all rivals while standing in a church professing faith, we see the metaphor: authoritarian capitalism, patriarchal religion, and state legitimacy all fused together. He “renounces Satan” while becoming him, the system itself.

Part II, sharpens this critique. We see young Vito’s rise in a world where feudalism is giving way to capitalism, one hierarchy composting into another. He kills Don Fanucci (feudal power) so he can build Genco Olive Oil (capitalist power). Same structure, new branding.

Meanwhile, Michael, the more matured form of this system, expands the empire into Nevada, New York, Miami, Sicily, Cuba. It’s the globalisation arc. And like all global empires, it’s built on betrayal: Fredo’s betrayal (internal collapse), Kay’s rejection (patriarchal fragility exposed), Michael’s violence against his own (self-destruction inherent in all hierarchical systems). By killing Fredo “for the family,” Michael destroys the family. Capitalism works the same way: protecting profit destroys society.

And the ending is the #techcurn lesson: systems built on secrecy, power, and control always collapse inward, devouring the people they claim to protect. Michael Corleone is neoliberalism in human form. Vito is the earlier, “nicer” version of the same system. And the people around them? Compost.

The Cuba revolution is the one moment where the system cracks – the #openweb moment of the film – where people try to reclaim the commons, break the hierarchy, stop being pawns.

On the subject of filmmaking, a lot of the films’ technics now look every day, this is not because they are, they are brilliant, it’s because every film for the last 50 years has coped them and thus diluted their shine with mediacy. Open your eyes, afresh, watch the films, you are seeing the invention of cinema. When you are used to a lifetime of derivative drivel.

Why Fail Safe Matters Now

Full film Fail Safe (1964) is a cultural mirror, from another age, that helps us think about the next ten years of mess. With technical systems out of human control. The film’s malfunctioning machines map directly onto today’s algorithmic governance (#dotcons, #AI, automated warfare). Once the chain starts, humans can’t pull back.

Leadership under impossible pressure. Henry Fonda’s president embodies the loneliness of decision-making when systems collapse. Compare that to our current leaders, who are weaker, more performative, and less willing to carry the weight of consequence.

The Professor’s logic vs. human life: Matthau’s cold “game theory” feels like the #neoliberal technocrat mindset – numbers over people, outcomes over ethics.

The unthinkable concessions of the ending forces us to imagine the price of avoiding total annihilation – not a win/lose game, but a choice between different forms of catastrophe. That’s climate politics, resource wars, pandemics, and #dotcons algorithm risk we face.

What lessons can we learn for the next decade? System fragility is the real enemy – climate systems, financial systems, digital platforms: one glitch, and collapse ripples out. We don’t have the principle modernism, Fonda’s gravitas – our current elitists class are hollowed out by #PR driven populism; when the crisis comes, trust won’t be there. The “Professor” mindset dominates – policy is still guided by “hard” data, models, metrics, and “rational actors,” even though reality has long escaped those dogmatic frames. Watching Fail Safe today is like watching the #deathcult’s worldview in black and white: centralized control, elitist decision-making, people as statistics.

What we need is open, collective mediation – instead of waiting for one lonely leader in a bunker, we need horizontal systems (#OMN, #openweb) that can act before catastrophe hardens. The #OMN and the #openweb reboot are the anti–Fail Safe projects: decentralize agency, mediate conflict before escalation, building trust outside fragile centralized systems. It’s a powerful film, because it frames the stakes not just as “politics” but as civilizational survival.

It’s a film of our times, what can we learn for the #openweb? In 1964, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe held its audience in terrified silence. A simple technical malfunction – a misread code – sent American bombers hurtling toward Moscow. No one could call them back. The world’s survival depended on one president’s unthinkable decision. It was fiction, but it spoke to a truth of the nuclear age: centralized systems, once in motion, cannot be controlled.

Sixty years later, we are in our own Fail Safe moment – but this time the system is digital. The malfunction, is #neoliberalism embedded in our algorithmic #dotcons pipelines. As we push more #AI moderation system, hallucinates flags, the error replicates at machine speed across platforms. What began as a technical hiccup hardens into policy. Governments, seeing chaos, step in “to restore order.” dictators empower security agencies to control networks, to stabilise their hold on power. Like the bomber wings in Fail Safe, the system escalates itself. Once the order is given, there is no recall code.

