Category: Non classé

A Year-Long Summer (short version)

I spent the summer of 1989 travelling in Ireland. I can’t now remember why Ireland, exactly. The first step was a lift to Barnsley with my parents, helping set up the exhibition 100 Years of Women’s Banners at the City Art Gallery. From there I hitchhiked north through the Lake District, stopping for the night in Keswick. In the morning I headed on to Stranraer, the cheapest route to Ireland, to catch the ferry to Larne, thirty miles north of Belfast.

I arrived in Larne late in the day and hitchhiked along the coastal road, which runs within a few feet of the sea all the way up the North Coast. I stopped for the night in a small village called Cushendall, where two of the three hotels had been blown to bits and the police station looked like an army fortress, bristling with aerials and wrapped in a high anti-rocket fence.

The coast itself is beautiful and unspoilt. According to a local tourist guide who gave me a lift, this was because the IRA had been sabotaging tourism and the economy since the 1970s, anything built was liable to be blown up. “Keeps the place liveable,” he joked darkly. The next day I continued to White Park Bay and the Giant’s Causeway, which was a bit of a disappointment, as famous tourist sites often are. But the cliffs of Benbane Head and the empty sea coast more than made up for it.

Hitchhiking toward Londonderry, I was joined by a friendly Irishman with a very thick accent in Coleraine. We got a lift from an English journalist who drove us round all the local trouble spots, with our Irish companion giving a running commentary: “That’s where Bloody Sunday happened… that’s the statue they blew up… that Post Office has been rebuilt three times…”

We were stopped at a checkpoint on the edge of the Bogside, two soldiers pointing rifles at me, more further back behind a heavy machine gun with their fingers on the trigger. They searched the boot, checked our passports, then waved us through.

Armed soldiers in the streets, convoys of armoured Land Rovers, roadblocks of corrugated iron and rusting barbed wire, concrete fortresses, bomb-damaged buildings covered in republican murals. Razor wire, rubble, neglect everywhere… all of this in what is, underneath, a normal country town: shopping arcades, council estates, grannies with shopping trolleys, mothers with kids in tow. The same as any small English town, but layered with tension and decay.

I crossed the border on foot, past a security bunker and huge concrete bollards, into the Republic of Ireland. I stayed the night in Muff, a small village just over the border, where I was offered a job as a “granny-minder” in the local hostel. She was an interesting woman, she remembered the first trans-Atlantic plane landing next to her cottage, but the repetition of dementia was too much for me.

I hitchhiked across to Donegal town, my first proper glimpse of the west coast, and then right out to the Atlantic. Rugged, deserted. I stayed just outside the small village of Kilcar, visiting the Celtic tombs and monoliths of Glencolumbkille, overlooking a quiet bay and the open ocean. At a tiny independent hostel that also doubled as the village shop, I was welcomed with tea, cake, open friendliness, the smell of a peat fire, and the chatter of a group of Germans.

After an Irish music session at the pub, I wandered down to the beach around midnight. No moon, pitch black, lit only by the stars. Ahead of me I saw what looked like a sack blowing in the wind. As I got closer I heard heavy breathing. The “sack” grew a white face and froze. I stopped dead in surprise. The vague black shape split into two large animals with white stripes across their faces. They stepped toward me, snorting loudly, then turned and bolted across the road, shaking the ground as they ran into an overgrown field. Two badgers, huge ones, materialising out of the dark. Quite a surprise to meet at midnight.

Down at the beach I saw phosphorescent waves for the first time, sparkling blue specks of light with each retreating wave. I would see this often later, from the bow and wake of the boat crossing the ocean.

I spent days exploring the empty landscape, getting lifts from peat cutters on lonely moors and locals who would stop even when I wasn’t hitchhiking. Children by cottages would stare with wide-eyed curiosity before giving directions with shy smiles beneath mops of curly brown hair.

Hitchhiked round to Sligo, arriving at midday with a strange feeling. After the magical tranquillity and emptiness of Donegal, it felt like I’d stumbled into sin city rather than a quiet Irish university town. Took the inland road to Galway, no memories of that stretch, and stayed a few days. A fantastic thunderstorm rolled into the bay: lashing rain, lightning cracking across the sky. I stood at the end of the pier with electricity skittering along the power cables overhead, total calm in the harbour below. Swans drifting, cormorants diving for fish. BOOM… CRASH… buckets of water pouring from black, tumbling clouds racing out to sea. Then silence: crystal air, a newly washed world.

Met Alic hitchhiking out of Galway. He showed me around Oranmore Castle. We sat drinking tea, talking about dolphins. He invited me back later that summer, I thought, maybe? From Oranmore to Kinvara, on the edge of the Burren, where I stayed in a deserted hostel. The next day I followed the coast to the Cliffs of Moughan, a blighted tourist spot if ever one existed. Then inland to Ennis and back toward the coast to catch the car ferry over the Shannon, stopping the night in a tiny village on the far side.

Down to Tralee and around the Ring of Kerry, high mountains, deep glens, pure white beaches, translucent blue sea. It felt more like a tropical paradise than the Western Atlantic, but I had neither time nor inclination to stop. Passed through Skibbereen to Baltimore, a small harbour village right at the southwest tip. Stayed a few days in a tidy, well-run German hostel by the sea. Went swimming in tidal pools and managed to slice my foot open badly, lots of blood, but only superficial. The water was so cold I didn’t notice until my plimsolls began squelching on the walk back.

To Cork next. While looking around the university in the evening I met some Americans who arrived back at the hostel at 2am carrying a bottle of mead and a trout they’d been gifted by a friendly fisherman in a pub. Shallow-fried trout, soda bread and mead at 3 in the morning with American stock-brokers, why not? The next day, a lively free rock concert by the River.

Hitchhiked to Rosslare via Waterford, which was pretty dull. Took the ferry to Fishguard and drifted around Wales, London, and Ollerton for a bit. Then back to Galway to take up Alic’s offer: coach from London, special deal via Holyhead and Dublin.

I stayed at Oranmore Castle, a tall, square, blocky stone tower overlooking Galway Bay, two great halls, heaps of bedrooms, dank corridors. Deserted except for the occasional visitor and me, haunting the place for the summer of ’89. Crab catching on the old stone pier, the Galway Races, helicopters overhead, champagne parties in the great hall, an art gallery under construction.

