A call-out for collective tech with teeth

It’s important to be honest about the landscape we’re working in. Just about every so-called “alternative tech” or #opensocialweb event – especially those run under the #NGO banner – is riddled with institutional parasites. They talk a big game about ethics, governance, and decentralisation, but their main role is to capture energy, not release it. The value in these spaces is minimal, maybe a few decent corridor chats, but structurally, they serve the status quo.

What we’re seeing is an attempt to #mainstream change by reshaping it into something more passive and marketable. It’s branding, not building. It’s funding cycles, not freedom. And people are so used to the #feudalism of current #FOSS governance models, full of gatekeepers, toxic meritocracy, and internalised hierarchy, that they don’t see the need to move past this. They double down instead, its just #blocking masked as principled caution.

That’s why the #OGB project (Open Governance Body) takes a radically different approach: build it permissionless and let it loose. No waiting for gatekeepers, no begging for funding, no asking nicely. Just making space for people to actually do the thing – together, in the open. If it works, people will come. If not, we try something else. But we stop wasting energy on the #mainstreaming rituals.

The key is to recognise that there’s a different and much larger group of people, beyond the usual suspects, who can be empowered by tech if the structures are simple, human, and social enough. People who want to work together, share power, and build resilience, not just ship code. Yes, the tools need to exist, the ideas already exist, what’s been missing is a path that doesn’t instantly collapse into control.

That’s why #OGB is a #KISS project, it’s not about perfection. It’s about functioning enough to seed community processes that can grow over time. Something you can pick up and use, rather than argue about forever in a GitHub issue or a grant proposal.

Let’s be real, people are up shit creek without a paddle right now. And most of what’s presented to them as “solutions” are just more mess dressed up in new UX. If we want people to find different ways out, we have to build different places to look. That means creating tech ecosystems rooted in social trust, creativity, and actual autonomy, not more extractive platforms or performative NGOs.

We also need to deal with the deeper issue of apathy and Laissez-faire fatalism. People feel the system’s broken but don’t believe it can be changed. They’ve internalised the idea that trying is pointless. So we need to design structures that take this into account. Systems that don’t rely on constant enthusiasm or perfect participation. That hold space through thick and thin, for the long term.

This is where there’s real space for creativity and care, not just in what we build, but in how we build it, and who we build it with. Not self-promoting conferences, not glossy decks, but compost piles and messy gardens, things that live, change, and root themselves in everyday needs.

The #OGB project is just one shovel. But there are others. Pick one up. The ground’s ready.

Evangelicals and the hardright

We’re seeing a pattern here in the UK similar to what Kristin Kobes Du Mez maps out in Jesus and John Wayne, the rise of hypermasculine, nationalist evangelical Christianity that’s far more about power than faith. It’s a core part of politics across the Atlantic for decades, and now the same push is happing here in the UK

Oxford city center, well funded free propaganda

In the US, white evangelicals didn’t back Trump despite his obvious corruption and lack of basic Christian values – they backed him because he embodied their real gospel: patriarchal authority, militant nationalism, fear of outsiders, and a fantasy of strongman salvation. Du Mez shows how generations of evangelical pop culture, from John Wayne to Duck Dynasty – laid the cultural foundations for this, replacing the Sermon on the Mount with cowboy swagger and authoritarian power plays.

Now, we’re seeing the UK version of this evangelical hard right mess pushing. Funded by US networks, hardline churches are expanding fast, particularly in working-class and migrant communities. These aren’t your local Church of England vicars or even your average happy-clappy congregations. We’re talking about groups pushing anti-LGBTQ+ agendas, climate denial, strict gender roles, and blind allegiance to state power, often with serious foundation and corporate money behind them.

Groups like Christian Concern, the Alliance Defending Freedom (which has set up shop here), and various Prosperity Gospel outfits linked to US megachurches are growing in political reach. Evangelical academies and ‘leadership training’ institutions are popping up, producing media-savvy influencers and aspiring MPs. The goal? To reshape UK politics around a Christian nationalist vision, just like in the States.

You can already see it in the way culture war rhetoric is creeping into #mainstreaming politics. Attacks on “woke culture,” trans rights, and environmental protections are all increasingly cloaked in moral panic and biblical justification. This isn’t an organic backlash, it’s strategy.

These churches are increasingly aligning with the hard right, providing the “moral” gloss for austerity, nationalism, and climate delay. And like in the US, they present themselves as victims, claiming persecution whenever they’re called out for bigotry and misinformation.

Let’s be very clear, this has little to do with Jesus, and a lot to do with building a new authoritarian consensus under the banner of faith, flag, and fossil fuels. If you want to know where we’re going unless we push back hard, look at the US. The seeds are already here, and they’re being watered with foreign money and feed on homegrown reaction.

