In the traditional media and our social reflection of this – “Belief in markets”, is theological thinking disguised as economics. The market is a god, and economists its priesthood. Modern economic discourse treats “the Market” as: omniscient (“the market knows best”), omnipotent (“there is no alternative”), morally authoritative (“price signals reveal truth”), beyond democratic challenge (“don’t interfere, or you’ll anger it”)
It should be easy to understand this isn’t analysis, it’s faith. When something goes wrong, the response isn’t accountability, it’s ritual: austerity, deregulation, labour discipline, “tightening belts”. This working class suffering becomes a necessary sacrifice to restore favour. That’s why at the #OMN we called it the #deathcult – normal people are expected to die, quietly, so the system can live.
Priests, temples, and worshippers, every religion has hierarchy, in this mainstream one: Central bankers are high priests, rating agencies are oracles, think tanks are seminaries, media pundits are evangelists, platforms are temples, metrics are scripture. It’s all theological thinking all the way down disguised as economics
The closer you are to the god (capital, liquidity, investment flows), the more authority you’re granted. Those far away – workers, communities, the climate – are treated as abstractions, “externalities”. And, like all priesthoods, our elitists claim neutrality while enforcing doctrine.
Heresy is not allowed, questioning the market is treated as: naive, dangerous, emotional, “anti-growth”, “anti-business”, “unrealistic”. This mirrors religious heresy exactly. Then the last 40 years of #posttruth, once belief replaces evidence, language becomes performative, words are used to signal loyalty, not to describe reality.
This matters for the #openweb and #OMN. The #dotcons are the digital expression of this religion, encoding market theology into infrastructure with engagement replaces meaning, growth replaces health, metrics replace judgment, extraction replaces relationship. This is why reform inside platforms fails. You’re not tweaking a tool, you’re challenging a faith system.
The #openweb threatens this religion because it decentralises authority, reintroduces human judgment, values trust over metrics, treats technology as means, not destiny. That’s apostasy.
Why “fairer worship” isn’t liberation, as most progressive #mainstreaming wants more inclusive access to the temple, fairer distribution of sacrifices, representation among the priests. That has real short-term value, yes. But it never questions the altar itself.
The #OMN position is different, stand up, walk out, build something else. A post-religious economics would look like: Signal thinking, not worship, markets as tools, not gods, economics as a social science, not divine law. Values decided democratically, not revealed by price. Survival and care as non-negotiables, growth as optional, not sacred. This aligns directly with our insistence on balancing social value and personal value.
This framing cuts through, by calling it religion we break the spell. People can see faith masquerading as fact, priests masquerading as experts, sacrifice masquerading as necessity, they can no longer pretend this is “just how the world works”. That’s why this language matters. It’s not rhetorical excess – it’s diagnosis. And diagnosis is the first step to composting the #deathcult and planting something that can actually keep people alive.
Most mainstream journalism is not about public truth, it’s about platform survival. This shite pile is why almost everything is noise, what gets called “news” today, when It’s not straight up propaganda is shaped by: attention metrics, outrage cycles, advertiser safety, institutional access, career risk management.
That’s why it feels so empty, even when it’s “factually” correct. The framing is already captured, journalism inside the logic of the #deathcult, wearing progressive, neutral, or technocratic costumes. So yes: most #mainstreaming news is noise, not because it’s all fake, but because it is: structurally irrelevant to challenge lived power, allergic to root causes, incapable of imagining alternatives, It’s mess because it job is to explain the world in ways that prevent change.
Signal vs noise is a useful distinction, signal isn’t “better facts” its orientation. Noise at best tells you a narrow view of what happened today, who said what in this narrow view, which team is winning in this view, how to feel about this. Signal doesn’t chase this novelty, it tracks patterns, power, and consequence.
What would “signal journalism” actually look like? Practically and philosophically, signal journalism would start from social need, not market demand, not “what will people click?” but “what do people need to know to act together?” Signal helps you understand, why things keep happening, who benefits structurally, what capacities are being destroyed or built, where collective agency still exists.
It’s thus explicitly about power, not pretending neutrality where none exists, rather about who is protected and who is exposed. It doesn’t confuse balance with truth, it treats people as participants, not audiences
Traditional media and #dotcons journalism assumes: speaker → audience → consumption.
Signal journalism assumes: participants → shared inquiry → shared action.
Today, too much journalism is caught in this trap. Precarious journalists + algorithmic discipline = fear-driven reporting. When private greed meets public need, this is the path of corruption. Working journalism is supposed to be: a public good, a memory system, a mediation layer for democracy. But the current mess is optimized for: extraction, surveillance, behavioural control, brand safety. So even “good” journalism becomes structurally conservative. This is why reform inside the same platforms fails.
