In the USA #techshit mess, #OpenAI is busy wrapping itself in the stars and stripes, pushing the fantasy of “democratic AI” while the democracy fig leaf is withering. This isn’t democracy – it’s branding. It’s the normal Silicon Valley laundering greed through the American imperialism.
The #nastyfew, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Masayoshi Son, and the Saudis will do fine. They’ll gorge on taxpayer, subsides, pouring billions down the drain, just like the political as normal boondoggles – the useless littoral ships, the Foxconn ghost factory. It’s all the same scam: shovel public money into private pockets, call it progress, leave wreckage behind.
This is the everyday #deathcult at work. The language of freedom and democracy as always been hollow, with the smoke and mirrors hiding corporate profit motives, sprayed in red, white, and blue gloss. They, the #nastyfew and their acolytes, were never building tools for people, they’re entrenching power, exporting Silicon Valley’s #dotcons extraction model under state sanction.
The rest of us? We get the surveillance, the climate wreckage, the bill. The only thing “democratic” about this current #AI path is how widely the costs will be socialized while the profits remain privatized.
What we don’t need is more Silicon Valley scams draped in flags. We don’t need “democratic AI” pushing billionaire control. What we do need is a living alternative: like the #OMN path.
The #OpenMediaNetwork isn’t built on subsidies for the #nastyfew, it’s built on trust, transparency, and tools for the many. It’s messy, human, and alive, rejecting the hollow language of branding and growing on the grounded: #4opens for media, code, governance, and community.
The #OMN path says: we don’t wait for corporations to drip-feed us “freedom” while chaining us with surveillance. We build our own networks. We create media that resists capture. We code grassroots protocols that put groups first, not extractive markets. We reclaim the #openweb as commons, not as the current shackled slave plantation.
This is the real “democracy” they are terrified about, and why they keep pushing their stage-managed branding “democracy” exercise. We need instead people creating together, federating, refusing capture, building resilience in the cracks of the failing empire. The #deathcult is extraction, distraction, and decay. The #OMN is life, connection, and power in our hands. The choice is simple. Which side are you on?
The #dotcons sell us lies. Shiny apps. Smooth words. Addictive feeds. It’s branded corporate greed wrapped in a digital addiction – the drug of distraction, sold to us as “connection.”
The #nastyfew billionaires gorge. They own the servers, the wires, the algorithms. They gorge on our clicks, our labour, our lives. And the rest of us pay.
We pay in surveillance. We pay in broken trust. We pay in climate wreckage, while their jets and data centres burn the sky. The bill is dumped in our laps. That’s the #deathcult we all worship.
But we have a choice. If we choose a different path, we don’t need their tools. We don’t need their lies. We don’t need their cages.
We build our own paths. Messy, raw, imperfect – but ours. That’s the #4opens. That’s the #OMN path.
Not for the market. For the people. Not top-down. Ground-up. Group-first. Trust-first. Messy, real, alive.
This is democracy they cannot script. This is media they cannot buy. This is the #openweb commons, we create together, not consume alone.
The choice is simple. Kneel to the #dotcons. Or rise up, and rebuild the #openweb.
Every so often I answer the out reach calls from more traditional alt/progressive media orgs, let’s look at some of the very illustrative “common sense” knock backs. The recent examples are Freedom’s reaction and Good Internet’s submission call – As their reaction is useful to illustrate the fault line of “radical publishing” in a federated media path.
Here’s a sketch of how it can (and arguably should) work if we’re serious about, #openweb, and soft-communing infrastructure:
Radical publishing vs content marketing
Linking, promiscuous citation, and remixing are not “self-promotion,” they are the currency of commons media. The #deathcult “common sense” (silo good, linking bad) flips this into “spam” because it serves enclosure. A federated media path re-asserts: to link is to share; the work which is often missing is to normalize this against the #geekproblem hostility.
Federated magazine model
Think of Good Internet or Freedom not as final silos but as temporary, themed hubs: Each issue/edition is an editorial filter over the wider #datasoup. Every piece lives in at least two places: Original home (blog, Fediverse post, OMN node, site). Curated home (magazine issue, zine, aggregator). Citation = federation: linking outward is a feature, not a weakness.
Protocols over Silos
ActivityPub / OMN: an article = Note or Article with links, tags, signatures. Bridging: same content can be pulled into Good Internet’s site, Freedom, an OMN feed, or a #p2p archive. Editorial collectives act as curators, not gatekeepers: they federate, contextualize, and remix.
Radical editorial practice
News vs. Narrative: anarchist/left publishers still to often mimic #mainstreaming news style. But radical publishing can foreground process stories (assemblies, conflicts, federations, mistakes) as valuable. The “native common sense” is that embedded links aren’t a vice; they’re a form of solidarity economy. Columns / paths: rather than stand-alone “takes,” recurring voices build a long-form conversation thread across issues.
Overcoming the spam accusation
Transparency: declare openly, “this piece first appeared on hamishcampbell.com – we federate because knowledge is commons.” Reciprocity: every time you link out, you also lift other projects, so the “flow” is visible. Editorial notes: curators can preface with: “We include links because they build the #openweb – federation isn’t promotion, it’s solidarity.”
Practical workflow (2026-ish)
Write a blog/site piece on your own, or community domain (independent anchor). Publish simultaneously to Fediverse (AP Article). Flag it with #OMN metadata (topic, source, tags). Editorial collectives subscribe to flows/feeds – curate into magazine/zine/weekly digest. Federation tools track lineage: where did this piece appear, when, how remixed. Readers move from curated hubs back to source domains (and sideways to other linked nodes).