A lot of resources are put into this outreach

This is why our response has to go beyond satire and eye-rolling. We need to compost this mess before it can root. Because this isn’t about church or state. It’s about who gets to shape the future, and who gets left out entirely. These people are funded to push the hard right mess in the UK. when you lift the funding lid, this is more about #classwar than “religion”.

Trumpism and the progressive paths to an alternative future

#Oxford

The Fediverse is opening, but there is a cost

With the #Fediverse gaining increasing #mainstreaming attention, we’re entering a familiar cycle, an influx of well-funded #NGO-branded projects trying to “fix” the #openweb by reshaping it in their own narrowing and to often blinded paths.

Take this year’s #chatteringclass event, #FediForum. Alongside breathless praise, last year, for #Threads joining the #opensocialweb space, we’re seeing the launch of shiny new tools: #BonfireSocial, #Channelorg, #Bounce. That promise innovation and ecosystem growth, but look closer, and you’ll see the #NGO pattern: branding over substance, silos in disguise, and a creeping return of the mini #dotcons under new, friendlier wrappers.

Let’s take Channel.org, On the surface, it looks like a #mainstreaming version of the #OMN project #indymediaback – community news channels, a grassroots publishing model, maybe even respectful federation. But scratch that surface and the cracks show quickly:

The default feeds are anaemic #NGO fodder
The orgs list reads like a who’s who of liberal foundations, with the usual hidden gatekeeping logic behind the scenes.
And it’s yet another “pay or pray” model: either be a professional #NGO or get nudged out.

In short, it’s likely just more #techshit to compost. A well-polished box built to contain, not empower. A place where “participation” is narrow and boring. This isn’t to say there’s zero value. There will be overlap with what we’re doing in the #OMN and #indymediaback spaces. But experience tells us, these projects rarely cooperate. They prefer to rebuild from scratch, with branding and compliance hardcoded. They see networks as products to manage, not native cultures to nurture. In the end they sell out, it happens.

And the result? A growing layer of parasites attaching themselves to the living Fediverse. That familiar smell of funding cycles, strategy decks, and locked-down roadmaps. We’ve seen this before. We know where it leads. The real question isn’t what’s new? It’s what’s native?

We don’t need a branded reboot of the same paths, what we do need is more funded and sustainable grounded, messy, radically open alternatives. Ones with deep roots in social movement history, not just nice UX. Ones that resist capture, and refuse in the end to turn community into product.

That’s the path we’re on, if the NGO track wants to build parallel paths, fine. Just don’t expect us to be polite about this mess making, we’ve already walked that road too many times. Live and let live, compost #techshit and build real alternatives #KISS

You know your getting big when parasites like this start to attach… salt and branding irons come to mind.

Trumpism and the progressive paths to an alternative future

Reflections from the Rothermere Institute Symposium #Oxford

This recent panel brought together a group of notable scholars – Melinda Cooper (Australian National University), author of Counter-Revolution and Family Values; Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Calvin University), author of Jesus and John Wayne; Joel Suarez (Harvard University), author of Labor of Liberty, forthcoming; and Noam Maggor (Queen Mary University of London), author of Brahmin Capitalism. – to explore the political and moral economy of the Trump Era United States. Their combined analysis is a vivid picture of how we arrived at our current political moment and the limited pathways out of it.

It was a really positive event, what’s striking is how much this conversation resonates not only in the U.S, but globally – particularly in the U.K., where the disintegration of the liberal centre is now fully visible. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the collapse of centrist consensus, leaving voters with a stark binary: hard right or hard left.

The collapse of the centre is leading us to the only way, is hard. In the U.S., when push came to shove, voters turned to the hard right, embodied in Trump and his sprawling ecosystem of grievance, authoritarian populism, and billionaire-backed influence networks. In the U.K., it’s not hard to imagine a similar dynamic emerging in the near future.

Crucially, what’s filling the vacuum left by #neoliberalism is not a return to liberal values. It’s a wholesale political realignment. The liberal centre has, so far, chosen to move toward the “respectable” conservative right, not leftward. Their ideological flight from the left has allowed the far right to become the current primary locus of political imagination.

The question is, will there be a swing to the left? And if so, what kind of left will emerge? Can it be a liberating left, rather than a reactive or technocratic one? Can we imagine a progressive future that is not just a repeat of 20th century social democracy, one that is rooted in new realities, yet grounded in solidarity, care, and the commons?

The neoliberal legacy and the rise of oligarchy. Several speakers traced today’s crisis to the economic architecture of late capitalism. Quantitative Easing (QE), the worship of capital gains, and financial deregulation have created a political economy that favours rentier elitists, tech monopolies, and patriarchal family capitalism. These forces are now shaping politics directly, not just through lobbying, but through ideological control and cultural engineering.