This is where projects like the #OMN matters: shared media, shared process, shared memory. “The capitalism of digital platforms makes labour discipline more rigid… subordinate and precarious at the same time.” The constant “now now now” is a discipline mechanism, its fake urgency.
Signal journalism asks:
what is structurally urgent?
what is manufactured urgency?
what requires patience and continuity?
Why this is an #OMN problem (and opportunity). The OMN was never about “better content”, it is about changing the conditions under which content exists. This is signal journalism: federated publishing, shared archives, transparent process, local grounding, slow trust-building. In other words: social infrastructure first, content second.
On this path #Indymedia worked not because it was perfect, but because it was situated, collective, and accountable to real communities, not metrics.
The hard part – Signal is harder than noise because: it doesn’t flatter identities, it doesn’t reward instant reaction, it often feels boring at first, it requires shared effort over time. Where noise feels alive… If we want journalism that matters, we have to build the soil it can grow in. That’s the #OMN path: less spectacle, more process, less worship, more walking out of the temple.
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters.
But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people off their knees to challenge the altar to stop the sacrifice. It rearranges the seating in the temple, feeding the deeper problem, obedience. Progressive mainstreaming accepts the frame, accepts the metrics, accepts the economy of extraction and then argues about distribution. It negotiates better terms with a machine that is killing us. That is not transformation, it’s managed decline.
The project of real change and challenge – the work the #OMN exists for – starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with people standing up and walking away. Walking out of the temple of the #deathcult we all live in, not in purity, utopia or comfort. But into mess, cooperation, unfinished tools, shared risk, and actual agency. This isn’t about better policies inside the system. It’s about building outside it, under it, alongside it – until the system hollowed itself out and no longer matters.
It’s about people picking up shovels, composting the wreckage, and growing something that can actually sustain life. This is simplicity #KISS#OMN
We have already seen the failures: lived through #Indymedia, the #NGO turn, the #dotcons capture, the #Fediverse repeating old mistakes. When we talk about #OMN, we’re trying to stop people from re-learning the same lessons by losing again. Silence would be complicity.
The #OMN is where critique becomes agency. It’s not about “promoting a project”, if we don’t talk about this without something like #OMN, critique collapses into doom, aesthetics, or personal exits. #OMN is a way to, act collectively, without lying about power, money, or governance.
Forgetting is how capture happens, the moment people stop naming alternatives, the space fills with managerial language, funding logic, and fear-based control. We talk about #OMN to keep the space open enough for something human to grow.
The #OMN is a path that resists #stupidindividualism, where most contemporary “solutions” reinforce isolation, personal brands, and individual safety strategies. #OMN starts from the assumption that survival and meaning are collective. We need to keep talking about this because almost nobody else does.
It’s unfinished – and that matters. It’s not about defending a polished system, instead, it’s about holding open a process. Talking about #OMN is how we invite others into the compost rather than presenting them with a finished product to consume.
We talk about #OMN because it’s a native way of saying: “We don’t have to repeat this. We can build differently, together, if we remember what already worked.”*
It’s not evangelism, it’s stewardship.
A few of us have been working on real, positive, horizontal social and technological solutions for over twenty years. Not hypotheticals, not vibes, things that actually work.
We know they work locally, we know they work socially. And after more than a decade building on the #fediverse, we know they can work in tech, at scale without going vertical, corporate, or authoritarian.
This isn’t speculative any more. Our creative task now – the #nothingnew work – is simply to combine what already works: Horizontal social practice, federated #openweb tech, trust-based governance. We already have a slate of projects waiting to be built: #OMN, #OGB, #indymediaback and #makinghistory. What’s missing is not ideas, it is people willing to show up and implement.
And here’s the hard truth: every time we try to talk about radical or progressive language, power, or structure, people retreat into #blocking and ignoring. The same unresolved tensions get replayed endlessly, nothing is mediated, nothing is grounded. Bad will accumulates, the social commons rots.
This rot isn’t accidental – it’s structural – To work our way out of this mess, we need both #fluff and #spiky. We need broad categories to think clearly, the #mainstreaming#fashernista rejection of this isn’t sophistication – it’s submission. It’s a soft, polite form of #deathcult worship.
You don’t dismantle a #deathcult by being nicer to it, you dismantle it by stopping your participation and building something better.
So this is the question, not rhetorical, not theoretical: Are you going to help make this happen? Are you going to pick up a shovel? Or are you going to stay on your knees, arguing about tone while the ground burns?
There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂 Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” – is killing us.
Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to find information about most things that actually matter. This isn’t accidental; it’s a structural #dotcons problem. Extraction, advertising, and algorithmic manipulation have replaced human discovery, context, and trust.
The same sickness runs through much of today’s open-source and free software world. Its governance models are still rooted in medieval political ideas: aristocrats, benevolent dictators, kings and courts. That might have muddled through in the 20th century, but it is obviously useless for the world we now live in.
The last twenty years trying to mediate this with neoliberal #stupidindividualism has only made things worse. The result is towering piles of steaming #techshit, endlessly churned, rarely useful, and increasingly disconnected from any healthy social reality. This is the #geekproblem made in: code, silicon and concrete.
The #mainstreaming disaster driven by #dotcons is obvious. We don’t need to relitigate it every five minutes. For motivation and clarity, let’s put them to one side and focus on what we can actually change. Our own tech culture is still hopelessly mired in the #geekproblem. So yes, we need to compost a lot of our own mess.
The path out of both the #closedweb and the geek cul-de-sac is not new. It’s old, boring, and powerful: trust, shared responsibility, and human-scale democracy. If we are serious, the #openweb has to be rebooted with grassroots democracy at its core. Social tech needs social governance. Without that, we are just recreating vertical power with nicer licences.
This is where #OGB (Open Governance Bodies) matter. With real democratic process, it becomes relatively simple to push the #dotcons back out of spaces they currently dominate by default. Without democracy, they will always win, not because they are smarter, but because they are organised.
Right now, we are drowning in the #mainstreaming mess. And worse, we are still adding to it. Every pointless project, every ego-driven fork, every governance-free platform accelerates #techchurn and deepens the rot. We need to stop pretending this is neutral.
Yes, “open standards” are a mess, always have been, but they are the mess we must build on until enough of the #openweb is rebooted – including democratic decision-making – to rejuvenate and civilise the standards bodies themselves. Strong democracy changes the game. With it, enclosure becomes contestable. Without it, we just get louder arguments and faster failure.
And when people doing obviously stupid things can’t understand what the #OMN hashtags mean? Click the hashtags and think, or stand and shout, then hit the block button. You get to choose 🙂 This is not rudeness, it’s focus. And focus is how we stop adding to the mess and start composting it into something that might actually grow.
The debate about so called #AI and large language models inside the #openweb paths is not, at its core, a technical argument. It is a question of relationship. Not “is this tool good or bad?” but how is it used, who controls it, and whose interests it serves.
This tension is not new, every wave of open communication technology has arrived carrying the same anxiety: printing presses, telephones, email, the web itself. Each was accused – often correctly – of flattening culture, centralising power and then when enclosed eroding human connection. And yet, each was also reclaimed, repurposed, and bent toward collective use when used within humanistic social structures. The #openweb path was obviously never about rejecting technology, it was about refusing enclosure.
On the #FOSS and the #openweb, we have always understood that tools are political. Not only because they contain ideology in their code, but because they embody power relations in how they are built, owned, governed, and deployed. The #OMN project grew from this understanding, it isn’t an anti-tech project, it is a re-grounding of technology in social process: trust-based publishing, local autonomy, messy collaboration, and human-scale governance. On this path we have to constantly balance the #geekproblem that servers mattered less than relationships, code mattered less than continuity.
#LLMs arrive into this tradition not as something unprecedented, but as something familiar: a tool emerging inside systems that are deeply broken. The danger is not that LLMs exist, the danger is that they are being normalised inside closed, extractive, #dotcons infrastructures.
What makes LLMs unsettling is not intelligence, they have none, It’s proximity. They sit close to language, meaning, memory, synthesis, things humans associate with thought, culture, and identity. When an LLM speaks fluently without being feed lived experience, then yes, it can feel hollow, verbose, even uncanny. This is the “paid-by-the-word” reaction many people have: form without presence, articulation without accountability. This discomfort is valid.
But confusing discomfort with real danger leads to the wrong response. #LLMs do not have agency, consciousness, or ethics, they don’t take responsibility, they cannot sit in a meeting, be accountable to a community, or live with the consequences of what they produce. Which means the responsibility is entirely ours. Just like with publishing tools, encryption, or federated protocols.
Much of the current backlash against “AI” is not about facts. It’s about vibe. People aren’t only disputing accuracy or pointing to errors. They’re saying: “This feels wrong.” That instinct is worth listening to, but it’s not enough. The #openweb tradition asks harder questions:
Who controls the infrastructure?
Can this tool be used without enclosure?
Can its outputs be traced, contextualised, and contested?
Does it strengthen collective capacity, or replace it?
