Category: Non classé

The Mess – If You Don’t Value Things, You Destroy Them

For roughly 200 years, we’ve lived inside – and many of us under – a single system: global capitalism. In this system, value is not measured by care, connection, or collective wellbeing, but by market logic, if something cannot be priced, scaled, or exploited within that logic, it is treated as waste. This has a brutal consequence, that, if you do not actively value alternatives, you will “accidentally” destroy them. This applies to technology, culture, nature, and community alike.

In tech, this shows up as misplaced value. People keep using #mainstreaming tools – the platforms and apps of the #dotcons – not because they’re good, but because they’re easy, familiar, and socially reinforced, its habit masquerades as neutrality. But this behaviour actively erodes the alternatives we’ve built, draining energy from projects like #visionontv, #OMN, #OGB, and #indymediaback. It recentralises power, breaks human-scale governance, and reinforces #stupidindividualism.

This is where the balance between social change and technological change becomes critical. Social change without technology stalls. Technological change without social grounding fails, or worse, causes harm. The #OMN projects, and especially the #OGB, exist to bridge this gap.

The #OGB isn’t dogmatic, no single ideology owns it. That’s its strength, it’s a balanced framework that many groups could accept – if a committed few would actually implement it. But implementation is hard, because we’re surrounded by BLOCKING. #BLOCKING and the #deathcult are everywhere, including inside us. We all block, liberals block radical alternatives, dogmatists block flexible, balanced ones. Most people block anything that complicates their worldview or demands responsibility.

After forty years of #neoliberalism, this #deathcult logic has soaked deep into us. It fuels a vicious cycle of #stupidindividualism. Without community ownership and shared vision, our tools rot. Projects collapse into power struggles. People retreat into passivity or purity spirals. “Personal freedom” becomes a hollow slogan that accelerates collective collapse.

The loop looks like this: Individualism → Disconnection → Destruction → Fear → More individualism. Breaking this loop is messy. It has to be messy. That’s why we must reclaim ownership of our #openweb infrastructure. We need democratic instincts, not polished #PR, not market-driven clarity. We need to take the #KISS path – Keep It Simple, Stupid – precisely because simplicity is the hardest thing to sustain in a world of endless distraction.

And yes, this involves you, many people are passive, disengaged, even stupid, not because they’re bad, but because the system rewards disinterest and punishes care. Many can’t even see the problem because they’re fully submerged in it. That’s the real trap, is the invisible #BLOCK.

That’s what #OMN and #OGB are trying to push through. So yes, I’m pointing the finger at you. But I’m also inviting you: to build, to grow, to compost the myths we’ve been fed and cultivate something more real, more collective, more human #KISS

#Neoliberalism is in everything we look at, everything we touch. We should feel distaste when we see it, and revulsion when we handle it. That discomfort matters. Without it, nothing changes.

This may get unpleasant.

It probably needs to.

Building #OMN projects

Both #Indymediaback and #MakingHistory represent grassroots publishing models built around commons-based media rather than platform ownership. They differ in structure and interface, but share the same DNA: collective trust, open participation, and social moderation. The challenge – and opportunity – is to bridge these approaches, allowing interoperability while preserving their distinct paths.

#Indymediaback

Data model is the commons, most content exists as shared common’s data rather than owned posts. Authority comes from collective process rather than individual ownership.

The default core flows:

  1. Newswire (public, chronological flow). The newswire is the living river, anyone can contribute, but trusted contributors publish directly. Untrusted or unknown contributors enter moderation flow. Editorial collectives curate trusted streams feeding into the instance. Te news is chronological, raw and immediate to reflect street-level reporting. This flow priorities presence over polish – what is happening now.
  2. Features (curated layer) where features are the reservoir built from the river. Editorial collective crafts longer pieces that draw from newswire material to provide narrative framing and synthesis. This is to slow down the flow, too provide time for context and elevate significant stories. This layer introduces collective editorial voice without eliminating grassroots origin.
  3. Hidden (private moderation layer) Hidden is the dam, filtering toxic waste while preserving transparency internally by moderating untrusted content, not publicly visible unless released. This is used for spam control, conflict mediation and ethical decision-making. The goal is not censorship but collective filtering.

The default view structure is mostly fixed layout of:

  • Newswire (live stream)
  • Features (curated)
  • Hidden (private moderation)

Tags exist but are secondary. Think of a fixed landing page shaped by flows rather than algorithms.

Editorial Model is collective moderation by affinity-group consensus to build social trust through participation. Authority emerges from process, not ownership.

