Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
Let’s look at a current issue that is in the news. The Americas have long been treated as a natural U.S. sphere of influence. From early Monroe Doctrine interventions to modern political pressure, the region has been viewed as a geopolitical backyard. Today, with Trump and MAGA pushing renewed U.S. dominance, countries in the region … Continue reading The Trump show is noise when we need to be focusing on signal
Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: we fucked up the last 20 years of #openweb tech. Not “they” fucked it up. Not only #BigTech, not only venture capital, not only governments and surveillance states. We did, especially those of us who were closest to the tools, the protocols, the decisions – the geeks, developers, architects, … Continue reading We fucked up… and that matters because we still have agency
Most progressive #mainstreaming isn’t about ending the #deathcult – it’s about making its worship feel more fair, more inclusive, more polite. There is some real everyday value in this. Fewer people get crushed immediately, some suffering is reduced, that matters. But let’s be honest about what it does not do, it does not get people … Continue reading Progressive Mainstreaming
#mainstreaming people are wilfully blind and alt people tend to be pessimistic, it’s a problem. Historically, real social change doesn’t arrive by waiting for collapse. It arrives because people are active, they build alternatives in advance, strong enough to bridge the mess when existing systems fail and lose legitimacy. This isn’t theory. It’s how change … Continue reading Building, what comes next?
A DRAFT story about markets, misfits, and taking back the commons (Tagline: “They came for the avocados. They left with revolution.”) by Hamish Campbell OutlineTHE MARKET STIRS Setting the scene: It’s a Saturday in East London. The smell of jerk chicken, sourdough, and incense wafts over Chatsworth Road. A young stallholder, Luna (17), sells upcycled … Continue reading Chatsworth Rd: Stalls and Code
A central thesis of Tolkien’s books is that evil provides the means of its own defeat. Sauron forged the One Ring that destroyed him. Shelob impaled herself on Sam’s blade. Smaug exposed his belly to Bilbo and revealed the weak point that brought him down. Tolkien’s world is full of this pattern: the seed of … Continue reading A Tolkien view of #OMN
A wider view of this https://nathanakehurst.medium.com/whose-party-ce23a8099624 Fluffy side: cautious, slow-moving, grounded in “keeping the peace” and managing optics. Classic problem: avoidance of conflict means bottlenecking decisions, blocking energy, and trying to centralise control, so things don’t blow up. Spiky side: impatient, direct, “get it done” energy. Spikiness pushes things forward, but often burns bridges, creating … Continue reading “Your Party” and the Fluffy/Spiky debate – a working path
The Open Media Network (#OMN) is an “anything in, anything out” network powered by a mediated trust system. Instead of one corporation or #NGO controlling the flow, the commernerty decides what happens to the data that moves through it. At its core, the #OMN is a data soup: tagged data objects flowing through channels. These … Continue reading OMN projects are tools for YOU to change and challenge the world we live (and die) in
In the tech world of social change and challenge, we’re living with a strange imbalance. Too often, the spaces we use and try and build are crowded with useless, self-destructive prats – people more interested in ego, control, and clout than in making anything grow from the roots. And when they do very rearly act, … Continue reading The stubborn few who show up with shovels, laptops, and trust
Every so often I answer the out reach calls from more traditional alt/progressive media orgs, let’s look at some of the very illustrative “common sense” knock backs. The recent examples are Freedom’s reaction and Good Internet’s submission call – As their reaction is useful to illustrate the fault line of “radical publishing” in a federated … Continue reading Looking at working with legacy media thinking – silo vs flow
Most software today = individualist. Even “collective” tools (Fediverse servers, enterprise SaaS, etc.) are just abstractions that aggregate individuals. The default assumption is the liberal subject: the sovereign individual. The infrastructure is built for self-expression, personal feeds, private chats, me, me, me. That’s why for example, when you step into libertarian codebases like #nostr, the … Continue reading In tech, it is really important, to see the unit of measure
We need to look at this from a different view, it’s not just the tech, we’ve had working #FOSS tools, protocols, and infrastructure for decades. What kills movements is social, it’s the politics. Fractionalism – ideological vanguards fighting to capture and control. Authoritarian “protection” – censorship framed as security, silencing criticism, shrinking ghettos – small … Continue reading The real blockages in activist tech