Does it help people build, remember, translate, and connect, or does it manufacture authority?
An LLM used to simulate “wisdom”, speak for communities, and replace lived participation is rightly rejected. That is automation of voice, not amplification of agency. But an LLM used as:
an archive index
a translation layer
a research assistant
a memory prosthetic
a bridge between fragmented histories
…can work within in a humanistic path if it is embedded in transparent, accountable, human governance. The #openweb lesson has always been the same: you don’t wait for systems to fail – you build alongside them until they are no longer needed. On this path #LLMs will become infrastructure, the real question is whether they are integrated into: Closed corporate stacks, surveillance capitalism, and narrative control or federated, inspectable, collectively governed knowledge commons.
If the open web does not claim this space, authoritarian systems will. This is not about fetishising this so-called AI, nor about rejecting it on moral grounds. Both are forms of avoidance. The #OMN path is pragmatic:
build parallel systems
insist on open processes
embed tools in social trust
keep humans in the loop
keep power contestable
#LLMs can’t and don’t need to understand spirit, culture, or community, humans do. What matters is whether we remain grounded while using tools – or whether we outsource judgment, memory, and meaning to systems that cannot be accountable.
Every generation of the open tech faces this moment, and every time, the answer needs to be not purity, but practice. Not withdrawal, but responsibility. Not fear, but composting the mess and planting something better. #LLMs are just the latest shovel, the question is whether we use them to deepen the enclosure, or to help dig our way out.
On the #OMN and #openweb paths, the answer has never been abstract. It has always been: build, govern, and care – together.
In my life, what is real is people being beaten and shot, blood on the walls, evidence fabricated, mass arrests, torture in prisons, borders closing, and fear becoming an everyday condition. Fear isn’t imagined. Fear is rational.
What is real is watching a police officer chat casually one moment, then flip instantly into an instrument of state violence the next. A human being turns into a mechanism: boots stamping, braking toes, batons smashing heads, cameras destroyed, people dragged away. Hundreds detained illegally. This isn’t abstract. This is lived experience.
This is what power looks like when legitimacy erodes. And this is not new. History is full of these moments – when states retreat from consent and rely instead on force, surveillance, and spectacle. When violence becomes administrative, repression is normalized and denial becomes #mainstreaming policy.
What is not real is pretending that this violence is secondary to discomfort over language. What is not real is prioritising hurt feelings, tone-policing, or abstract arguments about phrasing. What is not real is treating “uncomfortable language” as a greater harm than broken bones, smashed lives, and stolen futures. There is a profound mismatch here.
People are upset about words because words feel manageable. Words can be moderated, reported, debated. State violence cannot. It is harder to face. It demands courage, solidarity, and risk. So attention is redirected, from material harm to symbolic offence. This is how reality gets inverted, this is too much of the mess of the last ten years.
Talking outside someone’s direct experience is not violence. Naming systems of power is not oppression. Describing brutality is not the problem, the problem is the brutality itself. When repression becomes normal, discomfort becomes a distraction. It’s a luxury concern in a world where people are being beaten, imprisoned, and erased. Policing language while ignoring violence is not moral clarity, it’s moral collapse.
If we cannot distinguish between discomfort and domination, between harsh words and broken bodies, then we have already lost our grounding in reality. What is real is violence backed by the state. Everything else is noise, no matter how it makes you “feel.”
Yep, it’s a mess, that needs mediating for any outcome other than more mess to compost.
#mainstreaming people are wilfully blind and alt people tend to be pessimistic, it’s a problem. Historically, real social change doesn’t arrive by waiting for collapse. It arrives because people are active, they build alternatives in advance, strong enough to bridge the mess when existing systems fail and lose legitimacy. This isn’t theory. It’s how change has always happened.
If you are interested in a better outcome, we need to remember, build first, collapse later is the lesson that we keep forgetting. You don’t wait for the crash, you prepare, are ready to catch people when it comes.
Projects like the #OMN are currently blocked because capitalism, especially after forty years of neoliberalism, has poisoned our idea of individualism. We’re trained to see ourselves as isolated actors rather than members of a society capable of collective care and collective power. This keeps us passive while the systems hollow out around us.
One of the biggest blocks to change is the belief that politics is something done to us, rather than by us. People blame politicians for everything – climate breakdown, cultural decay, economic precarity – while avoiding responsibility for the systems we participate in daily.
In the working alt paths, we build parallel systems to make change happen. Revolutions don’t begin with a dramatic break. They begin quietly, when people redirect time, energy, trust, and care into structures that actually work. Gradually, those structures grow. Eventually, the old ones hollow out and lose relevance.
