Bringing #indymediaback: A Gentle Revival of Radical Media

The old flower beds of #Indymedia lie fallow, not dead. The seeds are still there, beneath layers of neglect, factionalism, and the noise of 20 years of failed “alternatives.” What we need now is not revolution or reinvention, but revival. A slow, careful re-rooting in the fertile ground of experience.

We don’t need to tear it down or rebuild from scratch. Almost all of what worked between 2000–2008 still works today, at least 90% of the original social structure is sound. Let’s focus instead on the missing 10%, the gaps that were never resolved. That’s where the real energy and creativity are needed. That’s where trust, experimentation, and diversity of tactics should guide us.

Change with Care: Soft Hands, Open Eyes – In today’s tech-social landscape, even the slightest structural changes can lead to rips and tears. And once those start, the momentum of destruction escalates. We’ve seen this over and over again: dogmatic reinvention, ego-driven platforms, over-complex redesigns, and every time, we’re left with more fragmentation and less power. Instead, we propose a path of slow change. Work with what already functions. Use the existing structure as a trellis to support new growth.

Let’s be clear:

#4opens is not dogma — it’s the distilled learning of 30 years of open-source and open-process practice.

#PGA Hallmarks are not just ideals — they’re the living legacy of thousands of grassroots organisers across decades and continents.

#Indymedia isn’t a romantic memory — it’s the real-world, working outcome of diverse radical media groups building something that worked.

Indymedia only fell when it forgot the principles it was built on. When the foundations faded, it couldn’t flex under pressure, from internal disagreements or external attack. Let’s not make that mistake again.

Old Tools, New Wisdom – We don’t need saviours with shiny ideas. We need comrades with shovels. We need “elders” who are kind and sharp, who know when to step forward and when to stay quiet. Let’s embrace our role in this: gently holding the centre path, not controlling it. When someone passionate comes forward with a “better” idea, let’s respond with:

“How does that work with the #4opens?”

“Does it move us toward the PGA hallmarks?”

If it does, let’s try it. If not, let’s compost it and try again. That’s the rhythm of real change.

Expect Mess. Build Anyway – Let’s not sugar-coat it. We live in a world collapsing under its own contradictions. #Brexit, #ClimateChaos, the digital enclosure of the commons, these aren’t trends, they’re symptoms of systemic failure. And into that storm, every grassroots effort will be met with confusion, conflict, and co-option.

Expect:

People driven by petty grudges and personal agendas.

NGOs smothering action with managerialism.

#Stupidindividualism hijacking community energy.

Waves of right-wing actors using open platforms better than the left.

The approach: Focus and fertility – The Open Media Network (#OMN) exists to nourish, not replace. It’s a shovel to compost the piles of #techshit and #NGO mess. It’s a network for linking what already works and rediscovering the strength of shared infrastructure.

This is what makes #IndymediaBack different from other “radical” tech revivals?

It’s built on lived practice, not theory.

It’s structured for diversity, not conformity.

It’s based on human trust, not techno-fetishism.

It’s deeply political — anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, rooted in care and collaboration.

Yes, this is slow work, there will be times when things get ugly, when howling mobs throw shit, metaphorically and otherwise. Our job is to stay calm, stay focused, and keep the compost warm. Reviving Indymedia is not about nostalgia. It’s about learning from what worked, and building with care on that foundation. Let’s dig in. Let’s grow something together.

4Opens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop adding to the mess – when you post academic articles without any connection to what’s happening now, in the real world, you’re not helping. You’re contributing to the noise. To the inertia. To the pile of unread PDFs sitting in everyone’s guilt folder.

Instead:

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

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

We’re building from the bottom, join us there.

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

Theory and Practice in Activism

The roadblocks to change: #Stupidindividualism and the #Deathcult that breeds it

If you’ve ever tried to build something radical, collective, and actually useful, you’ve run into these forces. They’re not just annoying. They’re dangerous, structural, and they always show up. This post is about naming those, calling them what they are, and understanding how they’re entangled in the wider problem:

A culture that valorizes individualism, feeds on careerism, and bows to the false “common sense” of the neoliberal #deathcult.

The #NGO agenda: Careerism in activist clothing. Too many grassroots projects are co-opted by well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) NGOs and their functionaries, who come waving grant forms and talking about partnerships. But really, they’re selling a diluted, bureaucratic version of change that fits inside capitalist institutions, with jobs and funding flows to protect.