Core metaphor is a river feeding a reservoir, with a dam filtering toxicity.

#MakingHistory

MakingHistory evolves the model from chronological publishing toward narrative ecology.

Data Model: Fragment-first publishing. Media objects become composable fragments of text, images, video, audio with annotations. Stories emerge from assembling fragments rather than existing as single immutable posts.

Everything begins as a crafted piece, linking fragments together.

Context is explicit, when editing is iterative and collaborative.

Publishing is closer to historical archiving than newsroom reporting.

Tag-based flows are primary navigation. Rich tagging enables dynamic timelines, thematic streams and historical clustering. Instead of one homepage, many narrative paths emerge.

Moderation has a private curator layers to review, prioritise and archive. Moderation becomes gardening rather than gatekeeping.

Interface is dashboard-based with multiple parallel views and TweetDeck-style streams.

Users track themes rather than sites.

Core metaphor is a garden of stories with paths (tags) connect plots. Some bloom publicly, others compost behind the scenes.

All #OMN projects have shared DNA

Both systems treat data as commons, rely on collective moderation and maintain public/private split for trust-building. They resist corporate enclosure, support grassroots communication. Differences are primarily structural:

  • Indymedia = flow-first (timeline + editorial layer).
  • MakingHistory = narrative-first (linked stories + thematic streams).

The role of #OMN is to act as bridge infrastructure enabling interoperable flows, shared trust networks and cross-platform publishing. Through ActivityPub and #4opens principles we get transparency, participation, open standards and shared stewardship. #OMN enables federation not just technically but socially.

Open Questions (Design Challenges)

  1. Collective data ownership. Should commons data be managed through group structures? A possible model is groups hold stewardship rights, membership grants moderation/admin capabilities and legacy admin roles remain but fade into background. The goal is to shift from individual admin power → collective governance.
  2. Trust model is about trusted vs untrusted flows – what determines trust? Possible signals are group membership, instance reputation, individual history, tag-based reputation and source provenance. Trust must remain dynamic and reversible.
  3. Metadata layer becomes the backbone of federation.
  4. Every object as a wiki is a radical shift, each object has a history in this articles become evolving commons rather than static posts. A Wikipedia of news built from organic trust groups and street-level reporting. Narrative truth emerges from collective editing over time.

The deeper shift is not in just technical architecture, it is moving from publishing as broadcast → publishing as process, authority as ownership → authority as participation, fixed media → living commons. The aim is to rebuild #mainstreaming from below not more centralised media institutions. We need federated grassroots storytelling networks.

Funding Proposal: Open Media Network (#OMN) – Building Portable, Human-Centred Digital Commons

Stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives

#Musk is a useful example of the #nastyfew: wealthy technocrats wrapping themselves in the cloak of progress while undermining the foundations of any, let alone a just future. These stories and narratives about innovation are a high-tech rebrand of green capitalism, a slick façade masking the same old decaying systems of extraction, inequality, and authoritarianism.

The problem they push is that instead of confronting the #KISS causes of our social and planetary crises, these people offer us distraction: electric cars for the elitists, fantasies of Mars colonies, and #AI overlords dressed up as saviours. This isn’t transformation – it’s #deathcult worshiping continuity in crisis.

People like Musk are useful to the #deathcult because they peddle a seductive, market-friendly myth: that we don’t need to change our behaviour, our economics, or our power structures, we just need to upgrade our tech. Comforting, isn’t it? For those who benefit from the status quo, it’s the perfect nasty con.

He personally embodies the worst of the #geekproblem: the cult of the engineer, disconnected from social reality, obsessed with “fixing” the world through code and hardware while ignoring the human systems that create the problems in the first place. This is dead libertarian ideology dressed in the shrowed of innovation.

We urgently need to compost these myths. Not just resist them, actively decompose them, mix them with grounded knowledge, and grow something better from this soil.

That’s where projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) come in – a project seeded in the messy, composted soil of decades of grassroots media and digital commons. Unlike the sleek towers of technocratic illusion, #OMN is rooted in public-first values: transparency, participation, autonomy, and trust. It’s not about building new silos or chasing the next unicorn, it’s about connecting the islands of resistance, amplifying local grassroots voices to rebuild public infrastructure for storytelling, organising, and governance.