The #OMN alternative to this is #KISS we need to build is affinity groups on the #openweb – messy, small, federated – to keep our communities talking. Instead of one brittle command chain, thousands of small nodes exchange trust. Instead of a sinal voice, a new signal-to-noise ratio emerges. This slows the shift right. People can begin to rebuild, bottom-up.

Fail Safe ended in tragedy, with a president sacrificing New York to prevent global annihilation. It was a portrait of lonely leadership in a centralised system gone haywire.

Our age offers another path. The lesson is stark that In centralised systems, malfunction = collapse. In federated, mediated systems, failure = resilience. The #openweb reboot is not about nostalgia for old tech. It’s about building structures that can survive the malfunctions ahead. When the next ten years are defined by glitches, spirals, and breakdowns – and they will be – then the survival of our social fabric depends on embracing the horizontal path.

The nuclear age taught us that a single misread code could end the world. The algorithmic age is teaching us that the current glitch could end society.

The #openweb native path gives us more of a chance to be Fail Safe.

#Film #coldwar #review

A small history – Russia

The story of the 1990s in #Russia is not just a local tragedy. It is the cornerstone of the modern #deathcult order. December 25th, 1991. The Soviet flag lowered for the last time. The West declared victory. The Cold War was over. “Democracy” had won.

But for millions of Russians, that night was not liberation. It was the start of collapse. The USSR’s vertical system had provided stability: guaranteed jobs, cheap housing, free healthcare. When it fell, all of it was ripped away in the name of “shock therapy” engineered by Western #neoliberal economists.

Prices exploded 2,500% in a single year. Pensions evaporated. Scientists, teachers, and doctors became taxi drivers and street vendors. Oligarchs bought entire industries for the price of a few crates of vodka and envelopes of bribes. The “transition” wasn’t transition at all. It was theft on an unprecedented scale.

From stability to rot: Bandit capitalism of factories sold for pennies, resources looted, mafia rule normalized. Gangster democracy with car bombs, contract killings, “roof” protection rackets running entire cities. Humiliation of grandmothers begging at metro stations, teachers starving, children roaming unsupervised.

This was not an accident, it was planned, the #deathcult in action, the neoliberal faith that “free markets” would magically self-organize into harmony. What actually emerged was rule by predators. While the West celebrated the “end of history,” Russia burned.

And from that compost of despair, a “quiet man from the KGB” rose up. Putin was not a break from the chaos, he was its product. The mafia state fused with the official state, suffering compacted into concrete, poured into the foundations of authoritarianism.

This is not only a Russia’s story, it’s the parable of the last century: Stalinism’s dead weight crushed trust and creativity. Postmodernism’s cynical fog turned truth into a selfish plaything. Neoliberalism’s greed-choked rot hollowed out alternatives and sold them for scrap. Each era piled on the stink. Each era buried and obscured the simple #KISS truth:

The right-wing feeds on division.
The left-wing grows from trust.

This 1990s history matter because it exposes the current right-wing hallucinations of the #deathcult, the lie of the free market, the false “victory” of the Cold War, the blind faith in Western models. Millions lived and died in that wreckage. And the system that followed, that is now pushing war and control towards the art of Europe – authoritarian, kleptocratic, imperial – was fertilized in this mess.

We see the same script running in the USA, and soon, likely, across the UK. This is now the legacy, social brake down packaged as progress, and authoritarianism sold as the only escape from #neoliberal collapse.

And, the lesson from this mess, is not that collapse is inevitable. The lesson is that composting is necessary. The wreckage of “proper channels”, whether Soviet bureaucracy or neoliberal privatization, is raw material. When left to fester, it breeds gangster rule and authoritarian “order.” Where the path we need to take, If we turn it, together, shovel in hand, it might become the soil of humane culture.

This work is not glamorous, it is not the smiling-face hallucination of the #fashionistas. It is dirty. Necessary. Real. Pick up the shovel, compost the #deathcult, grow something alive, before the tanks of war can churn over our gardens.

