The work of composting the #deathcult and growing something more human

The world is such a mess, partly this is because we use fear as a motivation to grasp for control were we should be reach for competence instead. The mess this makes needs shovels to work at composting, it is what tools like the #OMN are trying to provide, but to close this circle we have to first make them, then pick them up, then use them to shovel the #techshit into compost that is in part feeding this mess.

So what is blocking this work? In part it is we use language irresponsibly, and partly that this is a class issue. Groups feed back and reinforce bad language, forming tribes, these blinded groups then ingest the sickness and poison from each other. This is the world we have created over the last 50 years, shaped by the “law of the jungle”, where people behave less like humans and more like animals.

The irony is that the people with the most agency are often the most afraid of change. This is particularly visible in the #fashionista crew, Who constantly block necessary change, making process nasty and often violent until crisis overwhelms their fear. Only then do some maybe finally use their agency to try to save the situation, late and messily, when much of the damage is to late to be avoided

Lets look at this wider, there is a bigger argument than the current chattering class noise – how the last 50 years of #neoliberal culture reshaped social behaviour, language and, most importantly, our ability to act collectively. This connects to the #geekproblem, #fluffy/#spiky divide, #NGO #mainstreaming and why rebuilding the #openweb requires changing social norms, not only writing better #FOSS software.

Over the last 50 years, #neoliberalism shaped the social environment we live in, competition, individual advancement, insecurity and the worship of markets become normalized. We have been encouraged to see ourselves as competing individuals rather than participants in shared social paths. This is not simply a communication problem, it is a class problem, a cultural problem and ultimately a problem of collective growing any agency paths. Words that should help us understand the world have become tribal signals, instead of describing reality, they mostly describe which group we belong to, who we trust and who we are supposed to oppose.

The resulting mess where groups feed back their own language, assumptions and prejudices to each other is a feedback loop few try and escape from. They form tribes that develop internal vocabularies that reinforce their versions of reality. These closed feedback loops become increasingly disconnected from any idea of the wider world. People ingest the same social sickness and then pass it around, often believing they are defending something good, this is how bad ideas become new social norms.

Language should be a tool for exploring reality, negotiating differences and developing shared understanding, instead, much of our political and technological culture uses language as a form of social sorting. Words like safe, inclusive, progressive, radical, professional, disruptive, community and innovation lose their descriptive meaning and become membership badges.

The important thing for #mainstreaming is using the approved language rather than understanding the underlying reality, a strange situation were people become skilled at talking about social change while becoming increasingly unable to participate in it. We see this across our #openweb reboot were projects spend more time managing the language around participation than actually developing meaningful participation. The #fluffy approach then blindly turns kindness into avoidance – the #spiky approach can turn honesty into aggression. Both can become self-protecting tribes rather than useful approaches to collective work.

The class problem behind the tribes is that these behaviours don’t develop in a vacuum. Different social groups experience the world differently, have different resources and face different risks. They also develop different forms of agency, some people have professional security, institutional connections and the ability to move between funded projects. Others have practical skills, lived experience and grassroots relationships but little institutional recognition or financial security. These differences shape how people behave, for example:

The professional #NGO layer: Often has access to funding, institutional language and organizational influence. Its poison can be turning political struggle into manageable projects, consultation and career development. Its value is organizational experience, resources and the ability to maintain long-term work.
The #fashionista layer: Gains influence through cultural positioning, language and social legitimacy. Its poison can be conformity, status competition and policing who belongs. Its value is cultural energy, communication and the ability to bring new people into movements.
The technical #geekproblem layer: Gains agency through specialist knowledge, software and infrastructure. Its poison can be control, abstraction and the assumption that technical functionality solves social problems. Its value is practical skills, maintenance and the ability to build working tools.
The grassroots #spiky layer: Often has direct experience of organizing, conflict and practical resistance. Its poison can be hostility, burnout and destructive internal conflict. Its value is independence, political clarity and willingness to challenge established power.
The grassroots #fluffy layer: Often brings care, mediation, inclusion and relationship-building. Its poison can be conflict avoidance, endless consensus-seeking and enabling existing power. Its value is trust, participation and the social glue that keeps communities together.

These are all tendencies, not fixed identities. People move between them, and most projects contain several of these cultures at once, the thing is to understand that every group brings something useful and every group can also bring something destructive, we need to understand both. #Fluffy and #spiky: Two necessary sides of collective agency – the #fluffy/#spiky divide is a useful way of understanding a recurring problem in grassroots organizing.

#Fluffy

Trust and relationships
Care and inclusion
Mediation and consensus
Social stability

Failure mode: avoiding necessary conflict.

#Spiky

Challenge and resistance
Political clarity
Boundaries and accountability
Willingness to act

Failure mode: turning every disagreement into a battle.

Neither is enough on its own – without #fluffy, movements become hostile, exhausting and difficult to sustain. Without #spiky, movements become places where difficult questions are endlessly postponed and existing power is protected. To start to compost this mess we need to repair our grassroots groups so they can change the social norms to make these approaches work better together agen. Kindness must not mean avoiding accountability. Honesty must not mean abandoning care. A healthy movement needs both the ability to welcome people and the ability to challenge them.

The law of the jungle and the loss of human behaviour is another uncomfortable part of this argument. After 50 years of competitive individualism, much of our social behaviour is the law of the jungle. People become defensive, territorial, status-conscious and opportunistic. They protect their immediate position, compete for scarce resources and treat other people as threats or opportunities. This isn’t because people have somehow become less human by nature, it is because the systems we have built reward these behaviours. When insecurity becomes normal, trust becomes risky, when competition becomes normal, cooperation needs justification, when status becomes the measure of success, collective achievement becomes difficult to recognise.

We end up with groups that can talk endlessly about solidarity while behaving according to the opposite logic, this is one of the worst contradictions of the current #deathcult worship. We built social systems that undermine the very human qualities we need to change these systems.

The agency paradox: Those most able to act can become the biggest blockers is a particularly important contradiction. Some of the people with the greatest social agency are also the people most afraid of change. They have established positions, reputations, networks, professional identities and cultural influence, have learned how to operate within the existing system. They may have the resources to initiate change, but they also have the most to lose if the ground shifts beneath them, this is where the #fashernista problem becomes particularly visible.

The people who are most confident in progressive language tend to be the least willing to support actual structural change. They to often block emerging processes, challenge uncomfortable ideas, demand endless consultation and make practical experimentation socially difficult. They don’t necessarily do this consciously, as often they believe they are protecting the community, maintaining standards and preventing harm, but the outcome is the same: pre-emptive obstruction.

Then something interesting happens, as a crisis develops, the old structures begin to fail. Eventually the consequences become impossible to ignore. Suddenly, some of the same people who resisted change discover their agency. They start organizing, making decisions and taking responsibility, but by then the situation is much worse, the opportunity for gradual, thoughtful change has been lost. What could have been a manageable transition becomes a nasty and destructive crisis, the people who could have helped prevent the crisis discover their agency only when the crisis starts to threaten them directly. This is a currently a recurring failure of mainstreamed progressive culture: fear of manageable change produces the conditions for unmanageable change.