But we are society. It starts and ends with us. Learning how to help your neighbours now – feeding people, housing people, sharing skills, organising locally – isn’t charity. It’s practice. It builds the muscles, myths, and traditions we’ll need when systems fail harder than they already are. And they will fail. The only uncertainty is how badly.
This can start anywhere – including with shared tech infrastructure like the #OMN. You don’t need permission, mass consensus. You, simply, need commitment, continuity, and care.
Over the last decade, #techchurn has produced mountains of #techshit. Both mainstream and “alternative” tech piles need composting if we want to grow a more humane world. From a grassroots perspective, many past alternatives – anarchist, ecological, socialist – did work imperfectly, until they were eaten, flattened, or professionalised by #NGO, #fashernista, and #deathcult dynamics.
Stepping away from the tech mess means composting it. It’s good that people try not to push pointless tech projects. And let’s be honest: most new tech projects are pointless. In the era of #climatechaos, we don’t have the luxury of pretending otherwise.
That’s already happening, unevenly and messily, especially across the #Fediverse. The real question isn’t whether parallel systems will emerge. The question is whether the balance will be humane, democratic, and resilient, or authoritarian and exclusionary.
To figure out what’s worth building, we need to do #4opens reviews and publish them. This isn’t gatekeeping – it’s collective responsibility. Let’s build a shared culture of useful tech, together. The task now is to reboot what worked, using federated #4opens tech, and then innovate forward from there. This is where #OMN and #indymediaback sit: not nostalgia, but composted continuity.
In the era of #climatechaos, too many people are on their knees worshipping the #deathcult. We need to call pointless things pointless – clearly, calmly, without fear. If that idea scares you, ask why. Fear is how obedience is maintained. #fashernistas, get off your knees. Use the #4opens as a shovel. There are piles of techshit that need composting.
Collapse won’t be clean or total. It’s unlikely we’ll see a single cinematic moment. What’s far more likely is a long series of crises: recessions, austerity, market “corrections”, institutional decay, shrinking legitimacy. Capitalism isn’t stable. It’s inherently extractive and unsustainable. Growth has been artificially inflated to concentrate wealth upward, while the real ecological, social, and psychological costs are pushed downward. The illusion of growth hides the reality of extraction.
Power won’t step aside politely, as legitimacy shrinks, power concentrates. Smaller and smaller groups cling to control through coercion, surveillance, and force. History shows that entrenched power has to be pushed over, not waited out. That doesn’t mean chaos. It means having something better ready.
All thinking is critique. If you aren’t looking at faults, you probably aren’t looking at the thing at all. Don’t be afraid of that. Gardening requires digging. Lift your head, your shovel. Dig, and plant.
Without parallel institutions, collapse just creates a vacuum. And vacuums get filled by the worst actors. What actually matters doesn’t appear magically after a crisis. Community, care, knowledge, trust, culture, and shared infrastructure are built slowly, beforehand, by people who show up consistently.
The #Fediverse is an accidental #openweb reboot – a product of #fashernista energy, messy and decentralised. Herding cats is hard, but it’s not a flaw. It’s the material we’re working with. One path forward is #OGB – grassroots, DIY producer governance – building shared norms and flows without hard centralisation.
This isn’t apocalypse fantasy, it’s continuity. Waiting for the system to fall is a losing strategy. Protesting without building is noise. Commentary without construction is theatre.
If you want change: build alongside, build underneath, build beyond. That isn’t extremism, it’s history.
On the #OMN and #openweb paths, when I talk about not being a “prat”, am not talking about a personal insult in the everyday sense, I am naming a pattern of behaviour that actively blocks collective work, let’s be explicit. A prat is someone who:
Performs critique instead of doing the work
They talk about problems endlessly but won’t touch the shovel. They judge seeds for not being trees. They dismiss unfinished work while contributing nothing usable themselves. This isn’t accountability – it’s avoidance dressed as intelligence.
Defaults to vertical thinking in horizontal spaces
They try to manage, gatekeep, or “correct” instead of co-creating. In #OMN terms, this is importing #dotcons logic into open systems.
Treats values as weapons, not commitments
They quote rules, codes, or ideals to hit people with, not to strengthen the commons or protect the vulnerable. A code of conduct, used this way, becomes a club. The prat believes they’re being ethical – while undermining ethics in practice.
Confuses identity with contribution
They think being right, being radical, or being aligned is more important than building something that works. This is #fashionista behaviour: aesthetic politics, purity signalling, zero tolerance for mess.