Travelled through Connemara, visited Achill Island, windswept like the Falklands, dolphins jumping close to shore. At the most westerly car park in Europe, I impressed the locals by building a church out of sand, complete with graveyard. From Oranmore I explored the Burren: grey limestone hills full of rare plants, Celtic ruins, Christian ruins, guided tours round deep caves, not really my thing.

By the end of summer the weather closed in, dark, damp. I took my leave of Alic and Leone, packed my bag, and skipped off down the road with my thumb in the air. Got a lift, for the second time, from a slightly camp gay vicar. A couple of interesting propositions and discussions later he dropped me in Athlone. From there to Dublin, where I stayed a few days before heading back to Wales.

Winter in Britain didn’t appeal. So… Mediterranean? Africa? West Indies? Anywhere south.

Europe, heading downwards. From London to Paris by train. Arrived early, dumped my bag in a locker, wandered: the Seine, the Louvre, the Pompidou, Sacré-Cœur. Slept on the roof of a multi-storey car park near Gare du Nord because my friend’s flat was full of guests. Lack of planning has its disadvantages. Walked past the security cameras as if I owned the place, climbed to the top. From the roof of the service building I watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle and Paris breathe beneath me. Very safe, police patrols cruising by every few hours. I just sat and peered down at them. Weather was beautiful so I stayed two nights.

Left Paris to hitch to Bordeaux, hoping to pick grapes, but I’d missed the harvest due to the dry summer. Hitched to Biarritz with a New Zealander. Midnight picnic in a pine forest under a full moon: sticky fruit, wine, French bread, scents of warm resin and singing crickets. Biarritz is a strange mix of Victorian Englishness and southern French style, broad beaches, rolling Atlantic surf, Australians skipping across waves on boards, watched by bronzed models.

From Biarritz I hitched alone in an English lorry to Lisbon, a day and a half across the endless Spanish plains, the scenery only changing with the next flock of mangy sheep or the next church spire. Slept in a warm, aromatic haystack.

No luck finding a boat in Lisbon. Stayed ten days, checked docks and tourist sites. Polluted, unfriendly. Took an overnight train to the Algarve with some friends and a stunningly loud peasant brass band. Wandered to the Atlantic coast near Cape Vincent, wild, beautiful, white-sand coves scented with herbs. Ate figs from the trees, swam in surf, lay on beaches. Stayed a week in a smelly old fort perched on a headland, cliffs dropping sheer into the sea. Watched lazy fish outsmart fishermen casting nets from tiny boats far below.

Hitched to Seville by a patchwork of thumb, bus, train, and finally a battered Israeli VW camper van that broke down at the outskirts. Walked through boulevards lined with heavy orange trees into the old centre. Met a Guatemalan woman who helped us find a hotel. The remains of Moorish architecture: cool, calm, civilised. Got swept into a film shoot in the old quarter, carnival scenes, dry ice, masks, prancing, flying capes.

Bussed and hitched to Gibraltar. Rain, overcast, nowhere to stay. Almost arrested for inhabiting an abandoned military bunker, saved only because the police got stuck behind a car crash. After a week of asking around the marina, I found the Danish yacht Nana, a 42′ steel ketch heading for the Canaries and possibly the West Indies. Left the next day.

Sailing across the Atlantic on Nana was… something else. Left Las Palmas with Ivor the skipper and Dagmar as deckhand. The last sight of Europe was Cape St. Vincent, where three weeks earlier I’d been sunning myself in a secluded rocky cove. We skirted the coast of Morocco cautiously, staying out of sight of land to avoid pirates. Then nothing but blue, sometimes grey, waves stretching in all directions.

Climbed to the top of the mast on a calm day, fell out of bed and cut my head open on a not-so-calm night. Nine days later we arrived in Las Palmas, Grand Canary. Sailing… what a crazy thing to do! “Cooking in a galley with a swaying stove, pots and pans flying everywhere… sauces slurping, water boiling… falling forward, falling back, what a mad idea!”

Two weeks in the marina, sleeping in a hammock swinging from the mast, making do with the peculiar charm of Las Palmas: giant cockroachs, oil slicks in the harbour, the odd beach barbecue with exploding flambé. Explored the hills and mountains by hired car, swam in a mountain lake, skinny-dipped in cold, fresh water, the sun warm, pine needles soft underfoot. Friends from the marina, hopefuls and dreamers, looked for boats.

We motored east to Tenerife, waiting for the right weather. A storm damaged the docked boats: the Nana was crushed against the quay by a Brazilian mahogany schooner, the anchor motor shattered, ropes broken, railings scratched. I spent most of the night scouring the island for discarded tires to act as fenders, the waves tossing the boat like a tiny elevator, ropes straining, snapping with bangs. Five other boats were wrecked in the two weeks, running aground or slipping anchors.

While working along cliffs east of Los Cristianos, I spotted a sail flapping on the rocks, the English yacht Yarmouth. Hurrying down luckily, nobody was trapped. Spanish Red Cross shrugged; they didn’t seem to care. When our gear box fell off while manoeuvring in the harbour mouth, the Dutch rescued us just in time. Two weeks of inactivity, swinging from the boom, playing guitars with Dagmar in the cockpit to pass the night, getting sunburnt, cooking in salty water, this became our strange rhythm.

Finally, we set off. Motoring out at dusk with a leak in the oven, a sudden decision, there was no wind but a weather fax suggested wind 200 miles down the line, and the storm might close in behind us.

Atlantic Crossing. Days of calm, then the trade winds finally picked up. Dolphins escorted us, whales breeched in the distance, flying fish arced over the deck. Surfing down waves at night, the boat lifted by thirty-foot swells, stern first, before being carried down the other side. Shooting stars streaked across the sky every ten minutes. One massive thunderstorm blackened the sky on the port side for an entire day. Other sailing boats were tiny lights against the horizon; lone sailors, obviously asleep, continued their course. Even a tanker had to be dodged, they had a terrible turning circle and would not stop.

