An #openweb organic intellectual,technologist and part of the #OMN
We’ve had 40 years of head-down worship of the #deathcult, and now very few people dare to lift their heads to look around at the mess we live and die in. It is really hard to communicate to #mainstreaming people inside the #dotcons that today, way too much mainstreaming is simply parasitic. That the balance … Continue reading Feeding on the Roots: How Mainstreaming Devours Radical Movements
The internet’s origins are tangled with the military-industrial complex, designed for resilience in the face of catastrophe. But the protocols themselves, once set loose, created a playground for anarchistic experimentation. The lack of centralized control allowed people to build without permission, and that openness birthed the wild, decentralized internet we briefly glimpsed. It was an … Continue reading #openweb vs #closedweb is the battle for the Internet
To start to make things better this is a mess that we constantly need to compost, over the last ten years, it’s wild how people barrel into grassroots tech projects like #OMN behaving like paranoid #fuckwits, wreaking havoc and then scampering off to nurse their self-inflicted wounds. This nasty pattern repeats so often it feels … Continue reading To remember our own history
In the swirling chaos of the digital landscape, it’s easy to feel lost. The #Fediverse, should be a beacon of hope for a decentralized, community-driven internet, but as always is facing an onslaught of push back and pressures from every direction. The #dotcons loom large, #NGO agendas quietly co-opt grassroots energy, and the #encryptionists lash … Continue reading Composting the Mess to Make Room to Plant
In activism and grassroots media, you inevitably face an ongoing, unpleasant truth: when pushing against #mainstreaming and the inertia of the #deathcult, bad faith comes at you like a storm. Your best, and often only, defence is to hold onto your good faith. But good faith alone isn’t enough, we need shared tools to compost … Continue reading Open Media Network (#OMN) is a Tool for Change and Challenge, Composting the Mess
The new #mainstreaming right-wing crew has become adept at hijacking the language of liberation and twisting it for control. They steal words like “freedom,” “community,” and “resilience,” stripping them of their radical roots and turning them into tools for reactionary agendas. Meanwhile, the left, caught in cycles of internal purity politics and endless critique, fractures … Continue reading Is it possible to compost the mess and nurture the people tangled within it?
For the last 20 years, our own crew have played a big part in shaping the digital world we see today. The outcome is what began as a space of radical possibility has been enclosed, exploited, and transformed into a corporate-controlled dystopia of #dotcons. We now lived inside this algorithmic trap, and in many ways, … Continue reading We made this mess, it’s pastime to clean it up
In the world shaped by corporate control, liberal co-option, and empty activism, the language we use is a battleground. The unthinking push for #mainstreaming has dulled radical energy, replacing effectiveness with sanitized, #NGO-friendly language that avoids real social change and challenge. To be serious about building an alternative, we need to rethink how we communicate—not … Continue reading Stepping away: #OMN through clear, grounded communication
The #socialweb is shifting away from corporate-controlled paths like #Twitter and #Facebook toward decentralized, more #DIY alternatives. The idea is simple: instead of a single company having control, decentralized protocols allow different platforms to connect while giving people the power to shape and control their digital paths. Three major decentralized protocols have emerged: While all … Continue reading Comparing Decentralized #openweb Protocols
The tension between control vs. trust in tech and society is a core to defining the success or failure of grassroots, open projects like #OMN and the #fediverse. The problem isn’t just technical, but deeply social: a struggle between hierarchical control (power over) and distributed, democratic trust (power within). But we have the ongoing #geekproblem … Continue reading Are the currently spaces trust is built at scale, or do we need to create them from scratch?
The boater community is in rapid transition, with the pressures from gentrification, corporate control (#CRT), and online group dynamics (#failbook) colliding with a long-established scruffy, self-sufficient, and often chaotic #liveaboard culture. This can be seen in the #failbook London Boaters group which has shifted away from its activist roots into more of a “management” role, … Continue reading The stress of living in the remains of the commons, boaters in the UK
In the early days, the internet was a wild, open landscape, a place of creativity, collaboration, and decentralization. But over time, the rise of corporate platforms (the #dotcons) turned it into something far more controlled, walled-off, and extractive. What if we could reclaim that original vision? What if we could build an open, federated, and … Continue reading Rewilding a people-first web, beyond the #dotcons