The illusion of modern society is that freedom is only individualistic, when our freedom is in truth interconnected with the well-being of everyone. This is one of the central pushes of the #deathcult – the mess of #neoliberalism we still live and work inside. It tells us that we are free as consumers, that choice equals’ liberation, and that personal success is the highest form of virtue.
But this is a hollow freedom. What kind of liberty exists when every interaction is transactional, every space is owned, and every so-called “community” is just a market segment waiting to be monetized? We experience this every day. The #dotcons sell us “empowerment” through sharing, but it’s sharing inside a cage. Their platforms reduce human connection to engagement metrics and ad revenue. Every “like” is data for their shareholders, not any gesture of solidarity.
The #NGO world isn’t much better. It preaches collective change and “amplifying voices,” yet operates like any other corporation, brand-driven, risk-averse, allergic to the messy, unpredictable reality of grassroots organizing. Instead of networks of solidarity, they build vertical hierarchies of control. The people they claim to represent become “beneficiaries,” not participants.
Even in the alt-tech and “decentralized” spaces, this same illusion creeps in. Too often, we see projects confusing personal control with collective freedom, endless talk about privacy and autonomy without any grounding in social trust. A federation of silos is still a field of fences if the people behind them don’t share any values, practices, and care.
Real freedom isn’t about escaping others; it’s about building with them. The #openweb once embodied this, a commons of creativity, trust, and shared #FOSS tools. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked because people shared more than data; they shared intentions. The current #4opens are social principles first, technical structures second, path back to this.
25 years ago, seeded from the undercurrents video collective, we built #indymedia from this soil. Affinity groups came together to tell stories from the streets – direct, unfiltered, alive. You could see and touch it: the cables, the battered servers, the faces in the room lit by CRT monitors and endless tea. It wasn’t about perfection or control; it was about social connection.
Now we are knee-deep in mess, and need shovels to composting the Illusion, the challenge is to compost this #mainstreaming, to turn the rotting soil of #stupidindividualism into fertile ground. This is the work of the #OMN (Open Media Network): to regrow grassroots media not as a brand, not as a product, but as a living ecosystem of stories, links, and local action. Each part feeding the other. Each voice linked, not owned.
Where #dotcons feed on data extraction, we feed on compost, the messy remains of failed systems and burnt-out movements, broken down, rotted, turned into nourishment for the next cycle. Because our freedom doesn’t live in the self, it lives in the network, in the commons, in the trust between people, in the code and culture we share. The individual without community is not free, only adrift. The collective without openness is not strong, only captured. Freedom is not mine or yours. It’s ours, or it isn’t freedom at all.
In the #mainstreamin tech path, this is a useful step:
In alt tech there are lots of people doing good, and they are, but this is blinded shifting to doing “good” head down worshipping the #deathcult, this would be kinda OK if they held the bridge to a wider view of “good” but they don’t, they block and obscure there #blocking, this is bad, very bad as in the end the “good” they say they do, is just more mess we need to compost.
The real solution is always to respect and build from the fluffy/spiky debate, not bury it under politeness or pretend blindly it doesn’t matter. #Fluffy brings empathy, care, and bridge-building – vital social glue. #Spiky brings clarity, honesty, and challenge – the fire that keeps things real. Both are needed if a project is to stay alive and #4opens. The moment one side silences the other, the culture starts to rot. The second-best path, if balance isn’t yet possible, is to shift the #NGO-style fluffy language – soften its domination reflex – so it stops sounding like control disguised as kindness. This is where care can evolve into openness rather than enclosure.
The worst outcome is what we’ve already seen too often: blinded narrowness, the slow creep of civility politics that smothers dissent while smiling at best and ignoring then #blocking at worst. It’s silent damage, and it killed #SocialHub, turning what could have been a commons into a small irrelevant gated forum of insiders. You can’t maintain trust by excluding the spiky voices; you can only maintain a hollow sham.
So how can people try not to be prats about this conversation? Start by listening across difference, don’t pathologize conflict; compost it. Assume that critique is care, not attack. Drop the impulse to manage or “align” others – those are imperial moves. Instead, nurture space for spikiness within shared trust. The goal isn’t harmony, it’s living balance – a federation of tones, not a choir of compliance.
UPDATE: my feeling and experience of this is that these types of people will with blindness destroy what they say they value for the security of what they say they don’t value. The next generation will likely repeat this mess, and the compost will likely mould, as will our environment because little real change or challenge comes from the narrow blinded path this group keeps pushing. Yes it’s a hopeless mess, ideas to change and challenge this please?
PS. I would like to be proved wrong, this is a real opportunity for a nice group of people to do the right thing. By admitting the mess – don’t polish it – stop pretending everything’s fine. The blindness comes from politeness and professionalized facades – people smiling while quietly blocking change. Naming the rot is the first act of care, #4opens starts with open process, not spin.