On becalmed days, we swam. No land for a thousand miles, three miles deep beneath us. Overboard dives from the emergency box, careful of sharks. Every few days dolphins swarmed the bow, leaping, skimming, glinting in rainbow hues under the sun. The days were the same, sun-warmed bucket showers, peeling potatoes in salty water, washing clothes in salty water, everything salted, everything alive. The smell of the boat: plastic, fabric, wood, damp sea smell, sun blazing overhead.

After the 25-day crossing, Christmas Eve brought Barbados. The trees appeared bright- colerd off the starboard bow, a small brightly-painted fishing boat bobbing between the troughs. Anchored in a bay among other yachts, we motored into port to register with customs and immigration.

The West Indies were touristy but friendly. Stayed for Christmas and New Year in a cheap room behind a beach bar in Bridgetown. Shared it with a friend: one of us paid, the other hid under the bed at knocks on the door. Swam twice daily, got drunk on free rum at parties, travelled the island by bus, slept on a deserted beach for a night, climbed a swaying coconut palm for fresh milk, ripping the bottom out of my only spare trousers in the process. Bus rides back to Bridgetown drew strange looks: the only white person on board with a massive hole in the back of my trousers and no underpants. Had to smile.

No safe passage by boat appeared for onward travel, so I imposed on a friend from Las Palmas, Andrew, to take me to Granada in a 31’ English boat called Emma, participating in the ARC race to raise money for disabled sailors on tall ships. Incredibly seasick all the way, but Granada, tropical jungle overgrown with wood and corrugated iron houses, abundant fruits, flowers, and exotic birds, was worth every heave. Hitchhiked through mountains to the lake at the top, over the island, through banana plantations, nutmeg trees, dense jungle, a place both beautiful and strange.

Eventually, I found Nana anchored again in St. George’s harbour. Reunited with Dagmar and Nils. The Caribbean was stunning, but dull and expensive. Bought a flight ticket to London, with a stopover in Miami.

Florida, Orange Groves, and the American South. Landing in Miami, I was immediately struck by the emptiness, a soul-less vacuum of blacks and poverty-stricken whites. Found another Englishman, Berny, in the hostel. Hired a car and drove north to Orlando in search of orange-picking work. Frost had devastated the harvest; no luck this far up. Found another Englishman, Andy, and together the three of us decided to head south where the frost had been less severe.

Hitchhiked back to Avon Park. Met up in the library, shared a motel room, cooking on a camping stove in the middle of the floor. Next day, orange-picking under a Mexican boss in the grove, ten hours, earned $4 after deductions, argued with the Mexicans about tax and work permits, and that was the end of that work.

We splashed out on our meagre earnings at the beach, hoping for carpentry work, hitchhiking to Fort Pierce. We crashed on the flat roof of an abandoned gas station by the beach, mosquitoes, alligators, minor worries. Then, by chance, we were invited to stay for two weeks with a college family in Wotchuler: Disney World, affluent conservative American life, sunshine, absurdly clean streets. Back to Orlando, trying to find a way to California. Almost gave up before hiring a car.

Cross-Country Chaos. Drove a hire car to New Orleans with two girls from South Wales, me, Berny, and Andy. Stopped by police, $164 speeding fine for 70 in a 55 mph zone. Didn’t pay. Zooming out of the state, we drove through the desert, sleeping in a rolled-up sleeping bag, stopping once in a motel, the stars intense above us. Camped on the Rio Grande, scorpion as dinner companion, Navajo reservation in the middle of rocky scrub desert. Denver, crash in a car park, Indian cave dwellings, Painted Desert, Monument Valley — over the Rocky Mountains, across the Midwest, small-town America in all its exhausted glory.

Sat on a rusting iron girder bridge over a river, beavers playing, an overgrown railway nearby. The endless nights of small roads lit only by headlights, dark pubs, dead-eyed Americans, a bleak, fascinating wilderness.

New York City. Arrived New York next day. After dropping the hire car in Mount Kisko, me and Berny hitchhiked with a crazy guy in a giant American sports car doing 90 mph, weaving through traffic, squealing round stoplights, eventually dumped in the Bronx. Subway, chaos, flashing lights, sirens, smells. Stayed just over a week: Central Park, Manhattan, Empire State, Staten Island ferry, Statue of Liberty, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, a city alive and alinating.

Climbed rooftops for a better view, almost arrested as a terrorist at JFK for exploring too freely. Flight to London: six boring hours, a dull contrast to the wildness of America.

Back to England. Civilized at first glance, small, homely. But the impression wears off quickly. Hitchhiked to Wales over a day and a half, missed an arranged lift with my mother from Greenham Common Peace Camp. Had to hitch 250 miles by six in the evening, finally stopping past Carmarthen in a friendly pub. Signed on the dole in Aberystwyth, May 25th, 1990, nothing had changed.

Ireland, Oranmore Castle, Full Circle. Finally, back to Ireland, Oranmore Castle, completing the circle I had started over a year earlier. Stayed three weeks in time for Bill King’s 80th birthday party. Then back to Wales, onward to a job in London. Winter in Britain, not an appealing idea.

What next? Japan? South America? Who knows. The horizon always calls.

Long version https://hamishcampbell.com/a-year-long-summer/

Leadership in the Era of Quantum and AI – A Reaction

This lecture was framed as leadership in a time of economic, social, and environmental crisis. In reality, it was a performance, a ritual reaffirmation of the system that generated those crises. A talk about “leadership” steeped in the language of inevitability, technological salvation, and corporate myth-making.

The speaker, Muhtar Kent – Coca-Cola executive, delivered a brand sermon for the young acolytes of the #deathcult. Unconsciously or not, he was selling the two current hype bubbles: Quantum and AI. Both framed as paradigm shifts. But the problem with this mythology is that both are, right now, more fantasy than function.

#AI has no intelligence. None. It produces plausible text and performs statistical pattern recognition. That’s it. The current explosion of PR and funding is about destroying value, not creating it, replacing labour, creativity, and human meaning with cheap automated exhaust.

#Quantum computing, at present, has about the power of a 1990s scientific calculator at best. Much of the PR is built on pre-calculated solutions dressed up as magical quantum speed. It’s fudging. It’s lying. And yet, like AI, billions flow into the hype.

