An #openweb organic intellectual,technologist and part of the #OMN
A reminder: treating everything as a personal conflict is unbelievably stupid. It’s one of the most damaging habits we’ve normalized in our pushing of #stupidindividualism, and a core pillar of the #mainstreaming that keeps us in loops of division, burnout, and reaction. We’ve seen this time and again – online, offline, in activist circles, and … Continue reading Treating everything as a personal conflict is unbelievably stupid
The last 20 years of tech governance projects keep missing the mark because they refuse to engage with the real, lived experiences of grassroots activists and community builders. Instead of listening, they fall back into the comfort zones of the #geekproblem: control over collaboration, certainty over-curiosity, code over community. This is further compounded by the … Continue reading Tech governance fails, its pastime to compost the mess
A problem we’ve inherited from the last ten years of corporate social media, the #dotcons, is the toxic confusion of the personal and the public. Platforms like #Facebook and #Twitter blurred the lines between private conversation and public broadcasting, monetizing both as if they were the same. That mess wasn’t accidental; it was profitable. Unfortunately, … Continue reading Without discomfort, we won’t challenge the system we’re still living inside
Let’s get the shit-shoveling out of the way first. People get twitchy about the word Communism, waving their arms about “utopian” back-to-the-land communes or religious cults that gave up on society and ran off into the woods, on one side and on the other expansionist empires. That’s not what we’re talking about. Those were retreats, … Continue reading If I were a Communist
From hard walls to fluffy blocks – let’s compost the negative nastiness in our progressive spaces. In the 20th century, much of the nastiness came from the hard vertical left. Back then, control, ideology, and vanguardism created rigid hierarchies, enforced through forceful exclusion and dogma. In the 21st century, that same exclusion comes from the … Continue reading We need to compost the spiky and the fluffy nasty
The worst parts of people and society – fear, greed, envy, control – are self-reinforcing. They act as feedback loops in a broken sound system: shrieking, distorting, drowning out all nuance is the signal-to-noise issue we need to mediate. The problem is that some people feed on this noise. The media amplifies it. Social networks … Continue reading Let’s build from the rot something rich, wild, rooted, and real
From my decades of real-world experience – especially in activism – I’ve found that self-professed #Postmodernists and Western #Buddhists have been some of the most useless and damaging people I’ve worked with. Not an exaggeration: I could probably count the genuinely good ones on one hand. This isn’t bitterness. It’s about composting a mess that … Continue reading Our liberals talking about the death of #postmodernism
The #makinghistory project is a decentralized, open-source archiving and storytelling network designed to preserve and amplify grassroots histories. It’s founded on the idea that history isn’t written by the winners – it’s made by those who resist, build, and care. Using digitized collections like the CampbellFamily archive as a seed, the project invites communities to … Continue reading Dev test work for Makinghistory application
In tech paths, the last 20 years have been a mess of #fashernista trends and the ongoing #geekproblem, we now face a compost heap of broken promises and abandoned projects. It’s obvious if you lift the lid and really look. The glossy hype fades fast, the rot underneath remains. Much of what we call “innovation” … Continue reading Not to punish the individuals, but to highlight the groups to compost
We’ve got a new bunch of #mainstreaming tech devs flooding into the #Fediverse. Some from burned-out Big Tech, some from the academic funding circuits, some just looking for the next shiny project after the #AI hype wore thin. Now, this could be good. IF even a few of them started working on native, grassroots tech … Continue reading We need to shape native paths, not recreate #fashionista ones with shinier branding
#Mainstreaming talk about the internet generally completely misses the point, yep, it’s the FT so no surprise I suppose. The actual internet, the one we built before the takeover of the #dotcons, this is a culture of #4opens protocols, stitched together with moth-eaten mythologies and some messy traditions. It was never clean or pure, but … Continue reading From unstoppable slop, to #enshittification, the #FT on the internet is adding to the mess
We’re living in the wreckage of the old 19th century social order. The so-called Four Estates, pillars of traditional power and authority, which 200 years latter are either rotting from within or already dead. It’s now past time to stop mourning and start composting this. Right now we are doing this at the #OMN we’re … Continue reading Rebooting the Fourth Estate: Building tools for grassroots governance