The #OMN isn’t anti-tech – it’s pro-human. It’s a network built with people, for people – not for investors or ego-driven billionaires. It draws from the radical legacy of projects like #indymediaback, and threads in tools like #OGB to bring coherence and shared narrative to the fractured #openweb reboot. So please stop chasing tech cults and start growing rooted alternatives.

“Use and abuse” is a good strategy for dealing with the #dotcons while they continue to dominate our digital and social infrastructure. Why? Because refusing to engage with these platforms outright is the equivalent of shouting into the void – or living in a cave. And caves, while romantic to a certain type of purist, are never effective social solutions.

The truth is this #dotcons are still where the #mainstreaming people live, and mainstream attention is power, even if borrowed. As radicals or progressives, using their platforms to push counter-narratives, while simultaneously undermining their legitimacy and building our own independent infrastructure, is both necessary and strategic. Think of it as exiting from within by using their reach to grow the seeds of your alt-path.

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil

We need to keep highlighting an old but still urgent tension: the intersection of technology and social change. In this too often unspoken divide, one side leans heavily on practical, technical problem-solving. They want working code, functioning systems, and tangible results, not abstract debates. To them, critiques about capitalism shaping code sound like distractions from the “real work.” The other side insists that technical problems are social problems. They argue that all code is written by people, shaped by culture, power, and history. Ignoring the social dynamics behind technology guarantees we repeat the same failures.

This divide plays out constantly in movements trying to bridge the worlds of #AltTech and social transformation. You see it in tensions between the tech-focused “geek” communities and broader #mainstreaming society. And both sides have blind spots.

The geek camp often falls into the #geekproblem: over-prioritizing tech innovation while ignoring the human and social context. Meanwhile, the #mainstreaming crowd tends to embrace vague social ideals while underestimating the soft power – and necessity – of building real technical infrastructure to support those ideals. Neither side alone can solve anything meaningful, especially not something as vast as rebooting the #openweb or to even start to touch on #climatechaos.

We need bridges, that’s what projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), #OGB, #IndymediaBack, and #MakingHistory are about: building trust-based, grounded, people-powered platforms that can span the divide between tech and society.

But let’s be honest, there’s a lot of very bad behaviour on all sides of the #openweb reboot. Blocking progress, gatekeeping, aggression, virtue signalling… it’s all too common. Let’s try not to become prats, it’s easy to start, and hard to stop. Mess breeds more mess, prat-ish behaviour comes in waves. It aligns with waves of #mainstreaming and the reactive “alt” backlash, these tides bring a lot of flotsam, it’s up to us to shovel and compost what we can.

Our biggest block right now? The culture war postmodernist fog that has drifted through radical spaces over the past decades. It’s slippery, full of “common sense” that doesn’t hold up, but is hard to challenge because it feels “right”. Composting this will be difficult, but necessary.

The #Fediverse is built on people-to-people relationships. Trust, not just tech, is the foundation. That’s why there’s a healthy pushback against “tech fixes” that try to replace social trust, a path that is much more common in places like #Nostr and #Bluesky, where algorithms and cryptography are too often seen as the solution to everything.

Yes, in reality, we need a balance of both. The debate is fluffy in places, spiky in others. But if we build tech-bridges to span this messy social terrain, we might actually get somewhere. This brings us to the hard green question: how do you scale local, eco-conscious solutions to a disinterested – and sometimes hostile – global population? Green progressives often promote small-scale, ethical living. That’s great for the 1% who can afford to live that way. But what about the other 99%?

Let’s be blunt: some people will die from #climatechaos. Maybe 9%, maybe more. But 90% will still be here, and they will need different kinds of solutions. Right now, the options on the table look like this: A rebooted, green-infused social democracy (the old Corbyn project was an example). A slide into eco-fascism and top-down “solutions” (the Trump path). Or doing nothing, and let #climatechaos run wild (the current #mainstreaming).

One thing is likely, a wartime economy is coming within 20 years, where there’s will be little room for the last 40 years of #neoliberalism, and “soft” liberalism will likely play a secondary role at best, the political landscape is shifting fast. The new #mainstreaming question is which side will you be on?

Because we need more than clean branding and good vibes – we need bold, practical, radical action rooted in both tech and human trust. We don’t just need freedom from the state and the #dotcons – We need freedom from our own dogmas.

The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social soil where openness can grow, thrive, and renew. We need compost, and not just as a metaphor.

The #OMN View – The Dogma of Anti-Dogma: Rainbow Gatherings

In the alt paths we need to talk about a circler familiar mess: when movements that are open, non-hierarchical, and anti-authoritarian end up recreating the hierarchical problems they set out to escape. This is the “dogma of anti-dogma”, and you see it everywhere, the example I am using here is in groups like the Rainbow Gatherings.