Functionality – People have different ideas about what works – this explains why arguments about functionality are often so difficult. People don’t approach a project with neutral ideas about what works, they bring their social position, experience, expectations and cultural assumptions. For one group, functionality means safety, predictability and professional standards, for another, it means speed, experimentation and getting something working. For another, it means participation, inclusion and making sure nobody is excluded, for another, it means political effectiveness and the ability to challenge established power.

These are not simply different opinions about people, software or project management, they are different ideas about how society should work. The problem comes when one group assumes its own definition of functionality is universal – this is particularly visible in the #geekproblem – the assumption that if something works technically, it must work socially, it doesn’t. A technically “perfect” platform can support terrible social relationships, a beautifully inclusive process can produce nothing useful, a politically radical project can destroy its own community through internal conflict.

We need to judge functionality across the whole system:

Does it work technically?
Does it work socially?
Does it support meaningful participation?
Does it distribute agency?
Can people challenge and change it?
Can it survive conflict, failure and changing circumstances?

This is why we need to bring in native #4opens development. As changing the social norms is needed, we cannot solve these problems simply by asking people to be nicer, more inclusive or more radical. Those often become just more tribal signals, we need different social practices. Some starting points:

Make disagreement normal. Conflict is not automatically a failure. The ability to disagree openly without destroying relationships is a foundation of collective work.
Separate criticism of ideas from attacks on people. We need to be able to say that a process is broken without turning every argument into a personality conflict.
Reward practical agency. Value the people who maintain, build, organise, experiment and take responsibility, not just those who are best at managing the language around projects.
Make power visible. Who decides? Who controls resources? Who can block progress? Who benefits from the existing arrangements?
Allow experimentation. Small failures are often cheaper than large, delayed failures. We need room to try different approaches without demanding institutional approval for everything.
Build accountability into care. Being welcoming does not mean accepting destructive behaviour. Being challenging does not mean abandoning collective responsibility.
Protect the commons. The people who contribute to a shared resource must have meaningful ways to influence and govern it.

The #OMN path is about this – building social technology for human agency, it is why the #OMN is not simply a software project – balanceing – growing social technology that supports different groups, different cultures and different forms of agency without allowing one group to capture the whole path or process. But as people likely reply, openness alone isn’t enough, we also do need the social practices that make openness useful.

The #OMN approach is to build networks of flows rather than centralized platforms. People and communities publish, subscribe, moderate, curate and maintain relationships with information. Trust develops through human participation rather than being imposed by a single algorithm or management structure. The #OGB work is about building the governance needed to make that shared infrastructure accountable. And #indymediaback is about recovering the grassroots publishing and organizing practices that made the native #openweb meaningful in the first place.

These projects need to work across the different social cultures, not become or be seen as another tribe defending its own assumptions. We need #fluffy people who can build trust, #spiky people who can challenge power, technical people who can maintain infrastructure and organizers who can turn shared intentions into practical action. None should dominate, all should be accountable.

The bigger change is that the last 50 years have normalized a particular kind of anti social behaviour: competitive, defensive, individualistic and increasingly disconnected from collective responsibility. To step away from this mess, we need to stop pretending that better interfaces, nicer language or another round of professional management will fix this. The problem is deeper, we need to rebuild the social norms that make collective agency possible. That means learning to recognize the different poisons circulating through our groups, understanding the useful capacities hidden inside those same groups, and finding ways to bring those capacities into productive relationships.

We need to stop rewarding people for defending their positions and start rewarding people for helping communities move forward, and most importantly, we need to stop waiting for crisis to give people permission to act. The point of grassroots organizing is to build the agency to change things before the crisis arrives, the work is of composting the #deathcult and growing something more human.

The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: Civilizing Russia, or whitewashing Neoliberalism?

Dr Tobias Rupprecht’s seminar at St Antony’s College was The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: The Failed Quest to Civilise Russia, 1972–2022. But sitting through the discussion, I was left wondering whose tragedy we were really talking about, and who gets to define what it means to civilize a country. The nitpicking Oxford event kinda made sense, but pull back and my impression was that this was an apologetic account of the #neoliberal project in Russia: a story that gives market liberalism respectable historical roots while leaving too many of its own political responsibilities unexplored.

This guy looks so uncomfortable presenting his book, not surprising as his book is about rejuvenation of shock doctrine neoliberalism in Russia. This should feel uncomfortable, as for the last 20 years this same mess has ripped apart the global economy and society. Its a mess we need to compost not something to nitpick thought as liberal apology.

One of the striking things was the attempt to present Chicago School economics as something that grew naturally out of Russian experience. What was missing was any account of the international circulation of neoliberal ideas, the networks promoting them, and the ideological project that had been developing since the late 1940s. #Neoliberalism did not emerge from Russian soil, it had a history, a political purpose and powerful international connections.

The discussion of perestroika seemed equally uncomfortable. Liberalism was presented as having little or no role in the process, which was instead framed as purely Communist. But this leaves the central question hanging: how did market liberalism become such a powerful force in the transformation of the Soviet system?

Then there was the constitutional crisis, the bombing of parliament and the question of political responsibility. The impression he gives was that the liberals had clean hands. Anatoly Chubais was presented sympathetically, despite his central role in the “reforms” and upheavals of the period. The liberals helped bring Putin to power, then found themselves pushing back against the system they had helped create. The Chechen wars and the retreat of democratic liberalism formed part of this story, but the larger political responsibility seemed to dissolve into the narrative.

The Russian liberals were not simply neutral democrats caught in somebody else’s tragedy. They were also participants in a project of internal imperialism: a vision of modernization that treated Russian society as something to be managed, reorganised and disciplined from above. Chubais was described as a democrat while simultaneously expressing deep distrust of the Russian people. That contradiction deserves more judgement than it received in the talk

The comparison with China raised another uncomfortable question. Russia’s industrial development and social security were presented as obstacles to the transformation being attempted, while China’s large peasant population and overseas connections offered different conditions for market reform. But if the argument is that existing social protections made a country harder to reshape for the market, perhaps we should ask what kind of progress this version of liberalism actually represents.

At one point, a question about soviet algorithms prompted laughter in the room. Yet the wider discussion seemed to leave the basic assumptions of neoliberalism untouched. That was the most revealing part of the event for me. The room was bowing before the #deathcult, the belief that the market is the inevitable measure of progress, that societies must be remade in its image, and that the damage caused along the way is a regrettable but necessary price.

Nobody was willing to challenge the underlying framework directly, nobody in the room had any clothes on – the ideological assumptions were exposed – but the performance of respectable scholarship continued. Only one question near the end felt genuinely sane: an older woman asking something that cut through the comfortable narrative.

The tragedy is not that Soviet market economists failed in their quest to “civilise” Russia, it is more that the idea of civilizing a society through market discipline was part of the problem from the beginning. Liberalism presents itself as common sense, modernization and freedom. But when its advocates distrust the people they claim to liberate, excuse the violence of transformation, and treat social protections as barriers to progress, we should ask whose freedom is actually being served.

This is the wider problem with our worship of the #deathcult,turning blinded ideology into an unquestionable reality. Once that happens, the discussion examines every historical detail except the assumptions that hold the whole story together. We need to stop treating neoliberalism as the neutral destination of history. We need to examine the power behind it, the social damage it leaves behind, and the alternatives that have been pushed aside.