Reignite the spiky energy – spikiness is honesty, critique, fire – not aggression. Without that spark, the culture flat-lines into #NGO sludge. Invite spiky voices back with trust, not fear. Build cultures that can handle disagreement as fuel, not threat.
Rebuild from affinity, not hierarchy. Instead of “leadership” and “representation,” think federation – small, rooted, overlapping networks of trust. The #OGB model (Open Governance Body) can be a path for this shared stewardship, visible processes, no invisible power.
Compost the infective NGOs, use what’s useful (resources, access, tools) but don’t let them define the framing. Their language and logic are imperial – centralizing, sanitizing. Translate their “professional” talk into commons language, from “impact metrics” to “shared meaning,” from “alignment” to “affinity.”
Re-root culture in lived practice – the grassroots aren’t a romantic idea – they’re the only working base, real change comes from where people actually do things together, not from panels or “stakeholder dialogues.” Focus energy there, make it visible, and let legitimacy flow upward again.
Make openness the discipline, openness isn’t chaos, it’s a discipline of trust. The #4opens – open data, open process, open source, open access – are the anti-imperial charter. If a group can’t work by them, they’re not #openweb; they’re enclosure with good #PR.
Keep it #KISS simple. Most of the blindness hides in over complication – endless frameworks, metrics, governance layers. Keep it small, human, and understandable. Simplicity keeps power honest.
Let’s try some metaphors (was looking for a Star Wars meme but find them horribly right-wing, we have made a real mess of this)
Had to use an old video, kinda on subject to the metaphor
A long time ago, in a network not so far away… The internet was alive with wild diversity. Countless small worlds of the #openweb – linked by trust, shared roots, and messy, beautiful collaboration.
This #FOSS federation of commons was rising… until the Soft Empire came. They did not come with star destroyers and stormtroopers. They came with funding proposals, frameworks, and friendly smiles. Their weapons were not lasers but language, phrases like “scaling up,” “alignment,” and “governance.” They promised stability, but what they brought was assimilation.
Across the #Fediverse, the #NGO Order spread the doctrine of “professionalisation,” pushing the one’s free instances into managed dependencys. This “Fluffy Fleet,” draped in banners of care and civility, softly conquered all that was unruly, to replace the grassroots with “strategic partners.” Yet in the outer systems, among abandoned nodes and glitching servers, a Native Resistance survived. The composting moon, a dim squat, in forests of forgotten code, still small online imaginary fires burn. Around one fire sits a circle of rebels – coders, gardeners, storytellers – the last of the Commons Stewards.
“They say ‘alignment’,” whispers one. “But what they mean is assimilation,” replies another. “We compost their words,” says the elder. “We turn control into soil for renewal.”
They speak of ancient #FOSS practices – #4opens, the sacred code of trust. Their whispered language is relational: “affinity,” “balance,” “re-booting.” They call themselves the Open Media Network (#OMN) keepers of the native web. Their mission: to expose the imperial euphemisms hiding behind “good governance,” to reclaim story telling as an act of freedom, to rekindle the federation of wild diversity across the digital web. “In the age of the Smiling Empire, domination wears the mask of care. Naming is resistance. Trust is rebellion. And compost is revolution.”
Our language is where the imperialistic paths hide
In the change and challenge of the #openweb reboot of the last few years, there are strong echoes of imperialism through #NGOs – soft domination rather than open conquest. Funding becomes a disciplining tool: if you want a seat at the table, you must conform to their norms. This is semi hidden economic and cultural imperialism inside the #openweb, pushing the path of replacing shared trust (#4opens) with institutional control.
To shovel compost, first, we need to look at where the Imperialistic language hides, as the imperialism here isn’t overt, it’s in tone, framing, and process. You see it in phrases like: “Scaling up” or “professionalising” community work. “Creating standards for everyone.” “Ensuring governance” (but meaning control). “Bringing structure” or “alignment” to “fragmented” communities. “Representing the movement” or “speaking for the community.”
These sound neutral or even helpful, but in context they reproduce colonial logic: centralizing power, erasing difference, replacing “native” messy grassroots diversity with clean, managed systems by narrowing paths to founders and institutional interests. This is soft imperialism – language as enclosure, while framing itself as care (“we’re helping you get organized”) but, the harder reality is its ownership and #mainstreaming domestication.
In contrast, “native” grassroots languages, speaks in a different tongue, open, lived, relational. You can hear it in: “Composting” instead of “managing.” “Re-balancing” instead of “reforming.” “Native paths” rather than “standardization.” “Affinity” instead of “alignment.” “Trust” instead of “compliance.”
That’s the language of commons stewardship, not imperial management. The clash in practice, can be seen most clearly when #NGO-fluffy or #dotcons outreach talk about “onboarding the next billion users” or “building shared infrastructure,” they’re actually talking about absorbing the commons to pull people into their world, under their definitions, within their control.
