A post inspired by rereading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed as a part of the utopia reading group in #Oxford. This book is useful for the students jumping to the next stage of their lives. There’s a moment – often at the end of the teens when people face a choice. To be like everybody else for the rest of their lives, or to make a virtue of their peculiarities.
Most people choose the easy path: they find a nice, safe hierarchy and settle in. They obey the rules, repeat the slogans, and mistake obedience for belonging. They stop thinking for themselves, stop changing. But change is freedom, change is life.
What this means for the few who rebel? Nothing you have is truly yours, everything is to use, to share, to build with. If you do not share it, you cannot truly use it. The real act of violence is not censorship, it’s apathy, the refusal to think, the refusal to care, the refusal to change. You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them, only by ignoring them.
We need not be a subject of a State founded upon law, we can be members of a society born of revolution. Revolution is not destruction; it’s renewal. It’s the composting of the dead so that the living may grow. Revolution is an obligation, our hope of evolution. This is a living society, responsibility through freedom. The duty of the individual is to accept no imposed rule, to be the initiator of their own acts, to take responsibility for their consequences. Only then can society live – not as a static structure, but as a breathing, evolving commons.
So change, think, act, share, is the way we survive. In the current mess, everywhere you look, you can see it – people watching their talent, their work, their lives being wasted. Good minds submitting to stupid ones. Strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. It’s a quiet tragedy that plays out every day, not in revolutions, but in meetings, NGOs, tech projects, and social movements.
The potential for something living and new gets buried under control, ego, and fear. We’ve all seen it: that moment when someone brilliant steps back because the gatekeepers won’t let go.
When a grassroots project loses its edge because it’s easier to fit into “funding priorities.”
When energy turns to exhaustion, and creativity to compliance.
This is the logic of the #deathcult – the slow suffocation of change. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that systems are built to block freedom at every turn. The managers, the bureaucrats, the “leaders” who cling to control are terrified of what real openness might unleash.
But change is freedom. Change is life. The natural world understands this. Compost happens whether you want it to or not. What’s dead breaks down, and from that decay, new life takes root.
The same is true of culture and technology. In the digital world, the #dotcons and #closedweb platforms trap creativity and channel it into profit. They turn acts of sharing into data extraction, connection into surveillance. They turn good minds into content, and movements into metrics. We don’t need more “innovation” within this rot, we need composting. That’s what the #OMN (Open Media Network) is about: taking what’s broken and turning it back into living soil. A simple, federated network built on the #4opens to grow real, grassroots media again.
Because freedom isn’t something granted by institutions, it’s built collectively, from the ground up, through trust, collaboration, and shared tools. The challenge isn’t only technical, it’s social.
Can we let go of control? Can we stop strangling the brave and silencing the creative? Can we accept that change will be messy, uncertain, and alive?
To choose change is to choose life. To cling to control is to choose decay. The #OMN is one path to life, open, messy, collective. The alternative is more of what we already have: talent wasted, good minds ground down, courage strangled. Let’s get on with composting the old, and make space for what’s next.
#4opens #openweb #OMN #nothingnew #techshit #deathcult
DRAFT
