From my point of view, it needs to start from the raw truth: There is currently no functioning grassroots media. Not in any coherent sense. Before we talk about video, storytelling and digital tools, we have to answer the most basic question, one that most people have forgotten to ask: What is grassroots media?
It’s not “content creation.”
It’s not “influencer culture.”
It’s not another #NGO-funded project selling “voices from below” to tick a box for a funder’s annual report.
Grassroots media is the messy, local, real-world network of people using simple tools to speak, share, and act together, outside institutional control.
It’s about agency, not branding.
It’s about trust, not reach.
It’s about doing, not performing.
This is the core almost everyone skips, and it’s why so much “independent media” ends up feeling like a watered-down copy of the mainstream it was meant to replace.
Building networks, not platforms. If we want living, breathing alternatives, we need to think like ecosystem builders, not tech entrepreneurs. Balance means deliberately prioritising the roots – where stories grow from – to counter the dominance of traditional and #NGO media that always speak from above.
The corporate #dotcons – Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X, all of them – have poisoned the soil. Their logic is control, enclosure, and profit extraction. We can’t reform them, but we can compost them. Use what’s left of their infrastructure tactically. KISS – keep it simple, use and abuse what remains as compost to fertilise the new.
We need to dig back into the living history of #DIY media culture, those messy, chaotic, beautiful experiments that worked, to where and when media grown from social trust, not algorithmic metrics. Back in the day, it used to work because it was grounded in the #openweb a culture built on openness, transparency, federation, and collaboration. What we call the #4opens.
The #OMN (Open Media Network) path is about rediscovering that soil and replanting in it.
Building federated, trust-based, messy, human networks of media again. It’s not about replacing corporate platforms with shinier tech. It’s about rebuilding the culture of open media, the relationships, the ethics, the shared practice of truth-telling and collaboration.
Because if we don’t grow our own grassroots media again, someone else will sell it back to us in plastic wrap.
Extreme liberalism is the outcome of #postmodernism, the rot at the heart of the current “progressive” mess. It’s what happens when shared stories are replaced by (non) individual narrative, and meaning dissolves into (non) individual performance.
Our current #fashernistas swim in this thin soup, they call it “diversity,” “empowerment,” “innovation,” but it’s a dysfunctional mess, with marketing dressed as virtue. The problem we need to compost is that every attempt to make something that works – collective, rooted, accountable – gets drowned in an endless tide of self-expression and identity management.
Postmodernism was supposed to liberate us from hierarchy and dogma. But it left us atomised, trapped in their #dotcons feeds, without any shared compass. Out of that vacuum came the extreme liberalism of the last 20 years we think as “progressive”: the cult of the individual, the religion of choice, and the morality of markets. It’s the #KISS polite face of the #deathcult, its neoliberalism with a rainbow filter.
The #openweb – through the #4opens – is a path out of this swamp. It’s not about the illusion of freedom sold by #dotcons, or the grant-funded “activism” of the #NGO class. It’s about activist trust-based openness: code, data, governance, and process dogmatically open, that people and community can build, see and shape.
The #OMN (Open Media Network) grows from this ground. It’s not another brand or a platform – it’s a garden for messy, local, grassroots media to regrow. It starts from compost: the failures, the blocks, the burned-out projects. From that, we build something living again.
To move at all on this, we have to compost #postmodernism, keep its healthy scepticism, but drop the self-absorption. Keep openness, but return to shared meaning. Truth matters. Trust matters. The network needs to feed the commons, not the “individual” play-acting ego.
