Hamish Campbell is an #openweb organic intellectual and a core contributor to the #OMN (Open Media Network). He publishes at http://hamishcampbell.com, where he documents decades of radical media work, social tech projects, and reflections on activist culture. You’ll find him across the #Fediverse, on the #dotcons, and on #YouTube – pushing for open dialogue around politics, technology, and media.
Over the years, Hamish has been central to meany grassroots tech and media initiatives, including:
- Undercurrents – video activism documenting direct action and alternative culture.
- Ruffcuts – Copy left (before, Creative Commons) licensed video CD-ROMs project distributed across UK and global activist networks.
- UK Indymedia – part of the global Indymedia network, building open publishing platforms for activist journalism.
- VisionOnTV – producing and distributing social movement video through peer-to-peer networks and open tools. Now in its fourth generation of FOSS tech, the project has been running on and off for nearly 20 years.
- The PeoplesTV Project – creating low-cost, live-edit, and video aggregation tools for real-time, mobile grassroots reporting.
- 4opens – a framework for ethical #FOSS tech development, demanding openness of code, data, standards, and governance.
- OMN (Open Media Network) – building a trust-based federated media infrastructure for alternative publishing.
- ActivityPub and the Fediverse – working with native protocols and community to develop open, decentralized publishing tools and outreach them.
- OGB (Open Governance Body) – prototyping grassroots governance models tailored to activist and Fediverse cultures.
- Rebooting Indymedia – re-energising grassroots media infrastructure with fediverse tech and horizontal process. This Fediverse tech got to roll out before covid but did not survive the pandemic
- MakingHistory – a new project under active development, exploring collective memory and storytelling.
Hamish approaches all of this through a political lens – believing that code is ideology made real. He is sharply critical of tech shaped by capitalism, which he sees as systemically extractive, closed, and hostile to real social change. His approach to “humane coding” centres on designing systems that embrace complexity, emergence, and care – tools that reflect human relationships rather than enforce control.
Beyond the tech world, Hamish has been involved in hundreds of activist campaigns and alternative life experiments. He’s written academically on vagabond culture and hitchhiking, and has produced and edited over 1,000 videos and documentaries in the last 20 years.
For the past decade, he has lived aboard a semi-off-grid lifeboat, navigating Europe’s canals and coasts, a real-world metaphor for the digital values he champions: autonomy, resilience, and mutual aid, you can find this story at #BoatingEurope.
This is a space for taking what the mainstreaming say and making it alternative. The #OMN is a call to action to rethink our economic and social systems, embracing open, collaborative, and sustainable practices. It’s about recognizing the ideological forces at play and consciously choosing to build new systems based on different values. The path forward involves both rejecting harmful patterns and creating new ones that better serve the common good.
Filming a police riot in Genoa in 2001, I was at the core of a ten-year court case to prosecute the Italian police, for torture, perjury and false imprisonment.
A river that needs crossing political and tech – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over complexity
All code is ideology solidified into action – most contemporary code is capitalism, this is hardly a surprise if you think about this for a moment. Yes you can try and act on any ideology on top of this code, but the outcome and assumptions are preprogramed… cant find any good links on this…
“WHAT ABOUT HUMAN NATURE?” That simple question posits an even simpler view of human consciousness and decision-making. It says man is flawed—through his greed, jealousy, and selfishness—and that as such, he would destroy and corrupt any system which doesn’t utilize those very flaws. The way capitalism, for example, does with greed, by throwing us in the gladiatorial arena, or to be more realistic, a children’s sandbox, of the free market—where the greediest win.
The role of mythos and traditions, are ways of working in social groups and ideology frameworks. This is a key insight—any new system will need its own stories, values, and rituals to bind people together and give them a shared sense of purpose. So we should consciously grow mythos and traditions we live by #KISS
Open Media Network (#OMN) is a practical use path we can take. The #4opens advocates for building social groups based on principles similar to open source software—openness, transparency, and collaboration. The foundational “mythos and traditions” for new social structures, offering an alternative to the closed and exploitative systems we currently often live inside.
To be affective, am strongly on the “use and abuse” of the #dotcons and #mainstreaming culture side of the purity test.