The Rainbow Gatherings have deep roots in 1970s counterculture. Born from the peace and ecology movements, it emerged with a back-to-the-land, anti-establishment, peace-and-love spirit. Think spiritual communes, consensus meetings, and gatherings deep in the forest – far from the control of the state or #mainstreaming system. For #FOSS tech, this sound familiar? It mirrors much of “native” internet culture and resonates strongly with what we’re trying to grow through the #openweb today, in projects like the #OMN.

In the 50-year history of Gathering’s, there are no leaders, no money, no official permissions. People just show up. Communal kitchens are built, spaces are created for kids, elders, ceremonies, workshops. At the heart is the “Open Centre,” where anyone can speak, sing, or simply be. It’s grassroots in its purest form. When it balances, it becomes a lived example of radical inclusivity and cooperation. But as in any movement, issues emerge, beneath the surface freedom lie 50 years of mythos and informal traditions shaping this nomadic utopia.

This openness recurringly becomes a tangled mess for more vertical-minded people. While there’s no formal leadership, some long-timers – “elders” of any age – naturally hold more sway. And while there are no written laws, there’s a strong social tradition to follow certain paths and perform a kind of functional “openness.” When more #mainstreaming folks arrive and try to “suggest” (read: impose) better structures or force their way into consensus processes, the friction can soon become dysfunction. Often, after creating much mess, their well-meaning input ends up having to be set aside, in #OMN terms #rolledback.

Balancing this is active openness – it’s about pushing back against #mainstreaming orthodoxy being imposed without care, without consent. That tension mirrors what we’ve seen again and again in #mainstreaming “horizontal” movements, from Occupy camps to DIY tech spaces to alt-social networks. The desire to avoid hierarchy doesn’t eliminate power – but in a recurring circle it risks making it invisible. The problem isn’t structure itself, it’s unaccountable structure.

With the #OMN (Open Media Network), we face this contradiction head-on. We draw on the “native” mythos of the #4opens – Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process – as living traditions. Not just to #KISS build tools and platforms, but to build trust networks. We’re not pretending hierarchy doesn’t exist. We aim to make it visible, accountable, and, crucially, temporary. It’s not only about flattening decision-making, but ensuring it flows through real human relationships, not hidden power or #geekproblem black-box tech.

Rainbow Gatherings walk a nomadic path, grounded in mutual aid, shared meals, and rich social ritual. When we reboot the #openweb, we have to learn from paths like this. Radical inclusivity isn’t just about keeping the doors open – it’s about building shared social mythos and working traditions. And it’s about staying alert to how exclusion creeps back in: through silence, through pressure, and often through the #mainstreaming crowd who refuse to let go of their blindness.

Movements need memory, they need culture, but they also need self-awareness and space for dissent – space to reflect on the paths we’re walking together. A better #Fediverse, a real #openweb, has to be built by communities that can see their own shadows, name their own contradictions, and keep evolving together, link by link.

Because we don’t just need freedom from the state or the #dotcons, we also need freedom from our own dogmas. The #OMN isn’t just about media, it’s about building the social tech, the soil where openness can grow, thrive, and renew. And it needs compost, stinky and alive, not just metaphor.

#OMN #4opens #RainbowGathering #OpenWeb #AltTech #ActivistTech #Dogma #AntiDogma #IndymediaBack #TrustNetworks #MakeHistory #Fediverse

Mythos and traditions are needed for revolutions to grow roots

Composting the reboot funding

Dear Michiel,

At this point, it’s hard not to notice a pattern. You’ve received clear, thoughtful proposals aligned with your calls – yet no real engagement, year after year. I’ve said this gently before: your call-out text needs to be composted. If you’re not funding alternative, open, activist infrastructure – just say that. Don’t lead people on.

Look forward to seeing what did get funded – I’ll be writing something on that soon https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nlnet

A post on why this kind of institutional #geekproblem push needs compost: https://hamishcampbell.com/we-need-to-compost-the-current-culture-of-lying/

Hamish

Not surprised. This is probably the 10th time we’ve applied to the #NLnet / #NGI fund over the years. Just heard back: our proposals for #OGB (Open Governance Body), #indymediaback, and #MakeingHistory were not selected – again.

“We are very sorry that we cannot offer you support for your good efforts.”