At best, they water down radicalism into “deliverables.” At worst, they actively trample grassroots horizontality to build careers. They normalize the #dotcons. They manage, rather than transform. This isn’t conspiracy. It’s structure. And we need to build outside this model.

Petty politics and personal grudges: Micro-level sabotage. Let’s be honest, some people would burn the future to win a petty feud. This is the everyday rot of #stupidindividualism, where narrow self-preservation and shallow ego become more important than collective progress.

Projects like #indymediaback, which depend on shared vision and mutual respect, break down when people refuse to grow beyond grudges. These behaviours reflect deeper cultural damage, we’ve been trained to see each other as threats, not collaborators. We can’t build anything real if we don’t actively mediate this. That means talking it through, holding space, calling it in, before it derails the work.

The liberal trap: Dogma masquerading as “common sense”. I’ll say something unfashionable, I have respect for old-school liberalism. It gave us social safety nets, education, some rights, a lot of good stuff came out of liberal traditions. But today’s dogmatic liberals, clinging to broken institutions and smearing “common sense” over radical action, are a drain on movement energy. Their default is always compromise, always moderation, even when the world is on fire. We’re stuck negotiating with people who believe the future is a reformed version of the past. It isn’t. We need to move forward, not beg to stay where we are.

The #geekproblem: Control, complexity, and disconnection. We’ve talked about this before, and it keeps coming up. The #geekproblem is when technologists build tools for control rather than empowerment, for complexity rather than access, for themselves rather than people. Often dressed in “neutral” language or “perfect systems,” these tools lock out users, deny social context, and kill collaboration with arrogant assumptions. The fix? Build for people, not machines. Use the #4opens. Work from #DIY practice, not just theory. Centre community. Make it work for the bottom, not the top.

The path we need is compost, this isn’t about perfection. We’ve all played roles in the mess. The key is naming it, owning it, and moving differently. Tools like #OMN, #indymediaback, and #OGB are not shiny new things. They’re grounded in lived practice, built to solve real problems. They don’t pretend to be magic fixes. But they are shovels, to compost the current mess, and grow something better.

We don’t need another app, another platform, another paper. We need to build trust-based networks, support each other, and get our hands dirty together. A humanistic, future is still possible, if we stop feeding the #deathcult and start feeding the soil.

Add yours: What Blocks the progressive path? We need to name these issues clearly, not to shame individuals, but to make them visible as systemic patterns we all get caught in. So tell me: what else is holding us back? What sabotages collective projects from within? Let’s document the patterns so we can start composting them.

#grassroots #DIY #openweb #4opens #nothingnew #postcapitalism #stupidindividualism #culturewars #commoning

Talking about the mess we’re in

We’re living in an age of permanent crisis, there’s no going back to “normal.” Stop waiting for it. Let’s just STOP worshipping the #deathcult as a first step away from this mess. The trap we’re in, neoliberalism, or the #deathcult, isn’t optional. It’s systemic. You don’t get to opt out unless you’re rich enough to buy an island… and even then, it’s a fantasy.

But metaphors have value. #deathcult is a metaphor, yes, and a sharp, useful one. It’s a name for the dominant ideology of the last 40 years: neoliberalism, where markets are sacred, society is optional, and #climatecollapse is just another economic opportunity.

We use hashtags like #deathcult, #fashernista, #climatechaos, #stupidindividualism not to confuse, but to bring dry, academic critique into emotional, accessible terms. They’re #KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid. They cut through the noise, if you let them.

Want an example? I lived a metaphor, ten years ago, I bought a lifeboat and sailed away. Not into isolation, but into reflection. For the last five years, I’ve lived outside most laws and norms. Not because I think that’s the answer, but because it’s one place to plant seeds for better ones.

But the boat, like the #nastyfews islands, isn’t freedom. It’s a metaphor. A stopgap. A reminder that we can step sideways, temporarily, to prepare for change, but only IF we come back and build together.

Power is always social. There is no “DIY freedom” that doesn’t end in loneliness or failure. You are powerless until you engage with others, to build trust and accountability. This is what the #OMN is about. It’s not individual exit, it’s collective entry.

So, talk in metaphors. Use the hashtags. Share the language. Together, they tell a story. But only if you join in.

No more waiting for heroes.
No more worshipping broken systems.
No more technocratic denial.
It’s time to compost the old world and plant something new.

Theory and Practice in Activism

There’s a common confusion, pushed by well-meaning #fashernistas, about how change actually happens. They love theory. They love to talk about change. But when it comes to doing, things go sideways. Why? Because good horizontalists know: theory must emerge from practice, not the other way around.