Can’t handle undefined space
They panic when things aren’t: Finished, branded, institutionally sanctioned, measurable in platform metrics. Because #openweb work is by nature undefined, they respond with fear, defensiveness, or hostility. This is where “VERY negative when challenged” shows up.
Redirects anger
Their frustration is often justified, but it gets aimed at: Other builders, messy experiments, imperfect allies. Instead of: Centralized power, enclosure, #dotcons capture, #deathcult economics. This is how movements eat themselves.
What “prat” does not mean
It does not mean: Someone asking honest questions, someone disagreeing in good faith, someone making mistakes, someone learning in public. Mess, failure, argument is allowed. Blocking isn’t.
Why this matters
The #openweb only exists if people are free to: Start badly, iterate publicly, cooperate loosely, build trust over time. Prat behaviour shuts this down by: Discouraging participation, freezing experimentation, replacing process with performance. That’s why we say it plainly, not to shame – but to clear the path.
If you’re not helping build, not helping others build, not protecting the space for building. Then stop throwing rocks, pick up a shovel, or step aside. That’s what we mean by “don’t be a prat” on the #OMN and #openweb paths.
Most social problems aren’t conspiracies – they’re #fuckups, we’re only human. You could say “most social problems are caused by social issues”, but that doesn’t land the same way 🙂 The problem isn’t secret cabals, it’s accumulated dysfunction, bad incentives, and people defending their tribe instead of fixing the plumbing.
A practical example of this is the core of the #geekproblem. Everything we do in tech is built on standards. That part is unavoidable. The real problem is who defines them, how, and in whose interests.
Some people like building sandcastles. That’s effectively what you’re doing if you just make stuff up in tech and pretend it exists in isolation. In reality, anything you build already sits on top of a huge pile of standards – protocols, formats, conventions, governance models. Denying that isn’t radical, it’s fantasy.
And this is where things derail: instead of talking about tech practically, people slip into tribalism. They argue identity, ideology, vibes – not architecture, interoperability, or power flows. You see endless positioning, almost no engineering.
“Open industrial standards” get dismissed as nebulous or boring, but they’re actually where the value is. They’re the difference between shared infrastructure and enclosed fiefdoms. The #openweb worked precisely because of this boring, collective work.
Let’s look at this a different way – Nationalism is a similar kind of abstraction – a nebulous idea that people pour meaning into. And it’s also where violence tends to appear. Tribalism can be beautiful, grounding, and human, but it can also turn toxic when it replaces thinking.
Some #dotcons are now larger than nation states, so the metaphor isn’t stretched at all. They control territory (platforms), populations (users), economies (attention and money), and law (terms of service). Yet we still pretend this isn’t political. The geek “problem” is a very 20th-century dysfunction: a narrow tribal mindset that mistakes technical cleverness for social wisdom. And it’s damaging us all.
People are up for change. The frustration and anger are real. But we need to work ourselves past the current #blocking energies – the endless arguments, purity tests, and performative conflict.
On this needed move, short and sharp is often more ethical than long and drawn out. Say what matters. Build what works. Use #4opens to cut through the fog.
We don’t need more right-wing myths. We need shovels.
Calls for #degrowth are becoming unavoidable, because the facts are unavoidable. We are in ecological overshoot. We have consumed too many resources and produced too much waste. #Climatechaos and social breakdown with collapsing biodiversity are not side effects, they are #KISS signals that the system is very out of balance.
Degrowth is not primarily a population problem, it is an overconsumption problem, concentrated in the global North and among the wealthy everywhere. How we talk about degrowth matters, some framings slip quickly from ecological limits into dangerous territory. Phrases like “the population needs to fall below two billion” are intended as ecological realism, but historically and politically they have horrific baggage. The idea of “surplus population” has always been used to justify violence against those least responsible for growth and extraction. It slides far too easily into genocidal thinking, even when that is not the speaker’s intent.
That is an ethical failure, not a rhetorical quibble. There is solid research – from Hickel and others – showing that it is technically possible to provide everyone on the planet with a humane standard of living using perhaps 30% of current global energy and material throughput, if resources are distributed differently and wasteful consumption is cut at the top.
This matters because it shifts the problem from how many people exist to how systems are organised. That doesn’t mean population decline is irrelevant. An honest ethics of degrowth has to address it, but carefully, explicitly, and without euphemism. Population change will happen through demographic transition, not coercion: lower birth rates, longer lives, ageing societies. This brings real challenges: fewer working-age people, care burdens, pension systems built on endless growth, and deeply unequal patterns of consumption that won’t disappear on their own.