Sure, I, appreciate the polite brush-off again. But after so many rejections for solid, urgently needed tech projects that actually fit the funding goals, it’s time to name what’s really going on.

That there’s no #mainstreaming support for grassroots alternative, activist-rooted #openweb infrastructure. These projects aren’t pointless and inoffensive enough, not wrapped in shiny #NGO-speak, and don’t fit the comfy (in)circles of #geekproblem “innovative” funding. But they are native, they are needed, and they work – if you actually want a humane, federated, public-interest net that the funding outreach text says you do.

Time and again, we’re told these projects are “not selected” – Meanwhile, funding continues to flow toward a few good minority projects, a few #mainstreaming #fashernista alt tech projects, but the most goes to, minority interest, academic paths or closed bureaucratic #geekproblem circles, recycling the same stale stack of status quo ideas in slick/pointless packaging.

On balance, this is VERY much not building the #openweb – it’s way too often pushing #NGO and geek hobby paths or building another layer of the #closedweb under a friendlier mask. Yes, the is some small good done with this tech funding, it supports the big #dotcons copying Fediverse projects, no bad thing. But on the question of balance, we can see the lies.

We’re not discouraged. We’re composting this – as ever – into the next push. And yes, we’ll keep applying in till they change the text of the invites, so our projects are not the perfect fit they are now. Not because we believe the system works, but because we need to document the process if it works, well more when it doesn’t work, sadly. Composting lies is a part of the #openweb reboot.

If you do want to support native, trust-based, grassroots tech building, outside the NGO bubble, chip in here: https://opencollective.com/open-media-network or help to make this institutional funding work as it says it does.

A look at this narrow #NGO and #geekproblem point of view

The essence of the #geekproblem is its narrow, self-referential logic. Here’s a #spiky, pointed, prody view of the narrow track of thinking that defines the #geekproblem in the context of an #openweb reboot:

“There is no Emperor, King, or Priest in the Fediverse’s feudalism.”

The illusion is that it’s all flat – no power structures, just pure meritocracy. If you’re already a priest or acolyte, there’s no need to ask. You just do:

  • Want a new app? Code it.
  • Want a new protocol? Spec and ship it.
  • Want a new UX? Design it and deploy.

And if you can’t do it yourself? Then you kneel before the alternative establishment and pray.
Or, as they prefer to say, advocate.

This is both a critique of the (hidden) hierarchies and a mirror held up to the myths of autonomy and openness in the current #Fediverse culture. There’s a real power structure – it just doesn’t wear a crown, but if you look it’s VERY visible, people choose not to look, this is the #techshit mess we make and need to balance with healthy grassroots composting.

What would a #fluffy view of this look like?

The hard right path, the #nastyfew playing the Nazi card

In the current and historic right-wing path, the #nastyfew are mess making to mix and confuse social shit – like the recurring claim that Nazism was a left-wing movement, or at least contains left-wing elements as a mess making provocative and “controversial” statement. Let’s take a few minutes to look at this mess pushing argument (and Its confusion)

Hard right talking points:

  • It’s still “an open question” whether Hitler’s ideology was left or right.
  • Nazis called themselves “National Socialists,” so perhaps there’s a left-wing lineage.
  • No one has “done the analysis properly,”.

This is then framed in #mainstreaming pseudoscientific terms, borrowing credibility from the idea of science while avoiding rigorous historical or cultural context. This falls into #geekproblem territory where surface logic replaces any deep knowledge.

We need to spend time and focus to dismantle claim’s like this by highlighting the following:

  • Ideologies grow from shared cultural soil
  • You can’t categorize ideologies “left” or “right” – without considering the cultural compost they grew in. #4opens thinking reminds us to look at the process, not just the output.
  • Shared features ≠ same ideology, fascism does share tools, aesthetics, and concerns with both socialism and conservatism, because it arises from the same history and uses elements from both. This doesn’t make it “left-wing” in any way.
  • Ideology is not a checklist, the hard right idea to remove context is dangerously naive. Ideology isn’t a shopping list of policies – it’s a lived, embodied, blurry-boundary system of meanings, symbols, and affect. That’s part of the reason #dotcons and #NGO attempts at governance are floundering -because they think in terms of checkboxes, not compost.
  • Misunderstanding of culture, when we collapse evolutionary psychology into cultural history, it becomes #techshit reductionism. An example is when we try to explain 20th-century genocide using universalist “human nature” arguments, rather than the unique horror of a cultural breakdown under specific hard right (and its left shadow) political conditions.