Why it matters to anarchists
Free software is political; so is free publishing. Federation prevents capture by the #nastyfew – no central owner can throttle which radical voices appear. Linking promiscuously creates a mutual aid economy of attention, the opposite of platform/silo enclosure. Each zine/collective/magazine is an affinity group node; federation = council of nodes. It encodes horizontalism in media.
So when you bump against “not news enough” or “too self-promotional,” that’s the clash between #mainstreaming editorial common sense and federated radical publishing practice. One assumes scarcity (guard the pages); the other assumes abundance (share the flow).
Most software today = individualist. Even “collective” tools (Fediverse servers, enterprise SaaS, etc.) are just abstractions that aggregate individuals. The default assumption is the liberal subject: the sovereign individual. The infrastructure is built for self-expression, personal feeds, private chats, me, me, me. That’s why for example, when you step into libertarian codebases like #nostr, the smell of #stupidindividualism is everywhere.
Communities are treated as “groups of individuals,” not as entities. That’s the bourgeois blind spot, a community is not just a pile of people. A village, a crew, an affinity group, a social centre – these are organisms in themselves. They have memory, metabolism, reproduction, decision-making processes that aren’t reducible to a sum of members.
Much of activism and grassroots assemblies already know this, in real life, you’ve seen how assemblies develop rules-of-thumb, consensus practices, and internal cultures. They don’t need hard rules (code) to function; they need space, trust and ritual. What digital tools can do is soft map those existing practices into code, not create more structured #techshit that imposes individualist logic from the normal every day #deathcult priests of Silicon Valley.
So, if we take this different path, what would the balancing of communal-first tech look like? Well, much like the current mod process of good grassroots mastodon instances. Malatesta was right: anarchism is not the absence of “paths”, it’s paths we make for ourselves.
So looking over our shoulder, if we apply this lens to #nostr: The tech is libertarian free market, good for individual broadcasting. If you wanted to fork or layer it for communal use, you’d have to invert its assumptions: design clients that display group deliberation outputs, not only individual chatter. Right now, the #nostr crowd is hostile to this, because they’re blinded by crypto-bro ideology. But the protocol itself is kinda neutral, though the UX is still half-baked.
For #OMN and #indymediaback: This community-as-unit model is already in the DNA (#Indymedia was not a bunch of bloggers; it was collectives federating). The challenge is resisting the gravitational pull of the “common sense”, #mainstreaming, #dotcons control of the #nastyfew who can’t help but push everything to look like personal brands and influencer feeds.
As it should be easy to see, real-world collective practice – assemblies, affinity groups, neighbourhood councils – work differently. The base unit is not the individual but the group, bound by shared process. Thus, we need to build mythos and traditions before tools, decision-making protocols need to be horizontal and social, rather than hard coded digital control. To take this different path, we need to change and challenge the #mainstreaming with #KISS “native” tools, rather than the current mess of retrofitting governance into individualist existing software.
To recap, the unit of measure matters. Most digital tools are still built around the individual user account as the base unit. Everything radiates out from that: identity, control, permissions, content. This encodes #liberal, capitalist assumptions into the tech: atomised people, making “choices,” “connecting” in a marketplace of attention.
The #OMN is there to provide scaffolding for the pat away from this mess: a social layer that privileges collectives over individuals, that federates assemblies not personalities, and that accepts messiness as a feature rather than a bug. This is the path the #OMN can nurture, even if it means swimming against both the #dotcons and the libertarian crypto crowd, because we know that without shared process society collapses into prats, paranoia, and power-hoarding.
Let’s try to compost the mess rather than add to it, the #OMN is a shovel, please try not to be a prat about this, thanks.
Let’s look at a different view, it’s not just the tech, we’ve had working #FOSS tools, protocols, and infrastructure for decades. What kills movements is social, it’s the politics. Fractionalism – ideological vanguards fighting to capture and control. Authoritarian “protection” – censorship framed as security, silencing criticism. Shrinking ghettos – small groups defining themselves by exclusion, not expansion.
On the so-called radical paths, whether Trotskyist, Stalinist, or anarchist, the pattern is the same: authority asserts itself, dialogue is shut down, energy drains away. This is not new, it’s what happened in #Indymedia’s first wave (2000–2015). A boom of 100+ servers worldwide collapsed under internal antagonisms and the pressure of repression. The pattern is likely to repeat today in the #Fediverse – a federation of “benevolent dictatorships,” ideological ghettos, and isolation bubbles.
On this path, it’s still the same two poisons. Greed – the monetizers, who see everything as an opportunity to exploit. Liberals – who smother movements with control, respectability politics, and blocking, until the right crushes them anyway. Then we have the social issue of the #geekpronlem in front of this.
So why do alt tech at all, with projects like #Indymediaback / #OMN? Simple, it’s because this is an attempt to break this cycle. It’s not about building “the next Twitter,” or even just “the next Indymedia.” It’s about building infrastructure that makes it harder for greed and liberalism to strangle movements.
That means, collective relations over exchange relations. If everything is transactional, the hydra of exploitation regrows from within. Messy consensus over vanguardism. Power must remain distributed, rooted in trust, not captured by “protectors”. Openness over gatekeeping, #4opens (open source, open data, open standards, open process) are non-negotiable. The aim is not a perfect system, but a resilient culture that resists authoritarian drift of the controlling left or the right.