The West, Russia, and the madness of mutual sabotage

Pushing the #deathcult: “Respect for the rule of law is a must for all EU funding”

The intended consequence of that EU budget framing is to sound like “law, rights, stability” – but the (un)intended (and very real) consequence is to strangle the roots of protest, dissent, and grassroots organising we need to move way from the current mess. Here’s why it’s a problem for protest, which is the foundation of any meaningful liberal democracy path:

Rule of law vs. rule of order: These budget “safeguards” don’t distinguish between authoritarian crackdowns and legitimate acts of civil disobedience. If a protest camp, blockade, or media collective gets painted as “breaking the law,” EU funding mechanisms can be used to cut support, stigmatise, and silence them.

Weaponising legality: Movements that we need to challenge “captured” state and corporate interests always end up criminalised – not because they are wrong, but because they are inconvenient. Think of climate activists fined for blocking pipelines, migrants criminalised for crossing borders, journalists harassed for exposing corruption. With this EU framework, the act of being in dissent will be turned into grounds for exclusion.

Civil society narrowed: The EU says it wants to “support civil society” – but only the kinds of #NGOs and associations that worship the same #deathcult: professionalised, polished, grant-dependent. Grassroots networks, messy and spiky as they are, don’t fit. They’re starved out, left unfunded, delegitimised.

On the surface this image seems sensible, lift the lid, and it’s only a desperate and pointless shield for #Deathcult stability. Behind all this is the push to preserve the stability of a collapsing order – the long dead and blinded #neoliberal economics, fortress borders, fossil infrastructure. “Democracy, security, and economic stability” is code for maintaining the #deathcult status quo, no matter how much it rots the roots of any real democracy. So yes, this is exactly the kind of shit we need to compost, break it down, expose the rot, turn the shiny “rule of law” path into humus for the real path of the commons, of protest, of collective resistance.

A good start is to move to prosecute the people pushing this “law and order” agenda #KISS

#4opens Poem

Open data!
Show the rot, spread the truth!

Open source!
Build it free, build it loose!

Open process!
No closed doors, more voices in!

Open standards!
Solidarity – we rise, we win!

We compost their broken paths,
we grow wild flowers in the cracks,
flowers of democracy, of freedom!

#KISS

Individualism vs Commons: Why the Fediverse matters, and the Indieweb is legacy

The continuing, talking to legacy alt media people, sparks off clarification. The current conversation comes from the #indieweb, rooted in individualism, the digital mirror of the lone artisan, the self-sufficient homesteader, the coder as sovereign subject. This is not a critique in itself – individualism is a core driver of creativity and experimentation. But taken as the centre of gravity, it is a politics that naturally aligns with capitalism. Each person builds their site, their stack, their micro-brand, carving out a niche within the wider marketplace of attention.

By contrast, the Fediverse is – at least in practice – a commons-based approach. It is messy, communal, and often contradictory. The culture tells a white lie about being for individual empowerment (“host your own instance, be free!”) but the reality is that the Fediverse only exists because of shared infrastructure, federated protocols, and overlapping communities of care. It is not about individuals building perfect silos, it is about rough collective spaces and imperfect federation.

This makes the Fediverse a bad fit for capitalism, which is precisely its virtue. While corporations circle like vultures trying to find a monetization model, they repeatedly stumble over the fact that the Fediverse runs on gift economies, volunteer admin work, and political commitments to #4opens data. It resists enclosure, because enclosure breaks the very thing people come for: the federation of flows.

Politics is in the protocols, so much of this comes down to unspoken politics. The indieweb protocols and culture fit comfortably with #neoliberal individualism: “build your own, control your data, be an island.” The Fediverse protocols and culture emerge from anarchist, commons-oriented traditions: “connect, federate, share, fight (mainstreaming) spam together.”

Both are #openweb native, both valuable in their own way. But only one – the Fediverse – has proven capable of scaling into an actual social movement. It is not a coincidence that working activist traditions, mutual aid groups, and alternative media collectives gravitate toward federation rather than individual silos.

