There is a temptation to see today’s hard right move as something new. Looking at this mess, the #deathcult is the name I use for the destructive logic of #neoliberal capitalism: a world where profit, growth and competition are the dominant measures of value, while human needs, shared resources and collective responsibility are pushed aside.
If we want to understand the political crisis, we need to dig beneath its surface of how social crisis becomes authoritarian politics. The hard right doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, it draws power from the insecurity, anger and social fragmentation that this system helps produce. History offers some uncomfortable lessons.
Mussolini came from the socialist movement before breaking with the left over the First World War and moving towards nationalism, political violence and authoritarianism. Early fascism combined different political currents before developing into a more defined authoritarian project. In Germany, the Nazis used the myth that internal enemies had betrayed the nation to explain defeat and social crisis. Antisemitic conspiracy theories became central to their account of national decline.
The pattern matters more than any simple comparison between past and present. A society experiences economic insecurity, political failure and declining trust. People feel betrayed, existing institutions appear unable to respond. There are often genuine grievances underneath this anger, the dangerous move comes when structural problems are turned into stories about enemies.
Economic insecurity becomes the fault of immigrants. Political failure becomes the fault of an imagined conspiracy. Cultural change becomes evidence of national decline. Complex social problems are reduced to a few people or groups who can be blamed. The system disappears from view, and the scapegoat takes its place. This is politically powerful because it gives people a clear target without requiring anyone to challenge the structures producing the crisis.
The promise to make the nation great again, authoritarian nationalism often offers a story of lost greatness and promised renewal. Mussolini drew on an idealised image of the Roman past. Nazi ideology constructed a racialised national community around ideas of ethnic purity and exclusion.
National identity itself is not the problem. People need belonging, shared history and meaningful relationships with the places where they live. The danger comes when belonging becomes exclusion. “We live here together” becomes “this is ours, and those people do not belong.” A collective need for security is turned into a demand to identify outsiders. The promise of renewal becomes permission to deny others their place in society.
This is one way the #deathcult and the hard right can reinforce each other. A society organised around competition and insecurity leaves people looking for explanations. Authoritarian nationalism offers belonging and certainty without requiring a fundamental change to the economic structures producing the insecurity. The blame moves around, the underlying system remains.
The important point is the process of #mainstreaming. In social democracy, a fringe idea becomes a campaign demand, it enters a manifesto, other parties adopt parts of it. Newspapers discuss it as common sense, eventually, the boundaries of acceptable political debate have moved. The mess is not only the most extreme position, it is the gradual normalisation of the assumptions underneath it: that particular groups are the cause of national decline, that exclusion will restore social stability, or that some people’s rights can be treated as expendable.
This is how political culture changes before a decisive break with democratic institutions ever occurs. There is an important difference between the political environment of the twentieth century and our own, as the #dotcons algorithmic control industrialize the problem. The old hard right relied on newspapers, meetings, party organisations and physical networks. Today, political messages also travel through algorithmic platforms capable of distributing them at enormous speed.
The #dotcons turn grievance into a feedback loop: anger → attention → engagement → more anger. A complicated social problem becomes a short video with a villain. A conspiracys travel faster than a careful explanation. Outrage becomes a product, and the systems distributing it have incentives to keep feeding people these digital drugs to keep people engaged.
The #dotcons commercial incentives of attention-driven systems amplify conflict, reward emotional reaction and make it harder to sustain a shared understanding of reality. That is part of the #techshit problem, were, technical systems built around commercial incentives reproduce and intensify social problems while presenting themselves as neutral tools.
The #deathcult encourages #stupidindividualism the idea that everyone is responsible for their own survival, that social problems are individual failures, and that collective solutions are either impossible or unnecessary.
History shows how political fragmentation pushes authoritarian movements. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, conflict between the left’s major parties, violence and the selling out/weakening of parliamentary government contributed to the conditions in which the Nazis gained power.
Polarization makes collective action harder when it turns differences into an existential conflicts, when movements spend all their energy fighting internally, they stop building. When every disagreement becomes betrayal, cooperation becomes impossible.
When people lose the ability to work together across differences, someone can arrive promising to settle everything through force and authority. This leaves people isolated precisely when they need one another. When the emergency becomes permanent, we cannot build an alternative society if we destroy every space in which we might cooperate.