Leadership, with no connection to reality, this worship core message was simple: Leadership is a promise, and a brand is a promise kept, his talk had neither of these. A normal mess, a distillation of the managerial worldview; reality flattened into branding. Leadership becomes not action, not accountability, not ethics, but worship, corporate devotion, a smooth surface projected onto a burning world

The Q&A: Was a closed circle, the questions that followed were trapped inside the same narrow, pointless frame.

Q: How do we restore trust in institutions and politics?
A: Politics is a “bad brand”. The solution, apparently, is to partner with subnational actors, mayors, governors, etc. He avoids the structural crisis entirely and reframes it as a marketing problem.

Q: Does AI in Coca-Cola advertising create value or destroy it?
A: He claims it’s just applying old ideas with new tools. Again, pure branding logic.

The was more… the audience, wannabe future leaders of the global managerial class, were sycophantic, unquestioning, hungry for status. Every question was asked from inside the bubble. No challenge. No structural critique. No awareness of the real crises unfolding around us. The Audience were not people seeking truth or grappling with this crisis, they were worshippers looking for careers and job validation. Small sharks circling a bigger shark, hoping to learn how to swim with sharper teeth.

Conclusion:

Not leadership – worship.
Not intelligence – PR.
Not value creation – value destruction.

And the people in the room were not thinking their way out of the mess. They were rehearsing how to reproduce it as their path.

#Oxford

What has changed in leadership, which principles endure, and how do we respond?

The glossy rhetoric around “Quantum and AI leadership” makes it sound as if we’ve entered a new epoch where the old rules no longer hold. But strip away the hype and you find something familiar: the same elitist managerial class, still addicted to control, still mistaking centralization for competence, and still refusing to learn from the last 40 years of crisis.

What has changed is the scale and velocity of the mess they are creating. We’ve built systems we no longer understand, infrastructures too brittle to trust, and economies so captured by the #deathcult of neoliberalism that even existential threats – climate collapse, inequality, runaway tech – are treated as branding opportunities rather than calls for transformation. Leadership, as sold in these events, is a performance.

The tragedy is that the institutions talking loudest about “leading in the AI age” are the same ones least capable of doing so. They fear uncertainty, fear decentralization, fear the public. So they cling to control, and in doing so accelerate the crisis they claim to be solving.

Quantum and AI aren’t the challenge. The challenge is whether we allow the same narrow, extractive logic to shape the next era, or whether we root ourselves again in trust, openness, and the radical idea that people, not systems, are what matter.

Oxford radical history

The scent of damp soil and half-forgotten futures, a version that flow, a sourcebook for day-to-day life and activism from a time when the local living alternatives were not theory but everyday life, in a small English town https://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/ It’s an archive now, a time capsule you can wander through. If this current generation is looking for inspiration, I’d suggest starting at the beginning, the last few years of the site weren’t exactly its golden hour.

When I went back recently and found this page, I stumbled across two posts from my younger self, still humming with the raw, chaotic energy of those years. A small echo across time.

Oxford #Indymedia is a local example of how utopian and dystopian currents flow, how hope and burnout danced around each other like quarrelling siblings. It shows how people lived alternatives rather than only theorising, how the #openweb wasn’t a dream but a sweaty, meeting-filled, joyful, improvisational practice. If you want to dig deeper into the era, my own site is here: http://hamishcampbell.com

And for the moving images, the pixelated documents of that strange, fertile period, go rummaging in what remains of these vaults. Sort by oldest to get the proper archaeology:

There’s a lot there, though less from Oxford, mostly happened pre #dotcons, where you can’t find videos. The compost, the mistakes, the stubborn courage, the feeling that another world wasn’t just possible but already partially assembled in basements, squats, boats, and borrowed offices.

Maybe someone will pick up a thread and weave something fresh with it. That’s the hope.

https://unite.openworlds.info/indymedia/indymedia-reboot

“We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”?

Trump and Putin are the figureheads of the #deathcult and 3ed rate people like Staner are puppets. The #nastyfew, mostly invisible in the smoke and mirrors of #mainstreaming media, are the ones who push the “we”. And they also invest in a part of our “progressive” paths, always much less affective than they need to be, let’s look at this from the latest #AI tech the #dotcons and more importantly our own #NGO crew.

The core of the #NGO mess: they claim to represent everyone, while foreclosing every other possibility. “We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”? Meanwhile, the parasite class in tech has spent twenty years destroying the social fabric of the internet, turning everything into grift, extraction, and precarious dependence. There is every chance that this new wave of #AI/#NGO/#dotcons fusion will be just more mess for us to compost.

As I said, let’s look at these people who are in bed with the #dotcons, sucking at the teat (LINK) of the #nastyfew. It should be easy to see, at best they’re a warm blanket, precisely when we need a shovel. They always smother real change and real challenge while claiming to “scale impact.” and other buzzwords.

Working within the system and working outside it both have effects – and yes, we need to balance these paths. But let’s be honest: the “inside” path is 98% parasites, and the “outside” path is full of fashionistas hiding insider routes behind radical posturing. So the balance point isn’t where we think it is. It has to be pushed far, far back from the centre we’ve been trained to accept.

Yes, there is some value in their affective progressive-tech narratives, but it is a tiny force against the power of global capital. They love the idea of the “bridging node,” the mythical middle ground where nothing is actually bridged and nothing is actually changed. Soft, persuasive, endlessly consulting, the #NGO path is a warm blanket to snugal when you should be getting up to work. It comforts, it reassures, and it is collectively ineffective. In the end, that blanket is all they have to offer: a feeling, not a transformation.

And then there’s all the #AI, most of it #techshit witch we need to be clear, is not intelligence, just more civic control in the hands of the #nastyfew. LLMs, image recognition, all of it: tools with some utility, but zero real intelligence. What they do enable is more vertical power, refined manipulation, more subtle control, more extraction of attention, behaviour, and labour through the constantly spreading #dotcons.

With our ongoing #openweb reboot we need a real democratic steering wheel again, actual power to change, not ONLY warm blankets and #PR funding. This is why the #OMN, the #4opens, and the slow work of composting matter. Because every other path on offer right now leads straight back to the same smothering, stagnant centre – the place where nothing grows.