Silo vs Flow. Legacy media, and many who imitate it, still think in silo terms – bounded publications, paywalls, gated submissions. They mirror the scarcity logic of print capitalism. The #openweb, on the other hand, is about flow – federation, remix, sharing, building commons. The Fediverse works because it embodies this. The #Indieweb stalls when it forgets this.

The problem we now face is that almost all of the current “leadership” both technical and social of the fedivers is pushing blinded #mainstreaming, its good that some one is doing this, dont take this wrong, but we need balence. And this is why the #OMN path matters, the Open Media Network is the logical next native step: federation all the way down, a refusal to compromise with silo logic, and a clear embrace of the commons. Instead of curating content behind walls, we curate flows in open space. Instead of asking permission, we build bridges.

The need for balence is clear: push more individualist silos – a safe fit for capitalism, but doomed to irrelevance. Or embrace federated flows – messy, communal, unprofitable, and alive. The #openweb is at this crossroads. If we do not push the commons-first path, the vultures of #mainstreaming will enclose the #Fediverse just as they did the early web. This is why we need the native #OMN path, not as a brand, but as a living commitment: federation, commons, openness, and collective care. This is not just about tech, it’s about politics. About simple #KISS whether the future of the web belongs to capital, or to the commons. And the problem we need to compost is that common sense tells us to take the wrong path.

Looking at working with legacy media thinking – silo vs flow

Frictionlessness is a Poisoned Fantasy – an #OMN Reflection

In our current mess of a world, one of capitalism’s illusions is the promise of #frictionlessness, that everything should just work, that all interactions should be smooth, efficient, and untroubled. In tech this is the logic of the #dotcons, keeping the “users” engaged, never give them time to think, and above all don’t let the real world get in the way of the pipeline between their attention and your profit.

This has infected the #geekproblem deeply. In software culture, especially, friction is seen as a flaw to be eradicated. You get endless talk about seamless UX, microservices glued together with endless APIs, “AI” interfaces that complete your thoughts before you’ve had them. But in this drive for “smoothness”, we erase the very stuff that makes us human. Friction isn’t a bug, it’s the thing that matters.

We in the #OMN path think differently, humanistically, friction is where we bump up against each other, where ideas collide, where something has to be negotiated, not assumed. It’s where care, conflict, and collective learning live. Real life and community requires discussion. It forces mutual understanding. It invites shared responsibility. Not only that, but it’s slower – yes. Messier – absolutely. But in that mess, something native grows.

This is the fundamental difference between a society built for people and one built for control. A people-based network has thick edges, blurry boundaries, and rough interfaces, you feel each other. A control-based network is sterile. Optimized. Soulless.

This is what the #deathcult calls “progress”, the drive to strip the world of friction so that each of us can float through our own private consumerist delusion, never encountering anything real. Currently you feel this in the emerging cult of “AI as Everything Machine”, the idea that you’ll never need to interact with anyone ever again. Need something? Ask the machine. It won’t argue, won’t misunderstand, won’t push back. It’ll stroke your ego and reinforce your (their) worldview. It’s like having a compliant servant with no wages, no needs – and no truth.

We are encouraged to see this as liberation. But it’s so obviously the opposite. It’s a deepening of the loneliness machine. This is what happens when we build networks to eliminate community. No neighbours to disagree with, no comrades to compromise with, no community to be accountable to. Just you, “your” machine, and your carefully filtered feed, all controlled by the “invisible” #nastyfew in a feedback loop of isolation.

But, simply put, the real world doesn’t work like that, it is messy. The river floods. The server crashes. The refugee needs a place to sleep. The boat needs fixing. Your project needs people who don’t agree on everything, but care enough to stay and work it out. This is the world the #OMN needs to be built for.

Humanism is not removing friction, it’s mediating it. Friction can hurt, but it also brings growth. It’s how we learn, we feel our need for each other. And yes, how we fight, but also how we forgive.

If we’re serious about challenging the broken paths we’ve been led down – from #neoliberal isolation to techno-dystopian escape – we need to stop chasing the dream of #stupidindividualism, and start building networks that build communities of interest, that touch back. That remind us we’re not alone and push back, gently, when we try in our misery to float away.