Oil, gas, tech, and finance capital have all converged around a new parasitic oligarchy. This is not the “free market” they pretend to champion, it’s a state-dependent, deeply subsidized regime of asset accumulation. Their “libertarianism” is a mask, when you strip away the rhetoric, you find private capital totally dependent on the state – for subsidies, legal protections, and military-backed global markets. The American right’s political project is to eliminate the centre, cleansing moderate Republicans, capturing courts, weaponizing information systems, and exporting this authoritarian model globally.

Evangelical capitalism: The cultural engine, a key insight from Kristin Kobes Du Mez, is the role of white evangelicalism in this. Far from a sideshow, it forms the emotional and moral backbone of Trumpism. Patriarchal authority, nostalgia, submission to hierarchies, and promises of prosperity through obedience, these values echo through both megachurch sermons and Republican stump speeches.

Multi-level marketing, prosperity gospel, and the language of “blessings” have created a totalizing religious capitalism. It’s self-reinforcing: hard to exit, deeply social, and rooted in fear of the “other.” This is not just religion, it’s political economy, culture, and affect rolled into one. And yes, it’s white evangelicalism as #MLM, it’s a pyramid scam, a con.

Progressive futures are harder than they look, if the right is already moving toward a post-capitalist oligarchy, the left must also imagine post-capitalist futures – but with radically different foundations. Unfortunately, the progressive movement is fragmented, caught between nostalgia for New Deal liberalism and utopian paths with little grounding in material politics.

The chattering classes, policy think tanks, legacy media, technocratic #NGOs still cling to the dream of returning to neoliberal “normalcy”. But this is a dead end. As some panellists noted, even Trump and neoliberalism may not be opposites, but continuations of the same project: one naked, one dressed in civility.

What’s needed now is not a fantasy of restoring the centre, but a real commitment to build something new: grounded in solidarity, regenerative economies, climate realism.

Lessons and questions for the left:

Can progressive movements discipline capital and at a very basic level reengineer markets to serve social goals?
Can we reclaim the state as a tool for collective transformation, or can we do something radically different?
Can we learn from the global South, where post-colonial states have been navigating these contradictions far longer?
And can we build institutions that don’t replicate hierarchy, but still scale power and coordination needed in this globalist mess?

There’s a lesson from history here, progressive eruptions often pull from the past, from older traditions of mutual aid, labour solidarity, cooperative economics, and community defence. We don’t need to invent utopias from scratch, we need to recover the parts that worked, compost the ones that failed, and build with humility and collective care. But we do need to build.

You can support one of these paths https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

#Oxford

Evangelicals and the hardright

Climatechaos and the hard right is a cycle of collapse

The entanglement of hard-right politics and accelerating climate breakdown represents the most dangerous feedback loop in the coming century. Each crisis fuels the other, creating a devastating cycle of social upheaval and environmental destruction. As the climate crisis displaces millions, soon to be billions, of people from their homes, the far right exploits their suffering to consolidate political power. In turn, that power is wielded to block and reverse the long needed climate action, further degrading ecosystems, destabilizing societies, and setting the stage for even greater human displacement.

The problem in this crisis is the shrinking of what scientists call the “human climate niche”, the range of environmental conditions in which human societies can flourish. As global temperatures rise, vast swaths of the Earth become uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions are already trapped in areas plagued by deadly heat, water scarcity, failing crops, and collapsing health systems. Without urgent intervention, billions more will face similar conditions by 2030. Heat-related deaths will rise. Extreme weather events, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, will ravage entire regions. Entire communities will be forced to move, or die.

Despite this clear trajectory, wealthy nations – those most capable of mitigating climate impacts-have spent the last four decades systematically undermining efforts to curb environmental destruction. Climate policies have been diluted and blocked, not out of ignorance, but because they threaten the profits and power of entrenched elitists. Culture war narratives, pushed by billionaires and corporate interests, portray even the smallest, least affective environmental regulations as attacks on “freedom” or “national identity.” Climate denialism has returned in force, repackaged and rebranded, while scientists and activists face harassment, misinformation campaigns, and strong state repression.

As the crisis deepens, displaced people inevitably seek safety across borders, particularly in the global North. Instead of sanctuary, they are met with xenophobia, violence, and militarized borders. The far right seizes on these moments to fuel fear, spreading the lie that migration, not climate inaction, is the true threat. They weaponize suffering to advance nativist agendas, dismantle civil liberties, and double down on fossil-fueled growth. The result is a nightmare loop: climate devastation drives displacement, displacement drives reactionary politics, and reactionary politics fuel further climate devastation.