At the root of radical practice is #DIY culture. We don’t wait for perfect theory or academic approval. We get our hands dirty. We try things, we fail, we try again. Through this, we build theory that is grounded in reality, not floating above it.

The Problem with top-down theory is that when you start from theory alone, disconnected from lived experience, you go ground and round in abstract circles. Then, inevitably, someone tries to apply this neatly wrapped theoretical package as a “solution” to the mess we’re in… and it breaks everything.

At best, this leads to another layer of #techshit to compost. At worst, it becomes academic wank, beautifully phrased but practically useless, imposed on grassroots organisers trying to get real work done. We’re tired of clearing up after these failed interventions. Focus matters. Resources are scarce. Energy is precious. The practice-first approach, is why we’re doing something different with projects like:

#OMN (Open Media Network): building tools from the bottom up, with open metadata flows and radical trust.

#Indymediaback: rebooting a proven model of grassroots publishing that worked, updated for today.

#OGB (Open Governance Body): prototyping governance based on lived collaboration, not abstract debate.

All of this is theory grown from practice. None of it came from think tanks or grant-funded consultants. It came from kitchens, camps, squats, TAZs, mailing lists, and dirty hands. If you want to be part of this work, great. But please engage with it as it is. Bring your experience, your skills, your curiosity. But don’t dump disconnected theory on it. Don’t smother the flow with top-down frameworks or overthought abstractions.

We need people to join the flow of practice. Let the theory emerge where it’s needed, like compost, growing what feeds us. So: Start where your feet are. Build from what works. Trust the process of doing. And please, don’t push mess our way. We’ve got enough of that already.

Let’s build something real. Together.

#DIY #grassroots #4opens #KISS #deathcult #nothingnew

Why most radical tech is pointless, and why #indymediaback isn’t

Almost everything built in today’s alt-radical tech scene is, bluntly, pointless. Despite good intentions, most of it ends up feeding the endless cycle of #fashernista churn, flashy new platforms, bleeding-edge protocols, or encrypted communication tools nobody uses, built by isolated teams disconnected from real-world needs or history. This is the #geekproblem: a culture where novelty is fetishized, and social usefulness is an afterthought, if it appears at all.

Examples:

Secure scrolling tools: Every few months we see new chat apps, usually cryptographic fortresses with no communities. No one’s asking what these tools are for beyond vague abstractions like “privacy” or “freedom.” Tools without context.
Peer-to-peer silos: Projects like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) or many DAT spin-offs build entirely new social ecosystems that demand complete buy-in, rather than integrate into existing networks. What results is islands of lonely idealists yelling into empty timelines.
Protocol over people: Many Fediverse projects argue endlessly over specs like #ActivityPub or #Nostr, often prioritizing purity over pragmatism. What good is a protocol if no one actually uses it beyond a few devs congratulating themselves?

Why #indymediaback isn’t a pointless tech project, it offers something truly different. It is not “new.” It doesn’t pretend to invent a whole new ecosystem. It is an act of digital memory, a revival of the still-needed infrastructure that once helped build radical networks globally. #Indymedia worked. It published resistance. It distributed power. It was embedded in real communities and real movements. This is #nothingnew done right.

The #nothingnew approach mediates against the churn by reusing workflows, social trust, and existing cultural practices. It doesn’t ignore tech, it grounds tech. Examples:

#indymediaback uses simple publish-form-comment workflows, already familiar. No #AI, no #blockchain, no obscure identity layer. Just people posting and curating stories.

It connects to existing radical spaces: housing co-ops, street kitchens, climate camps—places where digital tools are needed right now, and where the point isn’t building a unicorn startup but having a place to publish the truth when the cops are lying again.

Why copying #dotcons isn’t enough, in the #fediverse we so far have replicate Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram — Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed. This is useful, to a point. But all code is ideology. Copying capitalist infrastructure dose smuggle in capitalist logic. Copying invites the #deathcult right back in through the side door.

indymediaback avoids this trap. It doesn’t replicate any#dotcons logic or UX patterns. It revives a publishing common that worked before Silicon Valley captured this path. And more importantly, it’s embedded in a set of radical social practices: the #PGA hallmarks, the #4opens, and the messy, beautiful legacy of grassroots movements who already knew how to organize.

The value of #indymediaback isn’t just in tech. It’s in trust-based social continuity, the hidden glue of any working movement. Without this, you don’t have a radical tech project. You have a ghost repo on GitHub. That’s the central point, without real community, without continuity, without trust, radical tech is a dead end.