Because only in activism – in tension, in movement, in shared resistance – can we build anything real #KISS

Criticisms of capitalism and its digital children, the #dotcons

Capitalism, especially in its late-stage #neoliberal form, has always had significant structural problems. In recent decades, these problems have been amplified and globalized through our society, I look here at the path of the digital platforms, what we call the #dotcons. These companies are not in any way a break from capitalism, they are its most refined, efficient, and extractive version to date.

Income Inequality

Traditional critique: Capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of those who own capital (factories, land, assets), while workers receive only a small slice of wages.

#Dotcons example: Big Tech CEOs and early investors have become some of the richest people in human history – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – while gig workers and content creators struggle to survive.

Amazon workers are underpaid and overworked, with high injury rates in warehouses. Meanwhile, Bezos took a vanity trip to space.

Uber/Lyft drivers bear the cost of vehicles and insurance, receive no job security, and can be "deactivated" (fired) algorithmically with no recourse.

Exploitation

Traditional critique: The wage labour system is inherently exploitative, profits come from paying workers less than the value they produce.

#Dotcons example: Digital platforms exploit user-generated content while paying creators next to nothing.

YouTube demonetizes videos arbitrarily. Creators build platforms that YouTube controls and profits from.

Facebook/Meta builds its empire off unpaid emotional labour — your social life, your attention, your photos — monetized through surveillance and advertising.

TikTok algorithms suck in youth creativity, reward a few, and discard the rest. The work is free, the profit is centralised.

We’ve all become digital piece-workers, feeding the machine with likes, posts, and swipes, and we’re not even getting wages any more.

Environmental Degradation

Traditional critique: Capitalism’s drive for infinite growth in a finite world results in ecosystem destruction.

#Dotcons example: The cloud isn’t light and airy, it’s made of data centres that consume vast amounts of energy and water.

Bitcoin mining (driven by capitalist speculation) consumes more electricity annually than Argentina.

AI training for LLMs (like ChatGPT) has a massive carbon footprint, often hidden behind “green” branding.

Amazon delivery and consumption cycles have increased packaging waste and pushed unsustainable shipping logistics into overdrive.

Digital capitalism gives us the illusion of “clean” convenience, but its ecological impact is catastrophic and accelerating.

Short-Term Thinking

Traditional critique: Shareholder capitalism focuses on quarterly profits, not long-term well-being.

#Dotcons example: The platforms build attention economies, short-term dopamine hits over sustained engagement, destroying social connectivity and democratic culture.

Twitter/X encourages outrage over insight. Algorithmic virality means trolls win.

Facebook actively promoted divisive content because it increased “engagement.”

Startups "move fast and break things" without repairing the damage. Few are held accountable.

Product design is driven by venture capital exits, not by usefulness or ethics. Tech isn’t solving problems; it’s creating new ones, faster and faster.

Lack of Access to Essential Goods and Services

Traditional critique: In capitalism, basic needs like healthcare, housing, and education are commodified, your access depends on your income.

#Dotcons example: Digital access is the new essential, but it’s increasingly paywalled and monopolized.

Google Classroom became a default education tool during COVID — but it’s ad-funded, tracks users, and lacks any transparency.

Zoom and other platforms required for remote work/schooling are corporate-run silos, with data surveillance baked in.

People in the Global South are increasingly pushed into “zero-rated” Facebook and WhatsApp ecosystems — giving up any path to digital autonomy for basic closed access.

The digital divide isn’t just about cables or bandwidth, it’s about who owns and controls the networks we rely on to build a future.

From Capitalism to #dotcons to #deathcult, the digital platforms didn’t disrupt capitalism, they turbocharged it. What we’re living through and witnessing now isn’t Big Tech behaving badly, it’s the logical endpoint of capitalism in a networked world. The #dotcons replicate and intensify the worst features of capitalism:

More control with less accountability

More labour with less compensation

More growth with more destruction

They’re efficient machines of extraction, cloaked in the language of innovation and empowerment. What’s the Alternative? We need to stop asking how to “fix” the #dotcons and start building outside of them. That means:

Supporting the #fediverse and #ActivityPub as protocols of freedom and decentralization

Backing grassroots media and alternative tech through projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network)

Embracing the #4opens

Fighting back against #mainstreaming capture by NGOs and foundations that reproduce te normal power hierarchies

Prioritizing trust over control, cooperation over extraction, and commons over private for profit platforms

We need to name the problem for what it is: Capitalism – digital or otherwise – is incompatible with the future of people and planet. It’s past time to compost it and grow something better. As a first very basic step, let’s build tech that reflects our #KISS values, not just our fears.