Our native path, on the other hand, speaks about bridging, federating, sharing roots, and keeping diversity alive. That’s anti-imperial by design, the tension is clear: #mainstreaming always wants to flatten difference, while we aim to amplify difference within shared openness. In our work, clearer naming, we can strip away the euphemisms, we call things what they are. Imperial languages real meaning: “Scaling” Colonising, “Professionalising” De-commonsing, “Governance frameworks” Control mechanisms, “Community representation” Gatekeeping, leading to “Alignment” Assimilation.
And on the positive side is commons language rooted meaning: “Grassroots governance” Native balance, “Decentralised collaboration” Open trust networks, “Interoperability” Mutual recognition leading to “Commons stewardship” Collective autonomy. The positive #KISS thing we can do is in simply naming the power play as it happens, not after it’s already shaped the story. Imperial language hides behind civility and “neutral coordination.” Naming is power. And if we can focus to name it, we can compost it. #OMN’s job – and ours – is to expose those euphemisms and restore more native naming so we can see the social we build more clearly.
Let try to do some of this: “Invisible roots / generation change”… “…the original crew who put the real work into growing the #Fediverse… are no longer invited, so become invisible to the new fluffy crew.” This is historical erasure, rewriting origins stories, to present them selves as the natural inheritor of progress. Here, “new” replaces “native.” The grassroots phase is forgotten or mythologized, allowing control to shift quietly to NGOs, corporate “helpers,” and state-aligned foundations.
Then we have “Fluffy dominance”, “…friendly, soft, smiling… but sliding into dogmatic blindness.” The language of niceness too often acts as imperial propaganda to enforce a monoculture of tone, with no dissent, no spikiness. This becomes ideological policing through manners, a soft colonialism of behaviour.
“Zero balance”, “…third event with the same narrow people… zero balance…” Imperial projects always stabilise imbalance. “Balance” is removed, so hierarchy can harden. Here, the imbalance is cultural: those aligned with funding and institutional legitimacy dominate; those rooted in messy grassroots work are marginalised.
So we need to work to compost the imperialism – in #OMN stories – composting means turning the waste of #mainstreaming into organic soil for renewal. The antidote to imperial framing is openness and plurality: Reclaim language – stop saying “community” when we mean “#closedclub.”. Decentralise narrative – many voices, not one authority to re-root trust – back to the base layer, where people actually do the work. Expose the smiling empire – funding, branding, and institutional capture need transparency to reassert the #4opens – the anti-imperial charter for #OMN governance.
The future of the #openweb depends on seeing through the soft imperialism of “good intentions.” If we can see it, we can name it, then we can compost it to grow something real, grounded, and free.
We need to look at this from a different view, it’s not just the tech, we’ve had working #FOSS tools, protocols, and infrastructure for decades. What kills movements is social, it’s the politics. Fractionalism, ideological vanguards fighting to capture and control, authoritarian “protection” – censorship framed as security, silencing criticism, shrinking ghettos – small groups defining themselves by exclusion, not expansion.
On the so-called radical paths, whether Trotskyist, Stalinist, or anarchist, the pattern is the same: authority asserts itself, dialogue is shut down, energy drains away. This is not new, it’s what happened in #Indymedia’s first wave (2000–2015). A boom of 100+ servers worldwide collapsed under internal antagonisms and the pressure of repression. The pattern is likely to repeat today in the #Fediverse – a federation of “benevolent dictatorships,” ideological ghettos, and isolation bubbles.
On this path, it’s still the same two poisons. Common sense greed – the monetizers, who see everything as an opportunity to exploit and blinded liberals – who smother movements with control, respectability politics, and blocking, until the right crushes them anyway. Then we have the social issue of the #geekproblem in front of this mess.
So why do alt tech at all, with projects like #Indymediaback / #OMN? Simple, it’s because this is an attempt to break this cycle. It’s not about building “the next Twitter,” or even just “the next Indymedia.” It’s about building infrastructure that makes it harder for greed and liberalism to strangle movements.
That means, collective relations over exchange relations. When everything is transactional, the hydra of exploitation regrows from within. Messy consensus over vanguardism, power remain distributed, rooted in trust, not captured by “protectors”. Openness over gatekeeping, #4opens (open source, open data, open standards, open process) are non-negotiable. The path is not a perfect system, but a resilient culture that resists authoritarian drift of the controlling left or the nasty right.
What we need is space for open discussion – not geek-only, not ghettoized, but broad, accessible, and transparent. What is needed is seed funding – servers and crew are running on fumes, without subsistence support, even the healthy politics collapses from burnout. Affinity groups – real-world working crews who share trust and values, not just abstract online networks. Bridging – from #Fediverse to #P2P and other channels, so we can resist repression and surveillance without pushing us into failed isolation.
With the hard right expansion, we are in a visible naked #classwar, the right is crushing the liberals, which ironically creates more space for the radical left. The “common sense” liberals can’t block as effectively when their own protections are stripped away. On a positive note, this is an opening for building balanced radical progressive infrastructure – not just protest spaces, but growing, federating, living networks.