The real challenge is simple, how do we draw down “standard of living” while maintaining and improving quality of life? That means separating wellbeing from throughput. Less energy and material use does not have to mean worse lives, but only if we redesign systems around care, sufficiency, public goods, and social infrastructure rather than accumulation and profit. Housing, transport, food, health, and culture can improve even as total consumption falls, but not within the current growth-obsessed economic #deathcult logic.
When we fail to do this deliberately, it very much not going to be a smooth transition. It is collapse: scarcity managed by force, inequality hardened, and a global replay of Europe’s dark ages, this time without a stable climate or functioning ecosystems to recover into. Degrowth without ethics becomes brutality. Ethics without real structural change becomes denial.
The task is not to decide who should disappear, but to decide what must stop, what must shrink, and what must be rebuilt so that fewer resources support better lives for everyone.
We still haven’t solved this. Looking back at a conversation from six years ago, what stands out isn’t disagreement – it’s how hard it is to even name the problem we keep circling.
Over the last 20 years, again and again, the discussion slips into the same dead end: personal value versus social value, framed through the language of #dotcons platforms, followers, influence, and business growth. What we need to learn from this is the confusion isn’t accidental, it is structural.
What we need is not only #socialmedia value, not engagement, not visibility. But offline value that exists between people, over time, as shared culture, trust, memory, and capacity. The chicken-and-egg problem, people ask: “What personal value do I get from this?”, “Will this help my business?”, “Can I use this without it using me?”
We need to compost, this messy common sense path. This is why the #OMN project was never about optimising personal outcomes. That #blocking framing belongs to platform logic, the idea that every action must be measurable in reach, influence, growth, or return. This is why the posts, like the one embedded above, people found “hard to understand” weren’t speaking that language at all. It were articulating what the #mainstreaming was #blocking and thus missing from our tech culture: social value.
What is hard to communicate is that social value doesn’t work like our current common sense thinks it does. You don’t extract it first and then decide whether it was worth it. Social value only emerges after people act collectively, without clear personal payoff in advance. Yes, personal value does flow from social value. Skills, relationships, meaning, resilience, opportunity. But it’s indirect, uneven, and slow. That makes it almost invisible inside systems trained to ONLY prioritise immediate, individual reward.
That’s why the conversation keeps short-circuiting, one of the early questions was whether the posts were meant to “influence followers”. That already assumes a vertical model: speaker → audience → outcome.
But #OMN thinking starts from a different place. It’s not about influencing people. It’s about creating conditions where different kinds of interaction can happen – horizontally, over time, without a central controller. That’s why the work often looks vague, unfinished, or “omelette-like”. Cultural values can’t be shipped as a product. It has to be grown, maintained, and defended collectively.
#Facebook was a comfort trap in hindsight. In the thread, several people describe using it pragmatically: staying in touch, organising events, maintaining real-world relationships. All true, and still kinda true today. But the counter-point raised then has only become clearer since: you don’t get to opt out of being used, no matter how carefully you think you’re using the system.
The lock-in effect (“everyone is on it”) was already obvious. What was less visible to meany people than was how disastrously deeply this would shape behaviour, politics, culture, and attention – and how hard it would become to imagine alternatives once that infrastructure was taken for granted.
Why this was hard to hear at the time? This conversation shows how difficult it is to talk about non-market value inside market-dominated spaces. Language itself becomes a barrier. People reach for familiar metrics because they have no shared vocabulary for anything else. So the discussion stalls. People get frustrated. It feels circular. Someone says “find out for yourself”, another hears that as dismissal. Nobody is wrong in isolation, but the frame itself is broken.
What we can learn now? Six years on, a few things are clearer: Social value is real, but it’s slow, collective, and hard to quantify. #dotcons platforms systematically erase the conditions needed for social value to emerge. Personal value derived from social value is indirect, not extractive. You can’t explain this cleanly inside systems optimised against it. This wasn’t a failure of communication. It was an early signal that we were trying to grow an open, cultural infrastructure inside environments hostile to its very existence.
Now is time to work on the unfinished path… #OMN project was – and still is – about creating space for social value to exist again: shared media, shared process, shared governance, shared memory. That was hard to see then, it’s still hard to see now. But the confusion in this old thread isn’t embarrassing. It’s instructive. It shows exactly where the fault lines are, and why the work has always been hard, messy, slow, and necessary.
Some things only make sense after you start doing them together #KISS
The impulse, it’s not wrong. What is wrong is how often that anger gets misdirected sideways, inward, and downward instead of upward, toward actual power.
A lot of people who think of themselves as “radical” aren’t being radical at all. They’re being assholes with better language. Cancel culture in 2020 played a similar role to political correctness in the 1990s: a way to signal virtue, police behaviour, and avoid confronting real power.