Hopelessness is a deeply conservative reaction to change and challenge

In the face of mounting crisis – social breakdown, political polarization, ecological collapse – many people turn inward. And in this turn, they mistake passivity, irony and detachment for resistance. But hopelessness is not radical, it’s deeply conservative. It says: “Nothing can change.” “Everything is corrupt.” “Why bother?”

This isn’t rebellion, it’s surrender. And it’s the exact emotional state that power systems – what we call the #deathcult of neoliberalism – need us to be in. It feeds on your hopelessness, it wants your sarcasm, it loves that you’re “above it all.”

Meme culture & irony: Subversion or sedation? What started as absurdist and ironic commentary devolves into a feedback loop of reaction over reflection. Sarcasm and irony dominate, and this can be useful satire, but more often it’s deflection. You’ll see it in:

The snide quote-tweets with no solution.

The endless “vibes” critiques in social threads.

The collapse of political dialogue into aesthetics and shitposting.

This “cool detachment” doesn’t move us any were toward change, it actively blocks it. We saw this in the decline of many #Occupy offshoots, where internal meme culture replaced organising. Or more recently in parts of climate circles, where #doomposting pushes people into nihilism instead of movement.

Inward-looking tribalism in a globalising world, the creeping tribalism of identity performance, the tendency to build ever-smaller circles of agreement and define yourself against the world instead of with it. On the surface, this might seem like radical rejection of the #mainstreaming. But it’s the opposite, a deeply conforming reaction to consumer individualism.

“Build your brand.”
“Curate your followers.”
“Find your niche.”
“Be your own revolution.”

This is #stupidindividualism, a self-defeating survival mode learned from decades of #neoliberal collapse. But there is no individual path through #climatechaos, only collective ones. We see this mess when grassroots media creators ignore collaboration and #4opens publishing, instead choosing to grow their own follower count on YouTube, TikTok or Substack. We see it when radical tech projects are siloed by pride and petty grudges, while the #dotcons eat their functionality alive.

This performative tribalism ends in isolation, not revolution. All of this is the problem, not the solution, let’s be clear:

Sarcastic detachment = stagnation.

Tribal identity wars = division.

Hopelessness = inaction.

Together, they serve the status quo. They are cultural arms of the #deathcult, a system designed to:

Feed on fear.

Incentivize competition.

Reward silence over solidarity.

So what is the change we need? A first step is in #KISS reviving:

Networks of trust, not control (#4opens).
Tools that connect, not isolate (#OMN, #OGB).
Spaces where we speak with doubt, and listen with care.
Structures of cooperation, not only critique (#indymediaback).

We don’t need perfect answers, we need open processes, and we need to reclaim hope, not as naïve optimism, but as active engagement. So pick up your shovel, join a group of composters, feed the soil of a future worth living in.

Hashtags are the River.

A conversation about money and the #openweb

Let’s talk about the tension at the heart of the modern #openweb, and why so many grassroots builders and radical technologists find themselves on the outside looking in. Scene: A typical “open internet” conference in Europe. Excited NGO-funded attendee toots:

“Just booked my place for ePIC in Lille! My first Eurostar trip! It’s where I started 10 years ago with Mozilla. Time flies. #OpenBadges #VerifiableCredentials”

Me (a social tech outsider):

“These things are hopelessly expensive. To attend you have to worship the #deathcult. Hard to know what to do with these two-track approaches. Kinda can’t be #openweb if they’re locked behind temple walls.”

PS. It’s a metaphor. But not an empty one.

Two economies, two Internets, the #mainstreaming of the #openweb means that most so-called “open” events are inaccessible unless you:

Work for a #NGO, startup, or university with a travel budget

Have a career track aligned with #neoliberal frameworks

Can spend hundreds of pounds on accommodation, tickets, and travel

That’s not grassroots, not radical, not open – it’s branded openness for the networking class. The Reply:

“I think that’s a complicated way of saying you can’t afford to go?”