That means building from the grassroots, through open processes and shared power, rather than imagining that societies can be perfected by economists, markets and elitists who do not trust the people they govern. The question is not whether Russia was sufficiently civilised for the market, it is whether the market’s self-appointed civilisers were ever willing to recognize the people whose lives they were reshaping.

The event was about teaching the young people that liberalism was not responsible for the mess… and the polite youth lap it up, no critical questions from them in the Q&A

END.

#Oxford #Talk #Event

Please get off your knees and pick up a shovel

Our choice for the last 20 years has been between the #deathcult and #fascism, how the hell did we get into this mess? And how do we find a way out? To build a path we need shovels, not saviours. We need to dig through the shit, compost failures and regrow paths to grassroots collective power. To work on this we need to stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start rebuilding the ground beneath our feet.

Politics is the human condition, you’d have to be mad as a hatter, or a liberal, to imagine we can somehow escape it. We live in messy times, and they’re getting dirtier. Politics isn’t going away, the question is whether we organize collectively to shape it, or leave the field to the #nastyfew people already digging our collective graves.

To be clear, what I’m putting forward doesn’t solve any single problem. What it does is take a practical step towards solving many problems, by changing how we work together. What we don’t need is market-based “green” solutions, elitist control or any more left-wing hero worship – as all feed into the same trap – the #deathcult of #neoliberalism. That common sense keeps us looking upwards for leadership, waiting for markets to save us or hoping the next hero will finally get things right, meanwhile, our uncommon sense collective ability to act decays.

To use a shovel we need is to move beyond fear and control towards trust, open processes and grassroots power. And yes, this isn’t the normal #blinded path about finding another perfect ideology to worship, it’s messy, its about growing practical tools and relationships to allow us to act together, to learn from failure and make change possible.

I should not HAVE to keep saying this, but this is what the #4opens process is about – moving beyond #stupidindividualism, beyond copying the #dotcons, and towards a path we can actually walk together. Open data, open source, open standards and open processes are practical starting points for shared responsibility. They test us, to build in public, hold power to account and create commons that belong to participation rather than private ownership.

The last 50 years of common sense monetization of everything is the #deathcult, as is the endless me, me, me that fragments our ability to act collectively. We won’t compost this mess by repeating the same individualistic habits with a few new slogans, we have to change the practices that keep reproducing it.

At #OMN, we’re turning to decades of grassroots experience of practical tools for collective action. #OGB, #indymediaback, #MakingHistory people have been working on for years. But, they’ve been stuck at the development stage for far too long. The challenge now is to get them moving, connect the people and skills involved, and turn activist traditions into working infrastructure for grassroots media, shared knowledge and collective organization.

This isn’t a magic solution, it’s a way to start growing many solutions from the ground up, rather than waiting for the market, the state or another self-appointed hero to deliver them. Please get off your knees, pick up a shovel, the ground is covered in mess, but that’s exactly why we need to start composting. We have plenty of shit to work with, and plenty of seeds worth saving.

And if you need a shovel, ask in the comments.

#OpenWeb #FOSS #4opens #OMN

The Open Media Network (#OMN) is both shovel and social path to dig the #Fediverse out of the #mainstreaming crap

Over the last five years, the #Fediverse has been pushed down the path of copying corporate #dotcons: chasing raw user growth, building paywalled conference cultures, reproducing professional #NGO gatekeeping, and concentrating power around branded projects and scale. To balance this mess the Open Media Network (#OMN) path offers both the conceptual shovel and the practical social infrastructure to help dig the Fediverse out of this #mainstreaming trap.

The answer is not to discard the last five years or retreat into nostalgia, it is to compost our failures, break down what has gone wrong, recover the useful nutrients, and use them to grow more durable grassroots commons infrastructure. That means shifting focus away from scaling platforms and towards connecting much wider divers networks.

From platform scale to network scale – what we need to work on composting is that #mainstreaming assumes success means a recognizable brand, a convenient platform and millions of users. But grassroots power does not have to follow this corporate path – the #OMN path is to strengthen the horizontal connections between the thousands of autonomous, community-run servers that already exist across the #Fediverse.

By developing and sharing new #AP codebases, we help these communities work together more effectively, sharing news, preserving our own histories and building collective resources without surrendering local control or self-reliance. If you need a slogan, start here – Moving from Social Media to Social Infrastructure. This describes a practical progression for grassroots power:

Open media flows → shared archives → trusted flows → community organization → federated governance. We begin by working with people to publish and share their own media, to build the archives that preserve collective memory, the trusted flows that connect communities, and the organizational capacity to turn shared knowledge into active lived collective action.

The push for #mainstreaming encouraged authority to concentrate into small professional layers, institutional foundations and technical gatekeepers. Where we need more native grassroots forms of governance, that operates between autonomous communities rather than above them. The Open Web Governance Body (#OGB) is a path for this. Through mechanisms such as permissionless participation, sortition, recallable delegates and distributed decision-making, we begin building governance that connects communities without turning into another centralized institution.

The challenge is to make cooperation possible without making communities dependent, and to make collective decisions without handing control to a new professional class. In technical terms re-centring people-to-people – on this path at the heart of the #OMN is a direct challenge to the #geekproblem: the habit of trying to solve human and political problems with another technical protocol, encryption layer or app.

Technology matters, but it cannot replace human trust, shared responsibility or mutual aid. The #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards and Open Process – provide a practical framework for keeping these social foundations visible and accountable. This means building technology around people and their relationships, rather than expecting people to adapt themselves to technical systems. It means recognizing that decentralization is not just about where servers sit, but about how people share power, make decisions and maintain their common resources.

The #Fediverse does not need to race to become the next corporate platform, what it needs is to recover its grassroots purpose and focus to balance growth to building on what already exists, to restart this by compost the failures of #mainstreaming, strengthen the connections between autonomous communities, build shared media and archival infrastructure, and develop federated governance that keeps power distributed.

Less branded platform growth, more network building, less blinded technical noise and more human trust. Less centralized control, more native grassroots power, that is the #OMN path towards a more durable #openweb Commons.

The tension between alternative cultures and the #mainstream is now rooted in 40 years of #neoliberalism – market logic replacing solidarity, grassroots movements being absorbed into #NGO process, and radical alternatives being forced to conform before they’re taken seriously.

This is how the system reproduces itself – block the bridges, co-opt what survives, and call the result “common sense”. Where we need bridges that connect without forcing conformity, collaboration without co-option, and grassroots alternatives that keep their radical purpose while sharing what works – less absorption, gatekeeping and more bridges.

#OMN #openweb #4opens

Bunker as a metaphor

There is something revealing about the way powerful people talk about our future, when they imagine crisis, they imagine their escape. A luxury bunker, fortress border, a private city, a rocket or an #AI cloud. A place for the self chosen few to survive while everyone else is left outside to die.

This is the “logic” of the #deathcult we all worship, if the world is breaking, protect yourself rather than repair the world. It should be obverse to us that this is is not really any actual plan for the future, its just more head down worship, an admission that this class have stopped believing in any thing at all.