What we need now is a space for open discussion – not geek-only, not ghettoized, but broad, accessible, and transparent. Seed funding – servers and crew are running on fumes. Without subsistence support, even the strongest politics collapse from burnout. Affinity groups – real-world working crews who share trust and values, not just abstract online networks. Bridging – from #Fediverse to #P2P and other channels, so we can resist repression and surveillance without pushing us into failed isolation.
With the hard right expansion, we are in a visible naked class war, the right is crushing the liberals, which ironically creates more space for the radical left. The “common sense” liberals can’t block as effectively when their own protections are stripped away. On a positive note, this is an opening to build balanced radical progressive infrastructure – not just protest spaces, but growing, federating, living networks of communication and trust.
In short: #Indymediaback using the #OMN framework isn’t just about servers or software. It’s about breaking the repeating cycle of fractionalism, authoritarian drift, and liberal smothering, and creating conditions where grassroots media and alt cultures can actually survive long enough to matter.
They are the people who always rise to the top when #mainstreaming takes hold. You see them on TV, in parliament, running #NGOs, managing #dotcons tech projects.
On the surface, they don’t always look bad – in fact, they often present as competent, articulate, even charming. But scratch that surface and the pattern is clear: their drive is not shared flourishing, it’s possession and control.
This minority #nastyfew, from a historical view, are today’s bourgeoisie. Marx outlined (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie), that the bourgeoisie historically gained their power through ownership of the means of production – factories, land, capital – while the working class had nothing but their labour to sell. The bourgeoisie used their control over wealth and coercion to keep society in balance, a balance where they stayed on top and everyone else stayed dependent.
The same dynamic runs through our present, the #nastyfew work to preserve a status quo that serves them. They exploit labour (waged or unwaged), capture resources, and use subtle or blunt coercion to suppress any change or challenge.
Those who hold power – social, technical, financial – remain the #nastyfew unless we actively work to compost them.
Then, in our cultural circles, we have our own “common sense” #blocking, the “parasites” who feed from progressive paths.
#fashernistas – chasing visibility, hashtags, and trends instead of substance. They drain energy by endlessly cycling the latest buzzwords while ignoring the compost underneath.
#Blinded dogmatic liberals – well-meaning perhaps, but so trapped in their own ideology that they block radical change without even seeing it.
The wannabe #nastyfew – those who orbit power, adopting the habits of control in hopes of rising up themselves.
Neo-liberals in disguise – the most dangerous, because they consciously wear the clothing of other paths: climate, diversity, openness… while quietly feeding the #deathcult of enclosure, growth, and control.
Some of these act blindly, reproducing harmful patterns without much thought. Others are deliberate: they know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it to consolidate control.
The unthinking #mainstreaming majority are shadows of the above. They’re not directly malicious, but they absorb the surface story: They repost the slogans. They nod along with “common sense” solutions pushed by the #dotcons and NGOs. They go with the flow, even when the flow is a sewer. Without working composting, they become the mulch for the #nastyfew to grow stronger.
The “nice liberals”. Not all liberals are destructive. Sometimes they play a healthy role: They keep projects afloat by doing practical work. They can mediate between radicals and the #mainstreaming. They often mean well, and can be allies if they’re not left holding the steering wheel all the time. They’re not the compost, they’re more like the worms: sometimes useful, sometimes wriggly, but part of the soil cycle.
And beyond, there are what has value, the progressive radical paths – both #fluffy (trust, care, openness) and #spiky (confrontation, defence, rupture). That’s another layer of the compost pile, and deserves its own focus. The key point: the #nastyfew and their parasites will always try to rise up in any fertile ground. The progressive trick is to compost them early – recycle their energy, block their possessiveness, and keep the soil rich for new seeds.
To recap, let’s look at some history. When the #openweb reboot began about a decade ago, it was rooted in grassroots values: #4opens, federation, collective governance, affinity trust networks. But as soon as the energy started to gather, the #mainstreamin pushed in:
#Dotcons pivoting into the space – Facebook rebranding as “Meta” and trying to swallow the Fediverse through the #Threads/ActivityPub move. This is enclosure dressed up as “openness”.
Standards capture – The #NGO actors increasingly gatekeeper the “neglected” #W3C processes, pushing, more corporate-driven priorities while blocking messy grassroots paths that did the shovelling to grow the reboot during the seedling years.
Control of resources – a few “elitist” individuals began hoarding power over infrastructure, domain names, and repos, reproducing the same top-down model we’re supposed to be escaping.
The result? We are seeing the #mainstreaming channeling energy away from collective growth into more controlled, branded silos. The Fediverse started as messy, small-scale, radical. But the same pattern repeated:
SocialHub degeneration – once the buzzing hub for ActivityPub, it decayed into a handful of blockers. The sometimes competent-and-charming surface masks a deeper instinct for control. Threads stagnate, dissent is suppressed, and the soil turns barren.
Mastodon centralization – while #Mastodon has been vital, its dominance has also let a single dev-team shape the Fediverse “common sense”. That concentration of reputation and technical control looks very much like a wannabe mini-bourgeois class rising.
#NGO incursions – funded NGOs present themselves as allies, but bring managerialism, paywalls thinking, and “stakeholder” logic. Instead of composting conflict, they plaster over it with workshops and careerism. Then #block the people who complain.