No, it’s not, it’s a social critique, and a common one from those of us who have spent decades building grassroots tech infrastructures and activist media, unpaid or underpaid, mostly ignored. It’s about asking: Who is the #openweb for, really?

Why this matters, when we raise issues like this, we’re not “being reply guys.” We’re making a point about the structural divides that are silencing and marginalising the very voices we need most in these spaces, the people actually building and defending the #openweb on the ground. You can’t build democratic tech by replicating elitist spaces and calling them “inclusive” just because the code is on GitHub. The pushback:

“You can’t live outside the mainstream, throw rocks at it, and complain when it doesn’t accommodate you.”

“I’ve never had a positive interaction with you. You wear that like a badge of honour. I’m muting you.”

Pause here, is this really the attitude we want? If you’re part of the #NGO world, if you have stable income and access to conference budgets, then you are in a position of power. When someone critiques that system, not you personally, but the structures you inhabit, and your reaction is to mute, dismiss, or mock them… something has gone wrong. This is exactly how we lose the #openweb. Not to tech giants, but to social silos within our own communities.

A different approach? Imagine this instead:

“You're right, many of these events are structurally exclusionary. I’ll raise this at the conference. How do you think we can bridge this divide without compromising either side?”

That’s the kind of solidarity we need, that’s how we stop #mainstreaming the death spiral, how we build together. If we want an #openweb that isn’t just another branded ladder for careerists, we have to defend the messy, painful, and vital presence of the grassroots, even when they come knocking without a conference pass.

Muting critique is easy, building bridges? That’s harder, but it’s the only thing worth doing right now.

#NLnet #NGI #NGIzero #EU #funding

Why most #geekproblem software fails: Trust vs. control

Affective Protest vs. Effective Power: From Spectacle to Strategy

What can we learn from the current mess. The protests didn’t fail because people didn’t care. They failed because the system is not built to respond to protest, it’s built to absorb it. We’ve marched for climate justice, taken the streets for peace, rallied for gender freedom, and now we mobilize for Palestine. The awareness is unprecedented. The turnout is historic. But what has shifted?

Police powers expanded. Fossil fuel extraction accelerated, Gaza burns. The truth is: awareness is not power. That’s a bitter pill for many on the #mainstreaming liberal left, who still believe that if we just scream loud enough, someone with authority will finally listen. But listen to what? A million voices chanting through state-sanctioned routes, wrapped in #NGO branding, monitored and shaped by our mobile devices?

This isn’t failure by accident, it’s design. Modern post #neoliberal governance has perfected the art of managing dissent, it doesn’t crush opposition, it curates it. It schedules protest, builds fenced-off “free speech zones” tallies engagement for annual reports. It makes this work by funding the same nonprofits it pretends to oppose to push protest as a pageant, a performance of resistance that never practically interrupt the flows of capital.

Worse than this, it trains us into harmless routines: march, chant, selfy, hashtag on the #dotcons, disperse, donate, repeat. It pacifies rage by channelling it into metrics, and then sells those metrics back to us as success. It offers us vacuous victories made of smoke and mirrors: a viral post, a headline, a panel discussion.

But to put this simply, real power doesn’t care how you feel, it cares what you can disrupt. And right now, they know we can’t disrupt much, because power doesn’t fear signs or slogans, it fears logistics. We know this from history. The Viet Minh didn’t defeat the French colonial army with slogans. The IRA didn’t survive the British Empire through branding. The Zapatistas didn’t hold territory in Chiapas by waiting for permission. These movements did not rely on protest. They relied on operations. On strategy. On adaptability. On patience and planning.

What do we need, to shift from affective protest to effective resistance? This doesn’t mean abandoning public protest entirely, but it means recognizing what it is: a signal, not a structure. It’s the spark, not the engine. And too often, we mistake the spark for the fire.