In short: #Indymediaback using the #OMN framework isn’t only about servers or software. It’s about breaking the repeating cycle of fractionalism, authoritarian drift, and liberal smothering. To create conditions where grassroots media and alt cultures can actually survive long enough to matter.
Too often, the ugliness we face in grassroots spaces wears a smile. It’s smiling-faced vileness: pleasant, agreeable individuals who wield control by blocking dissent, sanitizing movements under the guise of compromise, and maintaining the fake illusion of consensus. This is especially true in spaces overly tolerant of #NGO-style protocols – those bureaucratic, #fashionista postmodern traps that slowly erode the spark that makes real alternative communities thrive.
From my work across decades – from protest camps to #openweb projects – I’ve seen this negative pattern again and again. Projects like early #Indymedia were messy, radical, and fiercely autonomous. That edge, that wildness was slowly excised until what remains is either safe, bland, and powerless or locked down and paranoid, both smother the naive grassroots paths.
At late era #climatecamp i’ve witnessed activist planning groups that masquerade as open and inclusive, but doom radical ideas by policing language. If someone speaks candidly about power or inequality, they risk being labelled as “derailing.” Not unlike what I describe on the Fediverse: “a consensus ritual where insiders quietly veto contentious proposals, pushing them offstage.” The effect is chilling – the bold, and meaningful, get diluted and then silenced.
I’ve also seen “horizontal” groups adopt soft authoritarianism: a handful of insiders subtly side-line contentious voices with endless calls for care, safety and more research or structure, this is simply polite gatekeeping, in those quiet pauses, power consolidates. These practices don’t just kill energy, they devour possibility. They cannibalize the chance for communities that are both fluffy (nurturing) and spiky (radical).
Smiling-face vileness is not satire – it’s simple #fashionista postmodern gaslighting, that slowly smothers life with calm care and precision. To compost this mess, the task of the grassroots is to replant what’s been stomped. That means cultivating friction -mess, disagreement, negotiation – because that is how community grows, trust is built, and real alternatives emerge. Let’s embed this friction into our code, our community practices, our shared care. Let’s compost the #NGO and fashionista chokeholds so we can grow radical, tender, collective futures #KISS
A lot of the “smiling-faced vileness” comes from a mix of personal psychology, learned behaviour, and the systemic incentives that shape #NGO, institutional, and #mainstreaming culture. It’s not usually deep evil – it’s something more banal, entrenched, and self-justifying. Examples of this mess making:
Fear of losing control when change threatens the structures they know how to navigate, so they subconsciously (or consciously) try to stop it. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil idea applies here: harm is done by “ordinary” functionaries protecting their turf “The real danger is not that people will rebel, but that they will acquiesce in doing what they know is wrong.”
Cognitive dissonance management, as they see themselves as “the good guys,” so any action – even blocking positive change – must be reframed as “responsible” or “prudent.” #Postmodern self-protection: everything can be justified with enough narrative spin, “No one is the villain of their own story.”
Status preservation, NGOs and funding orgs reward stability over creativity, hierarchy over challenge. If this position, funding and reputation depends on maintaining the current order, so will fight disruptive change, even if it’s obviously better “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Incompetence + insecurity, breeds paranoia. If you don’t know how to balance real change, you start to fear those who do. The façade of competence becomes more important than actual results, “When a man’s only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Groupthink & conformity pressure, #mainstreaming cultures reward going along with the majority, even if the majority is wrong “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
This is why these people who cling to “power” often look “nice” on the surface while quietly gutting or neutralising anything spiky, challenging, and any change of path. It’s not just personal malice, it’s a cultural immune system against change, fuelled by fear, vanity, and comfort.
An example of this is when the tiny few “secede” in #mainstreaming media (and the history it writes) it is not neutral, it’s a kind of #PR machine. It launders power and polishes away dissent. The smiling faces and “respectable” voices then are just the velvet gloves over the iron fist. It’s fake history as PR – it isn’t history as lived memory or contested struggle, it’s official narrative, a “storybook” written to flatter the winners and confuse the rest. That’s why it feels vile and pointless: it distracts, pacifies, and reframes mess as inevitability.
We need to be clear, the people who produce this are not innocent. Yes, many are clueless functionaries who internalize the system’s values without question. Others are parasitic aspirants, desperate to climb into the #nastyfew by copying their methods. Even when they do “small goods” (a sympathetic article, a cultural puff piece), in the larger pattern they still serve the mainstreaming #deathcult machine.
The compost metaphor is about instead of raging endlessly at the mess, take what can be siphoned off (attention, fragments of narrative, disillusioned individuals) and redirect that flow into the alt systems (#OMN, #4opens, Fediverse, grassroots histories) then compost the rest: let it rot, break down, and become the fertilizer for something alive and grounded to seed. Because otherwise we get stuck in their cycle: doom-scrolling their fake stories, wasting energy on only reacting instead of building. Yes, the challenge is mediation, not just rejection. Spot the toxic flows, tap them for useful nutrients, to feed the roots of alternatives.