But, yes they hid this, they still tend to tell a story, the shiny version of this story is always the same, out of catastrophe comes a golden city, the old world burns, the rubble is cleared, and the self selecting few build something beautiful on top of it.

We have heard this story for thousands of years, apocalypse, judgement, Armageddon, collapse, then purification for paradise for the few survivors. The modern retelling simply replaces heaven with a billionaire bunker, an exclusive smart city, an AI utopia or a colony on Mars, different technology, same path.

On this #mainstreaming path some people, who we call the #nastyfew in the #OMN hashtag story, deserve to survive the mess they created. But what is not told in this simply story is that the bunker is hard right politics – #climatechaos, pandemics, resource conflicts, economic insecurity and technological disruption are real problems. But there are two very different ways to respond to systemic crisis.

One response is – How do we protect everyone and make the system more resilient?

The other is – How do I make sure I am on the inside when it collapses?

The second path is not surprisingly increasingly visible in #nastyfew billionaire culture, authoritarian politics and in the #dotcons industry we all spend way to much time inside.

in this modern story, the bunker is not just a building underground, it is a political metaphor, fortress borders are bunkers, private security is a bunker, gated communities are bunkers, #closedweb platforms are bunkers. What matters for us in #FOSS is monopolized infrastructure is a bunker. Even the fantasy of escaping humanity through #AI or space is another bunker, an attempt to leave the shared social and ecological world rather than compost our dysfunctional relationship with it.

This path is the opposite of the #openweb,it is were the #deathcult turns fear into control. The right-wing answer to social crisis is always built around fear – Fear of outsiders, fear of immigrants, fear of social change, fear of losing status, fear of disorder, fear of the future. But, then comes the golden lie, the promise, we will protect you, but this protection soon becomes control. The anger that should be directed toward concentrated wealth and political power gets redirected sideways and downwards toward other ordinary people.

The poor become the problem, migrants become the problem, minorities become the problem, the left becomes the problem. The messy complexity of society is reduced to enemies, it is an old political trick that the #blinded technological #closedweb makes much more powerful. Today’s authoritarian politics doesn’t arrive wearing an old-fashioned uniform. the phone in our pocket, influencers, algorithms, targeted advertising, surveillance systems, AI-generated propaganda and permanently monetised outrage. The infrastructure of the #dotcons is a bunker.

But what we focus on the #OMN path is there is alternative, this alternative isn’t pretending that everything is fine, not another shiny utopia, and it certainly isn’t waiting for some perfect political party, perfect technology or perfect leader to save us. The alternative is much more boring – Build things that work, trust, commons, local resilience. Create media systems where communities can see and understand what is happening. Focus more on building technologies that people can actually control by #KISS keeping the infrastructure understandable so participation is possible. Create spaces where people can disagree without immediately becoming enemies. That sounds much less exciting than an AI god or a $50 million survival bunker, good, what we need to do as the #DIY grassroots is move from bunkers to bridges

The important question is not, who gets into the bunker? The question is, what are we building outside it? Because humans have already built an enormous number of bunkers, political bunkers, economic bunkers, cultural bunkers, technological bunkers, information bunkers. We don’t need more, we need bridges, and bridges are fundamentally different from bunkers.

A bunker protects something by excluding people, a bridge creates value by connecting people. That is the deeper #openweb possibility – not a technological escape from society, but technology that helps society organize itself. Not centralized control, but distributed participation, not ownership of everything, but stewardship of shared resources, not fear as the organizing principle, but trust. Not “how do I survive when everything collapses?” but “How do we make collapse less likely, and life better, together?”

Its about composting the apocalypse – the world really is messy, but fear doesn’t have to become a bunker, it can become a reason to organize. This is where social composting matters, take the accumulated waste of the last decades — #neoliberalism, authoritarianism, #techshit, platform capitalism, political tribalism, broken institutions and the endless fear machine. Don’t pretend it isn’t there, don’t worship it or spend your entire life fighting it head-on. Compost it, break it down, learn from it, keep what is useful, let the dead parts become soil to then grow something different.

The #deathcult says the future belongs to the #nastyfew who can buy their way out, the #lifecult says the future belongs to those who can build relationships strong enough to stay. The choice isn’t really between apocalypse and utopia, it is between bunkering down or building commons. The planet doesn’t need another billionaire bunker, it needs people willing to pick up shovels.

A #mainstreaming view of this

#OMN #openweb #4opens #commons #lifecult #deathcult #dotcons #socialcomposting #KISS

Why “common sense” is a cage – we don’t have to worship this mess

The problem of #dotcons is attention capture, its why #digitaldetox is a part of the #OMN toolbox. So lets look at why we need to act on the digital drug problem. The everyday digital drug fix starts with a notification, you pick up your phone because you get a notification. You unlock it, check the notification. Then maybe you look at one thing, then another, then another and suddenly an hour have disappeared.

You didn’t decide to spend the next hour staring at short videos selected by a #dotcons in the service of the #nastyfew. You didn’t sit down and make a conscious choice to enter the endless scroll, you just responded to a notification. Swipe – maybe this one is rubbish – swipe – that’s funny – swipe – boring – swipe – interesting – swipe – somebody attractive, and on it goes. This is the basic addiction of the #dotcons: turning our attention into a reaction rather than a choice. The important thing isn’t that one particular video is good or bad, the problem is loss of focus.

Every notification creates another injection, every swipe gives the algorithm a signal about what keeps you looking. The drug learns what holds you there, while you gradually lose track of why you picked up the phone in the first place. This isn’t communication in any real way, it’s an attention stealing machine and the more time we spend looking at it, the more normal the behaviour becomes. This is why #DigitalDetox project isn’t about telling people to “use their phones less”, its an AA meeting, we need to understand the drug is difficult to stop.

The phone isn’t the problem – digitaldetox is about #KISS technology to help people have more focus to participate in their communities. This mess we need to composting is social, the technology is a part, and yes the is piles of #techshit but under this surface is blinded ideology – the business model and the social architecture we think of as common sense.

The question is what infrastructure we build around those addictive behaviours, it is the problem with #mainstreaming, that it rarely looks like control from the inside the trap, it looks like common sense. People are presented with acceptable ideas, organizations, technologies and ways of working. Then, because everybody around them makings the same choices, those choices are “natural” – “This is just how things are done.”

But that “common sense” has a history. – for forty years, a mixture of #neoliberalism, #postmodernism, professionalisation and institutional culture has created a particular political and technological environment, that tells us that change should happen through recognized organizations, recognized experts, recognized funding structures and recognized channels.

Alternative paths are not forbidden, they are simply made difficult to see, and when people have spent decades inside this environment, asking them to look outside it can produce strong negative reaction. Then the problem is not simply bad people, it is tempting to describe this as a problem of individual personalities. Someone is arrogant, someone is ideological, someone is a gatekeeper, someone is “woke”, someone is a bureaucrat. But that misses the deeper problem, that people are shaped by the systems they live inside.

If your professional environment rewards certain ideas and punishes others, eventually you learn what can safely be said, learn which projects look fundable, learn which language gets accepted. You learn which organizations are considered legitimate. You also learn which people are worth listening to, its a #KISS social filter. The result is not only a conspiracy, it is something mundane and, more difficult to challenge, a culture reproducing itself. The people keep selecting things that make sense in the current #mainstreaming paths, and become evidence that the current #techshit mess is right all along.

