Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford

There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence – high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education – leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold.

This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the institutional structures around them reward conformity and reputation management far more than genuine curiosity.

Over the last two years I’ve been spending time in and around the university culture in Oxford, participating in discussions, events, and academic life. The experience has been instructive, if in the end frustrating. You would expect a place associated with University of Oxford to be a centre of open intellectual challenge. In practice, it feels like something else: a system that filters, polishes, and reproduces existing assumptions.

This is not universal, some of the hard scientific disciplines still cultivate a form of disciplined skepticism, experiments fail, evidence contradicts theory, so you are expected to question results. The process encourages a narrow but very real culture of doubt, but outside those narrow areas, skepticism to often fades.

Instead, you find intellectual fashion cycles building reputational alliances that push institutional caution based on #blinded ideological signalling. The result can be a strange mix of high intelligence and low #blocking curiosity. People who are good at working inside established frameworks, but much less comfortable questioning the foundations of privilege those frameworks rest on.

This matters for the #openweb and projects like #OMN. I got nowhere here as many of the institutions that might have supported open digital infrastructure – universities, NGOs, research centres – have shifted toward the same #deathcult #mainstreaming #blocking that dominates the wider tech world. Funding cycles shape research priorities, institutional partnerships shape acceptable ideas and career incentives shape what can safely be questioned.

So even where intelligence and resources exist, the culture of disciplined curiosity that drives the needed real innovation is thin if it exists at all. The irony is that the early internet grew out of exactly the same institutions, but with opposite culture. The original World Wide Web ecosystem, the hacker and #FOSS communities, and early grassroots media projects like #indymedia were built by people who combined technical curiosity with deep skepticism about centralised control.

They didn’t wait for institutional approval, they experimented, built #DIY tools that broke things and rebuilt them. That spirit is what projects like #OMN are trying to revive. The goal is not to outcompete corporate #dotcons platforms or impress #NGO academic institutions. The goal is simpler: to build open media infrastructure that communities can use based on small nodes, trust networks and open metadata flows. Simple tools that allow people to publish, share, and connect.

This is a working #KISS approach to rebuilding grassroots media. If the last twenty years of the web have taught us anything, it’s that intelligence alone doesn’t produce healthy systems. You can have brilliant engineers building platforms that clearly undermine democratic communication, it’s the mess that shapes the current #dotcons world.

What makes the difference is curiosity combined with skepticism, the willingness to question the structures that shape our digital lives. Without that, even the smartest institutions drift into the same patterns of credulity and conformity, which is why rebuilding the #openweb is not just a technical project, it’s a cultural one.

For some reflections from the last couple of years around Oxford life and technology culture, see: https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/oxford/

#Oxford #academic #elitist

Why does it feel like so many people have become intolerant prats? A blunt observation: it increasingly feels like many people today are intolerant prats. And worse, this behaviour has started to feel normal. You see it everywhere. Online discussions collapse quickly into hostility. Small disagreements become unthinking moral #blocking were people retreat into camps where any challenge is treated as an attack.

This isn’t just a social media problem, though the #dotcons have certainly amplified it, it’s a deeper cultural shift. For decades the dominant systems shaping our culture have encouraged competition, individualism, and personal branding. The result is what I often call #stupidindividualism – a worldview where the individual ego becomes the centre of everything. In that environment, disagreement stops being part of learning and becomes a threat to identity, so people react defensively, aggressively or dismissively. What used to be debate becomes performance.

The platform problem is when the #dotcons platforms are designed to amplify this behaviour where algorithms reward outrage, tribal loyalty and moral signalling to push conflict to drive engagement. They do not reward patience, nuance, or curiosity, in other words, they are structurally optimised to turn ordinary people into worse versions of themselves. Over time this becomes cultural habit, people start to assume that hostility is normal conversation.

Another factor is the slow collapse of collective spaces. When communities interact face-to-face, or in smaller trust networks, people have to deal with each other as human beings. Relationships create friction but also accountability. In large anonymous digital environments, those social checks weaken. People become avatars and opinions rather than neighbours, this makes it much easier, “natural” to treat each other badly.

Why this matters for the #openweb. If we are trying to rebuild grassroots media and communication infrastructure, we need to recognise that these cultural habits have already spread into many communities, including the tech and activist spaces that should be alternatives. This is one reason projects fragment so easily as small disagreements spiral, people assume bad faith and thus trust collapses.

You end up with endless internal conflict instead of collective building. This isn’t just a personality problem, it’s the legacy of systems that reward attention and conflict rather than cooperation.