This is the carrot and stick we need now. If you care about the #openweb as a human value network, not just a protocol playground, you have to build things people can use today, and that people want to use, not because it’s encrypted or federated, but because it serves a purpose they already have.

This is where the wider #OMN (Open Media Network) comes in. It’s not another protocol war. It’s a shovel to compost the inhuman mess we’ve inherited. It’s a framework built with the #4opens, to grow digital commons that don’t depend on VC, control freaks, or fashion. It’s where we build bridges between radical tech projects, rather than isolate ourselves in yet another Git-based castle.

In short, it’s a path of people over product, process over platform. We don’t need more “solutions.” We need to stop being prats, pick up the tools we already have, and start rebuilding.

Food for thought, and action.

Wilde Words for a Wild Problem: The Chattering Classes and the Death of Change

“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde

It’s always hard to speak honestly about the chattering classes. Not because the problem is obscure or unimportant, but because it’s hidden behind niceness, cloaked in progressive slogans, and too often protected by politeness, guilt, and institutional grant cycles. But speak we must.

The chattering classes, the mix of educated professionals, #NGO careerists, culture critics, fashion-forward academics, and media-savvy activists, are not driving change. They are managing it, diluting it, colonizing grassroots energy and recirculating it through dull, institutional filters.

They do this not maliciously but as a reflex. In Wilde’s terms, they are pretending to be good, and the world, trained in liberal optimism, takes them seriously. They dominate panels, edit the newsletters, organize the conferences. They speak endlessly about the margins, while quietly living in the centre.

“Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.”
— The Remarkable Rocket, Oscar Wilde

In truth, most of these “good society” types are indistinguishable in action, if not in aesthetics. Their personal brands vary, their #dotcons bios are carefully composed. But their analysis is safe, their tactics repetitive, and their outcomes ephemeral. They’re stuck in loops of reformism dressed up as revolution, always one funding cycle away from burnout.

And they smother movements, not because they oppose them, but because they embrace them too early, too publicly, too noisily. The creative spark of grassroots activity needs space, needs contradiction, needs the possibility of failure and disobedience. Instead, the chattering classes turn every new idea into a media campaign, a festival, a grant proposal, or a “community-led” platform.

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
— De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

We’re left with mimicry masquerading as solidarity. Empty gestures instead of difficult choices. A political ecosystem more concerned with optics than outcomes. And yet, the dilemma is many of these people are genuinely kind, they have good intentions, read the right books, quote the right writers. But they just simply don’t do risk or rupture or reality.

So, what is to be done about this “common sense” mess making? Two overlapping strategies might help find a path:

Build affinity first, not consensus, by creating small, trust-based crews with shared values and clear purposes. Don’t wait for mass agreement. Use common standards, not homogenized platforms, so these crews can interoperate, fork, and remix without needing central approval. Think modular, not mass. Connect without control.
Practice strategic exclusion (Gently) is a path. Positive discrimination has a place, but often gets captured by the same chattering class logic. Instead, centre the unfashionable, the practical, the socially messy. Make deliberate space for voices that don’t align with #NGO polish and academic gatekeeping. Create contexts where the well-meaning can listen, rather than lead.

And let’s not pretend that mockery has no power. Wilde knew that satire, when sharpened, could cut through even the most well-padded smugness.

“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
— The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

Well, maybe we can’t get into it, or maybe we simply won’t. The future we need isn’t one built on respectable panels and well-funded dead ends. It starts elsewhere. It’s messy, lived, and hard to quote in polite company. Let’s stop pretending to be good, let’s start becoming dangerous, together.

Pushing back AI hype and building better futures

This week, Dr. Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), co-author of The AI Con, delivered a much-needed reality check in Oxford, cutting through the fog of #AI PR myths and techno-dystopian smoke. In The Q&A by Professor Catherine Pope (Nuffield Dept. of Primary Care), the conversation explored how AI is being used not to elevate us, but to devalue human creativity, justify surveillance, and concentrate wealth and power in the bands of the #nastyfew

This wasn’t the normal breathless “future of work” keynote. It was a call to arms about the AI Con – What Are We Really Being Sold? Dr. Bender, known for coining the term stochastic parrot, highlights how AI hype isn’t just noise – it’s a strategy, to push unregulated, underperforming, resource-hungry technologies into every part of society. It turns complex problems into opportunities to extract data, deskill more workers, and justify more austerity.

We’re not being sold intelligence, we’re being sold plagiarism machines that mimic but don’t understand, synthetic text extruders trained to sound right, but to often hallucinate. Mathy-maths cloaked in prestige, built on broken benchmarks like the Turing Test – long since reduced to a measure of gullibility.