The evidence is stark in Europe. Refugees fleeing war, drought, and collapse are vilified, turned into political scapegoats by far-right parties who rise to power on the back of manufactured hatred. Their platforms universally involve gutting climate legislation, slashing social programs, and retreating into nationalist fantasies. What emerges is a fascist politics of abandonment, one that condemns the vulnerable to death while protecting elitist interests at all costs.

To pretend that the fight for climate justice is separate from the fight against fascism is a dangerous illusion. These struggles are intertwined, and neither can be won in isolation. Preventing the collapse of Earth’s life-support systems requires more than technological solutions or market tweaks, it demands a cultural and political transformation grounded in solidarity, justice, and collective power.

This transformation won’t come from above. It must be built from the ground up: through grassroots organizing, mutual aid, and global alliances committed to resisting authoritarianism and building alternative futures. We need to challenge the systems – economic, political, and ideological – that sustain both planetary destruction and far-right resurgence.

Without this kind of deep resistance and renewal, the trajectory is clear: an increasingly unlivable planet ruled by increasingly violent regimes. But another path remains possible, if we have the courage to take it. Have people who fixated on #mainstreaming noticed that they are useless? We might get some change challenge done when they do… so please tell them thanks.

The wall of funding silence

In the sprouting landscape of #openweb infrastructure, it’s not just code that gets ignored, it’s the possibility of change itself. Projects like #makeinghistory, part of the wider Open Media Network (#OMN), aren’t asking for much. They’re not flashy. They’re not political in the mainstream sense. They just quietly build the back-end tools that allow people to document their histories, publish from the grassroots, and hold space for the memory of struggle that shape our progressive liberalism. But that seems to be too much.

The wall of funding silence – We’ve submitted funding proposals – dozens over the years, to every channel supposedly set up to fund the non-mainstream side of tech. From #NLnet to #NGI, from “open futures” to the latest EU moonshots. Most of the time, the response is a polite no, a vague shrug, or silence.

Sometimes, we get honesty – “This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for” or “I don’t have an obvious candidate for you.” What they don’t say is what’s really going on: The system does fund this kind of work, look at the bonfire fresco as an example, but only when it’s a shadow of the status quo.

There’s a path through this, if we’re honest about the rules of the game. One such route is the #makeinghistory project, a non-threatening, archive-based approach that doesn’t scream radical, but quietly lays the groundwork for deeper change. What funders may not realize (or perhaps they do) is that by supporting it, they also enable development on #indymediaback and the metadata “soup” back-ends of the OMN, the very infrastructure needed to reboot truly grassroots media.

It’s a shadow funding path. And yes, that might feel cynical. But if you’re unwilling to fund change directly, maybe you’ll fund the shadows of change. Sometimes the only way to sneak truth past the gatekeepers is through the side door.

We do need to get past this broken balance, the hard part is that many of these funders do think they’re doing good. And to be fair, they are, a little. But the balance is broken. That imbalance is invisible to most, especially those inside the comfort of stable institutions. When we push back, it looks like we’re hitting “good” people with little sticks. It’s messy, and it’s easy for them to just turn away. We get told to be grateful. To celebrate, the seedling being planted in the foreground, while bulldozers level the rest of the forest behind it.

Stick or Carrot? So what do we do? We talk about sticks and carrots. The truth is, our sticks are tiny, dwarfed by corporate lobbying, government inertia, and internal conservatism. The peaceful, hippy route changes nothing long-term, but conflict isn’t working either. We’re stuck in between, too radical for the boardroom, too polite for the barricades.

But here’s a thought: maybe it’s not about the size of the stick, but where we aim it. We’re not here to fight good people. We’re here to point out that a little good is not enough, not when the stakes are this high. If we don’t build space for change, it won’t happen. And if funders like #NLnet want to be the change they speak of, then they need to fund the infrastructure that makes it possible, even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s indirect…

What Now? We’ll give it a month. Then maybe we nudge a bit harder. But no shame, no blame. Just a call for balance, for trust, for a shift in what “doing good” really means.

The pushing of doomed projects

#OMN #makeinghistory #indymediaback #NGI #NLnet #NGIzero #openweb #4opens #deathcult #mainstreaming #funding #changechallenge

Governance, the mess of AI tech-fix paths

Seminar Reflection: Philosophy, AI, and Innovation – Week 6
Topic: AI Deliberation at Scale
Speakers: Chris Summerfield (Oxford & AI Safety Institute), MH Tessler (Google DeepMind)
Key texts: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (excerpt) and Summerfield et al., “AI Can Help Humans Find Common Ground in Democratic Deliberation”

This seminar focus is on scaling democratic deliberation via AI. The example proposal is the #HabermasMachine a test projects to facilitate large-scale consensus using #LLMs (Large Language Models). The framing, unsurprisingly, is drawn from the elitist tech sector – Google DeepMind and Oxford – with a focus on “safety” and “moderation” over human messiness and agency.