A different path can be grown in projects like #OMN which is partly about rebuilding infrastructure, but they are also about rebuilding culture. The idea is simple: smaller networks, trust-based publishing, open metadata flows and simple tools people can run themselves. A #KISS approach to communication infrastructure.

But technology alone doesn’t solve the deeper issue, what actually makes communities work is something much older and simpler: tolerance and curiosity. The ability to disagree without instantly turning disagreement into war. The ability to assume that the other person might have something worth hearing. Without those habits, no infrastructure – open or closed – will function well for long.

Composting the mess – the current online culture is a mess. A lot of the behaviour we see today is the product of twenty years of #dotcons platform design. But mess is also compost, it shows us clearly what doesn’t work. The next generation of the #openweb has an opportunity to build systems that encourage something better: slower conversation, local trust networks, collective responsibility, shared media infrastructure. Less shouting, more listening.

It won’t magically make people perfect. Some people will still be intolerant prats. But at least we won’t be running the entire communication system of society on platforms designed to encourage it.

#KISS

This Oxford mess is a shadow of a larger mess. We were told the story of Prometheus: fire stolen from the gods and given to humans – our first real piece of technology. The myth asks a simple question: what do we do with power once we have it?

In democratic society why do we put up gig work and side hustles, endless surveillance platforms pushing algorithmic attention traps, housing crises and climate collapse all pushed by a handful of billionaires controlling huge parts of the economy. Why do we put up with What with the mess of technocratic oligarchy – a system where technological infrastructure concentrates power instead of distributing it?

The #mainstreaming mythology of the tech founder helped this happen. The “visionary genius” narrative around people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk turned corporate executives into cultural heroes. This mess is simply #KISS oligarchy with better marketing.

Even ancient thinkers warned about this. Plato and Aristotle described how societies cycle through forms of power, and how rule by the wealthy tends to serve the wealthy above everyone else. The irony is that many of today’s tech elitists think of themselves as the new aristocracy – the “smartest people in the room” guiding humanity forward.

Yet the future they’ve built is #techshit platform #feudalism with people monitored constantly, economic life mediated by a few #dotcons platforms. Infrastructure owned by private empires and democratic institutions bought out then sidelined.

The tragedy isn’t that technology failed, it is more that we let our technological imagination be captured by oligarchs. Prometheus gave humanity fire so we could build civilization together, not so a tiny #nastyfew tech CEOs can privatise the flame and sell back the light.

The real question isn’t whether technology will shape the future, it’s who controls it.

#OMN #OpenWeb #TechPower #Oligarchy #Future #Compost

Shovels, Hashtags, and Revolutions: Roots of the #openweb

It’s obvious to everyone paying attention that the relentless push of #mainstreaming over the last forty years has not made society healthier or more stable. Quite the opposite, the result has been accelerating social disintegration and the rapid expansion of #climatechaos.

When the current trajectory continues, the consequences are catastrophic. Over the next fifty years we are looking at millions dead and billions displaced by climate breakdown, ecological collapse, and the political instability that follows. Flooded cities, failing agriculture, collapsing states, mass migration, these are no longer speculative futures. They are already visible on the horizon.

What makes this situation so disturbing is not ignorance. For the last decade, the consequences have been very clear. Climate science, ecological data, and lived experience have converged into a single message, that the system driving this crisis cannot continue. Yet those with the power to change course continue pushing the same policies, the same economic logic, and the same institutional inertia that produced the crisis in the first place.

This is not simply failure, it is knowing failure. And that raises an uncomfortable question of when does systemic negligence become a crime? For forty years the dominant ideology has been the worship of endless growth, deregulation, privatization, and extraction – what many people now recognize as the #DeathCult of #neoliberalism. On this path, ecosystems are treated as expendable, communities are hollowed out, and public institutions are dismantled in the name of “efficiency”.

The result is the hollowing-out of social structures and the destabilization of the planet itself. This isn’t an accident, the evidence has been overwhelming for decades. From early climate warnings in the 1980s to the now constant stream of scientific reports and disasters, we have known were this path leads. And yet the machine keeps running.

At some point we have to confront the idea that what we are witnessing is not just bad policy but something closer to systemic criminality. When leaders, corporations, and institutions knowingly pursue actions that will cause mass death and displacement, we enter the territory of #CrimeAgainstHumanity. The historical analogy that needs resurfacing is Nuremberg.

After the Second World War, the world established that individuals in positions of power could be held legally responsible for crimes that harmed humanity as a whole. The principle was simple: “just following the system” is not a defence. Today we face a different kind of global crime – slower, more bureaucratic, wrapped in economic language – but far larger in scale.