Anthropomorphism by design, responsibility by none, is insidious that AI systems are designed to mimic humanity. They pull users in through anthropomorphism, but when something goes wrong, no one is held responsible. Not the engineers, not the companies, not the funders. Just the user caught in the middle. As Dr. Bender and others have pointed out, there’s no “intelligence” in AI, just statistics, training data, and the motives of those who built it.

What’s Lost in the Hype?

“We used to do language translation better with fewer resources.”
“Cloud computing is a lie, it’s just someone else’s server burning through energy and water.”

These are the quiet truths ignored by AI boosterism. Dr. Bender laid bare the ecological, cognitive, and political costs:

Corruption pushing ecological waste: AI training and cloud infrastructure depend on water, energy, and mining—routed not where they’re sustainable, but where regulation is weak.

Erosion of trust: Models trained to sound authoritative spread confident falsehoods, degrading public discourse.

Security risks: Code generation tools are notoriously lax, riddled with hallucinations and vulnerabilities.

Dehumanisation of labour: AI doesn't replace bad jobs with good ones, it turns good work into mechanical “oversight” roles, where humans are paid to babysit broken systems.

And in health and care, where these technologies are increasingly being pushed, the stakes are life, dignity, and wellbeing.

What I have personal found is that Oxford is feeding its brightest minds into AI. As institutions bend to corporate funding and hype cycles, critique becomes harder, not easier. But critique is essential. This is a fight about who benefits, and who bears the cost.

Governance, the mess of AI tech-fix paths

Like the Luddites of the 19th century, we’re not against machines, we’re against machines used against us. The Luddites knew that the issue wasn’t the loom, it was who owned the loom. That’s why we need more conversations like this. Not just about what AI is, but about what kind of society we want. And more importantly, who gets to decide.

What could work on these tech pats is:

Smaller, dumber, domain-specific models where needed.
Open standards, not closed corporate APIs.
Tech built with consent, accountability, and ecological limits.
A refusal to let “innovation” be an excuse to undermine public infrastructure.

Above all, we need to centre people, not profit, humility, not hype. Very important not to be a prat about this.

#Oxford

This is what the #dotcons, control, is doing with the #AI mess. to us.

Metadata and the #OMN Path: Who Controls the Invisible Hand?

Capitalism’s invisible hand has always relied on hidden data. In the digital age, that data is metadata the overlooked, under-the-hood information that tells us who, where, when, how often, and what next. It doesn’t matter what you say or do if someone else controls the context around it. That’s where the power lies. Let’s be clear: the battle for metadata is the battle for the future.

Three Broken Paths

Capitalism: Metadata is hoarded by the #dotcons. Google, Meta, TikTok—they thrive on extracting context from your every click. It’s not about what you say, but what your patterns say about you. They sell this to advertisers, to governments, to anyone with enough cash. Capital controls metadata, metadata controls behaviour, and behaviour keeps the system in place. This is the tech-feudalism of today—soft fascism in algorithmic form.

Chinese Communism: Here, the state doesn’t outsource metadata - it owns it. Surveillance is centralised. Social credit systems reduce people to patterns and can be used to penalise deviation. The state controls metadata, metadata controls capitalism. It’s the digitised return of the command economy.

Liberalism: Wants to privatise metadata to the individual, to revive the mythical free market of rational actors with perfect information. But this is a fantasy—metadata’s power comes from aggregation, and no individual can match corporate or state capacity to hoard it. The liberal path leads to a more blinded, slightly less abusive cage.

Anarchism and the Commons: A Fourth Way

What does anarchism want? It wants the social conditions for free association. It wants autonomy, not just individual, but community autonomy. The #4opens and the #OMN (Open Media Network) are an explicit political project to create this.

Open data: everyone can see and use.
Open metadata: the tail behind the content, telling you where it came from and how it’s been passed around.
Open process: how decisions are made is visible and changeable.
Open code: tools are modifiable and forkable.

The #OMN doesn’t pretend metadata isn’t powerful, it’s built around that power. But instead of hiding it, it makes that power visible, shared, and accountable. We’re not encrypting metadata into irrelevance. We’re composting it into trust.

Commons vs. the market, capitalism uses metadata to target, extract, and sell. We use metadata to share, trust, and build. The #OMN proposes a radical shift to replace the market with metadata commons. In capitalism, knowledge is hoarded for advantage. In the commons, it is shared for coordination. The market’s “invisible hand” becomes the commons’ visible knowledge, messy, partial, human, but rooted in mutual aid, not profit.