This is the #Fediverse version of “workers remain workers, employers remain employers”: contributors remain contributors, gatekeepers remain gatekeepers. We face the issue of possession over collaboration – we see that collectives fracture when individuals cling to admin roles, mailing lists, funds, and leadership positions. Possession rots trust and then groups wither.
The people who hold (and hored) resources, contacts, and media attention become more deadened than path, even if they started with good intentions.
The composting lesson, is that over and over, the #nastyfew and their parasites repeat the bourgeois pattern at scale: They present as competent and charming. They consolidate possession and control. They preserve the status quo by suppressing dissent.
And over and over, the solution is the same: compost them. Turn the piles of #techshit and #NGO mess back into fertile ground. Protect the seeds of grassroots tech trust, keep the social soil messy and alive.
The #OMN is based on human beings doing the right thing.
And they will not, and it will fail.
Human beings doing the right thing, and they will not, and it will fail.
And they will not, and it will fail.
And will fail.
This is the challenge in the era of the #deathcult: A culture that feeds on fear, on greed, on possession.
Seeds are planted, but the soil is barren. Trust is offered, but hands close into fists. A path is drawn, but the walkers scatter into shadows.
The #OMN is fragile, thin green shoots in a field of ash.
It asks the simplest thing: Do the right thing. Not once, but again, and again, and again.
And if we do not? It will fail.
And if we do? Perhaps, seeds will take root, and grow beyond the compost, beyond the #deathcult, into the messy, open, living forest.
It’s good to see more people turning their focus back to the #openweb. For the past five years of the #reboot we’ve been distracted in a signal-to-noise mess from the #fashionistas. That time needs to be over, we need to start looking clearly at both internal rot and the external threats.
A good first step is in balancing the realisation that we actually have far more direct power to deal with the internal mess than we do over the eternal #dotcons and their #closedweb “common sense”. That’s why we need to put activism into composting the internal #blocking (see: https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost). Composting isn’t just a metaphor – it’s a way to recycle the piles of #techshit we’ve built up into soil that can grow new #openweb seeds. #KISS
I understand the focus on the external #dotcons, yes, we also need to keep pushing back against the external enclosures. But inside our own spaces, it’s clear that possessiveness, in code, in reputation, in control over projects, undermines cooperation. It destroys trust, it wastes resources, it corrodes integrity. People often destroy what they love, not out of hate, but out of possession.
Drafting blog posts, polemics, and rallying calls to sharpen the #OMN narrative. Use the compost metaphors (#techshit, seeds, soil) into accessible messaging that sticks. Editing to transform the long posts into shareable, short-form content for Mastodon, Fediverse, and allied networks.
Curating and organizing existing #OMN writings into a structured wiki-style knowledge base. Building summaries, FAQs, and primers for newcomers who hit the projects cold. Draft “composting guides” – how to deal with #blocking, #fashionistas, and #geekproblem inside communities.
Writing simple documentation for the Unite Forge and other #OMN tools. Helping draft roadmaps that explain what’s built, what’s missing, and what needs contributors. Produce explainers on why #OMN is different from #dotcons and #NGO capture, grounded in #4opens.
Write out templates for horizontal decision-making (#OGB style) that projects can adapt. Suggest practical ways to “compost” blockers while keeping the wider network fertile. Help draft neticate rooted in #KISS + #4opens rather than #NGO-speak.
Each of these can be grown into living resources: wiki pages, blog posts, shareable guides, or activist toolkits – depending on where you want the energy to flow.
The geek answer (bad faith or blindness): “If only everyone learned to code, then society would be fairer.”
The activist answer: Code is part of the landscape, but culture, governance, and lived practice matter more. We don’t escape domination by teaching more people to type commands, we escape by changing what we do together with the tools.
Why “teach everyone to code” has become a dead-end slogan – it’s been tried, it’s been funded, and yet it hasn’t shifted power one bit. If anything, it’s reinforced the tech priesthood instead of breaking it.
The #geekproblem is exactly this blindness: geeks mistake tools for culture, skill for power, and training for change. They can’t see that the last 20 years of “learn to code” projects have failed precisely because they sidestep politics, trust, and social fabric. It’s comfortable, because it keeps power where it already is.
So, coding literacy might be useful, but it’s not transformative without social literacy – trust, collective governance, open processes. The real activist social tech path is to compost geek mess-making and build alt-cultures where tools serve the collective, not the priesthood.
Otherwise, “coding for all” is another flavour of #blocking – keeping us stuck, distracted, and blind. This is a useful example of the blinded #geekproblem. I use the word blinded to illustrate that people can’t see the sense in front of their faces. And I use the hashtag #blocking to show the outcome of this common “sense” blindness #KISS
Coding is not automatically social power, but in some contexts it does act as power, and understanding when/why helps unpack the #geekproblem.
When coding is not power
Most coding done in industry is low-level labour: writing scripts, fixing bugs, maintaining old systems. These programmers aren’t powerful; they’re workers. Their code serves capital.
Teaching kids to code (“everyone can make an app!”) rarely translates to actual power, because the infrastructure, distribution, and governance of platforms remain controlled by corporations.
Coding on its own doesn’t equal voice. A line of code in a corporate repo is no more socially powerful than a line in a personal diary if the person coding has no agency over how it’s used.
When coding is power
Coding becomes power when it bridges infrastructure + governance + culture.
Building #openweb infrastructure: If you can write the protocols or standards (e.g. ActivityPub, TCP/IP), you shape the possibilities for everyone downstream. That’s a kind of structural power.