It helps to use the composting metaphor, problematic figures come from messy soil. It’s possible to be honest about the rot and acknowledge resilience, #nothingnew might be helpful?

The danger in the hard right populists is in confusing the crowd, with intellectual sleight of hand using familiar #mainstreaming phrases (“science,” “open question,” “no one’s done this properly”) and mixed ideological references that feel insightful at a glance. Then icing on the cake is the #fahernista playing of personal vulnerability that is used to deflects criticism.

This is the hard right

Underneath this is a kind of cultural manipulation – blurring lines in a way that disorients rather than enlightens, it’s not critical thinking. It is an example of right-wing capture of shared cultural stories through contrarianism disguised as open-mindedness.

This is what happens when you let narratives drift unmoored from social history. It’s why we need to focus on grounding projects in native cultural understanding – because when you lose that grounding, anyone can hijack the conversation with pseudo-insights. In short, this hard right shit is composting badly. It’s fundamentally mixing rotten banana peels and plastic bags and calling it soil. It might look rich, but it won’t grow anything good.

You need a shovel, you help find one here https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

Why Tech Belongs in the Open

In activist tech, it’s not the code that makes the project – it’s the people. And if we want the Open Media Network (#OMN) to work, we need to remember that how we build is just as important as what we build.

The problem with encrypted chats, let’s get this clear: encrypted chat is great for security. But it’s a terrible place to build a shared, open, activist codebase. If you’re talking tech in a closed chat, it might feel like you’re doing the work – but it’s invisible to everyone else. There’s no transparency, no documentation, and no way for others to join in or pick up where you left off.

This kind of siloed development culture is how the #geekproblem takes root: insular, opaque, and ultimately unsustainable. If we want to compost that mess, we have to actively grow something different. A horizontal way of working, the #4opens are our compass:

Open code

Open data

Open standards

Open process

This isn’t simple idealism, it’s a practical path to building something that lasts, something that others can join, learn from, remix, and maintain. The kind of network that doesn’t rely on a few experts in a locked chatroom, but instead thrives through collective stewardship.

The left path of change and challenge

So we need to keep dev off encrypted chat, move our contributions, bugs, ideas, and discussions to the shared dev spaces – the issue tracker, the wiki, the public logs. THEN, if you must, link to it from chat. That way, chat stays a bridge, not a black hole.

“The Less We Do Here, The More We Do There” We say this a lot because it matters, the more energy we pour into open, accessible spaces – the more likely this project grows roots. The more we retreat to fast, disposable chat threads, the more fragile it all becomes. We need shared visibility, clear documentation, and trust in messy, collective process. That’s how the #OMN becomes real, not just as software, but as a living, growing network of trust.

Let’s keep our tech open, let’s keep our process visible, let’s build the #OMN the way we want the world to work.

http://unite.openworlds.info
http://opencollective.com/open-media-network
http://hamishcampbell.com

The #nastyfew, billionaires funders fear informed, educated public

The #nastyfew are now building bunkers, literally, escaping with their bodyguards when the shit hits the fan. That’s the plan. No fixing the mess, no community care – just winning and escape. It’s #deathcult logic all the way down from now on – with pushing #geekproblem tech fixes as a cross fingers wing and a prayer, to stop any grassroots drift to green sustainable alternatives.

This is simply the next stage of the #deathcult worship of endless growth, and infinite tech “solutions”. It’s now about rebooting capitalism, so the machine can keep grinding. #NothingNew in a very bad way. This is the normal empathy for corporations, and brutal Darwinism for actual people like you and me. The #dotcons of big tech are moving visible to the business of manufacturing distraction to avoid facing the collapse they pushed for the last 20 years. The mess of #AI and #Bitcoin are energy black holes, sucking resources while pretending to be futuristic.

It should now be “common sense” that colonialism never ended – it rebranded. That’s how the consumerist growth cult started: exploit, extract, repeat. Capitalist “progress” is cancerous, more #GDP doesn’t mean better life – growth isn’t about thriving, it’s about churn. #TechCurn. The current #mainstreaming solutions are always more tech, more control, more conferences, and less reality. The #GeekProblem, with the #techbros philosophical inspiration: Nietzsche, or rather, a cherry-picked remix by his fascist sister, stitched together without context. The wannabe’s quotes “Will to Power” as gospel to justify trying to control the rest of us.

To the #nastyfew, education doesn’t mean opportunity – it means instability. A literate person is someone who questions power, organizes, votes, and leave toxic relationships. A curious mind is unpredictable. A well-informed population is a threat.