#OMN

The Voyage of the Volga: The Wager

INT. THE OXFORD UNION – EVENING

A worn wooden interior lined with old photos and leather books. The clock above the bar ticks with naval precision. A few posh students sip pints and argue about lectures. Rain patters against the windows.

PRESENT:

HAMISH CAMPBELL, calm, steady, with a glint of wild vision behind measured words.

STUART, a skeptical undergraduate engineer.

RALPH, an economic prof who’s seen too much red tape.

FLANAGAN, a wannabe cryptocurrency trader with a cynical grin.

SULLIVAN, a journalist looking for a story.

DAN, a scruffy but sharp mechanic, quietly nursing a mug of tea.

STUART
(holding up a chart)
Hamish, you’ve lost it this time. You can’t sail to Iran on an inland route. Europe isn’t a bathtub, you know.

HAMISH
(flatly)
You can, if you know the canals. London to the Baltic Sea, then down the Volga—across to the Caspian. From there, it’s a short hop to Iran.

FLANAGAN
(snickers)
That’s not a voyage, that’s a labyrinth. Half those waterways are closed, half forgotten.

RALPH
And the tugboat? You’re taking that scruffy old thing—what’s it called?

HAMISH
(smiles faintly)
The Volga.

SULLIVAN
You named the boat after the river you’re trying to conquer. Poetic—but absurd.

HAMISH
It’s not absurd. The inland waterways are the old arteries of Europe. We’ve just forgotten how to use them.

STUART
You really think you can make it all the way to Iran by river and canal?

HAMISH
Yes. And I’ll prove it.

A silence falls. Rain grows heavier against the windows.

FLANAGAN
Prove it how? A blog post? A film? Another myth for your #openweb friends?

HAMISH
(smiling thinly)
A patron campaign.

STUART
A wager? What are we betting on?

HAMISH
That I can make the voyage. No flashy corporate sponsorship. No closed tech. Just the tugboat Volga, open charts, and Dan here.

Dan looks up, startled, tea half-spilled.

DAN
Wait—me?

HAMISH
You said you wanted a break from working life. This is it.

SULLIVAN
You’re both mad. I’ll sign up for the Patreon—what—five hundred pounds says you won’t get past the Keal canal.

FLANAGAN
Make it a thousand to reach the Helsinki.

STUART
(laughing)
And ten thousand if you actually touch Iranian soil!

Hamish calmly pulls a slim laptop from his backpack and slides it across the table.

HAMISH
Let’s make the pledges official.

They type, close the laptop, and stands, buttoning his jacket.

HAMISH (CONT’D)
The river doesn’t care about politics or doubt. It just flows. All we have to do is follow it.

He checks the clock — 8:45 p.m.

HAMISH (CONT’D)
Come on, Dan. The tide’s waiting in London. Time to move.

EXT. IFFLEY LOCK – NIGHT

The tugboat Volga rocks gently under the amber glow of the Isis Farmhouse lights. Ducks gather along the bank. Rain glistens on the solar panels. Dan loads supplies while Hamish inspects the digital charts.

DAN
You really think this old tub can make it to Iran?

HAMISH
If it can float, it can travel. Trust the river, not the chattering #dotcons online.

He starts the engine. The tug hums to life.

HAMISH
Next stop—the North Sea. Then the world’s forgotten backwaters.

They push off into the mist as Oxford recedes behind them, the city lights reflecting faintly on the black water.

FADE OUT.

TITLE CARD:
“The Voyage of the Volga has begun.”

#boatingeurope

The #OMN Path: Openness as Revolution

This is about revolution as regeneration, not only destruction. In an era built on tech dependency, revolution isn’t only about smashing the machines, it’s about liberating them. Turning tools back into commons, not commodities. It’s composting the toxic monoculture of the #dotcons into fertile ground for the #openweb to grow again. Revolution means reclaiming agency, not blindly rejecting technology, but re-rooting it into light, human-scale, transparent, and accountable relationships.

The #openweb as infrastructure for freedom, isn’t just a technical architecture, it’s a social contract. Revolution means re-establishing that contract through the #4opens. When we build networks this way, we decentralize power, not just servers. The #KISS act of publishing, federating, and remixing information freely is itself revolutionary in a world where everything is locked behind paywalls and algorithms.

Tech as commons, not commodity, We’ve learned that “innovation” under capitalism means enclosure and surveillance. Revolution in this context looks like refusal of extraction: creating cooperative infrastructures that are not driven by profit but by maintenance, care, and shared use. Think of community built #p2p mesh networks, open hardware, peer-to-peer storage, and federated #ActivityPub publishing as revolutionary paths – not add-ons, but foundations.

Cultural and cognitive shifts, shifting the cultural narrative from “user” to participant. From “consumer” to custodian. The real struggle is against the #deathcult of endless growth and the #geekproblem of technocratic detachment. It’s about re-learning how to think together, rebuilding trust, and balancing the #fluffy (care, empathy, collaboration) and the #spiky (truth, resistance, boundaries).

Direct action in the digital today looks like:

  • Practicing digital mutual aid – sharing skills, hosting, dev, and care.
  • Bridging online and offline organising, connecting digital tools to local struggles for housing, food, land, and rights etc.

Above all, any real revolutionary network – like the #OMN – has to strip away the old skins of power. No hierarchies. No hidden structures. No property games. No fetishizing of tools, status, or “official” etiquette.

If we’re building something new, we can’t carry the unconshuse ghosts of the old world with us. That means not just saying we’re open, but being #4opens. Open in decisions, and open in how decisions are made. Transparent in process, not just in outcome. Coherent theory is practice, and practice is theory.

Everyday life has to reflect the world we want to grow. That means composting the commodity mindset, no trading social trust for personal gain. It means building through shared assemblies, through community, through small and self-directing circles that stay alive to change and challenge.

The structure of the #OMN should always be simple, transparent, and direct, so that anyone can walk in, understand it, and shape it. No special knowledge required, no gatekeeping. Thousands of “unprepared” people able to join, act, and make it their own. That’s what #4opens means, a living culture of clarity and participation.