Activist tech has been stuck in “bunker mode” for 20 years. We now need to lift our heads to work on building #4opens native, commons-first systems that store, share, and protect movement knowledge in ways that don’t require a priesthood of insiders to access.
We need to re grow an appreciation that in an active movement, forum threads, shared docs, livestreams, and photos aren’t just chat noise, they’re collective memory. We need to better understand that when we treat them as disposable, we throw away the hard-earned lessons that future activists will desperately need. The solution is #KISS-fed, redundant, federated archiving:
All public movement data sits in the commons.
Metadata + content are mirrored across multiple federated nodes.
Backups are easy to pull, restore, and re-seed by anyone who ever has trust access.
Data is grouped via hashtags, not rigid taxonomies, so it flows where it’s needed.
This is appropriate tech: low-complexity, high-resilience, built for social utility first. But for this to grow it can’t be mediated to death by the #geekproblem – code should follow social needs, not the other way around. If we can get this kind of infrastructure running, we stop losing our history, we keep movements porous instead of paranoid, and we finally start building bridges instead of walls.
Let’s look at a possable example of this: For the #DAT protocol to become relevant in #FOSS activist tech, we need to stop treating it as an isolated island and start building solid bridges to #ActivityPub. The two are not enemies – they are complementary paths. #p2p tools and protocols like DAT brings distributed, peer-to-peer file persistence; ActivityPub brings the social layer, discovery, and conversation. Together, they might create a space where activists choose their preferred path without being siloed or alienated, and without the unhealthy isolation that comes from the current #geekproblem habit of fetishising one protocol at the expense of all others.
Diversity is the basis of any healthy ecosystem – biological, social, or technological – in nature, monocultures are fragile; in tech, monocultures are authoritarian. We need to approach activist infrastructure with the same principles that make ecosystems thrive: multiple species of tools, cross-pollination between communities, and a constant flow of ideas and resources. This doesn’t mean adding complexity for complexity’s sake; it means designing with #KISS in mind, while ensuring redundancy and adaptability.
If we take this ecological view of the #openweb, then bridges are not optional extras, they are the lifelines. In our example, by linking #DAT and #ActivityPub, we create a richer habitat for movements to live in and make it harder for corporate capture to take root, to give people the freedom to move between spaces without losing connection and context. That’s how we replace the bunker mentality with real commons, not just defensive walls, but thriving, interconnected gardens.
Let’s be honest: we have a real and ongoing #geekproblem in how funding is allocated in the alt-tech and #openweb space, and it’s holding us back. The current push for infrastructure is important, but it’s not enough.
Yes, backend infrastructure is vital. You can’t build sustainable alternatives to #dotcons without solid plumbing. Funding projects like mesh networks, free firmware, and decentralised protocols, as #NLnet and others often do, is necessary work. BUT… If no one uses the infrastructure, or if it simply gets absorbed back into corporate platforms, then we’re just building tools for the next round of tech enclosures. That’s the pattern we’ve been trapped in for 20+ years.
Take the example of #ActivityPub. It would have remained a marginal protocol if #Mastodon hadn’t wrapped it in good UX, approachable design, and a culture people actually wanted to be part of. It was this social work, not just the code, that made the #Fediverse grow. That success was accidental, not structural, and we’re now coasting off that one cultural leap forward while backend devs get all the attention and funding. Culture first, code second is the hard truth:
The Fediverse is a culture first, and a standard second.
Where is the real funding for building sustainable social tools, interfaces, and communities? Where is the funding for actual alternatives to #dotcons that real people can use? This is one of the things we mean by the #geekproblem, the over-prioritisation of backend infrastructure in a vacuum, without acknowledging the social, political, and cultural layers needed for real systemic change. What’s the Risk? It’s that we end up with:
Endless dev churn.
Great tech no one uses.
A cultural vacuum that’s quickly filled by bad actors or subsumed by corporate rebranding.
Sound familiar? So what do we do?
Balance the Funding. Yes to infrastructure, but also fund user-facing projects, UI/UX work, community engagement, moderation tooling, multilingual outreach, and federated editorial practices. In other words, fund culture-building.
Support “Soft” Projects That Matter. There’s very little funding for projects like #OMN, #indymediaback, or #openwebgovernancebody because they don’t look like “innovation.” But these are the organic, lived tools that connect radical tech to real social movements.
Fund social protocols, not just transport protocols.
#4opens, the #PGA hallmarks, and trust-based governance are protocols too, just not the kind that compile into binaries. They help mediate conflict, keep projects focused, and build human networks that last.