Hard vs. soft power, the #OMN doesn’t rely on cryptographic “hard” security. It builds “soft” trust:

You don’t need perfect encryption, you need networks of relationships that resist capture.
You don’t need top-down control, you need reputation, memory, and care.
It’s not about preventing all bad things, it’s about making good things easier to grow, and bad things harder to scale.

Yes, if the state turns fascist, they’ll try to use metadata against us. But they already do. The #OMN doesn’t pretend to offer perfect protection. What it does offer is a head start in building the infrastructure for resistance, before the rubber truncheons arrive.

This matters, metadata will happen, no matter what you do, you can’t opt out, you can only choose where the power flows:

Capitalists?

States?

Individuals?

Or communities?

We choose the commons.

And we make this chose, not in theory, but in practice. We’re building systems that work today, in browsers, on the streets, and in activist circles. This isn’t just tech. It’s a strategy. It’s a shovel for the compost. It’s a way to make new life from the old system’s rot.

A conversation on #OMN issues around metadata

What Should We Do With Metadata? A Post-Capitalist Path via #OMN

We’re in a global metadata arms race — and most people don’t even know the stakes. Here’s the current battlefield:

Capitalism wants metadata privatized — hoarded by #dotcons to manipulate markets and politics. This power now controls the state. Welcome back, fascism.

Authoritarianism (like China’s digital state) wants metadata centralized — state-controlled to command capitalism itself. The command economy returns, just digitized.

Liberalism wants metadata individualized — a libertarian dream of sovereign users and self-determined markets, it still leans into myths of meritocracy and fails to balance collective power.

But what if we chose a fourth path? Anarchism, grounded in voluntary association, mutual aid, and decentralization — this is the path #OMN walks. Using #4opens, we’re attempting a #KISS trust-based, commons-driven model for metadata.

The Commons of Metadata. In the #OMN (Open Media Network), metadata isn’t hidden or monetized. It’s open, trusted, and functional — a new kind of commons. This visibility becomes the replacement for capitalism’s “invisible hand.”

We don’t sell metadata.

We use it to replace the market.

We organize with it, not exploit it.

Metadata flows become signals of trust and connection — shaping what gets seen, valued, and shared. It’s post-capitalist infrastructure based on visibility, not secrecy.

How It Works: A Trust-Based Metadata Flow

A simplified trust model for content flows:

Link – I find your flow useful.

Trust – We’ve got a relationship.

Moderate – Let’s build that relationship.

Rollback – Something went wrong, undo it.

Unlink – This isn’t working.

We don’t just trust blindly. Metadata lets us query the trust network:

How many people I trust also trust this?

Is this source consistently reliable?

What do community tags say about this?

This keeps quality high, even when bad actors appear. If necessary: unlink, rollback, move on.

What About Surveillance and Security?

We’re honest: the #OMN network can’t protect you from a fascist state. No tech can. But we can:

Use pseudonymity with known-good peers.

Whisper in the forest before posting.

Protect sources while keeping distribution open.

Use P2P crypto for the 20% of cases that need it — not the 80% that don’t.

Unlike the #encryptionists or #geekproblem crowd, we’re not building bunkers. We’re planting gardens.

Why It Matters

If metadata is the new currency, then open metadata is the new commons. Capitalism runs on closed systems — the #OMN runs on shared knowledge and decentralized trust.

This isn’t about perfect tech. It’s about:

Human-scale trust
Community autonomy
Fast, messy, democratic distribution
Real-world resilience

It’s not utopia. It’s compost — and we’ve got the shovels.

The current media environment is heavily skewed towards establishment interests, making it difficult for progressive movements to gain any traction. Why We Need the Open Media Network (#OMN) https://hamishcampbell.com/why-we-need-the-open-media-network-omn/

Soft and Hard Process: Lessons from the Rainbow Shopping Mission

One of the most fascinating things about Rainbow Gatherings isn’t the food, the music, or even the politics – it’s the process. The invisible culture of how things get done. Spend some time in a Rainbow kitchen, or go on a mission for food supplies, and you’ll start to see two very different ways of organising humans in action. One works. One fails in beautiful and frustrating ways.

The shopping mission: A Case Study

Let’s say you’re headed to market to buy food for the kitchen. A crucial task. You need energy, coordination, and collective intention.