This is one of the traps of #mainstreaming – its the grassroots problem we need to compost – grassroots projects come from somewhere completely different, they are messy, experimental and don’t always have professional language. They are built by people who see a #DIY problem and start doing something about it. That is where interesting alternatives begin, when these projects enter the mainstream funding and organizational environment, something bad happens. The project is asked to translate itself, then translate itself again to fit into a recognized category, demonstrate impact, scalability, governance, sustainability etc.

Then comes the compleat #block, it has to demonstrate that it already looks like something the funder understands, by the end, the thing being funded is very different from the thing that originally mattered. This fuck-up is not always malicious, it’s a structural problem of mainstreaming trying to make the unfamiliar familiar, and in doing so, it removes the qualities that made the grassroots project interesting in the first place. When we try and compost this #mainstreaming mess, people become defensive. When you challenge somebody’s “common sense”, you are not challenging an opinion, you may end up challenging their social position, their professional identity and their understanding of how the world works. That feels threatening, so its normal that the response is defensive.

Instead of asking “Could this alternative actually work?” the conversation becomes “Why aren’t you doing this properly?” Then comes the familiar #blocking “Use the proper channels.”“Talk to the right people.” “Get the stakeholders together.” “Build consensus.” “Follow the process.” “That’s not how things work.” And sometimes these are perfectly reasonable suggestions, but sometimes “proper process” is simply #blocking, ensuring that nothing outside the existing system can ever become legitimate.

The #OMN is built from a different starting point, it does not share any assumption that the existing institutions can solve the problems. It starts with people, communities, media and flows to build useful things the people can use, avoiding technical complexity to make participation is possible. We need these native technology’s as tech has its own version of the problem, the #geekproblem that assumes, if something is technically possible, the technical architecture should determine how people behave. This is the way power accumulates around administrators, developers, institutions and large communities, it is social. Thus, simply making something “open source” does not automatically make it socially open.

It is why #4opens matters, open data, open source, open standards and open processes are not the whole answer, but they can create space for communities to make their answers. Mediation rather than control, the answer to messy human behaviour is not more control. The #OMN is closer to a river than a filing cabinet, objects flow, people contribute to the flow, communities filter and shape the flow. Different places can create different views of the same underlying information. Some things become trusted – some things remain uncertain. Some things disappear from a particular view without pretending that they have magically ceased to exist everywhere.

This is a very different idea of network governance, its organic, its about composting the mess. The #openweb has accumulated decades of corporate platforms, closed APIs, surveillance economics, status games, technological churn, institutional habits and ideological baggage. There is a huge pile of shit, the answer is not to pretend otherwise, we compost it, take what is useful, break down what is harmful. Reuse existing tools, keep the lessons, discard the assumptions to help grow something new from what remains.

That is a more practical form of radicalism than simply traditional #fashionista left declaring that everything has to be destroyed and rebuilt from zero. It is also why #KISS matters, keep it simple, make the useful thing work. The real challenge to compost is cultural, the barrier to alternative technology is often not technology it self, it is the problem of common sense imagination. People need to imagine that things could work differently, then after this grassroots paths need space to experiment, to grow, before they are forced into the current #mainstreaming.

Funders like #NLnet need to recognize that something can be valuable before it has already become institutionally respectable. And #mainstreaming organizations need to understand that they are not the source of innovation, as to often they are the last people to notice this, that does not mean abandoning them, but it means not making them the only path.

So the question becomes, how can we convince them to build real alternatives, we can just to spend another twenty years trying to convince a closed system that it should become open. The path out of this mess is simple build something open, don’t waist to much time and focus explaining to institutions why grassroots communities deserve infrastructure. And don’t wait for “the right people” to give permission, start with the people who are already doing the work.

The important shift is from permission to participation, from ownership to commons, from control to mediation, from platforms to flows. From mainstreaming the grassroots into existing institutions to letting grassroots practice grow outward into the wider culture. The existing “common sense” can be composted, it is not inevitable, it is simply what has grown around us, to become a mess. We don’t have to worship the mess, we can pick up a shovel, turn the pile, let it breathe and grow something better from it.

Which Nature Are We Growing?

There is such a thing as reality, and humans have an intrinsically limited idea of what it actually is. All human thought and culture are created by humans. In that process, there is a strong tendency for our ideas to become religion, things we believe to be true rather than things we keep testing.

The West developed a useful hack to try to escape this trap. Religions are built around truth. Science is built around doubt. Make an observation. Test it. Try to prove yourself wrong. Keep the results. Let someone else test them. This simple hack has worked VERY well – for good and for evil. Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. That’s the next problem.

Morality.

Institution create the behaviour they claim merely to measure – Economics → institutions → behaviour → the #deathcult

One of the meany problems with modern capitalism is not simply that some corporations are greedy. It is that we have built institutions around the assumption that people are greedy, and then wondered why they behave that way.

Since the 1970s, #neoclassical economics became dominant in business schools and corporate thinking. An older social democratic idea of the manager as a professional with responsibilities to workers, customers, communities and society was displaced by a #geekproblem model of management built around financial incentives, shareholder value and measurable returns.

This became part of what is commonly called #neoliberalism. At the #OMN we polemically and, we argue, factually call the resulting social system the #deathcult: a system that places financial accumulation, competition and individual economic interest above the social relationships and ecological systems that actually make society, and life possible.

The darkness at the centre of this system is the idea of #Homoeconomicus – the simplified economic human who is assumed to rationally pursue personal advantage and maximise material rewards. Applied to the corporation, the logic becomes straightforward, managers cannot be trusted to act in the interests of shareholders because they have interests of their own, so we need incentives.

Give managers shares and stock options. Tie their bonuses to share prices. Measure everything. Monitor everything. Make individual financial reward correspond with corporate financial performance. This became part of the intellectual foundation for shareholder value.

The corporation increasingly stopped being understood as a social institution with multiple responsibilities and became something closer to a machine for maximising financial returns. Workers become costs, communities externalities, nature becomes a resource, customers markets. Managers become agents, shareholders become the priority. And success becomes a number.

The problem is that people aren’t actually like this – the fascinating thing is that the economic model is a very dangerous description of how humans actually behave. Research from behavioural economics and even game theory has repeatedly demonstrated that people are motivated by much more than financial self-interest.

People care about: honesty, fairness, trust, reciprocity, reputation, pride in their work, belonging and professional responsibility. People will often sacrifice financial rewards in order to behave in ways they consider right, cooperate when they trust each other, reward cooperation and punish behaviour they believe is unfair – sometimes even when doing so costs them something.

This matters enormously for how we organise institutions – if people are capable of cooperation, trust and reciprocity, then building institutions on the assumption that everybody is fundamentally selfish can actually make society more selfish, a institutional feedback loop

This is the real problem, a narrow and blinded theory about human behaviour becomes institutional reality. We start by saying: People are selfish, so we design institutions around that assumption. We create bonuses, stock options, surveillance, competition.