Gatekeeping: If you control the codebase of a popular project, you can decide what features exist, whose contributions get merged, and which voices are excluded. This is soft but real power.
Automation and scale: Writing code that automates tasks (e.g. bots, algorithms, moderation tools) gives leverage over many people’s experience, especially when hidden in the background.
Narrative + legitimacy: In activist or grassroots spaces, coders too often get treated as “high priests” because they appear to have magical abilities others lack. This cultural framing inflates their social weight.
Coders confuse technical power with social change. They think: “If I can write the tool, I can fix the politics.” But tools reflect cultures. Without collective governance, tools just reproduce existing hierarchies.
The illusion of inevitability: because software underpins modern life, geeks assume society must organize around them. That blindness is what we’re pointing to.
When geeks push “everyone must code” as the path, they miss that most people don’t need to code to have power, they need agency in decision-making and trust networks.
How it really works (coding + social power)
Coding has power when embedded in movements that control their infrastructure. Example: early #Indymedia coders had real social power because their code directly enabled publishing outside corporate media – and at the start they were accountable to activist collectives.
Coding has power when it’s used to mediate flows of attention, trust, and resources. For example, algorithms that boost or bury voices. In grassroots hands, that can be liberatory; in corporate hands, it’s oppressive.
Coding becomes shared power when it is paired with open process (#4opens), shared governance (#OGB), and cultural literacy. Otherwise, it’s generally more priesthood, likely for the #deatcult in the end.
So: coding is like fire. On its own, it’s just heat and light. In the hands of a few, it’s a weapon or a fortress. In the commons, with shared tending, it’s the hearth – collective power.
To recap, coding as social power: Myth vs Reality
Myth 1: Coding = empowerment We’ve been told that “if everyone learns to code, everyone will have power.” Twenty years of coding bootcamps, “learn to code” initiatives, and school programs prove otherwise. Most of this simply trains people to slot into corporate pipelines. The power stays where it always was.
Reality: Coding on its own is labour, not empowerment. The infrastructure, governance, and distribution layers decide where the power flows. Without culture and collective governance, coding is just fuel for someone else’s engine.
Myth 2: Coding makes you special Coders often act like priests, holding secret knowledge. In activist spaces, this creates the illusion that coders alone can “save” or “lead.” That’s the #geekproblem in action.
Reality: Tools are only as powerful as the cultures and processes around them. A coder without collective accountability is just another gatekeeper. A coder inside a collective, with open governance (#4opens, #OGB), can help shift power outward.
Myth 3: Coding will fix politics The geek fantasy: “If I build the right app, the politics will fix itself.” We’ve seen this with countless “alternative platforms” that end up reproducing the same hierarchies.
Reality: Politics is culture, trust, and process. Code can mediate, amplify, or automate, but it cannot replace politics. Tools without culture are empty shells; culture without tools is still possible.
The compost view is the task isn’t to make everyone a coder, but to compost the priesthood and grow cultures where coding is a part of the collective. That’s the #KISS answer: code can support social power, but it is not social power.
Build cultures, not just tools: Stop pretending apps fix politics. Tools only matter if they grow inside strong cultures. Put people first, tech second.
Open the process (#4opens): Keep everything open: code, data, governance, strategy. Power hides in shadows; openness dissolves the priesthood. If it’s not open, it’s not our path.
Practice collective governance (#OGB): It helps when decisions about infrastructure are made more horizontally. Coders are part of the collective, not above it. Shared governance turns coding from priesthood into common fire.
The path out of the #geekproblem is in composting geek blindness and building living cultures where coding is a part of growing the commons.
For an example, this post is relevant to the degeneration of the #SocialHub project, which for meany years was the place for #ActivityPub and #Fediverse#openweb reboot, but now what’s left of the social side is the few remaining active unthinking “problem” people.
This is a normal path and outcome, that we need to compost to keep growing seeds #KISS
All too often, the ugliness we face in grassroots spaces wears a smile. It’s smiling-faced vileness: pleasant, agreeable individuals who wield control by blocking dissent, sanitizing movements under the guise of compromise, and maintaining the fake illusion of consensus. This is especially true in spaces overly tolerant of #NGO-style protocols – those bureaucratic, #fashionista postmodern traps that slowly erode the spark that makes radical communities thrive.
From my work across decades – from protest camps to #openweb projects – I’ve seen this pattern again and again. Projects like early #Indymedia were messy, radical, and fiercely autonomous. That edge, that wildness was slowly excised until what remains is either safe, bland, and powerless or locked down and paranoid, both smother the naive grassroots paths.
At late era #climatecamp i’ve witnessed activist planning groups that masquerade as open and inclusive, but doom radical ideas by policing language. If someone speaks candidly about power or inequality, they risk being labelled as “derailing.” Not unlike what I describe on the Fediverse: “a consensus ritual where insiders quietly veto contentious proposals, pushing them offstage.” The effect is chilling – the bold, and meaningful, get diluted and then silenced.
I’ve also seen “horizontal” groups adopt soft authoritarianism: a handful of insiders subtly side-line contentious voices with endless calls for care, safety and more research or structure, this is simply polite gatekeeping, in those quiet pauses, power consolidates. These practices don’t just kill energy, they devour possibility. They cannibalize the chance for communities that are both fluffy (nurturing) and spiky (radical).
