Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
Next 20 years you are looking at shifting the economy to a wartime footing to deal with climate change. State Socialism is an outcome, horrific fascism another. I don’t think there is a role for liberal democracy for the next few generations. Currently we have none of the technology infrastructure for a tech utopia. Green … Continue reading Our citys under Capitalism #deathcult
Going to an Oxford event tonight where the #mainstreaming people will be idealistic about cynical politics – while I’m going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My mission is to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build bridges across that gap. There is a useful conversation between idealism and cynicism: … Continue reading Be realistic about how power actually works
There is a temptation to see today’s hard right move as something new. Looking at this mess, the #deathcult is the name I use for the destructive logic of #neoliberal capitalism: a world where profit, growth and competition are the dominant measures of value, while human needs, shared resources and collective responsibility are pushed aside. … Continue reading Pick up the shovels to start growing the commons, that’s the #OMN path
“Just self-host it” is blinded techie advice that ignores reality, most people don’t want to spend their lives patching servers, managing certificates and worrying about whether they accidentally opened a security hole. But the alternative doesn’t have to be handing everything to a commercial platform. There is a third path: community self-hosting. And this is … Continue reading The answer to the #dotcons isn’t everyone becoming a sysadmin
We have done this before, we take a useful technology, wrap it in a huge financial story. We centralize it, try and monetize it to turn it into a platform. Then we pretend the social consequences were somehow an accident, it is what we are doing with LLMs. We took an interesting piece of software … Continue reading The #deathcult is selling the future as #techshit
There is something revealing about the way powerful people talk about our future, when they imagine crisis, they imagine their escape. A luxury bunker, fortress border, a private city, a rocket or an #AI cloud. A place for the self chosen few to survive while everyone else is left outside to die. This is the … Continue reading Bunker as a metaphor
Hummm this needs more thought… DRAFT The #deathcult is selling the void, turning meaning into a market, in this post we cover the normal themes of #stupidindividualism, commodification, atomisation, trust and community. One of the deeper tricks of the #deathcult is that it doesn’t only sell us products. It sells us back the meaning, belonging … Continue reading Trust matters, community matters, participation matters
Techno #feudalism is a description of the power that large #dotcons technology platforms now have over the economy and society. The comparison is with medieval feudalism. Under feudalism, land was the critical means of production and ordinary people worked land they did not own. Lords controlled access to it and extracted rents or surplus from … Continue reading The #openweb and projects such as the #OMN are more than technical alternatives
One of the meany problems with modern capitalism is not simply that some corporations are greedy. It is that we have built institutions around the assumption that people are greedy, and then wondered why they behave that way. Since the 1970s, #neoclassical economics became dominant in business schools and corporate thinking. An older social democratic … Continue reading Institution create the behaviour they claim merely to measure – Economics → institutions → behaviour → the #deathcult
We need to stop talking about “climate change” as though we are discussing a slightly inconvenient change in the weather. Climate change is too soft, too neutral. Climate change makes it sound as though something simply happened to us. It didn’t, we pushed this mess, we built an economic system that treats the living world … Continue reading The old system is already compost, the question is what we grow from this mess
There is an important argument within environmentalism that often gets lost between the lifestyle politics of the light greens and the anti-industrial politics of the dark greens. It is humanistic green environmentalism – the idea that ecological sustainability does not require us to abandon technology or progressive modern life. Instead, we need to radically redesign … Continue reading The blocking happens when criticism becomes a substitute for action
One of the most useful ways to understand the mess we are in today is to ask a deceptively simple question – what comes first – the individual or the network? #Mainstreaming economics startes with the individual, were sociology, anthropology and related traditions start somewhere else – with relationships, institutions, communities and the social structures … Continue reading The individual, is not, the starting point for the #OMN