Then people learn that these are the behaviours that matter, cooperation becomes secondary, professional pride becomes secondary, community responsibility becomes secondary. Trust becomes something that needs to be managed rather than something that can be built.

People adapt to the system, and then we look at the resulting behaviour and say: “See? People really are selfish.” it is the trap we have all walked into. Assume people are selfish → build institutions around selfishness → reward selfish behaviour → weaken trust and professional norms → observe selfish behaviour → conclude that the original assumption was correct.

The institution has created the behaviour it claims merely to measure, is the #mainstreaming problem. Once a particular model becomes normal, it stops looking like ideology, it becomes common sense. Eventually, people forget that things could have been organised differently.

This is one of the most powerful things institutions do: they turn particular assumptions about human beings into apparently neutral systems. The system then reinforces those assumptions is how ideology becomes infrastructure.

This argument is more subtle, and more important. A narrow economic model has had enormous influence over how corporations understand management, incentives and organisational success. It helped legitimise corporate culture with its head bowed down worshipping a #deathcult.

And once that becomes the default, even people who personally reject the model have to bow there heads or be banished. To let the light into this mess, the path itself has to change, from extraction to participation. This connects directly to the #OMN projects.

We need to stop designing social systems around the assumption that people are isolated individuals competing for maximum personal advantage. Humans are social, we build relationships, we cooperate, create communities, develop shared norms. We care about reputation, we care about doing a good job, care about whether other people treat us fairly.

This is also why the #OMN puts so much emphasis on trust, participation, commons and the #4opens. As the alternative to the #deathcult isn’t simply a nicer version of the same system, it is a different understanding of what people are. Instead of designing systems to control selfish individuals, we need to #KISS design systems that enable cooperation between social beings.

Instead of endless surveillance, build trust, of individual competition, build participation.
Instead of extracting value from communities, build commons, recognise them as contributors.
Instead of measuring everything through financial value, recognise social and ecological value.

The path isn’t simply “How do we make selfish people behave better?” the bigger question is “Why are we building institutions that require people to behave selfishly in the first place?” That is the question we need to ask of corporations, business schools, governments, NGOs and our own activist institutions. Because when a system repeatedly produces the behaviour it claims is simply human nature, perhaps the problem isn’t human nature, perhaps the problem is the system.

Our institutions are not neutral observers; they actively shape human nature. The path away from this mess is simple and native to the #openweb, compost the #deathcult, build the commons.

The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from this mess

#OMN #4opens #openweb #commons #neoliberalism #neoclassicaleconomics #HomoEconomicus #mainstreaming #capitalism #community #trust #participation

Public conversation about public problems

Our current working models of “governance” in #opensource are mostly:

Monarchy – the dictator for life.
Aristocracy – the devs.
Oligarchy – NGOs/funders.
And way out on the edge: Democracy – the users.

We need better governance native to the #openweb. Let’s look at this at a more personal level before the normal wider social view. Yes, in #FOSS development the devs doing the work deserve respect, and #OMN isn’t arguing that users should simply demand things from volunteers.

The point about “aristocracy” is about more where decision-making power sits, less whether devs are privileged people or whether their work has value. If the people who write and maintain the code also decide what the project is, what gets built, what gets rejected and how the project develops, then you have a governance structure where technical expertise becomes political authority.

Hope am clear, that isn’t a criticism of individual developers, it’s a structural observation. The #OMN approach is to separate doing the work from owning the direction. Developers are essential participants, but so are users, moderators, communities and other contributors. Different kinds of knowledge need different kinds of power.

The challenge is building governance where devs don’t get bossed around by users, users don’t get bossed around by devs, funders don’t get to buy the direction, and nobody gets to become the permanent ruler.

That’s what the #OGB work is trying to explore: governance native to the #openweb, based on trust, transparency, participation and voluntary cooperation. This alternative isn’t “users rule”, it’s shared power with different roles.

With this in mind lets talk about the wider issue, a reminder: when I talk about the internet and society, I am not necessarily talking about you, I am talking about groups, cultures, classes, institutions and patterns of behaviour that you might be part of. You can recognise yourself in a critique without the critique being a personal attack – Simple – Take the useful bit and move on.

What is interesting – and a pretty good example of #stupidindividualism – is how difficult this has become. We increasingly seem to believe that we are not allowed to talk about groups any more. Everything has to be reduced to the individual “Are you saying I’m stupid?” “Are you attacking me?”
“Who exactly are you talking about?” This makes it difficult to discuss social patterns, and that matters because many of the problems we face are not individual problems. They are produced by relationships between people, institutions, technologies and economic systems.

If we cannot talk about groups, we cannot talk properly about the #geekproblem, #mainstreaming, the #dotcons, #NGOs and funders, tech communities, activist cultures, class interests, institutional power, #neoliberalism or the wider #deathcult culture. We end up privatising a public conversation.

This is one of the things that makes #dotcons-style social media so destructive, as everything becomes personalised, emotional and reactive when structural criticism gets turned into interpersonal conflict. But a feeling is not a fact, a feeling attacked does not necessarily mean someone is attacking you. Sometimes it means that something has made you uncomfortable, or challenged a worldview you have become accustomed to.

That discomfort can actually be useful as the point isn’t to find individuals to blame, the point is to understand the systems and cultures we are collectively caught inside. We need to get beyond the #neoliberal #TINA – There Is No Alternative – thinking that reduces everything to individual choice and responsibility. We need to be able to say – This is a group pattern, a cultural pattern, a class interest, an institutional problem. It’s about how power reproduces itself, then we can actually talk about what to do about it. That is the conversation we need to reclaim: public, collective and capable of naming the structures that shape our lives.

Remember none of this is about personal attacks, not tribal prat fights, not individualised outrage. It’s a public conversation about public problems.

#stupidindividualism #mainstreaming #openweb #4opens #OMN #deathcult

Media, the deathcult and climatechaos

The current wave of wildfires across Europe is not simply a natural disaster, it is also exposing a deeper mess, the failure of our information systems. Instead of explaining why Europe is burning, significant sections of the corporate media are either ignoring #climatechaos or distracting by blaming rewilding, net-zero policies and environmental protections. Rather than confronting the #KISS scientific evidence that fossil fuel combustion is driving global heating, they redirect public anger towards the policies intended to mediate the damage.

This isn’t simply corrupt journalism, it’s a theological and political choice. The reality inversion – when forests burn, rivers dry, crops fail and people die from extreme heat, the obvious question should be – What is causing this? The scientific answer is clear, human emissions of greenhouse gases – from burning coal, oil and gas – will increase the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, droughts and wildfire conditions. This is one of the strongest areas of scientific consensus in modern research.

Yet much of the corporate press is #blocking this connection. A look through thousands of UK newspaper articles covering the June 2026 heatwave found that around three-quarters never mentioned #climatechange at all. Yes, the public was shown the symptoms while the cause was quietly edited out. This matters because information shapes action, if people don’t understand why disasters are happening, they cannot understand what needs to change.