Smiling-face vileness is not satire – it’s simple #fashionista postmodern gaslighting, that slowly smothers life with calm care and precision. To compost this mess, the task of the grassroots is to replant what’s been stomped. That means cultivating friction -mess, disagreement, negotiation – because that is how community grows, trust is built, and real alternatives emerge. Let’s embed this friction into our code, our community practices, our shared care. Let’s compost the #NGO and fashionista chokeholds so we can grow radical, tender, collective futures #KISS
A lot of the “smiling-faced vileness” comes from a mix of personal psychology, learned behaviour, and the systemic incentives that shape #NGO, institutional, and #mainstreaming culture. It’s not usually deep evil – it’s something more banal, entrenched, and self-justifying. Examples of this mess makeing:
Fear of losing control when change threatens the structures they know how to navigate, so they subconsciously (or consciously) try to stop it. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil idea applies here: harm is done by “ordinary” functionaries protecting their turf “The real danger is not that people will rebel, but that they will acquiesce in doing what they know is wrong.”
Cognitive dissonance management, as they see themselves as “the good guys,” so any action – even blocking positive change – must be reframed as “responsible” or “prudent.” #Postmodern self-protection: everything can be justified with enough narrative spin, “No one is the villain of their own story.”
Status preservation, NGOs and funding orgs reward stability over creativity, hierarchy over challenge. If this position, funding and reputation depends on maintaining the current order, so will fight disruptive change, even if it’s obviously better “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Incompetence + insecurity, breeds paranoia. If you don’t know how to manage real change, you start to fear those who do. The façade of competence becomes more important than actual results, “When a man’s only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Groupthink & conformity pressure, #mainstreaming cultures reward going along with the majority, even if the majority is wrong “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
This is why these people who cling to “power” often look “nice” on the surface while quietly gutting or neutralising anything spiky, challenging, and any change of path. It’s not just personal malice, it’s a cultural immune system against change, fuelled by fear, vanity, and comfort.
An example of this is when the tiny few “secede” in #mainstreaming media (and the history it writes) it is not neutral, it’s a kind of #PR machine. It launders power and polishes away dissent. The smiling faces and “respectable” voices then are just the velvet gloves over the iron fist. It’s fake history as PR – it isn’t history as lived memory or contested struggle, it’s official narrative, a “storybook” written to flatter the winners and confuse the rest. That’s why it feels vile and pointless: it distracts, pacifies, and reframes mess as inevitability.
We need to be clear, the people who produce this are not innocent. Yes, many are clueless functionaries who internalize the system’s values without question. Others are parasitic aspirants, desperate to climb into the #nastyfew by copying their methods. Even when they do “small goods” (a sympathetic article, a cultural puff piece), in the larger pattern they still serve the mainstreaming #deathcult machine.
The compost metaphor is about instead of raging endlessly at the mess, take what can be siphoned off (attention, fragments of narrative, disillusioned individuals) and redirect that flow into the alt systems (#OMN, #4opens, Fediverse, grassroots histories) then compost the rest: let it rot, break down, and become the fertilizer for something alive and grounded t seed. Because otherwise we get stuck in their cycle: doom-scrolling their fake stories, wasting energy on only reacting instead of building. Yes, the challenge is mediation, not just rejection. Spot the toxic flows, tap them for useful nutrients, and feed the roots of alternatives.
Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away.
We put a class of media into the commons, governed openly through the #4opens: open data, open process, open source, and open standards. That means no one can close it down, hoard it, or fence it off for profit. The value comes from the shared pool, not from gatekeeping.
This is the heart of #KISS in the #OMN: make the flows work first, in ways people can understand, and build trust on top of that. The tech exists to serve these flows, not to dictate them. This isn’t about perfect crypto or hard lockdowns; it’s about commoning media so that everyone has the right to read, share, and build on it.
Yes, the #mainstreaming mess will eventually follow us – as it always does. But the plan and hope is that by the time it catches up, the habits, culture, and expectations we’ve grown around open media will have shifted society enough that the old traps won’t work the same way. If we’ve done our job, the default will be more open, collaborative, and accountable, not locked down. That’s the #KISS path: simple, resilient, and grounded in the commons.
On the #OMN with #indymediaback and #makeinghistory paths – We’re not talking about a single bridge, but a federated ecosystem, with the current example of both #DAT and #ActivityPub running on the same server, sharing a common database of media objects. As the data flows, text and metadata are redundantly stored in the open (#4opens). That way, if one server gets hacked, it can simply be rolled back and restored from the wider pool. #KISS
The P2P side works much like #nostr in that it can have a list of flows in and out to servers and can use any of these to publish and receive media on the #openweb. The advantage of the #p2p app side is that each local app in a backup for the online servers (see #makeinghistory), which as critics say can be, and will be, taken down some times. Also, they will work in their own right for people who need a more locked down path, and this will be needed in more repressive spaces and times. The clear advantage is this still gives them outflows to the wider #mainstreaming client server media outreach, to what matters, effect, so it ticks both boxes.
We aim to solve technical issues with human-understandable social paths, not hard tech for its own sake. Yes, in a minority of cases hard tech will be needed – but that’s for the #geeks to solve after the working social paths are clear, not before.
We fix problems through #KISS social processes and #4opens transparency, not by defaulting to encryption and lockdown. Hacking is outside the focus scope of the #OMN. What we’re building is about trust and flows, not code as an end in itself. Hacking belongs on the #geek paths – useful, but only after the trust and flows are established. The code should be there to secure what’s been built, not to block it before it exists.