Rule one: don’t tag along with someone else’s crew. Form your own.
Why? Because crews are organisms, not schedules. Going with an existing crew means walking into dynamics you didn’t help shape. You’re a guest, not a co-creator. You may have opinions, but no influence. Frustration is inevitable.

But go with your crew, formed from bonds of trust, shared experience, and a bit of laughter, and suddenly the chaos flows smoothly. You’re not fighting inertia, you’re moving together. This logic applies everywhere at Rainbow, from the kitchen to the fire circle to the compost pit.

Hard vs Soft Process

What we’re seeing here is the tension between hard organising and soft organising.
Hard Process

Open to all

Formalised roles

Meetings, plans, rules

Transparency as a virtue

Bureaucracy by default

This is what liberal society champions. It looks democratic, fair, and scalable. But in practice, it often just surfaces those who already have confidence, cultural capital, and practice at dominating spaces. In hard structures, the most forceful voices rise. The quieter, the hesitant, the new—these are drowned out or self-censor.

Soft Process

Based on trust and relationships

Closed but not exclusive

Grows from what already exists

Nurtures rather than commands

Invisible until you’re inside

Soft organising is suspicious to many. It feels messy. It looks unaccountable. But it works because it builds from care. You know who you’re working with. You know what they’re good at. You aren’t managing people – you’re collaborating with them. And this is crucial: soft organising grows strong crews. You don’t recruit with a megaphone. You spot someone passing by, ask them to chop carrots or build a bench, because you’ve already seen them do something well. They come with a task in mind, and they stay because the connection is real.

Why soft builds better, hard, the insight: you can’t build anything strong using only hard organising. But soft organising can grow hard structures, when needed, and make them resilient. Hard organising, on its own, creates brittle forms. They might stand up, but they rarely endure. And when they fall, they leave no roots. They just vanish.

Soft organising builds roots. Deep ones. It surfaces overlooked skills, creates space for powerful people to step back, and gives new talent a chance to grow. It creates a culture where people can show up not with a résumé, but with presence and intention. From there, you can build all the structure you want. It will be flexible, not rigid. Adaptive, not defensive.

Learning from “Disorganisations” intentional communities, activist camps, temporary autonomous zones like Rainbow – these are spaces that function on the edge of collapse. Yet somehow, they often succeed in surprising ways. That’s because they use soft process to survive, even if they don’t always name it. Yes, they can be a mess. But they’re also laboratories. In their dysfunction, you’ll find hidden patterns that work: invisible flows of trust, leadership without authority, accountability without enforcement.

If we want to build humane, liberatory systems, whether tech, political, or social, we need to start here. Not with hierarchy. Not with paperwork. But with relationships, trust, and the soft skills most of our society has tried to forget.

Soft is not weak. Soft is the soil. It’s where the hard stuff grows.

Note: this is kinda dysfunctional, but It’s how things work, we need to balance these two things.

America was always violent -You likely just have not noticed

The thing most liberals forget is that Americans are a notoriously politically violent bunch. From the Boston Tea Party to armed labour uprisings, from the Black Panthers to white vigilantes, from state crackdowns to citizen riots – the American story has always been soaked in political violence, the “land of the free” has enforced its freedom with fists, guns, and fire.

But over the last 40–50 years, all that was deliberately erased, rewritten, smoothed over, sold back as Disney-branded rebellion or CNN documentary tragedy. Out of sight, out of mind, out of options. That was the bipartisan strategy from Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Obama. Not to resolve pressure, but to suppress it.

The return of reality, is what we’re seeing now, this isn’t some “unprecedented crisis.” It’s a return to form. It’s the American normal that elitists have been desperately trying to keep hidden under plastic for decades. The only thing that’s changed is this: There’s no longer any outlet for the pressure, no trusted media, no real opposition party, no economic ladder, no commons to gather in, just debt, anxiety, and screens.

What now shocks the political class isn’t the chaos, it’s that there’s no release valve except their own collapse. They’re not afraid of the people rising up, They’re afraid that the state will be held accountable, and lose.

We were at this moment before in the USA, when the new deal was a white flag, let’s go back for a moment, FDR’s “New Deal” wasn’t a gift, It was a surrender, after 50 years of exploitation by the robber barons and their cronies, the country was on the brink. Labour revolts, communist organizing, anarchist movements, real threats to the state, were everywhere. FDR was smart enough to see the writing on the wall. The New Deal was a bargain: “Here’s a little back. Don’t take the rest.” It worked, temporarily. But only because people still had leverage.

Now? Every President since has mostly just tried to keep the lid on, offering less and less in return, and weaponizing the “culture war” as a distraction. By the Clinton era, the deal was done.