They know that: A literate woman may not rely on a man for shelter. An educated Black or Brown voter may vote in their own self-interest, unlike the more easily manipulated MAGA base. A widely read immigrant may advocate for systems beyond the #deathcult of vulture capitalism – community care, cooperative ownership, real democracy.

Education creates the conditions for social mobility, leading to change and challenge, which the #nastyfew see as an existential risk to their self defined stratified order and elitist based statues. Keeping people in their “place” is essential to maintaining control. Stagnation is strategic.

This is why capital flows into campaigns to undermine grassroots media, activists, public schools, libraries, independent publishers, school boards, and non-corporate scientific research institutions. The #nastyfew goal isn’t only profit – it’s cultural hegemony. Anything that feeds critical thinking or encourages civic imagination becomes a target.

From a progressive mainstreaming point of view, this agenda includes:

It’s a war on #4opens, public knowledge, disguised as common sense “parental rights” and “free markets.” In truth, it’s about maintaining control by keeping people uninformed and isolated, a core part of #stupidindividualism we have all been #mainstreaming for the last 40 years.

Capitalism grew from historical processes rooted in enclosure, extraction, and the exploitation of people and nature. Liberal politics stabilise rather than challenge this, while promoting forms of (stupid)individualism that fragment collective power, making it harder for people to organise together against entrenched control.

When we defend grassroots projects, activism, schools, libraries, open-source platforms, small publishers, and public institutions, we are not just defending information, we are defending democracy itself. The battle for truth is inseparable from the battle for justice. We have to build our own compost piles, plant what matters, and ignore the bling. These #nastyfew and their billionaires funders aren’t saving us – they’re digging deeper bunkers and writing climate denial checks. It well pastime to stop playing the #mainstreaming game.

#KISS

Post inspired by @Npars

Governance rooted in trust rather than formalized decision-making

In alternative paths and spaces, governance is rooted in trust rather than formalized decision-making. These are environments where shared values, relationships, and practical action matter more than rigid rules or bureaucratic processes. People who come from more institutional or #NGO-style backgrounds default to proposing formal structures – voting procedures, consensus check-ins, rotating chairs, code-of-conduct enforcement committees. While these processes feel necessary to them, in practice they fail in grassroots spaces. Why? Because, fundamentally, nobody has to do anything.

Take a volunteer grassroots run radical media collective, for example. If someone proposes a complex consensus model or tries to enforce step-by-step project plans, it usually ends with endless meetings, unresolved tensions, and burnout. The reason is simple, unlike in paid or hierarchical systems, there’s no leverage to force participation. When push comes to shove, people just walk away.

What happens next is revealing. After the mess, what we might call the composting of the formalized process, people who are still around begin to just do what needs to be done. A few trusted people pick up the shovel, others join in when they see real work happening. Momentum builds through doing, not debating. The group evolves informally, with leadership emerging from action and care, not from mandates. Trust grows as people witness each other’s commitment over time. This informal flow tends to work surprisingly well most of the time.

For example, in the early days of Indymedia, despite various affinity groups having very different political approaches, decisions often came down to who stepped up to do the tech work, write the stories, or run the servers. Trust was built by contribution and consistency. Similarly, in grassroots disaster relief efforts (like Occupy Sandy), attempts to impose centralized control often broke down. But mutual aid networks thrived on trust, initiative, and lightweight coordination, text threads, shared spreadsheets, and informal roles. It was messy, but it worked.

The insight, in trust-based spaces, power flows not from authority or process, but from care, responsibility, and visible action. People trust those who show up and do the work, not those who talk the most or try to control the process. While this model isn’t perfect – and trust can be broken – it often outperforms rigid structures in flexible, values-driven communities.

And then there’s the wannabe #nastyfew – those who feed off control, disruption and ego, often seeking to dominate through manipulation and obstruction. We don’t need to fight them head-on or sink into their drama. In healthy alternative spaces, we learn to step around them, focus on building trust and function, and let their influence compost along with the rest of the mess. In time, as we balance and grow, manage our own lives better, we can feel empowered to push them out of the way, not with force, but with the strength of community, clarity, and shared purpose. They might then become useful in some way?

Compost lies using #4opens horizontal networks

The #4opens makes many people uncomfortable. Why? Because it cuts through the bullshit. Think about it: #FOSS already runs most of the world’s information flows. Servers, networks, phones, clouds – all built on open code, open standards, open processes. The world already depends on openness.

