Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
I’ve been working at the heart of this space for more than 30 years, funded and unfunded. In that time I’ve seen hundreds of alternative tech projects start with energy and good intentions. Most of them wither on the vine, a very small number flower. After watching this cycle repeat for decades, one thing has … Continue reading A note to #FOSS funders
There’s a familiar pattern in foreign policy debates: outrage at the current regime, amnesia about how it got there. Yes, the current government of #Iran is repressive. It crushes dissent, restricts freedoms, and enforces authoritarian rule. None of that needs soft-pedalling, but if we’re at all serious about understanding the world – rather than just … Continue reading Policy churn, selective memory, and the mess on repeat
Human Tech: The Open Media Network (#OMN) is a proposal for human-scale, federated media infrastructure built on standard #FOSS practices and the #4opens: open data, open source, open process, open standards. It does not attempt to invent a new platform. It defines a minimal, interoperable framework for how content flows through networks, in ways that … Continue reading A Minimal, Governable Infrastructure for Trust-Based Media Flows
We are feeling a cultural current many of us recognise but rarely name clearly. A feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong, not just politically or economically, but culturally. An experience that imagination has narrowed, participation has thinned, and people are increasingly pushed into the role of spectators rather than participants in shaping the world. … Continue reading The #openweb is the soil, #OMN the seeds
The individual, their freedom, and their capacity for reason are products of social relationships, not independent origins. Society is not built from isolated individuals; individuals arise from shared culture, history, and collective life. As society grows richer and more humane, individuals gain the conditions needed for deeper development and freedom emerges from this shared foundation. … Continue reading The uncomfortable path
A cohesive manifesto is needed as the world we inherited is fractured. Wealth, power, and knowledge are concentrated in the hands of the #nastyfew: platform owners, data hoarders, and corporate monopolies who extract value from our work, our attention, and our trust. Democracy has been hollowed out, captured and controlled by algorithms that decide what … Continue reading Open Media Network: A Manifesto for the Digital Commons
Despite the constant #mainstreaming hype, the branding, and the trillions of dollars being poured into it, there is a simple reality that needs to be stated plainly: There is no intelligence in current “AI”, and there is no working path from today’s Large Language Models (#LLM) and Machine Learning (#ML) systems to anything resembling real, … Continue reading There is no intelligence in AI – and no path to any
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
A path to do this is to step away from the #mainstreming mess. In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. The prize recognised their work on how institutions shape prosperity, most famously through their book Why Nations Fail. The timing matters, it matters a lot. … Continue reading We need to stop worshipping a #deathcult
In our worship of the #deathcult, if you strip away the robes, chants, and charismatic leaders, what remains is behaviour, not belief. A destructive cult is not defined by how strange it sounds, but by what it does to bodies, lives, and futures. This matters because it breaks a common illusion: cults are judged by … Continue reading We live in a deathcult, what is blocking people seeing this?
We still haven’t solved this. Looking back at a conversation from six years ago, what stands out isn’t disagreement – it’s how hard it is to even name the problem we keep circling. Over the last 20 years, again and again, the discussion slips into the same dead end: personal value versus social value, framed … Continue reading Social value, personal value, and the chicken-and-egg problem
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