The ideological mess we need to compost:
Post-modernism
Over the last four decades, post-modernism has emphasized subjectivity and questioned universal truths. Its aim was to deconstruct grand narratives and expose hidden power structures. While this brought critiques, it also contributed to increasingly fragmented worldviews, where shared reality became harder to establish and #fashionista truth was treated as entirely relative. This fragmentation has made it more difficult to build coherent social movements capable of addressing systemic problems.
Neo-liberalism
Neo-liberalism promoted deregulation, privatization, and market-driven policies as the dominant model for society. In practice, this has widened inequality, weakened labour rights, commodified public services, and concentrated wealth and power. Economic growth has too been pushed at the expense of social justice, democratic accountability, and ecological sustainability. Markets have become the only measure of value, while the commons and collective wellbeing have been pushed aside.
Identity Politics
Identity politics has played an important role in highlighting the experiences of marginalized communities and exposing forms of discrimination that were previously ignored. At the same time, when disconnected from broader social and economic analysis, it fragments collective action by encouraging movements to organize around separate identities rather than shared material interests. Institutions can also adopt the language of diversity and inclusion without addressing the deeper structures that reproduce inequality, turning radical ideas into only liberal symbolic gestures.
The Balanced Approach
Any real change and challenge project needs to respond to these challenges by rebuilding the commons through collective action rather than individual competition. We need to restart our thinking starts from the view that social, economic, technological, and ecological systems are interconnected, and that meaningful change requires addressing these #KISS relationships together.
A practical framework for this is the #4opens: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. These simply encourage “common sense” transparency, collaboration, and shared ownership while reducing opportunities for enclosure, monopoly, and co-option.
On the path we push – rather than rejecting identity or diversity, #OMN aims to place them within a broader politics of solidarity. Individual experiences matter, but lasting change depends on building communities capable of acting together across differences. This shifts the focus from representation alone toward creating institutions and infrastructures that empower people collectively.
The goal is not simply to critique post-modernism, neo-liberalism, or identity politics, but to compost their limitations into something more productive: in the tech path an #openweb built on trust, participation, shared governance, and the digital commons. In this sense, #OMN is both a technological and a social project, as it seeks to create practical tools that help communities organise, communicate, and govern themselves while remaining rooted in the values of the commons rather than the logic of markets or centralized control.