Funding only “safe” back-end tech guarantees it will either be: Irrelevant, co-opted, or turned into the next closed platform. We have to fund risky, visible, social alternatives if we want a different outcome. None of this is new, I like meany people been banging this drum since the #indymedia days and writing about it for decades. On this path, the #geekproblem isn’t about individuals, it’s a systemic blind spot. Let’s please take the time to balance funding tech AND the culture to finally move toward more humanistic paths.
Everyone knows we are in a mess, but most people are too distracted to do anything to change this. Most of us keep on the dysfunctional path – scrolling, clicking, consuming – because the current mess we live in is incredibly skilled at hiding most consequences.
The environmental cost is buried under greenwashing. BP rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” Shell sponsors art galleries. Apple makes claims about “carbon-neutral” devices, then glues batteries shut to prevent repair. Meanwhile, rare earth extraction, e-waste, and fast fashion destroy ecosystems from Congo to Cambodia.
The labour cost is outsourced, invisibilized, atomized. Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles to keep pace with surveillance timers. Foxconn installs suicide nets around dorms. Uber calls drivers “partners” while avoiding all responsibility for their lives or livelihoods.
The mental health cost is reframed as personal failure. You’re anxious and burnt out? Must be your mindset. Try a mindfulness app. Maybe eat better. Maybe “grind smarter.” Meanwhile, the structure of your life, precarious work, information overload, climate dread, is never questioned.
The social collapse is blamed on the “irresponsible poor” or “divisive politics.” Communities are gutted by austerity, housing is hoarded by speculators, but you’re told it’s your neighbour’s fault, immigrants, the unemployed, the other political tribe. The system throws fuel on every fire, then lectures you on “civility.”
Every crisis becomes your problem, not the system’s. This is because the #deathcult we unconsciously worship doesn’t just produce stuff, it produces numbness, distraction, and above all, thoughtlessness, a never-ending now, stripped of memory and consequence.
And the moment you try to pull back the curtain? There’s a brand, an #NGO ready to sell you “resistance” too. It’s a system designed to make rebellion feel like a cloned lifestyle choice.
A t-shirt with a slogan.
A rainbow flag slapped on a weapons manufacturer.
A “climate justice” conference sponsored by Shell.
A new Netflix docuseries about the thing you’ll forget by next week.
#KISS resistance requires more than outrage, we don’t just need better tech or better politics, we need:
Better attention — to what's real and what's propaganda
Slower thinking — against the churn of hot takes and algorithms
Reclaimed time — stolen back from platform metrics and work schedules
Spaces for consequence — where the impacts of our actions (or inactions) are visible, shareable, accountable
That’s why #DIY infrastructure, the commons, and openness, matter. That’s why we are rebooting the #openweb, with the #4opens, with the #OMN, with peer-to-peer tools, and with each other. And we need to do this before thoughtlessness becomes all we have left in the #mainstreaming mess.
There are meany sides to the current mess, it’s worth looking at them. An example the #mainstreaming path of paywalls stacked on paywalls isn’t any real life, it’s a trap, which we need a way out. The wider picture in our everyday lives, we’ve come to accept the absurd:
You pay to eat food grown on land you don’t have access to,
Pay to sleep under a roof that someone profits from,
Pay to drink water privatized by corporations,
Pay to breathe because the air is poisoned by industries that sell you both the problem and the solution.
And if you miss a payment? Game over (inspired by). That is not a functioning economy, it’s not in any way freedom, it’s a hostage situation, where every basic human need is held behind a transactional barrier, and the meter is always running.
This #deathcult is late capitalism: an endless stack of paywalls enclosing what used to be public, shared, and free. It isn’t just about money, it’s about control, dependency, and isolation. It’s a system that need to engineer artificial scarcity, so a #nastyfew can profit while the many just try to survive.
But it wasn’t always like this, for most of human history, people lived within commons-based paths, where land was collectively stewarded, food was grown and shared within communities, tools and knowledge were passed down, not patented and governance was sometimes local and participatory.
The last 200 years of “common sense” capitalism is an enclosure of these commons, first the physical ones (land, water, food), and now the digital and social ones (communication, culture, identity). The #openweb, like the open land before it, is being digitally fenced off. Platform by platform. App by app. Cookie banner by paywall.
This enclosure now defines much of our tech infrastructure, in this #mainstreaming every scroll, click, and share is now mediated by profit-driven platforms. Even activism – once vibrant and messy – is being swallowed by slick interfaces and the same throttled feeds. Resistance is filtered, shadowbanned, deboosted, and pushed to monetize. And “our” #NGOs fighting platform power… are doing so on those same platforms.
It’s an absurdity, and worse: it’s a trap. We need alternatives, real ones. We’re not going to “ethics workshop” our way out of this. We need to rebuild the tools of everyday life – economically, digitally, socially – from the grassroots up.