If millions die and billions are displaced because decision-makers continued destructive policies long after the dangers are clear, then if social democracy survives, future generations will have every reason to enforce people as accountable? This is not about vengeance, it’s about accountability and the possibility of changing course before the worst outcomes arrive.

The tragedy is that alongside this destructive path there have always been alternatives – social, technological, and cultural. Grassroots networks, commons-based governance, cooperative systems, and the original ideals of the #openweb all point toward more resilient and humane ways of organising society. But these paths have been buried under forty years of blinded #mainstreaming, where every institution, including our own #NGO people, force alignment with this narrow economic logic.

Digging out of this mess requires more than better technology or better policy papers, it requires collective action, memory, and courage. In other words: Shovels. Hashtags. And revolutions. Because the first step in changing the future is digging up the truth about how we got here.

#OMN #techshit #compost

The #Hashtags Tell a Story: Building Trust in a Messy World

We live in a time of crisis. Climate, community, communication, all are breaking down. Our tools and platforms no longer serve us. To make sense of this, we need to tell stories. And in the digital world, hashtags are one of the most powerful ways we do this. But our hashtags don’t just tag, they trace the roots of our problems, and signpost paths out. Each one is a seed. Together, they are a map.

#dotcons – From #openweb to walled gardens. Once, the internet was a place of openness, built on free tools, shared protocols, and community spirit. Then came the #dotcom era, where profit became the driving force. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, what we call the #dotcons, reshaped the web to lock us in and sell us out. A handful of corporations own the highways of our communication, and their algorithms guide what we see, say, and believe.

#dotcon = profit for a few, con for the rest.

#stupidindividualism – A trap we set for ourselves, we were promised empowerment. But what we got was individualism without solidarity. We’re told: brand yourself, hustle alone, curate your reality. But without community, there is no resilience. Without cooperation, there is no change.

#stupidindividualism is the cultural poison that tells you “you’re on your own.” It weakens us from the inside.

#deathcult – Forty years of neoliberalism. The last four decades have been shaped by a ruthless ideology, that markets solve everything, government should step back, and people must compete, not care. This is the #deathcult – a term for the deadly logic of late-stage capitalism. It’s taken over politics, media, even our sense of self.

Climate denial, gig work precarity, housing crises, mental health collapse - these are all symptoms.

#geekproblem – The failure of trust in tech. Even our allies, the people building tech to fix things, fall into a trap. The #geekproblem is when developers replace trust with control, more permissions, more encryption, more complexity. Instead of building with people, they build over them. The result? More unusable tools, more silos, more #techshit that ends up needing to be composted in abandoned GitHub repos.

#4opens is a way out of the mess, we need this new paths, based on simplicity, humility, and openness, a compass. If a project doesn’t pass the #4opens, it’s not building for the commons, it’s just making another silo.

#OMN, shovels and compost, we already have the tools, projects that build media flows, not platforms. To connect blogs and podcasts into open rivers of content, using simple tech instead of complicated “Web3” vaporware or #dotcons mess.

We’ve built up piles of #techshit. It’s time to pick up our #shovels, compost the waste, and grow something new.

Hashtags = Soft tools for hard times. We use soft metaphors because we live in soft systems: culture, emotion, trust. You can’t “solve” these with code alone. You need care, community, and storytelling. Yes, many demand hard, scientific “proofs” or “frameworks.” But if someone can’t feel the metaphor, they’re probably not ready for the work of rebuilding. We need to focus on those who can, who’ve seen that a different world is possible.

If you can understand that different ideologies shape different realities, then these hashtags will start to speak to you.

Let’s recap the key tags in the story:

#dotcons – Corporations that own and fence in our web

#failbook – Facebook and its culture of manipulation

#openweb – The decentralized, people-powered internet

#4opens – A compass for ethical, sustainable tech

#geekproblem – Tech that controls instead of empowers

#stupidindividualism – Isolation sold as freedom

#deathcult – Forty years of neoliberalism and its collapse

#OMN – Building networks, not silos

#techshit – All the unusable tools that ignore real needs

#shovels – The work we must do

#compost – Making good soil from past mistakes

We don’t need heroes, we need gardeners, grab a shovel, let’s build a future please.

Stop throwing regurgitated theory at me: We’re drowning in academic mess

The “common sense” of mainstreaming #deathcult worship is one thing. But on a different side, i’m getting bored – and honestly frustrated – with people constantly throwing academic articles and dense theory into conversations about practical grassroots change. If academic knowledge worked in the real world, we wouldn’t be stuck in a permanent state of crisis. We wouldn’t be burning out. We wouldn’t be watching every radical initiative slowly get co-opted, neutralised, then forgotten.