An example of this – done right, a code of conduct isn’t a weapon. It’s not a piece of paper you use to beat people with. It’s a declaration that you will protect the people who actually need protection – from harassment, abuse, and structural harm.
Done wrong, rules become clubs. People pick them up and hit each other with them. The wording becomes vague, moralistic, and performative. The enforcement becomes selective. And suddenly “safety” is being used to silence any disagreement rather than defend the vulnerable.
That failure creates space for bad actors, conservatives step in and pretend they’re “speaking truth to power” or “defending free speech”, when what they’re really doing is exploiting the mess to protect the normal hierarchy and privilege. They’re not wrong that something’s broken – they’re wrong about what and why.
The behaviour being criticised isn’t a tribe. It’s a mode of thinking, a widespread, unspoken #postmodernism that still dominates contemporary discourse. A style of politics where everything is relative, language replaces material reality, and moral positioning matters more than any outcomes.
This thinking eats movements alive, it fragments people, replaces strategy with signalling, and turns accountability into spectacle. Most importantly, it redirects energy away from those actually using power. This is a dangerous moment because we no longer have a shared baseline of reality. The #mainstreaming narratives are designed to divide, distract, and trigger – pulling attention away from concrete demands and real accountability.
That didn’t come from nowhere, forty years of #neoliberal economics hollowed out material security. At the same time, generations were trained in postmodern academic frameworks that are excellent at critique but terrible at building shared ground. Strip out material analysis, strip out class, strip out power – and you’re left with vibes, identity skirmishes, and endless internal conflict.
That’s what #OMN has always been pointing toward: rebuilding social truth, shared process, and horizontal power in a culture trained to fragment itself. Without that, we keep fighting each other – and the #deathcult keeps winning.
Looking back from the mid-2020s, the arc of #web03, #NFTs, and blockchain culture is very clear. What once promised (lied about) decentralisation, liberation, and a break from corporate capture now looks like the same, mess, #techcurn pattern repeating itself, yes it had new language, new branding, but it was easy to see it had the same underlying mess making dynamics.
As these #geekproblem projects hollowed out, the signs became hard to ignore. The technical optimism faded, the user bases thinned, and the economic logic exposed itself. What followed was totally predictable: spin. Makeup and perfume slapped onto decaying projects to hide the smell of rot and exploitation. Rebrands. New narratives. New demographics. Same extraction. This was the outcome of building “liberation tech” on foundations that still centred virtical money, speculation, and power concentration.
With these projects we are now in the zombie phase, projects kept moving, kept talking, kept selling – long after the animating ideas had died. Influencers and promoters continued to perform belief, even as any substance drained away.
This is a few years when #fashionista culture met #encryptionist ideology – aesthetics and technical absolutism snogging the undead remnants of a failed #deatcult vision. The result wasn’t in any way decentralisation; it was a simply a new enclosure. People weren’t being freed, they were being financialised, the money problem #KISS
At the core was a simple structural truth: #dotcons feed on money. Put money in, influence comes out. That logic doesn’t disappear just because you wrap it in cryptography or decentralised rhetoric. “Bad actors” weren’t anomalies – they were following the incentives as designed. Aany social good becomes just collateral damage. This is why the lie collapsed in te end.
The deeper harm and problem with #techcurn is each wave claims to have fixed the problems of the last. But each wave reproduces them, because this is what works when worshiping a #deathcult. This isn’t just a failed tech trend, the #techcurn disparity, driven by extraction systems cause enormous human harm, displacing livelihoods, concentrating power, and amplifying inequality at planetary scale.
These systems don’t fail harmlessly, they fail onto people. That’s why the call isn’t just to “be critical,” but to step away – and help others step away too. Not through purity exits or individual moralising, but through collective paths back to technologies built for people rather than profit, life over zombies
There has always been another path: the #openweb. Messy, imperfect, slower, less glamorous, but grounded in shared infrastructure, social trust, and human-scale governance. The #OMN approach doesn’t promise salvation. It offers compost instead of speculation. Process instead of hype. People over tokens.
A note on hashtags: And yes, the hashtags matter. Click them., search for them. They cut sideways through algorithms – small back doors into less mediated, less controlled ways of seeing. Not a solution, but a crack in the wall.
The current #Ai hype bubble is repeating this mess with a little more useful #LLM functionality, but on top of this is a huge mess of #techchurn, which will need composting.
Observation: some people go into news to speak truth from power – using institutions to legitimise the status quo and defend the worship of the #deathcult.
Others speak truth to power – using journalism to expose, question, and challenge unequal power and its consequences.
Only one of those serves the public interest #KISS