Commons-based systems, let’s turn some “common sense” on it head, instead of private ownership: stewardship. Instead of scarcity: abundance through sharing. This is where projects, like The Open Media Network (#OMN) come in as a practical framework for grassroots media infrastructure:
Built on the #4opens: open data, source, standards, and governance.
Designed to decentralize publishing, and return control to local communities.
Uses both client-server and P2P bridges for accessibility and resilience.
Encourages trust-based networks over extractive platforms.
OMN is not just theory, it’s active code, messy dev, and practical tools for people to tell their own stories, host their own content, and build alternative knowledge systems outside corporate media. These technologies make community hosting the default – not the exception. They reduce reliance on fragile or compromised #dotcons infrastructure. They’re imperfect, but they’re a step out of the enclosure.
The point isn’t just tech, It’s power, capitalism doesn’t only gate resources. It enforces relationships of power. That’s why rebuilding tech without addressing governance, ownership, and access won’t get us far. The #geekproblem is real: tech that nobody can use isn’t liberation, it’s just another dead-end.
The alternative? Keep it #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), prioritize social usability over technical elegance, build bridges, not silos, return to shared ownership and open processes. Capitalism is a hostage situation, but we can walk out the door – if we build the exit together.
You’re not powerless, and this isn’t about purity or escape. It’s about building real infrastructure for real life, so when the capitalist system keeps crumbling (as it will), we’re not left scrambling. We’ll already be living differently.
UPDATE the seed of this post was from a toot, but can’t find the original to link to due to the #UX of mastodon updating and no functioning search on my instance to find history, sorry, add in comments if you find the original. Updated
In our media and tech projects, we’re walking two very different paths – often without any or partly realizing the tension between them. On one side, we’re seceding under capitalism, that means navigating funding applications, #NGO partnerships, grant cycles, and institutional compromises. It’s where projects get trimmed down to what’s legible to founders, it’s survival, maybe even minor success, inside the system.
On the other side, we’re seceding toward the change we want and need, by building alternatives with radical trust, open governance, mutual aid, and grounded peer-to-peer systems. It’s messy, difficult, but it’s actually outside the system, what we used to call pre-figurative politics, what we now build as #openweb infrastructure, federated networks, and horizontal institutions.
These two paths are not the same and if we pretend they are, we lose. What we need is a #4opens bridge between them:
Open data to keep control in the commons.
Open source to prevent black boxes of power.
Open process so anyone can inspect and challenge decisions.
Open standards to build actual interoperability - not walled gardens in disguise.
But here’s the problem we are currently blind to that balance, and that bridge doesn’t stay up on its own. It has to be maintained through deliberate political will, through active resistance to co-option, through remembering why we started building in the first place.
The mainstream will always try to absorb the open, turn it into a sandbox, a product, a brand. That’s the nature of #mainstreaming and #NGO logic. We’ve seen it again and again – #FOSS, #indymedia, #activism – all turned into funding pipelines and branding opportunities if not defended.
So our task is not just technical, it’s political infrastructure work to hold the bridge, guard the open paths, so that we have the space and access to compost what’s broken.
There’s an old rot in the heart of European tech policy – and it’s not just from the corporate lobbies. It’s also sprouting from the well-funded, #NGO-flavoured corners of what should be grassroots movements. A contradiction that tells us everything we need to know about how broken all the current #EU#mainstreaming crew and paths are.
Take #Eurostack for example, on paper, it looks decent: a collaborative push toward European digital sovereignty, resilience, and open-source infrastructure. The slogan is right, some of the tech might be right. But the people who will be driving it? And the people that will flood onboard to push it thought, that’s where it obviously falls apart.
The same revolving-door #NGO actors, the same consultant-heavy think-tankers. The same polite funding circles that treat power as something to be managed, not challenged. These are not builders in any way we need to build, these are managers of decline, politely cutting the edges off radical tech to make it presentable to policymakers, while completely ignoring the communities that can actually make it work.
And then we have #NLnet, which still has some grassroots soul left, but let’s be honest, the #geekproblem rears its head. Some of the funded projects are brilliant in technical terms but exist in complete social isolation. Beautiful protocol paths that no one will use. Decentralized stacks with zero real social onboarding. Tools solving problems that are themselves geek-invented, not in any sense real-world urgent that anyone needs.
So what do we get? Corporate-captured “open” projects that simply entrench the status quo, with a shine of progressive #PR (hello #Mozilla). Funded grassroots tech that is overengineered, fragile, and every way oblivious to social or political context it’s built for. Endless talk of “digital commons” by people who’ve never participated in one.
The result? More #techno-solutionist dead ends, more paper victories, more funding poured down the drain, feeding the empty abstracted versions of real solutions. And worse, a complete blind spot for why the #openweb is in crisis: it’s not a lack of good tech, it’s a lack of courageous, messy, trust-based social organizing.