The problem we face is that this #techshit path might work, but for who is the question, what kind of “public sphere” is this #AI recreating, and who holds the power to shape it? These are strongly top-down, technocratic proposals, rooted in a narrow utilitarian logic. The underlying assumption is that human decision-making is flawed and must be mediated, and ultimately managed, by algorithmic systems. Consensus is determined not through lived human to human dialogue or, as I like to say – mess, but through an AI that quietly nudges discussions to centrist consensuses.

There is no meaningful eye-to-eye group interaction in this project, no room for DIY, #bottom up agency. Participants become data points in a system that claims to “listen,” but acts through elitist mediation. It is consensus without community, and safety without solidarity. What’s missing is the power of mess, the presenter ignores this central question: Can we build messy, human-scale deliberation that doesn’t rely on top-down interventions?

Projects like this are not grassroots governance, rather it’s governance-by-black-box, mainstreaming by design, the incentive model is telling: ideas that align with the status quo or dominant narratives are rewarded with more money. Consensus is guided not by grassroots engagement or dissenting voices, but by what the algorithm (and its funders) consider “productive.” This is the quiet suffocating hand of #mainstreaming, cloaked in neutral code.

#TechFixes paths like this are about stability at all costs, yet we live in a time when stability is the problem, with #ClimateChaos threatening billions, the demand is for transformation, not moderation.

This is AI as intermediary, not a facilitator of the commons paths we need. Transparency? Not here, no one knows how the #AI reaches consensus. The models are proprietary, the tweaks are political, and the outcomes are mediated by those already in power. The system becomes an unaccountable broker, not of truth, but of what power is willing to hear.

We need to be wary of any system that claims to represent us without us being meaningfully involved. This is a curated spectacle of consensus, delivered by machines, funded by corporations, and mediated by invisible hands. What we need is human to human projects like the #OGB, not tech managed consensus. This #mainstreaming path isn’t compost. It’s simply more #techshit to be composted, mess is a feature, not a bug.

In the #OMN (Open Media Network), we explore paths rooted in trust, openness, and peer-to-peer process. Not asking for power to listen, but taking space to act. We compost the mess; we don’t pretend it can be sanitized by top-down coding.

#Oxford #AI #techshit #dotcons

The story: power, truth, and walking the fun path

Our powerlessness feeds our desire to hate. This is not a personal failing – it’s a social design flaw. A path built on alienation and distraction will always funnel frustration into polarisation. That’s why the controversy-driven algorithms of the #dotcons (corporate social media platforms) are not just annoying, but actively harmful. They feed on our despair, and we, often unknowingly, feed on the drama they serve back to us.

It’s a closed loop of spectacle and spite, profitable to the #nastyfew but corrosive to us, the meany. An extractive business model built on social breakdown. And yet, many of us know this. So why do we stay? Because stepping away from this mess is hard. It takes more than wishful thinking. It takes movement. Not only that, but it takes organising. It takes the kind of networked activism and lived alternatives the Open Media Network (#OMN) has been building and trying to seed for the last ten years

Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.

Truth isn’t declared, it’s built. #Postmodernism taught us that truth is slippery. That’s fine, but in the hands of #mainstreaming culture, that slipperiness has become a tool of endless distraction and decay. People say things like they are true because they feel true. They build tech platforms because they believe in them. They sell movements as brands because it looks like change. But let’s be honest: wishing something into truth does not make it true.

What makes things true is collective struggle, shared purpose, and concrete acts of solidarity. A load of social work, grounded activism, and careful trust-building make something true. This is the hard path, but it’s also the only one worth walking, and when we do it together with joy it’s the happy path.

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big.

The #geekproblem, again, is too often a part of this mess. Writing code is seen as a kind of truth declaration. “Look, it runs! So it must be real!” But a thing that compiles is not the same as a thing that lives. Tech without community is a corpse. For anything to matter, you need people. And to keep people, you need some rough-and-ready PR. You need actual engagement. You need trust, time, and probably a bit of music and food too. We can’t engineer our way out of this crisis. We have to organise our way out.

The #Lifecult vs. the #Deathcult. What we’re up against isn’t just bad ideas, it’s a worship of stability, spectacle, and control, the illusion of movement through aesthetic alone, no real challenge to the dominant system. It feels warm. It promises safety. But it leaves no room for difference, contradiction, or rebellion, this is inside both “cult”.

