Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
Updated with this image The fluffy/spiky debate in #XR is well on the fluffy side, not a bad thing. You’re seeing noise from the confused, spiky side of the tribe in reaction to this. Fluffy/spiky is not a moral judgment, rather it is a respect for diversity. Think #XR was fab, what … Continue reading The fluffy/spiky debate and #XR
A plebiscite (or simple poll) reduces complex questions to binary or multiple-choice outcomes decided by raw headcount. This works reasonably well for large nation-states were aggregating millions of preferences is practically necessary. But in small community groups – like a WhatsApp boating community – it undermines democratic values rather than express them, for several reasons. … Continue reading Why WhatsApp plebiscites, and #dotcons in general are a crude and negative democratic instrument
This is a conversation that more people need to have to make change and challenge real. Every time there is a shift in technology and culture, there is a messy transition period. We are in one now, as there is real movement away from the #dotcons and back towards the #openweb. People are questioning platforms … Continue reading The Transition Mess
“Working groups (#WG) have one job – get things done, they don’t need permission for every step – they need to report openly, consult when it affects others, and hand back decisions that are too big for them to own alone. That’s it, that’s the whole structure.” One of the biggest recurring naiveties of horizontal … Continue reading Working Groups, Horizontal Organising, and Getting Things Done
People think in groups, that’s normal. The mistake isn’t group thinking itself, it’s pretending we’re all isolated individuals while still acting through tribes, identities, and social blocs. A lot of today’s “common sense” comes from the #stupidindividualism group mindset. We are encouraged to see every problem through individual choices rather than collective realities. The real … Continue reading #Nicenasty the hidden power of soft obstruction
A reaction to this post – From an #OMN perspective, the current conflict around #antisemitism, anti-racism, and protest politics is not a simple moral disagreement. It is a systems failure in how truth, trust, and harm are processed across society. We are not dealing with one issue, we are dealing with a layered collapse where … Continue reading Who controls the story of harm? Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and institutional anti-racism
People nowadays are soaked in #stupidindividualism, and the important word on this is hopeless. Not hopeless because people are bad, but because we’ve spent decades dismantling the social structures that gave us the ability to act together. We know how to consume, react, and perform as individuals, but increasingly struggle to cooperate, organise, and build … Continue reading The Fediverse’s growing signal-to-noise problem – and who’s causing it
“#Oxfordboaters – Some of the people have to lie to themselves as they blindly believe in private property and rule of law but squat on private property and brack the law by not moving. They try and pretend this is not true, if they do this pretending to strongly they will make us all homeless.” … Continue reading The non-action bloc: resignation, cynicism, and the culture that keeps people powerless
For most people, the crisis feels recent. Housing costs. Energy bills. Food prices. Debt. Insecure work. Growing inequality. Endless wars. Ecological breakdown. The #mainstreaming story is that these are separate problems with separate causes. COVID. Ukraine. China. Immigration. Technology. Bad politicians. The reality is simpler, these crises grow from the same roots – the moment … Continue reading How we built the neoliberal #Deathcult
This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but … Continue reading Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess
One of the hardest things to hold in activism is that people are not fixed. Scratch a fluffy person enough and they go spiky. Bring a spiky person into real trust and shared purpose and they can soften. Repression, fear, insecurity, ego, trauma – these are universal. The point isn’t pretending the tensions don’t exist. … Continue reading Something I’ve been sitting with and want to share honestly
DRAFT: Let’s look at this as an example of effective and ineffective activism. The mess we make and how we can compost it. Let’s start with an example outreach text that has not been sent out yet. WHO WE AREWe are resident boaters living on a stretch of the River Thames near Donnington Bridge. For … Continue reading SAVE THAMES RIVER HOMES