Yet, when we bring this into activism, NGOs, or “progressive” tech, people recoil. They prefer managed openness – consultations, workshops, endless talk – while the real decisions stay hidden, careers protected, power intact, but that’s not open, that’s control.

The #4opens is seen as dangerous because it removes the masks:

Open Data: no hoarding.

Open Code: no black boxes.

Open Standards: no silos.

Open Process: no backrooms.

When you have this second look, it’s common sense, but for meany it kills the comfort of #mainstreaming, when the soft power of gatekeepers shrivels under sunlight, that’s why they hate it.

We already live in a world powered by #FOSS. The only question is whether we keep pretending otherwise, or compost the mess and take openness seriously. Why does this matter? On the wider picture, we’re past the point where the #mainstreaming paths have effectively given up on mediating #climatechaos and social break down.

What we’re seeing now is ONLY the performance of action – flashy, expensive, technocratic distraction to keep business-as-usual afloat a little longer. It’s not any longer about preventing catastrophe, or even mediating catastrophe. What we have now is managed #PR and keeping in place elitist continuity as the small #nastyfew and their sycophants visibly retreat from the growing mess.

For an alt #mainstreaming view

Solutions? Take this example: https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to-cover-its-own-emissions/ #Climeworks, a flagship carbon-capture initiative, is so inefficient it fails to offsetting its own emissions. This is the #techshit path the #mainstreaming are backing to get us through the next few centuries? This is beyond a mess, it’s ideological collapse. These fake solutions are the logical outcome of continuing with #neoliberal ideology, where systemic change and thus challenge is avoided at all costs, and techno-fixes are sold to us by #PR as silver bullets, the #deathcult in action, profit-driven stalling wrapped in light green branding.

Let’s be clear on this: Carbon capture is currently not scalable, not ethical, and not even functional. It is not a climate solution – what it is, is a delay tactic, an obscuring hedge for polluting industries. It’s backed by the same #nastyfew class of institutions that told us markets would fix inequality, that endless growth was compatible with ecology, that privatization would bring prosperity. The truth is simple, they, the #nastyfew we keep putting into power, have no plan. They are playing at engineering the social and ecological collapse while, at this final stage, simply pretending to be managing it.

So what do we do? We #KISS hard stop trusting in any elitist-managed futures. We collectively refuse to be spectators in the mess of the #mainstreaming paths. Instead, we compost these lies and build #4opens, rooted, local, horizontal networks of resistance and renewal. Projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) don’t pretend to “solve” everything, but they create space for people to act together, share knowledge, mediate and hold power to account, and thus build trust for action outside the collapsing verticals.

This isn’t about hope in the abstract, it’s about practical solidarity in the spreading ruins. No one is coming to save us, but maybe we can still save each other. Let’s build the seeds of the next world, before this one burns everything down around us.

OMN, best not to get distracted, this isn’t about purity, it’s about direction
Composting the fiendlyenemy’s

The #4opens framework is best understood not as ideology or branding, but as a simple set of engineering heuristics for evaluating whether a project will remain usable, forkable, and resilient over time.

Most long-lived #FOSS projects already follow some version of these practices implicitly. The value of #4opens is making those assumptions explicit, so people can quickly understand how a project works, who controls it, and whether it will survive beyond its original maintainers or funding cycle.

In practical terms, the #4opens ask a few straightforward questions:

  • Is the development process visible and reviewable?
  • Are data formats and interfaces documented and reusable?
  • Can someone else run this independently without permission?
  • Are governance and decision-making transparent enough that forks remain viable if needed?

These aren’t abstract political goals, they’re lessons learned from decades of broken platforms, abandoned repositories, and “open” projects that centralised control.

For developers and sysadmins, applying the #4opens as a lightweight checklist helps reduce risk:

  • Less lock-in to fragile ecosystems.
  • Easier collaboration across projects.
  • Better long-term maintainability.
  • Clearer expectations for contributors and downstream users.

A shared registry or index based on these criteria functions much like early open source directories or package repositories – not as gatekeeping, but as a map. Projects could self-declare alignment and provide verifiable signals about openness, interoperability, and governance structure.

The goal isn’t purity tests or badges for their own sake. It’s about improving signal-to-noise so builders can quickly identify tools that are likely to remain open, portable, and maintainable.

In a landscape where systems drift toward centralisation and corporate capture, the #4opens simply provide a shorthand for practices that help keep the commons viable, without requiring anyone to agree on ideology.