It requires less mental effort to condemn than to think

This is why we don’t need worship, we need practical action. Change and challenge are not side effects of our projects – they are the sharp point. We don’t do this work to be liked, we do it because there is no other way to make things true. And if we do this together, it becomes fun and meaningful – we create social “truth”.

Working with the #Eurocrats (and other impossible people). Let’s talk about the institutions. The #EU. Local governments. #NGOs. Big tech “allies.” They are hopelessly incompetent when it comes to grassroots tech and progressive social change. But here’s the thing, they will not go away on their own. If we don’t push, the right-wing will step in and push harder. That’s mess is already happening.

Revolution is but thought carried into action.

So we take the harder path, we show up, try to guide. We keep the door open even when it slams in our face. And yes, it’s exhausting. We’ve tried to work with #mainstreaming people. Many are unbelievably vile, and worst of all, they have no idea they’re behaving badly. They don’t see their role in the decay. They don’t see the crisis, because the spectacle of control makes everything look fine.

But we see it, and we are not powerless, refusing the mess is about rebuilding the commons. Yes, the current #mainstreaming is a mess. A deep, systemic, soul-grinding mess. But we should not put up with it. That’s what #OMN is for. That’s what projects like #indymediaback, #OGB (Open Governance Body), and the broader #openweb movement are trying to hold space for.

We don’t need more hype. We need slow, messy, grounded work:

Listen more than we preach.
Read each other’s code, politics, and history before rewriting.
Talk about our failures honestly.
Grow media and networks that are native to community, not layered on top like #dotcons digital colonialism.
Build up our own cultures of care and collaboration in the #openweb to replace the dying ones.

This is fun, not a strategy of purity or perfection, it’s a strategy of survival, and even joy.
Ideas? Responses? This is not a closed story, it’s a beginning. If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of it, good. That’s where we start from. But let’s not stop there. Come build, talk, and argue. Come plant seeds, come help make the mess into compost.

All the quotes are from Emma Goldman

Collaborative futures “Go Outside”

A brief literary diversion to get back to our coding and #UX design. In the book News from Nowhere, William Morris invites us to dream, but more than that, he asks us to build. Written in 1890, this visionary novel imagines a world beyond capitalism: no money, no bosses, no state, just people living together in beauty and cooperation, with practical labour, shared resources, and a deep reverence for the land.

For the Open Media Network (#OMN), Morris’s imagined future is not a quaint artifact of socialist utopianism. It offers living lessons, tools, for those of us rebuilding the balance of collective systems of media, communication, and trust from the ground up.

But these lessons come with a challenge, theory is easy, communication is hard. Morris wasn’t naïve about the criticisms he’d face. In News from Nowhere, he playfully mocks the kind of rigid, #mainstreaming or book-bound political thinking that critiques from a distance. In one scene, a bookish character is told off:

“You have so muddled your head with mathematics, and with grubbing into those idiotic books about political economy (he he!), that you scarcely know how to behave… It is about time for you to take some open-air work, so that you may clear away the cobwebs from your brain.”

This is more than a literary joke. It’s a call to stop abstracting and start relating, to the world, to each other, to the work in front of us.

Let’s get back to focusing on coding in grassroots tech and media paths where we are trying to move beyond the current #mainstreaming, we face a similar issue: we to often fall back on rewriting. If a project doesn’t make sense, or if it feels messy or “badly coded,” we’re tempted to scrap it and start over. It’s always easier to build something from scratch than to understand and contribute to a shared vision.

But that instinct, while human, is deadly to collaboration. Reading code is like reading a community, you’re presented with a program someone else wrote, and for whatever reason, you need to understand it, whether to fix something or build something bigger, it will likely be painful. Their choices, habits, or style might seem opaque or even “wrong” to you. But if you rewrite instead of understand, you lose something deeper than code: you lose continuity, you lose trust, you lose the opportunity to actually work together.

This problem isn’t just about software, it’s cultural, it runs through all grassroots movements, including the #OMN. We don’t need another polished platform or a perfect protocol. What we need is the maturity and humility to read each other’s work – whether it’s code, writing, media, or mutual aid projects – and find ways to extend it, rather than erase it.

Morris never intended News from Nowhere to be a literal map of the future. It was always a provocation, a reminder that theory must live in the real world, among people with needs, desires, and contradictions. His “utopia” isn’t managed by frameworks or protocols. It’s governed by relationships. Trust and care are its foundation, not abstract “rules.”

This is crucial for how we approach governance in the #openweb and the society it needs to shape. Rather than getting stuck in ideological loops or trying to design the “perfect” horizontal system, we need to stay grounded. We must treat organising like reading someone else’s program: with patience, attention, and empathy. Don’t rewrite from scratch, build on what’s already alive, collaborative maturity is radical.