The truth is obvious: most academic frameworks don’t translate well into real-life practice. They to often abstract away the people, the politics, the pain, and the actual doing. And when you try to impose this abstract knowledge onto the messy, complex world of activism, it two often backfires, badly.

Example: The Horizontalist Trap – We’ve all been in those consensus meetings that take hours because someone read a paper on “formal process” and insists we follow it to the letter. The outcome? People walk away frustrated, nothing gets done, and the only ones who benefit are those with time, education, or social power, the exact opposite of what the theory promised.

Example: The NGOization of Resistance – Academics love to talk about power and hegemony, then take funding from the same institutions that perpetuate the problems. They publish papers about “grassroots voice” while never showing up to a single protest, occupation, or food distribution.

Worse still, academic frameworks often become the justification for #NGO “best practices”, which means measurable, fundable, easily controlled deliverables that neuter real resistance and keep everything nice and “professional.” Look at the climate movement’s NGO wing, all form, no fire.

Example: The Misuse of Radical Jargon – Words like “intersectionality,” “decolonisation,” “assemblage,” and “ontology” are thrown around like power spells. But, they act like a fog machine, confusing, not clarifying. They become tools for gatekeeping rather than building any usable shared understanding.

This isn’t to say these ideas are worthless. But if they aren’t grounded in practice, in lived reality, in #DIY doing, they become another form of control, the academic equivalent of bureaucratic jargon, empty of any power.

Let’s talk about practice – If you’re serious about radical change, start with what people are actually doing. Watch how trust is built, how disagreements are handled, how collective tools succeed or fail. This is the terrain of useful knowledge. Theory should grow from practice, not the other way around.

This is the basis of the #DIY approach. It’s what grounds #OMN, #IndymediaBack, and the #4opens framework. These projects didn’t come from a PhD thesis, they came from struggle, failure, and iteration on the ground. They work because they grow from this practice.

So to sum up, please stop adding to the mess – when you post academic articles without any connection to what’s happening in the real world, you’re not helping. You’re contributing to the noise, to inertia, to the pile of unread PDFs and emails sitting in everyone’s guilt folders.

Instead:

Link to practical guides, not just papers.
Summarise ideas in accessible ways, not just as a show of “knowledge”.
Relate theory back to what people are already doing.
And most of all, ask first: Is this helping, or is this just feeding my own need to be heard?

We really don’t need more theory right now, we need fire, tools, and compost. If you must bring theory, make sure it’s something that came from someone doing the work. Otherwise, maybe save it for the seminar room.

We’re building from the bottom, get your hands dirty, join us there.

#DIY #NothingNew #4opens #OMN #IndymediaBack #Activism #Compost #OpenWeb #Deathcult

Theory and Practice in Activism

Rethinking Technology

A lot of the posts on this site are based on the thinking that technology is how a society interacts with physical reality. It’s how we feed, clothe, shelter, and heal ourselves. It’s the material stuff that makes life possible, from cooking fires to solar panels, from flint knives to AI algorithms. What is so messy today is the common sense embedded in this thinking, that only ‘hi-tech’ counts as technology which is an absurdity born from a century and a half of industrial brainwashing.

We’ve been so numbed by endless ‘progress’ that we assume only things as complex as computers and jet bombers qualify as technology. As if paper, ink, wheels, clocks, and aspirin pills weren’t tech, just things that exist, like trees and rivers. As if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled plastic grew on trees, ripe for the picking.

The false divide of ‘hi-tech’ and ‘low-tech’ is a bad illusion that we need to see through. Try lighting a fire without matches, realise that even so-called primitive tech takes skill and knowledge. Try making a fishhook, a shoe, or a simple tool, realise how much has been lost in the rush towards hyper-specialised consumerism.

Tech isn’t just what we consume, it’s what we can learn to do. That’s the point. And all science is, at its core, technological, whether we understand this or not. A lot of what the #geekproblem thinks as social is just as much technology, as the hard blinded modernism they tend to worship, the cults are as much a problem as a “solution”. The social structures that we use to shape the world our geeks tend to “blindly” worship is technology, too.

Post inspired by https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology. The idea that technology is not politics (which is a technology) is the myth that is at the heart of our current mess.

#Technology #Nothingnew #TechShit #Openweb #4opens #Deathcult #DIY #Compost

What can we do with our fashionistas?

Trying to make the #fashionistas functional in an #openweb reboot is much harder than it needs to be. But still, we do need to harness their strengths by working to redirecting focus towards #KISS sustainable and meaningful outcomes. How can we do this?