Too many of the actors at the table are blinded by the common sense of the #deathcult of neo-liberal governance. They don’t want alternatives – they want reforms that keep their seats at the table warm. This isn’t conspiracy talk, it’s about the structural failure: the very people tasked with change have made comfort and compliance their only path. That’s why the best thing we can do with this EU mess is compost it.
Let’s be clear: We’re not burning bridges with #NLnet or even #Eurostack. We’re building parallel paths with stronger roots, clearer intentions, and radical memory. We’re rebooting native projects like #indymediaback and the #OpenMediaNetwork not because the EU can’t help, but because it won’t, unless it’s dragged there by working alternatives. Until then, the #mainstreaming “solutions” paths will remain #PR for the status quo rotting and failing with decay. Pastime for you to help to compost the lot, and grow better from the mulch.
The problem with the #EUEurocracy on social and tech issues isn’t usually only malice, it’s institutional incompetence. They struggle for any understanding of grassroots digital culture, the #openweb, commons-based governance, and the social realities of how technology actually works.
That leaves us with a choice. We can try to engage, push, educate, and help them become a little less incompetent. Or we can focus entirely on tearing down existing institutions.
The danger with the second path is obvious. Vacuums rarely stay empty. If progressive and grassroots voices walk away, the people most ready to fill the space are the nationalist, authoritarian, and right-wing people already waiting in the wings.
This isn’t just an #EU issue. It applies to most #mainstreaming institutions. They are failing, slow-moving, and trapped in outdated assumptions, but abandoning them entirely doesn’t automatically lead somewhere better.
The challenge is to build alternatives like #OMN and the #openweb while also applying enough pressure, education, and challenge to stop existing institutions from becoming even worse.
Not a comfortable path, but likely the least dangerous one.
We recently had an extended and thoughtful discussion on signal between collaborators working on #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory, an issue emerged: how should we structure “actors” (ActivityPub identities) in a network where the focus is collective action, not individual performance? This question isn’t only a technical issue, it’s political, and central to the success or failure of rebooting radical grassroots media within the #Fediverse.
The tension is about balancing the individual and the collective. In most current Fediverse platforms (like Mastodon or PeerTube), each user is an “actor” with their own inbox/outbox, mirroring the logic of the mainstream #socialweb where identity and expression are deeply individual. But for platforms rooted in collective publishing, such as a revived #Indymedia, this doesn’t map neatly.
“We are trying to balance individualism with collectivism. People already have all the individualism they can take, we need a structure to support the collective.”
That means maybe moving away from assuming every account needs to be a visible, subscribable actor. Working model: Per-instance actors first, a consensus is emerging around per-instance actors – e.g., the Newswire and Features flows of a local Indymedia site act as the primary publishable entities in the Fediverse. These represent the editorial collective’s curated output – not just anyone shouting into the void.
External trusted contributors (like info@hamishcampbell) would publish content from their own Fediverse accounts using hashtags like #oxfordindymedia, which the local Indymedia instance detects, vets, and republishes.
This brings three key benefits:
Curation over chaos – Stories don’t just flood in via hashtags; they’re filtered through trust relationships.
Permissioned federation – Only trusted flows (or untrusted but manually reviewed ones) are accepted. Hashtag spam is naturally blocked.
Maintaining editorial identity – Subscribing to an Indymedia instance means subscribing to its judgement, not just raw fire hose feeds.
Do we need per-user actors? Here’s where things get messy, and interesting, three models were debated:
Classic Fediverse model: Each user has their own actor. This supports full transparency and traceability of actions, but risks returning to individualist norms and opens the door to abuse or platform drift.
Invisible user accounts: Users exist internally for moderation or curation roles, but aren’t visible in the Fediverse as actors.
Controlled per-user actors: Users do have actors, but these are only used to publish activity logs, not posts. Think: “Editor X approved story Y”, useful for building transparency and trust within an open process.
Option 3 sits nicely with the principles of the #4opens, particularly open process and open governance as it provides a transparent audit trail without pushing users into the spotlight. #UX vs backend architecture, what becomes clear is that the user experience should foreground collective flows – Features, Newswire, Tags – while any per-user mechanics operate in the background, supporting moderation, traceability, or edge-case publishing. Whether those background accounts are #AP actors or not might depend on implementation details.
“It’s not about the actors per se - it’s about what shows up in the front-end #UX, and how we build trust in the process.”
Final considerations, networks like #IndymediaBack default to collective-first publishing, with user actor functionality off unless needed. #MakingHistory, by contrast, might enable user actor publishing to support mass collaborative storytelling. Both platforms rely on whitelist federation, meaning only trusted instances and users can feed directly into the editorial stream. Abuse prevention comes not just from code, but from the politics of moderation, curation, and shared norms.
We probably need per-user actors, but used sparingly and carefully.
We definitely need per-instance actors for trusted collective outputs.
Hashtags are a start, but the flow must be curated and accountable.
UX should put collectives front and centre, with user identity in the background.
This is a political choice, not just a technical one, and that’s a good thing.