The #OMN isn’t about shiny apps or new stacks. It’s about a culture of maintenance and shared ownership, of federated messiness. To get there, we have to often let go of (stupid) individual ego, the idea that our code, our writing, our instance is the one that will “win.” Instead, we aspire to be the kind of people who can join a network not by dominating it, but by understanding it. By reading what came before, by contributing to a path that strengthens the whole.

As in Morris’s world, the future doesn’t arrive through force. It grows in the commons. It thrives when people take the time to learn each other’s language, even if that language is clumsy, half-broken, or unfamiliar. This is the path from utopia to everyday practice, what News from Nowhere offers the #OMN and any grassroots horizontal movement today:

Understand before rewriting. Your time is better spent in solidarity than in solitude.
Theory without practice is noise. Go outside. Apply ideas in real communities.
Culture matters more than code. Values, trust, and shared rituals hold systems together.
Slow is not bad. Messy is not failure. These are signs of life, not dysfunction.

Let’s be very clear, building any shared future isn’t easy. But if we can move past the reflex to rewrite, and instead read, listen, and extend, then we’re not just writing better code or building better media, we’re building the kind of world past thinkers like Morris dreamed of. One worth the hard, meaningful work that is at the centre of the value streams in the book. This can be fun.

William Morris – Bridging Theory and Practice in News from Nowhere

This post is from being a part of this Oxford reading group. Feedback on William Morris, his life and books, which doesn’t only critique capitalism and dream about its collapse, but also offers a compelling vision of what comes after. Imagines a society without money, coercion, or hierarchical governance. Power is radically distributed, labour is voluntary and meaningful, and the commons is at the centre of life. It’s not a managerial future, it’s an organic one, shaped by lived values. This mirrors the path of the #OMN, building tools, processes, and networks that support autonomy and participation, not through top-down control or commercial funding, but through collective action and care.

With a little bit of historical context, it is clear why William Morris prods his critics, he anticipates the scepticism from theoretically thinkers, especially those following in the tradition of Marx and Engels. In one exchange, Morris inserts a moment of humour to push back against armchair critics. The narrator, William Guest, is exploring a utopian future guided by Dick, a cheerful and capable local. They encounter Bob, a character marked by his outdated bookishness and preference for abstract theory over lived experience. When Guest accidentally slips up, forgetting he’s meant to be posing as someone from overseas rather than from the past, Bob calls him out. Dick steps in with a scathing but playful remark:

“The fact is, I begin to think that you have so muddled your head with mathematics, and with grubbing into those idiotic books about political economy (he he!), that you scarcely know how to behave. Really, it is about time for you to take some open-air work, so that you may clear away the cobwebs from your brain.”

The laughter after “political economy” is key. Morris isn’t just poking fun, he’s positioning his vision as something deliberately different. Rather than being a blueprint built from existing leftist theory, his utopia grows out of lived practice and collective labour. He acknowledges the critiques Marxist thinkers might level, but counters with a subtle provocation: leave the theory room and go outside. Work with your hands. Test your ideas in the open air.

Theory is not dismissed outright, but it is secondary to active participation in community life. Morris invites readers to imagine a world shaped not only by critique, but by doing. His utopia isn’t a perfect extrapolation from Marxist doctrine; it’s an imaginative leap into what might happen when people stop only theorising and start building together.

This is core to the #OMN story, the #openweb failed in part because it became a playground for commercial, #geekproblem abstraction or academic debates, or worse, captured by institutions that fear mess and openness. Morris reminds us that we need doing, not just thinking – and that horizontal systems only thrive when they’re lived and felt, not just diagrammed.

This is a vision without dogma, unlike the rigid structures of Marxist utopia or the technocratic dreams of platform capitalism, Morris offers a soft, slow, human-scale path. It’s full of contradiction, it’s messy, and it values beauty, leisure, and craft. It’s grounded in love for place, people, and cooperative labour.

Horizontal organising as culture, not system, governance happens through conversation, relationships, and shared values. There are no formal elections or bureaucracies. Everything operates on trust, accountability, and mutual care, built over time, not imposed from above. This is a needed lesson for grassroots organising.

The #OMN doesn’t need polished governance frameworks before people act. It needs lived participation, native cultures of trust, and tools that reflect those values. Morris shows that horizontal organising isn’t a tech stack or a voting app, it’s a culture. Projects like the #OGB are about reclaiming this messiness. The idea is not to replace one form of control with another (just more “open”), but to nurture space where real community publishing, trust, and difference can coexist. Like Morris’s vision, it’s a lived, imperfect commons, not a polished platform.

What people in the #OMN path can learn is that utopia is not a blueprint, it’s a compass. Use it to orient, not to dictate. Theory must be grounded in doing. Don’t build systems people can’t live in. Trust is built in the day-to-day and governance starts in how we relate to each other. Beauty, leisure, and joy matter, alternative systems fail when they forget to be human.