So what does this shift look like? Stop chasing virality. Build networks that don’t rely on platforms owned by billionaires. Organize in ways that can’t be throttled or shadowbanned.
Don’t just protest; prototype. Create alternatives: cooperative farms, tool libraries, mesh networks, open media infrastructures (#OMN), community defence projects. Measure what matters. Track not followers or clicks, but mutual aid distributed, infrastructure built, people trained, tools replicated. Treat resistance like an ecosystem. Not wannabe famous (stupid)individuals shouting louder, but communities learning, adapting, and reproducing decentralized power.

In short, we need an operational culture, built not on outrage cycles but on daily commitment, iteration, and survival. This is prefigurative politics in action: we don’t beg the world to change, we build the new one inside the shell of the old. Yes, the current system will collapse. It is already collapsing. The question is no longer how to reform it, but at this stage, how to outlive it, and outgrow it.

This is where strategy matters, this is where affect must meet action. Because we aren’t here to perform resistance for an audience, we’re here to construct parallel systems in the cracks of empire. And that starts with understanding: protest alone is not enough. We must become ungovernable, not just in what we say – but in how we live.

#KISS

Getting through this era of collapse with anything humane intact

The discussions on sovereignty at #NGIForum2025 make me wonder: what year are we in? It’s as if we’re rebooting grassroots conversations we’ve had for decades – but without the mess, memory, or movement that gave them meaning in the first place.

A breath of clarity came from @renchap, who said it plainly:

We need to focus our efforts on funding and supporting public value network infrastructure… THAT CANNOT BE BOUGHT. 💪

Absolutely. If that idea resonates with you, try starting with the #4opens – a pragmatic path to build tech with real accountability and openness. It’s not a utopia, it’s a filter designed to push out 95% of the #techshit we’re constantly drowning in. The rest? That’s the work: compromise, community, governance.

For those curious about mapping this stuff, I appreciate the attempt to formalize governance components of digital commons here: https://commons.mattischneider.fr/2-constituants It’s useful, but my take? Still not messy enough to reflect how real-world horizontal projects actually work. As the site rightly says:

“If you already have experience in operating commons, you or your organisation will probably have specific practices that are more appropriate to your context.”

Exactly, why context matters, and why real commons need trust-based governance, not just metrics and diagrams. Let’s remember:

Tools are only useful if people use them.
And that’s our real problem right now.

Take this audience question as a clear example: What should we do when a US company acquires an EU one – like Cisco buying Slido? It hits the core issue:

Centralized, vertical control is always the endgame of VC funding and the mainstream tech stack.

What’s the mainstream response? Push more AI. Push more “innovation.” Push more #stupidindividualism. This story is heavily funded and constantly amplified. Why? Because it keeps us distracted, divided, and demobilized. We need to compost this garbage.

Let’s stop pretending #opensource is the goal. It’s only useful if it lives in common infrastructure, owned and governed collectively, with embedded solidarity, not slogans. Yes, someone pointed out that:

"Open source licensing permits continued operation of the software with an EU provider."

That’s technically true, but in practice, how many such transitions actually happen? How many of these tools become hollowed-out ghost projects after the buyout? We need the EU to fund #4opens #FOSS and commons-native projects directly, not startups chasing exit strategies.

And yes, I’ll be blunt here:

There’s likely a whole class of people who should be prosecuted for fraud.

Because the current “innovation” circuit is knowingly wasting public money on private gain under “our” banner of openness. It’s a con. A parasitic class living off the #countercultures they parasitise. So let’s call this out, not to “disrupt” for disruption’s sake, but to open up space for what actually matters:

Native projects with shared roots in code, care, and community.
Activism that isn’t tacked on for #PR, but central to the infrastructure itself.
Horizontal governance that embraces mess, rather than paving over it.

We don’t need more products, we don’t need more platforms, we don’t need more panels pushing safe #neoliberal “common sense.” What we do need is to build and protect infrastructure that can’t be bought, captured, or silenced. Because that’s the only way we’re getting through this era of collapse with anything humane intact.

#NGIForum #NGIForum25 #4opens #OMN #openweb #techshit #commonsnotplatforms #mutualaid #FOSS #trustnotcontrol #liberalcapture #activismtech #geekproblem

Oxford: Going with The Flow