Only when a movement reflects the decentralized, self-organizing community it wants to bring into being can it avoid becoming another elitist shell, another bureaucracy pretending to be radical.

When the #OMN does its work right, it doesn’t stand above the revolution, it dissolves into it, like a thread into a healing wound, leaving behind not an organization, but a living network.

That’s the path: community, openness, trust, and the messy joy of self-organization.

The Mess is Boiling

We’re in a mess, our worship of the #deathcult has driven emissions to another record: the world’s CO₂ levels jumped by 3.5 parts per million from 2023 to 2024 the largest single-year increase on record. Our decision to leave the #nastyfew in charge – our short-sightedness and worship of greed – has pushed the planet beyond the stable ecosystem that supported human life. We have done this for nothing, only for big numbers to go up, for nothing. The one planet we know that can support life is being burnt to a crisp for nothing.

There are two reasons. First: we’re still burning, still digging, still feeding the growth obsession. Emissions are rising – the curve is bending, but not nearly fast enough. Second: the planet’s natural buffers – forests, wetlands, oceans – are weakening. The carbon sinks are choking: less CO₂ is being absorbed and more remains suspended in the atmosphere.

The math is brutal and simple: more in, less out. The atmosphere fills faster; the climate accelerates. This isn’t a surprise – scientists warned us for decades – but the facts are stark: we’ve locked in more than 1.5°C of warming. The UN has said it plainly. In the UK, the Climate Change Committee told the government to start planning for a +2°C world. That’s not a prediction, it’s a plan for failure.

If we want credibility beyond our grassroots #DIY bubble to change and challenge a wider #mainstreaming audience, we must call out both corruption and profiteering within the so-called eco industry as well as celebrate any genuine innovation. Otherwise, billions are spent on initiatives that inflate costs while ‘eco leaders’ jet around in privilege and luxury. Tens of millions in the West are angry about this corruption and injustice. But the effect is negative, that anger is feeding a hard shift to the right which will #block any meaningful progress toward sustainability.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The solutions exist and are already working in many places, but we’re not scaling them quickly enough. Renewables are expanding, but too slowly. Deforestation is slowing, but not enough to save the canopy. Methane-detection and fixes are finally being reported more widely – responses have risen from around 1% to 12% – but that’s still negligible compared with what’s required.

The story of the living world since 1970 is one of catastrophic loss: roughly 73% of wildlife populations wiped out. The curve may flatten slightly at the end, but only after the living world has been gutted. That’s not balance, that’s exhaustion.

The catastrophe we are facing is because of a tiny number of powerful actors and their enablers, pushed past tipping points in multiple systems. Warm-water corals have crossed thresholds: the ocean is too hot for recovery in many regions; collapse is now locked in. The Amazon risks drying into Savannah. Ice sheets are destabilising. Methane is beginning to be released from thawing tundra. We’ve crossed a red line.

Meanwhile, political theatre keeps serving up delays and rollbacks. A global carbon tax for shipping was scuppered by hardline actors; the Net Zero Banking Alliance collapsed under pressure. While leaders squabble, the Atlantic produced one of its strongest-ever storms for this time of year – Hurricane Melissa – supercharged by waters heated by our pollution.

For anyone paying attention, recent months have been the worst climate months on record, not only in numbers but in meaning. We’ve forced the planet into feedback loops. Scientists warned this would happen; watching it unfolds brings a new grief.

Yet despair is not a plan. The #deathcult wants us paralysed, to claim “it’s too late.” But this isn’t binary. A planet at 1.5°C is bad; at 2°C it’s worse; at 3°C it’s catastrophic. Every fraction of a degree matters. Most projections today point to a 2.5–3.0°C increase by century’s end under optimistic political assumptions. A more realistic projection, accounting for slower, fragmented action, could be 3.0–3.5°C by 2100.

From a #spiky perspective: Western electorates are increasingly choosing far-right, climate-denying parties. Growth is capitalism’s lifeblood, but it’s death for the environment. Leaving decisions that affect society to a tiny, profit-driven minority is morally unacceptable. This isn’t a technological problem we lack the tools to solve – we have the tools. Instead, a relatively tiny number of selfish actors and their fear and greed are blocking meaningful change.

From a #fluffy perspective: Individuals, billions of us, can act. Start with these everyday steps:

Eat a plant-based diet instead of meat and dairy.

Use public transport, cycling and trains instead of cars.

Buy less; choose used over new whenever possible.

Insulate homes and reduce energy consumption.

Support and use renewable energy: solar and wind.

We can’t walk away from this, the only option is challenge. Reconciling this fluffy and spiky debates is the hardest part: we must act without illusions. We may never “win” in a clean, final sense, but our actions still matter. The difference between 2°C and 3°C will cost billions of lives. The difference between despair and defiance is the grassroots #DIY future we need to seed and grow.

From the spiky side, some argue for direct action: break laws that protect destructive industries, sabotage systems that perpetuate ecological harm, or withdraw labour to halt the economy. These are radical proposals with profound ethical and practical consequences.

From the fluffy side: consider moderating those impulses. Channel energy into mass organising, nonviolent direct action, community resilience, and building alternatives that scale. We need both defiance and construction: refuse what destroys us and build what sustains us. That is how we turn grief into resolve. From the fluffy side, maybe mediate your blocking of this needed spiky path?

At best, the old #mainstreaming was about equality in worshipping the #deathcult

The old #mainstreaming was only in a limited way about freedom, so we now need to focus on more on what it was about, equality in obedience. Equality in our blinded worship of the #deathcult: growth, consumption, competition, endless mess on a dying planet.

That’s why #fashernista liberal progressivism is always a dead end problem, it plays radical, says radical, but composts nothing. At best, it sells rebellion as a lifestyle. It’s equality inside the system, not about freedom from it.

We’ve seen this play out a thousand times. Movements rise, fresh and alive, then get polished into campaigns, reports, and consultancy slides. Grassroots becomes “stakeholder.” Vision becomes “strategy.” Change becomes “branding.” All form, no compost. All language, no shared life.

Any real change, living change, means turning the dead weight of institutions, egos, and fear into fertile soil. It’s messy, collective, risky. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t chase funding and #NGO approval. It grows because it has to.