News from Nowhere is not a fantasy novel, It’s better to see it as an early manual for how to feel our way into better futures, this path aligns with the #OMN mission of rebuilding media and communication from the ground up, with openness, care, and community at its core.

https://opencollective.com/open-media-network

#Oxford

Finally, make the most of my attention, I’ll be blunt, you don’t have my attention for long

The #OMN (Open Media Network) is a radical rebooting of what a working grassroot “news” network can be. It’s not another tech platform chasing the latest hype cycle or VC buzzword. It’s grounded in 30+ years of real-world, on-the-ground activist experience, built explicitly on the #4opens

One of the advantages of this path is that we’ve been here before, and we’ve watched it fail, repeatedly. I’ve personally seen projects just like this fail 10–15 times over the last two decades. Brilliant ideas, sometimes beautiful tech, all eventually collapse under the weight of poor social foundations, bad governance, and chasing #geekproblem dreams and #fashionista paths that have nothing to do with real people’s needs. That’s why, from this experience, we’re not doing this as another #techshit project.

We’re not building toys just for geeks, nor another doomed tool for #NGO grant cycles. We’re building a living media network, grounded in the organic, messy, grassroots communities that made independent media, with projects like indymedia and undercurrents, powerful in the first place, It’s where the value is, let’s use this opening to not just walk the same broken paths again.

One thing we don’t need is more #techshit to compost, we’ve got a whole graveyard of it already. Scuttlebutt, Diaspora, SecureDrop, and dozens of others, all had pieces of the puzzle, but lacked cohesive, social-embedded foundations. We don’t want to add to this pile, instead, let’s focus on building something that lasts because it is:

Rooted in existing communities paths

Built for human needs, not dev ego

Simple where it matters (#KISS)

Modular, federated, and easy to adopt

This isn’t about building – The Next Big Thing™, it’s about building something, working, local, resilient, and useful, something people can use and adapt without waiting for permission from gatekeepers or corporations.

Finally, make the most of my attention, I’ll be blunt, you don’t have my attention for long. I’ve seen too much, and I’m tired of false starts. So if we’re going to do this, let’s get real, move fast, and avoid ego traps. Make your work count, keep it grounded, build bridges, not silos. The #OMN is already moving, join in, you can fork it latter and go your own way. But whatever you do, let’s not waste another decade repeating the same tired mistakes. We don’t have that kind of time any more.

And PS. please try not to be a prat.

Telegram messaging app is dieing

Telegram partnering with Elon’s #AI to distribute #Grok inside chats is a clear line crossed. This matters because private data ≠ training fodder, bringing Grok (or any #LLM) into messaging apps opens the door to pervasive data harvesting and normalization of surveillance.

This is an example of platform drift: Telegram was always sketchy (proprietary, central control, opaque funding), but this is active betrayal of its user base, especially those in repressive regions who relied on it.

Any #LLM like Grok in chats = always-on observer: Even if “optional,” it becomes a trojan horse for ambient monitoring and a normalization vector for AI-injected communication.

“Would be better if we had not spent 20 years building our lives and societies around them first.”

That’s the #openweb lesson in a sentence, that the #dotcons will kill themselves. This is what we mean by “use and abuse” of these platforms which have been driven by centralization, adtech, and data extraction, that they inevitably destroy the trust that made them popular. It’s entropy baked into their #DNA. As Doctorow calls this #enshitification, the tragedy is how much time, emotion, and culture we invested in them – only to have to scramble for alternatives once they inevitably betray us.

What to do now, first step, remove data from your account then delete telegram app, not just for principle, but for your own safety. Move to alternatives – #Signal for encrypted, centralized messaging (trusted but closed server). There are other more #geekproblem options in the #FOSS world but like #XMPP, #RetroShare, or good old email+GPG can work too, but they can be isolating, so stick to #signal if you’re at all #mainstreaming.

Then the second step, build parallel #4opens paths by supporting and develop alt infrastructure like the #Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.), #OMN (Open Media Network – decentralized media), XMPP and #p2p-first protocols, #DAT/#Hypercore, #IPFS, or #Nostr etc.

Yeah, things will get worse before they get better, what we’re seeing now is the terminal phase of the #dotcons era. These companies are devouring themselves and will eventually collapse under the weight of their contradictions. The question is, will we have built anything to replace them?

If not, authoritarian tech (like Elon’s empire) fills the void. That’s why we rebuild the “native” #openweb, even if it’s slow, messy, and underground. That’s why projects like #OMN and #Fediverse matter. If you’re reading this, you’re early to the rebuild, welcome, let’s do better this time.