Another historical warning concerns the politics of exception. Authoritarian movements argue that ordinary democratic processes are too weak to handle a crisis, extraordinary circumstances supposedly require extraordinary authority. An emergency like on rushing #climatechaos does not automatically produce authoritarianism, societies sometimes genuinely need exceptional measures to respond to immediate dangers.
The #deathcult thrives on the claim that there is no alternative. The hard right turns that same sense of inevitability into a demand for control. If people are persuaded that the only choices are fear or authoritarian order, the space for alternatives becomes smaller. This leads to the next stage of the #deathcult – when human beings become economically useless.
Beneath these political mechanisms sits a deeper problem, the idea that human worth depends on blinded economic usefulness. As people are encouraged to see themselves as individual economic units, competing for a place in a system that treats profit, growth and capital accumulation as its highest values. Work harder. Consume more. Compete better. Become more productive. Apologise for needing anything.
What happens when you become ill, disabled, unemployed, old, poor or simply unwilling to spend your life enriching someone else? If your value depends on your productivity, it becomes easy to treat your needs as a burden and your existence as something that must be justified. This is one of the cruellest tricks of #stupidindividualism: a structural problem becomes a personal shame.
People begin asking whether they deserve a decent life, rather than asking why the conditions for a decent life are being made conditional in the first place. At the same time, the concentration of wealth creates opportunities for a small number of #nastyfew actors to influence politics, media, infrastructure and public debate. The danger of systems that weaken accountability and treat the suffering of some people as an acceptable cost of doing business.
Homelessness, preventable illness, poverty, displacement and environmental destruction do not all arise in the same way. They do, however, show how human needs can be subordinated to other priorities. A system can destroy lives without ever officially deciding to kill anyone. The question is not only whether a class of people might directly target those they consider economically useless. It is why we tolerate arrangements that make some lives more expendable than others.
And why do we internalize that judgement, apologizing for our existence instead of challenging the system making us feel ashamed? The problem is social, not individual, as there is no individual solution to a fundamentally collective problem.
We cannot buy our way out of a crisis produced by the concentration of wealth and power. We cannot solve social isolation through endless individual self-improvement. We cannot rebuild shared reality by retreating further into personalised feeds and private bubbles. Nor can we expect a change of politicians, a new app or another set of slogans to solve the deeper problem on its own.
We need to rebuild the social capacity to act together, that means practical communities, independent media, shared resources, public accountability and spaces where people can disagree without destroying their ability to cooperate. It means creating alternatives before a crisis forces us to act, rather than waiting for existing institutions to fail completely.
This is where the #openweb becomes important, the #OMN: news, archiving and governance. The path is news → archiving → governance. Before we can govern together, we need ways to remember together. Before we can remember together, we need trustworthy public media. And before that works, we need communities capable of disagreeing without destroying themselves.
The #OMN works towards federated media flows in which people and communities can publish, subscribe, moderate, archive and share information without handing ownership of the entire media environment to a central platform. The #4opens – open data, open source, open standards and open process – provide practical principles for examining whether this infrastructure is genuinely open and accountable.
The aim is not to pretend that technology alone will save us, it is to build tools that support collective participation rather than passive consumption, and shared resources rather than platform ownership. The same principle lies behind #OGB, the Openweb Governance Body: exploring how autonomous communities coordinate, negotiate and govern their relationships without surrendering everything to a central authority.
These projects are small parts of a much larger social challenge. But they offer a practical direction beyond simply complaining about the existing system. This is social composting: learning from the mess
We need to compost history, that does not mean romanticizing the past or pretending that every earlier movement got things right. It means treating history as material we can work with. Keep what helps us understand, expose what failed, learn from the damage. Do not repeat the structures that produced it.
The hard right thrives when people believe that the only choices are fear or control. The #deathcult thrives when people believe that there is no alternative to competition, extraction and permanent insecurity. Our task is to make other possibilities practical.
Trust instead of fear, commons instead of concentrated ownership, participation instead of spectatorship, cooperation instead of permanent culture war. Not another shiny political platform, and not another round of #techchurn. We need social infrastructure through which people can build together, maintain shared memory, challenge concentrated power and create alternatives rooted in everyday life.
The future is not predetermined, the worst outcomes are not inevitable. But ignoring the mechanisms that produce them will not make them disappear. The hard right becomes dangerous while its assumptions are becoming normal. The #deathcult becomes harder to challenge when we mistake its values for common sense.
We need to dig at the roots, not just cut back the visible growth. Pick up the shovels to start growing the commons. That’s the #OMN path.
