Good to look at this without attacking individuals, we need to mediate the safety-absolutism that is quietly killing change and challenge. When fear becomes #blocking, safety becomes dangerous. This is hard to say plainly, but it needs to be said. Fear is now one of the primary blocking forces in our movements. And the way we currently talk about “safety” is actively preventing change and challenge.
This isn’t about mocking trauma, denying harm, or dismissing the very real violence people experience. It’s about recognising when defensive survival strategies harden into political dead ends. The safety spiral logic: “We can only be close to people or communities that already fully align with us on every axis of harm, identity, politics, health, and worldview – otherwise we are not safe.”
So the conditions for engagement become: covid-conscious in exactly the right way, anti-psychiatry / anti-DSM, anti-state, anti-capitalist, anti-cop, inclusive of disabled, trans, plural collectives, youth-liberatory, anti-electoral, explicitly anti-racist (correctly so), rejecting radfem frameworks, rejecting astrology-based categorisation, acknowledging ongoing pandemic realities, and doing all this perfectly, visibly, immediately. Are a few of the more messy examples.
Only when every expanding box has been ticked can contact begin, only then can conversation happen and blocking stop being the default. This isn’t solidarity, it’s pre-emptive social closure, a social kind of #geekproblem as we call it in the hashtag story
What this produces in practice isn’t safety, it’s total fragmentation. Everyone is one misstep away from exile, disagreement becomes a threat vector, an unfamiliar person is a risk assessment. Every public space collapses into curated micro-enclaves, where blocking becomes the primary social technology. Not mediation, not context, not repair, just disappearance, head in the sand. This doesn’t build resilient communities, it builds brittle ones that shatter under any pressure.
This Is especially dangerous now, we are not in a stable period, we are in accelerating collapse: ecological, political, economic, informational. Change and challenge require friction, they require contact across difference, they require disagreement that doesn’t immediately become expulsion. If every space must feel safe before struggle begins, then struggle never begins at all.
Movements don’t grow in controlled environments, they grow in contested, imperfect, human ones. #Blocking can have good social use, it’s a secondary tool in porous community building in projects like the #OMN
But when blocking becomes: the default response, the first tool, not the last, the substitute for governance, mediation, and care …it stops being protective and starts being politically disabling. Blocking erases memory, erases accountability, erases the possibility of learning. A movement that cannot remember its conflicts cannot grow.
This is the hardest truth, safety is incompatible with transformation, safety-first politics assume: stable institutions, time to refine norms, space to withdraw, systems that absorb failure. We don’t have those conditions anymore.
When safety becomes sacred, it silently aligns with the status quo, because the status quo is what guarantees minimal risk for those who already have community. Radical change always feels unsafe, it always threatens identities, certainties, and boundaries. That doesn’t mean we abandon care, it means we stop confusing comfort with justice.
An example: Anti-racism doesn’t mean zero engagement with difference. It means building structures that can hold conflict without defaulting to erasure.
What modernist projects like the #OMN are actually arguing for is not in any way: “everyone should feel unsafe”, “ignore harm” or “abolish boundaries”. It is more about context instead of purity tests, and accountable conflict instead of silent blocking. Visible social process, not invisible fear management.
This is not a call-out – It’s a call back – to movement cultures that could argue, fracture, repair, and continue. A final, uncomfortable point, if a political space can only exist by blocking most people on sight, it is not a movement, it’s a bunker, and bunkers don’t build futures. They just help people wait out the collapse – alone.
We need less fear pretending to be politics, less safety pretending to be justice, more messy, risky, mediated, human engagement. That’s where change has always come from.
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