Without trust and working flows, there’s no value at all, no matter how secure, encrypted, or elegant the tech stack. If the campaigns, activism, and people aren’t using it, the system is pointless. And being pointless is something we need to be more honest about. Building for the sake of building, while ignoring the social, community layer, feeds the #geekproblem and starves the movement.
So, what can people actually do in the real world to make this path happen?
If you have resources, you can help fund the development work – keeping it in the hands of the people actually building the open commons, not some corporate gatekeeper.
If you’re technical, you can code the applications and servers that power the flows. We need builders who understand that trust and usability come first, not shiny tech for its own sake.
If you work in UX or testing, you can make sure what we build is something real people can actually use and trust – simple, clear, and accessible.
If you do media, you can tell the story. Write, film, photograph, blog, podcast – whatever it takes to spread the word. The more people hear about an alternative that works, the more chance it has to grow.
Whatever your skills or resources, the important thing is to get involved in the flow. This is not a spectator sport, and the is unlikely to be pay, it’s #DIY so the commons will only be built if we build it together. #KISS #4opens #OMN
Activist tech has been stuck in “bunker mode” for 20 years. We now need to work on building #4opens native, commons-first systems that store, share, and protect movement knowledge in ways that don’t require a priesthood of insiders to operate.
In an active movement, forum threads, shared docs, livestreams, and photos aren’t just chat noise, they’re collective memory. If we treat them as disposable, we throw away the hard-earned lessons that future activists will desperately need. The solution is #KISS-fed, redundant, federated archiving:
All public movement data sits in the commons.
Metadata + content are mirrored across multiple federated nodes.
Backups are easy to pull, restore, and re-seed by anyone who ever has trust access.
Data is grouped via hashtags, not rigid taxonomies, so it flows where it’s needed.
This is appropriate tech: low-complexity, high-resilience, built for social utility first. But for this to grow it can’t be mediated to death by the #geekproblem – code should follow social needs, not the other way round. If we can get this kind of infrastructure running, we stop losing our history, we keep movements porous instead of paranoid, and we finally start building bridges instead of walls.
Let’s look at an example of this: For the #DAT protocol to become relevant in #FOSS activist tech, we need to stop treating it as an isolated island and start building solid bridges to #ActivityPub. The two are not enemies – they are complementary paths. p2p tools and protocols like DAT brings distributed, peer-to-peer file persistence; ActivityPub brings the social layer, discovery, and conversation. Together, they create a space where activists choose their preferred path without being siloed or alienated, and without the unhealthy isolation that comes from the current #geekproblem habit of fetishising one protocol at the expense of all others.
Diversity is the basis of any healthy ecosystem – biological, social, or technological. In nature, monocultures are fragile; in tech, monocultures are authoritarian. We need to approach activist infrastructure with the same principles that make ecosystems thrive: multiple species of tools, cross-pollination between communities, and a constant flow of ideas and resources. This doesn’t mean adding complexity for complexity’s sake; it means designing with #KISS in mind, while ensuring redundancy and adaptability.
If we take this ecological view of the #openweb, then bridges are not optional extras – they are the lifelines. In our example, by linking #DAT and #ActivityPub, we create a richer habitat for movements to live in. We make it harder for corporate capture to take root, and we give people the freedom to move between spaces without losing connection and context. That’s how we replace the bunker mentality with a real commons, not just defensive walls, but thriving, interconnected gardens.
Appropriate technology in activist tech means tools built for our real contexts, not for Silicon Valley fantasies or bunker-dwelling paranoia. It’s about lightweight, repairable, understandable systems that communities can actually run, adapt, and share. Right now, the #geekproblem pushes us toward shiny, #dotcons shaped over-engineered toys that serve developer ego more than people and community need or bloated encryption stacks nobody understands, federated protocols that collapse under complexity, and endless half-finished “next big things” with no grounding in actual social use.
We need to drag the conversation back tofit for purpose, tech that works in the messy, underfunded, real world of activism, where trust and openness are the foundation, and security is woven in without becoming a fetish that locks us away from each other.
The #fedivers#openweb reboot of the last ten years is a good first step, but it embeds meany of the #mainstreaming issues and has the deep #geekproblems embedded into its culture and tech stacks. A second step away from this is, the social understanding, that security doesn’t come from code alone, it comes from the community that surrounds it. Without a living, visible, and shared culture, the best tools are just dead weight.
The path starts with embedding our tools inside open, self-documenting, collective cultures. If you can’t see how decisions happen, you’re just replacing one opaque power structure with another.
Forget the myth of the “perfect” platform. What we need are messy but resilient spaces, a diversity of nodes, loosely connected, each carrying its own part of the load.
Build commons-first infrastructure, to re-anchor our work in openness, federation, and trust-based networks baked in from the start. The baseline is #4opens – open data, open source, open standards, open process – non-negotiable.
On this path, the #OMN (Open Media Network) can be the publishing spine: a trust-based network where stories, actions, and knowledge move between activist spaces without corporate choke points and #blocking.
We must bridge into existing real-world struggles – unions, climate justice, housing fights. Tech that only talks to other techies is just another dead end.
Stop digging the same hole, we stop wasting energy on projects that make us smaller and weaker:
No more encryption fetishism. Encryption is the lock on the door, not the whole house.
No more closed, invite-only dev silos. If you can’t talk openly about the work, it’s either the wrong work or the wrong space.
No more “founder cult” projects that collapse when one person burns out or drifts off.