This is manufacturing confusion – the right-wing press push reality inversion. Europe burns, the blame shifts to rewilding, the mess – heatwaves become evidence that environmental policy has gone too far, wildfires become an argument against restoring ecosystems, net-zero becomes the problem rather than one of the responses. The effect is to move negative attention away from fossil fuels and towards environmental movements. When the cause of a crisis threatens #nastyfew interests, our “journalists” redefine the problem until those interests disappear from the story. The debate becomes about forestry management, or environmental activists. Or planning regulations, migrants, or bureaucracy. Almost anything except the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

In the #OMN vocabulary this is the logic of the #deathcult – A system organised around endless growth cannot admit that endless growth is destroying the conditions that make civilisation possible. With the shift to the hard right – every crisis becomes someone else’s fault – every solution becomes economically impossible – every warning becomes political exaggeration – every disaster becomes “unexpected.” The current path survives by refusing to recognise the consequences of their own actions.

This is why “common sense” has become part of the problem. After forty years of #neoliberalism, what many people call common sense is the common sense of the market. Growth is always good, markets always know best, corporations are inevitable, consumption equals freedom and thus environmental limits are optional. But, this isn’t common sense, it’s forty years of shaping people to see the world through the eyes of only capital.

So why do we still let fossil fuel companies still shape public policy decades after the science became overwhelming? The language changes, the power structures remain. This is #mainstreaming, the appearance of addressing the problem while carefully avoiding the changes needed to solve it. The #mainstreaming problem isn’t confined to openly conservative newspapers. Much liberal media performs a softer version of the same function. Climate change is acknowledged, the latest disaster is reported, scientists are quoted. Then coverage moves on, the structural questions are rarely asked – Who profits? Who owns the media? Who funds political influence?

The #OMN perspective is that this isn’t only a journalism problem, it’s an infrastructure problem. When a handful of corporations control the majority of communication, they also shape which stories become visible, which connections are made and which questions remain invisible. Feed this narrow mess through the #dotcons that amplify engagement rather than understanding, we get stinking mess. It is easy to understand that corporate newspapers depend upon commercial interests controlled by the #nastyfew and political institutions still focus communicate through the same commercial traditional media and #dotcons platforms, the result an information ecosystem optimised for attention and control rather than any truth.

The path we need for survival – the coming decades of #climatechaos will test every institution we have – communication systems, food systems, energy systems, governance and public trust. If our media continues to hide causes while amplifying distractions, societies will become less capable of responding when they need clear information the most. A community that cannot accurately describe its own reality cannot organise to change it to move beyond the #deathcult. The uncomfortable truth is that there is no path through the coming century while remaining politically loyal to the assumptions that created the crisis. The #deathcult has reached its limits.

The question is no longer whether that model is sustainable, it isn’t. The question is what replaces it. The #OMN answer begins with rebuilding the commons, open media, open governance, open standards, open knowledge. Communities capable of telling their own stories and acting on shared reality rather than manufactured distraction. Because if we cannot agree on what is happening, we cannot respond together.

And if we continue allowing corporate media to define reality for us, they will continue pushing the systems that are driving us deeper into #climatechaos. The future depends not only on changing our energy systems, it depends on changing the information systems that tell us what is real.

For 45 years we’ve been told that “economic efficiency” means making the rich richer and the poor poorer. By that narrow measure, the system has been a huge success. The problem is we’ve sacrificed everything else. Environmental responsibility? Ignored. Social sustainability? Undermined. Community? Hollowed out.

The result is #climatechaos, collapsing social trust, and an economy designed to extract rather than nurture. We urgently need to rebalance our priorities. The economy should serve society and the living world – not the other way around.

That work cannot wait.

The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess

The #Deathcult is a historical metaphor

We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they’re sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn’t simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it’s understanding how they find their way back out again.

History suggests something important – entering crisis is often easier than leaving it – it’s a downhill path. For long periods, societies can appear stable. Institutions function, people get on with their lives, and conflict remains manageable, yet beneath the surface something changes.

Power concentrates.
Wealth accumulates upward.
Institutions begin serving themselves rather than the commons
Public trust erodes.

By the time these trends become obvious, society has already gathered momentum, think of it like a huge ball rolling down a steep valley, once it begins rolling, it becomes incredibly difficult to stop. This is where much of today’s #climatechaos, democratic decline and digital enclosure fit. They are symptoms of long-running structural shifts rather than isolated failures.

To understand this recurring mess, it’s useful to think about this is as a wealth pump. Healthy societies circulate resources, were unhealthy societies increasingly extract resources from ordinary people while concentrating wealth and decision-making power into ever smaller circles. Eventually this creates reinforcing problems – the growing insecurity for everyone else, competition between increasingly numerous elitists leads to weakening of public institutions, eventually the system becomes unstable. This describes much of the last forty years of #neoliberalism just as well as many earlier historical periods.

In #OMN language, this is one way of describing the growth of the #deathcult. Technology follows politics, so the same process appears online. The early #openweb distributed power, the #dotcons recentralised it. Open participation became algorithmic engagement, communities became audiences, citizens became products. This wasn’t a simple a technical change, it’s the same mess of concentration of power occurring throughout the wider society. Technology amplified existing political and economic trends, crisis created the possibility.

The encouraging part of history is that outcomes are not predetermined, although the path into crisis is narrow, the path out is surprisingly open. Once institutions begin failing, many futures become possible. Some societies descend into violence, some replace one ruling group with another while changing very little. A few manage genuine reform, the difference comes from organised social movements that are able not merely to seize attention, but to rebuild institutions capable of creating trust again. This matters as moments of instability are also moments when relatively small interventions can have disproportionately large effects.

This is where #OMN fits, the Open Media Network is not a project to seize power. It is a project to rebuild commons infrastructure. Instead of reinforcing extraction, it strengthens trust. Instead of creating new gatekeepers, it distributes responsibility. Instead of proprietary platforms, it builds open processes. Instead of replacing one monopoly with another, it supports federation and shared ownership.

This is why the #4opens matter, not as ideological slogans, they’re much more useful as practical safeguards against rebuilding the same systems that created today’s crisis. Trying to engineer perfect systems produces new failures, complex societies never become tidy, so the useful goal is not perfection. Rather to create institutions capable of learning, adapting and redistributing power before crises become catastrophic. This is why #OMN emphasises mediation over control, commons over ownership, participation over spectatorship to push trust over extraction.

Building the next commons matters – if we accept that we’re living through a period of structural instability, then waiting for institutions to solve it is unlikely to succeed, the work we need belongs to communities.

Building archives.

Building media.

Building governance.

Building trust.

We can play a part in this by building technologies that reinforce this path rather than undermine it as history suggests that societies emerge from crises when they reverse the flows of concentrated power to begin rebuilding the commons, that’s the path #OMN is on.

All startups are expressions of the #deathcult, every #VC is, in effect, a bishop preaching endless growth, extraction and enclosure. This isn’t innovation. It’s a business model accelerating social breakdown, deepening inequality, and feeding the #climatechaos that will displace billions and cost millions of lives over the coming century. If you’re serious about activism, stop feeding the machine. Put your energy into building the #openweb commons instead.

The whole value system behind startups and #VC is the problem, not the solution. The #KISS truth is simple: endless growth, extraction and enclosure cannot solve the crises they create. They are accelerating today’s breakdown and shaping tomorrow’s catastrophes. We don’t need more investment in the #deathcult. We need investment in the digital commons, the #openweb, and the #4opens.