Deregulate the economy.

Outsource everything.

Privatize everything else.

Turn politics into a spectacle.

Keep the pressure building—but never release it.

And now here we are, in a real mess, with a poisoned society from 40 years of #deathcult worship, the political class are now standing naked before the onrushing #climatechaos and social break down, stripped of their sacred robes.

Spiritual poison: stripped rituals, atomized families, forgotten connections.
Social poison: movements fractured, solidarities lost to infighting.
Civic poison: institutions hollowed out, education turned to obedience training.
Media poison: truth for sale, journalism devalued, platforms turned to weapons.
Cultural poison: every feeling a product, every hope a commodity, every act of care reduced to an app.

This should worry the #nastyfew who are propping up this political class. We, the people, are still numbed, distracted, transactioned, algorithmically isolated, so still we can barely even imagine a world otherwise. And still the pressure builds, the worst mistake they’ve made is believing they can just keep doing this, that there are no consequences, that people will always submit if fed enough Netflix, fentanyl, and Uber Eats.

But history doesn’t work that way, when a government wages war on its people… Eventually, it loses, not because the people are strong, but because the government is brittle. The lie of modern technocratic rule is that you can govern without trust, coerce without violence, suppress without blowback. That myth has shattered now, collapse is a trajectory, not a theory.

So what now? We need to rebuilding beyond collapse. This is where our work comes in. #OMN, #indymediaback, the #openweb they’re not just nice ideas, they’re survival infrastructures. We can’t wait for a revolution that will never be televised or appear in our algorithmic feeds. We can’t expect institutions to reform themselves. We need:

Public spaces without paywalls

Media systems without gatekeepers

Tech that serves people, not platforms

Governance that comes from below, not above

This isn’t just political, it’s existential. Either we rebuild from the rubble of this poisoned world, or we get buried beneath it.

The choice isn’t “radicalism” or “reform.”
It’s resistance or thoughtlessness.
Collapse or commons.

You decide.

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

The current mainstreaming’s greatest sin is thoughtlessness

Everyone knows we are in a mess, but most people are too distracted to do anything to change the current path. We’ll keep on this path – scrolling, clicking, consuming – because the current mess we live in is incredibly skilled at hiding consequences.

The environmental cost is buried under greenwashing. BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” Shell sponsors art galleries. Apple makes claims about “carbon-neutral” devices—then glues batteries shut to prevent repair. Meanwhile, rare earth extraction, e-waste, and fast fashion destroy ecosystems from Congo to Cambodia.
The labour cost is outsourced, invisibilized, atomized. Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles to keep pace with surveillance timers. Foxconn installs suicide nets around dorms. Uber calls drivers “partners” while avoiding all responsibility for their lives or livelihoods.
The mental health cost is reframed as personal failure. You’re anxious and burnt out? Must be your mindset. Try a mindfulness app. Maybe eat better. Maybe “grind smarter.” Meanwhile, the structure of your life—precarious work, information overload, climate dread, is never questioned.
The social collapse is blamed on the “irresponsible poor” or “divisive politics.” Communities are gutted by austerity, housing is hoarded by speculators, but you’re told it’s your neighbour’s fault—immigrants, the unemployed, the other political tribe. The system throws fuel on every fire, then lectures you on “civility.”

Every crisis becomes your problem, not the system’s. This is because the #deathcult we unconsciously worship doesn’t just produce stuff, it produces numbness, distraction, and above all, thoughtlessness. A never-ending now, stripped of memory and consequence.

And the moment you try to pull back the curtain? There’s a brand, an #NGO ready to sell you “resistance” too. It’s a system designed to make rebellion feel like a clone lifestyle choice.

A t-shirt with a slogan.
A rainbow flag slapped on a weapons manufacturer.
A “climate justice” conference sponsored by Shell.
A new Netflix docuseries about the thing you’ll forget by next week.

#KISS resistance requires more than outrage, we don’t just need better tech or better politics. We need:

Better attention — to what's real and what's propaganda

Slower thinking — against the churn of hot takes and algorithms

Reclaimed time — stolen back from platform metrics and work schedules

Spaces for consequence — where the impacts of our actions (or inactions) are visible, shareable, accountable

That’s why #DIY infrastructure, the commons, and openness, matter. That’s why we reboot the #openweb, with the #4opens, with the #OMN, with peer-to-peer tools, and with each other. And we need to do this before thoughtlessness becomes all we have left in the #mainstreaming mess.

Tech princes and the #deathcult