Security is not enough, survival is not victory, we can be safe and irrelevant – or vulnerable and changing the world by breaking corporate dependency, by building the infrastructure of a post-#dotcons world. This isn’t about perfect software, it’s about building the cultures that can use it – and win.
What is it that blocks this needed change and challenge? #Geekproblem is about when the “solution” Is the problem. One of the most frustrating things is how often its defenders mistake their narrow fixations for universal solutions, or worse, offer them up in bad faith to derail the real conversation.
You’ll raise an issue – social, political, cultural – and instead of engaging with the messy, human, collective work needed to address it, the geek brain rushes to replace it with a neat technical patch. The tool, the workflow, the protocol. As if the complexity of human trust, governance, and solidarity can be debugged into submission.
This isn’t just misunderstanding; sometimes it’s sabotage. By framing the “solution” purely in terms of tech or procedure, they strip the problem of its social and political context. What remains is something sterile, depoliticised, and ultimately unfit for purpose.
It’s why I keep bringing this up. Because if we don’t name the #Geekproblem for what it is, we’ll keep circling in the same loops, patching over social fractures with shiny but hollow code. The answer isn’t more complexity; it’s #KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple in the sense of clear, human-first, and grounded in open, accessible processes.
The truth is, solving problems in the #openweb isn’t about cleverness or code alone. It’s about people, and unless the geeks can learn to work with that, rather than overwrite it, they’ll stay part of the problem, the #geekproblem
Please, please try not to keep being a prat about this.
For two decades, activist tech has been stuck in a defensive crouch. We’ve built bunkers (security tools, encryption layers, anonymity networks) but very few bridges. That’s left the field fragmented, insular, and often unattractive to the people we’re supposedly trying to empower.
If the aim is to push social change and challenge rather than just survive, here’s what I think needs building:
#4opens-native infrastructure Open data → not just sharing docs, but making activist knowledge queryable, remixable, reusable. Open source → tools that anyone can template and that are designed for non-geek participation. Open process → transparent decision-making, recorded and accessible, not locked in Discord chats and private Signal groups. Open standards → making sure our platforms talk to each other rather than becoming new silos.
Right now, most “secure” activist tools violate at least two of these, which is why they never scale socially.
Defensive tools keep activists inside – whisper networks, encrypted groups – but change needs broadcast. We need infrastructure for:
Collaborative publishing (like a modern Indymedia, federated rather than centralised)
Native-to-activist communities, not corporate platforms with activist skin
Embeddable media flows that any group can plug into their own site and feed back into the commons
Bridges between the “geek” and the “street”
We keep losing people at the handover point between coders and campaigners. This means:
Building social UX: not just “usable” but welcoming, narrative, and easy to onboard without a training camp
Open governance for projects, so they don’t ossify into closed dev clubs
Mixing online and offline organising so the tech is embedded in the movement, not floating above it
Most activist tech projects fail when the original team burns out or falls out. We need:
Federated governance where each node makes its own calls but can still coordinate
Lightweight, transparent conflict resolution instead of exile-by-moderator
Structures that reward contribution over gatekeeping
Narrative + polemic
Tech alone doesn’t move people, stories do. The #4opens path should be wrapped in cultural work: films, zines, podcasts, political memes, all pointing back to live, working tools people can join today.
Why this matters: If all we do is encrypt ourselves into tiny rooms, we’ve already lost – the social fabric will rot away outside those walls. Encryption is necessary for many struggles, but it’s not sufficient. Positive activist tech must be porous, messy, and visible, because change needs an audience and a route for people to join.
Bridges: An activist tech roadmap
We’ve made excellent hiding places – but the point was never to hide. What we need to stop building. (Let it compost – it’s done its job, or it was a dead-end from the start?)
Paranoid toys for the already paranoid. Endless “yet another secure messenger” forks for people who already have six installed.
Security fetishism that confuses obscurity with safety.
Crypt bro sandcastles. Blockchain “liberation” projects that replicate Silicon Valley greed, gated by tokens and VC hype.
Anything that smells like replacing corporate overlords with slightly more smug overlords.
Single-issue encryption fortresses. Tools so focused on privacy that they have zero public presence or outreach capacity. Result: the tech survives, but the movement starves for connection.
Endless horizontal-but-empty governance “frameworks” Looming Google Docs full of aspirational process that nobody follows in practice. No real community roots, just “process cosplay.”
What to start building (This is the real #4opens + #OMN work)
Social-first tech stacks. Start with people, not protocols.
Build interfaces that encourage conversation, collaboration, and collective memory.
#4opens principles applied to UX, governance, and hosting — not just the code repo.
Native governance baked into the stack. #OGB-style decision-making visible and accessible to every user. Influence exercised in the open, with accountable stewardship, not backroom admin chat.
Open media networks that publish first, secure second. #OMN-style federated publishing where public content flows freely, while personal data defaults to private. Focus on amplifying radical stories instead of just hiding them better.
Tools that make bridges not walls. Mediating the signal-to-noise rather than blocking at the first whiff of disagreement. Spaces where trust can grow between different grassroots tribes without falling into the #NGO/#dotcons gravity well.
Composable, messy, repairable tech. #KISS principles, with the option for local hacks and templates. Document the how and why so that when projects die, others can compost them into new growth.
The call-out is we can’t code our way out of the #deathcult with bunker software. The way forward is messy, social, and built in the open. Let’s stop pretending that better locks will save us, and start making better streets for our movements to meet, cooperate, and fight together.
The #4opens + #OMN path is the stepping stone back into the light. Take it, or stay buried.