That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) path is about – composting the old #techshit, the #dotcons, and the NGO decay into something living again. Media that belongs to no one but serves everyone, built on the #4opens.

So the real question is simple. What does real change and challenge look like to you? How do we build it together, in the open, without falling back into the same polite obedience that killed everything before?

The #OMN and the #4opens aren’t abstract ideas, they’re tools for action. If we’re serious about composting the old world into something living, we need hands in the soil, not just words in the air. Here’s how people can start now, from wherever they stand:

#FOSS coding: Build the #openweb, not the #closedweb. Work on #Fediverse tools – join existing native #fashernista projects like Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, Funkwhale, or the more useful #OMN itself. Fix bugs, improve UI, write docs, or just help test and report issues.

Use the #4opens in practice: No private repos, no hoarding, public decision-making, everyone can use it. Compost old code: take abandoned projects and adapt them. Don’t build shiny new tech for ego points, fix what’s already here. If you’re practical, run small community servers: self-host media, blogs, Fedi instances. Learn how networks breathe.

Then we have social activism, keep it social, messy, and grounded. Form local affinity groups around #openweb media – film nights, repair cafés, public jams. Document everything: record protests, community stories, forgotten spaces.

The next #Indymedia starts with people saying this matters. Challenge control where you see it growing – in meetings, projects, #NGOs, progressive spaces. Ask: is this open? Who holds power here? What’s being hidden? Compost negativity: don’t waste energy on flame wars. Turn frustration into content, conversation, and code.

Avoid the #NGO trap – don’t let money dictate the mission. Use micro-funding and co-ops:
OpenCollective, Liberapay, cooperative hosting. Keep the process/books open: publish budgets, donations, and decisions publicly (#4opens). Value labour differently, not everything needs to be paid. Shared work and mutual aid count as real economy.

Bridging to #NGOs and Institutions but don’t get eaten. Engage, but on your terms, use the #4opens as a boundary tool. If an #NGO don’t work openly, walk away. Offer bridges, not control. Help NGOs learn openness, federate, don’t integrate.

Bring culture into the conversation. Explain why open process and transparency are political acts, not technical choices. Stay autonomous: The moment an institution starts setting your agenda, compost it.

Build the commons, not empires. Everything we do should feed back into the collective soil.
* If you build a tool, make it usable by others.
* If you make media, licence it open.
* If you host something, teach others how to host too.

This is how we win: not through scale, but through replication. Small, self-organizing, composting networks connected through trust. Remember, revolution isn’t about blowing up the system. It’s about composting what’s dead, sharing what’s alive, and keeping the soil open for what’s next.

#openweb #nothingnew #techshit #OMN #fashernista #mainstreaming #deathcult

The Blockchain Socialist: Self-Destruction as Theory

The Blockchain Socialist podcast is the deluded self-destructive talking about the deluded self-destructive in tech. It’s a mirror of our time: intellectuals dissecting the ruins while still worshipping the same #deathcult gods that caused the collapse.

I am listening to an example of this Urbit – about a hardcoded, reactionary tech dream of order built on decentralization, doomed from the start. Not only because the code is bad, but because the culture is. Control disguised as liberation. Hierarchy dressed up as protocol.

This pointless conversation, like so many in the blockchain mess, shows the core #geekproblem: A culture so desperate to escape (old)capitalism that it rebuilds it, line by line, in smart contracts and hard tech algorithms. The people of the blinded tech #deathcult feed on this delusion. Which rewards cleverness over care, abstraction over community, and always, always mistakes power for freedom.

If we want a real alternative, it won’t come from this technocratic dystopias or tokenized cooperation. It will come from composting this mess, from projects grounded in the #4opens, from the living soil of the #openweb, from people who choose the path of trust over control.

Listen to this chattering on the dark enlightenment if you must, but listen as you’d watch decay: as part of the cycle. The old world breaking down so something new can grow.

#OMN #geekproblem #techshit #nothingnew #deathcult

The Open Media Network: Composting the Dead Systems

#FOSS and open source is always political. Let’s say that out loud, because it’s easy to forget. The very idea of open collaboration, of sharing code, ideas, and stories freely, was never a neutral stance. It was, and remains, a radical act of refusal. Refusal to privatize creativity. Refusal to turn cooperation into competition. Refusal to let the #deathcult of neoliberalism define what freedom means.

From the early days of free software and the #4opens, to the #openweb and #Indymedia, the roots of our digital commons grew from solidarity. People gave their labour not for profit or prestige, but because they believed we’d all be better off together, if we stopped rewriting the same bits of code in isolation and started building commons instead of empires.

That’s not apolitical – that’s revolutionary. But over time, the #dotcons wrapped this labour in corporate branding, turning our shared tools into their private profit. They renamed exploitation “innovation.” They turned our commons into capital. The result? A generation of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, and fear of change.

People see their talent, their work, their lives wasted, buried under managerial control, compliance, and hierarchy. This is not just a technical story; it’s a moral one. We need to work to stop this “common sense” apathetic path of waste. The #deathcult is the slow deletion of memory, looking back:

  • Think of #Indymedia – once a global blaze of collaborative media freedom, later smothered by internal bureaucracy and external hostility.
  • Think of #visionOntv’s attempt to reboot on #PeerTube – an echo of that radical history, only to see ten years of grassroots video quietly unfunded, deleted, shadowbanned, “de-prioritized.”

Bureaucrats, NGOs, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash. That’s what the suffocation of freedom looks like today, not yet jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory. The #deathcult doesn’t need to crush rebellion outright; it just needs to keep people afraid. It thrives on fear and hierarchy – the illusion that safety comes from control.

They call it “stability.” But as Ursula K. Le Guin warned in The Dispossessed, obedience doesn’t create stability – it creates death. The capitalist world of Urras ran on obedience. The anarchist world of Anarres survived on trust and mutual responsibility. We face that same choice today, every day: control or change, Urras or Anarres, death or life.

The path we need to take is composting the #closedweb. The natural world already knows what we’ve forgotten: compost happens.

When something dies, it breaks down.
From that decay, new life takes root.