#OMN #4opens #OpenWeb #Fediverse #Commons #DigitalCommons #Governance #MakingHistory #ClimateChaos #TechForGood #Oxfordboaters

This was my thinking on the Fediverse a few years ago – building commons

The #Fediverse is an accidental reboot of the #openweb, it wasn’t designed from the top down, it emerged because thousands of people built alternatives to the #dotcons. That’s its greatest strength, it’s also why it’s so messy.

Herding cats – the #Fediverse has no central authority, every project, server, and community has its own priorities, culture, and governance. It’s often like herding cats. This can be frustrating, but it’s also what makes the network resilient. There is no single point of failure, no CEO to sell it, and no corporation that can simply shut it down. The challenge this leave us with is not eliminating the mess, but learning how to live with it productively.

The invisible problem that keeps blocking this path is in part the limits of “common sense”, what the #geekproblem refuses to see is that the difficulty isn’t primarily technical. For over forty years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what people experience as “common sense.” Competition replaces cooperation. Individualism replaces commons. Endless critique replaces collective construction. People absorb these assumptions without realising it, then push them over real alt paths.

When alternative ways of organising are introduced, many people instinctively react with hostility or retreat. Push too hard, and they disappear back into familiar habits, like snails retreating into their shells. This isn’t usually bad faith, it’s learned behaviour.

We have a project to mediate this mess, native governance without hierarchy. This is where the Open Governance Body (#OGB) comes in. The goal isn’t to control the #Fediverse or impose bureaucracy, the goal is to create lightweight, transparent ways for communities to coordinate, resolve conflict, share responsibility, and make decisions together.

Governance should emerge from the grassroots, not be imposed from above. That’s why #OGB builds on the principles of the #4opens:

Open Data
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Process

The last of these – Open Process – is the missing piece. Technical openness alone isn’t enough. Communities also need visible, participatory ways of building trust. What matters is creating processes that turn #mainstreaming failures into shared learning instead of endless conflict.

The future of the #openweb won’t be built by perfect software, it’s built by imperfect people who learn how to cooperate despite their differences. That’s the real work of #OMN and #OGB: not replacing the mess, but giving it enough structure to grow into a healthy commons.

#Fediverse #4opens #KISS #DIY #openweb

Our failure to mediate the mess

The current #AI boom is built on a huge contradiction, you can see this in #mainstreaming terms. That AI companies are not paying the real costs of what they consume. They haven’t paid for the copyrighted material they trained on. They haven’t paid the environmental costs of the water and electricity they use. They haven’t paid for the pressure they place on public infrastructure, or for the social costs of flooding the web with synthetic content.

Yet AI services are sold below their true cost, subsidised by investors gambling on future monopolies. This should sound familiar as we saw the same pattern with social media, with the gig economy, with cryptocurrency. First comes the hype, then investor money, then comes market capture, only later do the public pay the real costs.

The problem is like every time before is not the technology itself, it is that we’re allowing it to develop within the logic of the #deathcult, where growth matters more than social value, extraction matters more than care, and monopoly matters more than the commons. Simply shouting “ban AI” won’t solve this, nor will pretending everything is fine. We need to actively and democratically mediate this technology socially, which means asking (and acting on) questions the tech industry never asks.

This is where the #OMN approach matters, technology doesn’t exist outside society as every technical system embeds social values, whether intentionally or not. If we leave the current mess AI is making entirely to venture capital, Big Tech and the market, we shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the same inequalities and failures of those systems.

This mess is a part of our long-standing #geekproblem, that technical culture mistakes technical possibility for social progress. Yes, sometimes it is not driven by malice, more often it’s a feedback loop of arrogance and ignorance, where clever engineering is assumed to be enough, while questions of governance, trust and community are treated as secondary, or more likely ignored altogether. The result is endless #techchurn: one wave of disruption after another, each promising liberation while quietly or noisily reproducing the same concentrations of power.

We don’t need to knee-jerk reject technology, we need to compost the culture that keeps producing these #techshit outcomes. The #4opens offer one practical path, this needed path is not anti-tech, but it is pro-society. On the path we need to take, the challenge isn’t stopping progress, it is widening the culture that guides creativity, so technology can better serves people and the planet rather than the current narrow blinded interests of capital, feeding the #nastyfew.

That’s the work of the #openweb, and the path of #OMN.

Techno feudalism what changes

What part can you play? The #openweb is one place to start, keep it simple (#KISS), build commons, compost the mess. The political centre created this mess. Four decades of neoliberal “common sense” deepened inequality, weakened democracy, privatised public goods, and pushed us beyond ecological limits. Yet much of the centre still offers only more of the same: better management of the #deathcult rather than a path beyond it.

That leaves a dangerous vacuum. If progressive movements cannot offer practical alternatives, the far right will continue to grow by presenting itself as the only force willing to confront the crisis. Their answers are built on fear, exclusion and authoritarianism – but they resonate because they acknowledge that the old system is failing, while the centre too often pretends it can be repaired.

Simply defending the status quo is not enough. Nor is retreating into abstract radicalism disconnected from everyday life. We need practical, grassroots alternatives that people can participate in and build themselves.

This same pattern appears in technology. Our #geekproblem isn’t primarily bad code – it’s a culture of arrogance and ignorance. Technical communities often reproduce the assumptions of the wider society without questioning them. They celebrate disruption while recreating centralisation. They mistake individual freedom for collective liberation, reproducing #stupidindividualism while unconsciously serving the logic of the #deathcult.

This isn’t usually malicious. It’s a feedback loop. The culture produces the technology, and the technology reinforces the culture. The answer isn’t to reject technology. It’s to mediate it socially.

The #4opens offer a simple path:

Open Data keeps knowledge in the commons.
Open Source keeps tools accountable.
Open Standards prevent enclosure.
Open Process ensures communities – not just developers or investors – shape the progress.

We need to use this to composting 40 Years of “Common Sense”, For the last 40 years, #neoliberalism and #postmodernism have shaped what passes for “common sense” in #mainstreaming society. Their influence runs so deep that many assumptions now feel natural rather than ideological. When these assumptions are challenged, people react defensively, not because they’re bad people, but because their worldview feels under attack.

This isn’t just a mainstream problem. Activist spaces reproduce the same patterns. The result is endless circular arguments, performative politics, and fragmentation rather than solidarity. Our task isn’t simply to oppose this culture, it’s to mediate it, to compost the mess rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Composting means taking the waste of the last forty years – failed assumptions, captured institutions, #techchurn, #fashionista politics, and individualism – and turning it into fertile ground for something better.

The worrying trend is that the grassroots signal is being submerged beneath an echo chamber of #mainstreaming voices. On many #fashionista threads, noise overwhelms practical action. We spend time performing politics rather than building the infrastructure movements need. That requires empathy, patience, and practical organising. It means creating spaces where people can step outside inherited “common sense” without feeling they have to defend it. It means building working alternatives instead of only criticising broken systems.

The answer isn’t to shout louder, it’s to build better spaces, better tools, and better processes. The signal-to-noise ratio can change again, but only if we do the patient work of mediation, trust-building and commons creation – The work of #OMN.