Ideas? Clarify Objectives, is a start, with straightforward and compelling stories that outline why the #openweb matters and how individual contributions can make a difference. A path to this is bridging skill gaps, with tools, workshops and resources that equip people with the knowledge and capabilities needed to participate in technical and community projects. By empowering people to use native #openweb tools. This helps shift the focus from self-promotion to collaboration, to environments where the emphasis is on shared goals and outcomes rather than individual status and branding. Core to this, is a culture where collective progress is celebrated more than individual accolades, motivating the fashionistas to work alongside others to build communities of action.

In community #DIY projects, it helps to involve #fashernistas in decision-making through community-led governance structures that align with the #4opens (open data, processes, source, and standards). To build on this first step, we need to focus on narrative and storytelling to highlight social impact, crafting stories around how #openweb projects positively impact real communities, this resonates with #fashionistas interest in influential narratives.

We can try, to make work, engagement with higher statues “influencers” thoughtfully to create and share stories that champion community-driven tech solutions and emphasize ethical, long-term growth over the normal fleeting trends. We need to then connect these trends to tangible long term goals to demonstrate how style and purpose can align without losing depth.

Creating opportunities for fashionistas to be involved in pilot projects, hackathons, and online campaigns that result in visible, practical changes can help to #compost the social flaws, the negative aspects, by acknowledging and address superficial tendencies, redirecting energy towards problem-solving and constructive efforts. Then use feedback systems to point out valuable contributions and areas that need more depth, guiding fashionistas away from shallow engagement towards impactful involvement.

The path is to promote long-term thinking is in challenging short-lived trends, by demonstrating value over time with examples from successful open-source and community-driven paths that gained momentum with steady and committed efforts. We can hope that, by aligning their creative energy with the structural and ethical needs of an #openweb reboot, the #fashionistas become not only influencers but essential collaborators in pushing a more connected, community-focused, resilient digital paths that we need in this era of crises.

OK, yes this will be hard, with lots of back sliding, but it needs to happen.

The #hashtags tell a storie

Dot for profit for few con for the rest – took over the #openweb during the #dotcom era.

#stupidindividualism is our internal poison that we breed from the #deathcult

#failbook will/has failed us as individuals and as a society.

#openweb is a good view of what we had and what we won’t.

#4opens is a path out of the #geekproblem

The #geekproblem is a humane failure of trust and its replacement with control.

The #hashtags add up to tell a story and thus build a way out of this mess.

The #deathcult is the last 40 years of neo-liberalism.

Need to work in shovels, shit and compost to the story. Hashtags a tool for #openweb organizing ideas/stories/community’s. The is obviously a balance with self-expression. At the moment this “balance” is pure #deathcult being pushed by our shared #stupidindividualism

We have a #shoval, common storied #hashtags we have piles of #techshit to shovel for #compost to build up fertile soil for planting flower and vegetables to nourish our soles and actions.

Why talk in “soft” metaphors?

The issues are soft as are the explanations/metaphors. You can’t have a hard explanation of the social world without building it up from an ideological foundation. As most people are in denial of the possibility of different world views/ideologies this makes “hard” conversations a largely pointless way of communicating. People asking for them have not taken the first step so talking their hand to help them will soon lead you down a different/ideology path. As the project is about #KISS and focus this is something we have limited time/focus for.

If you can glimpse the world from different views/ideologies than the soft/metaphor will talk to you and the attraction for hard will be less strong. These people have a hope of building a different/ideology world/process so can help in real ways.

As we need to focus, it’s not an issue to talk to the first and more important to consolidate around the second… question is finding people that have not been “broken” by #mainstreaming agenders.

Next step in the #OMN

The majority of #mainstreaming #openweb tech projects have the assumption that human nature is a fixed thing and that every project has to be built in reaction to the 40 years of neo-liberal #deathcult that we all live in now as this is the “only” human nature visible. They completely miss/ignorer the social nature of people in groups in this look back at the 20^th century, and we have clearly different views of human nature as examples to build society. Call it social democracy, call it communism, call it what you like. We DO NOT have to build tools in relation to the #deathcult, and we clearly should not base “hope” on tools that are built in this relation.

Mastodon, activertypub and the fedivers took a small #stepaway from this mess. The #OMN takes the next step away. For the rest #compost and #shovels come to mind.

The #OMN is a simple #KISS social tech project.

All these projects work off the same core code/workflow of tagging and editing metadata.

#Indymediaback is the news part of the project. This is to grow journalism from the grassroots and to make our news mainstream.

#Makinghistory – is the archiving project. This is to preserve and grow our history from the grassroots and make our history mainstream.

#Friendsandfamily – is the social networking project. For family/affernerty groups to move away from the mainstream #dotcons and to nourish the grassroots.

All the projects are #4opens and federated.