The same is true of culture and technology. The #closedweb and #dotcons are already rotting, bloated with ads, surveillance, and fear. For 20 years, they’ve trapped our creativity and turned every act of sharing into data extraction. We don’t need more “innovation” in this rot. We need composting.

That’s what the #OMN – the Open Media Network – is for. To take what’s broken and turn it back into living soil. A simple, federated network built on the #4opens – open data, open process, open code, open standards – to grow grassroots media ecology. Not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons. Because revolution is not only destruction – it’s also renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living can grow.

Choosing life, choosing change. Stands for the living side of that choice – open, messy, collective, and grounded. It can’t offer safety or stability. It can push growth, courage over comfort, collaboration over control.

As Le Guin wrote:

“You cannot buy the revolution.
You cannot make the revolution.
You can only be the revolution.”

Let’s be it, compost the dead systems and make space for what’s next, act on remembrance, rebellion, and renewal please.

Change is Freedom, Change is Life

You don’t get transformative change by building according to the incentives of the dominant system. A post inspired by rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as part of the Utopia Reading Group in #Oxford

“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Most people choose the easy path: they find a nice, safe hierarchy and settle in. They obey the rules, repeat the slogans, and mistake obedience for belonging. They stop thinking for themselves. They stop changing.

But change is freedom. Change is life.

Le Guin’s The Dispossessed captures the tension perfectly – between the anarchic, cooperative world of Anarres and the closed, hierarchical planet of Urras. It’s not only a science-fiction metaphor; it’s the current mirror of the #openweb we refuse to look into. The “open” world we imagine is already all around us, fragile, fragile seedlings buried beneath layers of control, ego, and fear.

This is the mess we need to compost, we see it every day. Talented people watching their work and lives being wasted. Good minds submitting to stupid ones. Strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change.

Looking back at web history, think of how #Indymedia burned bright for a moment, then was strangled by internal control and external hostility. Think of how the second reboot – visionOntv on PeerTube – tried to keep that radical history alive, only to collapse again under neglect, lack of support, and the dominance of #dotcons platforms. Ten years of grassroots videos deleted, shadowbanned, or “de-prioritized.” That’s oftern what the suffocation of freedom looks like, not jackboots, but the slow deletion of memory.

Everywhere, the potential for something living and new gets buried under the weight of control. When a grassroots project loses its edge because it’s easier to fit into “funding priorities.” When energy turns to exhaustion, creativity to compliance, rebellion to report-writing. This is the logic of the #deathcult – the slow suffocation of change.

The #deathcult thrives on fear and hierarchy, the illusion that safety comes from control.
It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that the system teaches them not to. Managers, bureaucrats, “leaders” are all terrified of what real openness might unleash.

The banality of obedience. Le Guin warned us that the danger of obedience is not stability, it’s death. Urras, the rich capitalist world, runs on obedience. Anarres, the poor anarchist moon, survives on mutual responsibility.

You can’t get transformative change by operating according to the incentives of that system.
That’s why NGO culture and corporate-funded “innovation” projects always fail the real test.
They replicate the very control structures they claim to challenge.

The composting of culture, the natural world understands what our institutions forget: compost happens whether you want it to or not. What’s dead breaks down, and from that decay, new life takes root.

The same is true for culture and technology. The #dotcons and #closedweb platforms trap creativity and channel it into profit. They turn every act of sharing into data extraction, every connection into surveillance. They turn good minds into “content” and living movements into metrics.

We don’t need more “innovation” within this rot, we need composting. That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) is for, taking what’s broken and turning it back into living soil.
A simple, federated network built on the #4opens to grow real, grassroots media again, not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons.

Revolution is not destruction; it’s renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living may grow. Revolution is our obligation, our hope of evolution.

Choosing life over control, to choose change is to choose life. To cling to control is to choose decay. The #OMN is one path to life, open, messy, collective. The alternative is more of what we already have: talent wasted, good minds ground down, courage strangled.

Le Guin’s lesson still stands:
“You cannot buy the revolution.
You cannot make the revolution.
You can only be the revolution.”

Let’s be that change. Let’s compost the dead systems, and make space for what’s next.

#4opens #openweb #OMN #nothingnew #techshit #deathcult #TheDispossessed #UtopiaReadingGroup

Finding the Rainbow Gathering

How fascism actually works

How can we get people to see that #Fascism isn’t only about goose-stepping soldiers or dictators shouting from balconies – that’s the cartoon version. The current danger sits much closer to home. Fascism is the extreme end of a spectrum that runs right through our everyday lives: hierarchy, obedience, control, and fear dressed up as “common sense.”

It’s an old story of the #nastyfew controlling the many through managed fear. A dictator doesn’t rise from nowhere, they’re made possible by the people who go along quietly. Not because they’re zealots, but because they’re scared of losing their jobs, their status, their comfort.

That’s the quiet machinery of fascism: not just one man with a plan, but a whole system of compliance. Teachers, engineers, clerks, journalists, in the 1930s most joined the Nazi Party not out of belief, but because they had to in order to work. It wasn’t terror of death that ruled them, but terror of being left out.

And this hasn’t gone away, it’s still the mess we swim in. The #deathcult of #neoliberalism runs on the same fuel. The #NGO world, the corporate #dotcons, the mainstream media, all are built on quiet obedience and careerist cowardice. “Don’t speak up, you’ll lose your funding, your platform, your relevance.”

As Upton Sinclair said: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” That’s how evil becomes banal, not in the villains, but in the everyday silences that pushes system over all of us.

So when people say, “I can’t speak up, I’ll lose my job,” I get it. But understand what that means, it’s the same mechanism that built the worst social systems in history. The real question is what happens after the first person speaks out. Because there always has to be a second, and a third. That’s how the wall cracks – not with one heroic act, but with collective courage.

This is what we’re trying to nurture again with the #OMN – a network built not on fear or control, but on trust and openness. #4opens is our inoculation against fascism in tech. These are not only tech slogans, they’re social tools for courage, for rebuilding collective strength.

We need to compost the rot of obedience, turn it into soil for something alive again. The first one through the door often takes a hit, yes – but the rest of us can’t just stand there watching. Freedom isn’t found in silence or safety. It’s found in trust, in solidarity, in messy, shared action. We either move through that door together – or we stay in the dark alone.