The Blavatnik worldview, book talk

A talk on a new book by Pepper Culpepper on how corporate scandals could be used to save liberal “democracy”. This talk is the familiar fantasy of elitist institutions like the Blavatnik School, Oxford. Culpepper and co author Lee reframe disasters from Enron to Cambridge Analytica not as structural failures of a system built to concentrate power, but as healthy “corrections” that supposedly can be used by people like them to renew democracy.

In this telling, public anger is something to be safely channelled into regulation, corporations remain indispensable, and democracy survives as a managerial process overseen by the normal “progressive” liberalish policy priests. It is #deathcult logic, polished up, to worship the system while denying its violence, recurring catastrophe not as proof of collapse, but as evidence that the machine still works – if only the right people are allowed to control it.

The Blavatnik worldview in one sentence “Capitalism is broken, but only experts can fix it, without threatening those who benefit from it.” The tone is elitists pessimism dressed as realism, the talk opens with managed the pessimism “Yes, things are bad…” “…but lives are improving” “…and the liberal order still basically works” “…we just need better policy”. Everything else is ornamentation, democracy is talked about constantly, but control is never offered.

This is the #deathcult chant, not in any way apocalyptic enough to demand rupture, and also not hopeful enough to empower people. It’s pessimism, justifying elitist management, so no real change. They talk about democracy, but notice how it’s framed: Democracy = policy capacity, regulatory competence, party systems and institutional continuity. Democracy is not found in any real popular control, public ownership, exit, refusal, redistribution, or material power. The people appear as voters, outrage generators, legitimacy providers, but never as agents who might take any part in control, the old mainstreaming tradition of social democracy as crowd management.

The book is worship of policy nerds vs fear of the #techbrows, a strange inversion at work, that billionaires are dangerous, reckless and markets are running amok. The solution for them, is therefore, “we need policy experts to save us.” who can circulate through the same elitist institutions, depend on the same funding systems and never threaten ownership or accumulation. Yes, capitalism is “broken” – but only as a governance problem to solve. This is instead of any stress of public vs concentrated power, in their book, it’s an intra-elite turf war, sold as democracy.

They get very close to truth here “capitalism is a minority of people with a lot of power, unafraid to use it.” But then they refuse any logical conclusion, if what they say is true, then regulation is insufficient, as any real accountability requires ownership change and democracy requires material leverage to function. Instead, they do a quick pivot to stakeholder capitalism and value generation as a path to “put capitalism back on its feet”. This is a system that’s killing people, while insisting itself must stay alive.

Public capitalism is a bloodless fantasy that might sound radical to a privileged chattering class. But it’s the same failed mess, where the public gets, exposure, risk, volatility while the elitists keep control and set the agenda. It is inequality, endlessly acknowledged, but never touched, the normal elitists preference disguised as inevitability.

There, assumptions are wrong, yes, the is a very real fear of autocracy, but not of oligarchy, they are worried about autocracy, but they are not worried enough about billionaires controlling media, capital, thus veto over policy, regulatory capture and economic coercion. Why? Because oligarchy is their ecosystem. Autocracy is framed as something external, crude, foreign, where oligarchy is polite, networked, respectable… and pays for book launches at the Blavatnik School we sip wine at, after the event.

They are scared by “bad populism” but love “good populism” as outrage without power, believing, outrage can be used to drive a very narrow idea of reform, scandals and anger can be “harnessed” as a fuel for what they see as elitist balance. The public is a matchstick, a controlled burn to open up a space for their class (literally their children) the future“policy entrepreneurs” who, with generational wealth, still rich enough to volunteer, bored enough to care and insulated enough to fail, its politics as a hobby of the ideal rich.

In the Q&A they talk about media fragmentation = democracy in trouble (but not elitist paths). They worry we “can’t agree on facts”. But they don’t worry about who owns platforms, who shapes narratives, who funds think tanks, who sets the Overton window. Fragmentation is blamed on the public, concentration is never blamed on capital. Then we have #AI outrage already being pre-neutralised, the AI bubble “will pop”, they say. The question is, “how do we use that outrage?” Not, how do we let people decide, how do we transfer control, how do we prevent enclosure in the first place.

Outrage is something to be channelled into managerial politics with the Churchillian cop-out “democracy is the worst system except all the others.” Which translates into, lower expectations, accept elitist rule to manage decline politely.

In this path, corporations are treated as unavoidable, people are treated as incapable, you get a strong feeling from this talk and book that this is it is not democratic theory, rather paternalism with footnotes. The core lie, unspoken underneath everything, is “we can fix capitalism without shifting power.” Every answer assumes that capitalism must remain, corporations must remain, and that the elitists must mediate and guided the public not to challenge this.

It’s elite self-soothing, but yes, they aren’t wrong that the system is broken, they’re wrong about who is allowed to fix it.

#Oxford

Open Media Network: A Manifesto for the Digital Commons

A cohesive manifesto is needed as the world we inherited is fractured. Wealth, power, and knowledge are concentrated in the hands of the #nastyfew: platform owners, data hoarders, and corporate monopolies who extract value from our work, our attention, and our trust. Democracy has been hollowed out, captured and controlled by algorithms that decide what is knowable, profitable, and even true. Ecology, community, and care are sacrificed on the #deathcult altar of growth and consumption.

In this mess, the Open Media Network (#OMN) is a #KISS project that exists to reclaim the digital commons, reshape society, and redefine what is possible when power, knowledge, and technology are returned to the people.

In the current #dotcons economy, access to infrastructure, information, and governance is rent-based and extractive. Communities pay to participate, and the surplus flows to distant shareholders.

The #4opens – open code, open governance, open data, open processes – upend this system. Putting tools of creation and coordination into grassroots democratic, collective stewardship. Value no longer flows automatically upward; it stays with the communities that generate it.

On this path, inequality stops being “natural.” Rich and poor are revealed as structural outcomes of enclosure and extraction. By reclaiming infrastructure as a commons, we recompose power, and inequality becomes a historical memory, not a permanent fact.

The logic of capitalism equates growth with progress, but infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. Digital goods – knowledge, code, culture, and coordination – are non-rivalrous, replicable, and shareable. By moving value into open, digital abundance, the material basis of economic expansion shrinks.

This frees human effort to focus on ecological outcomes. Energy systems can localise, circular economies can flourish, and extraction-driven industries can shrink. Consumerism no longer masquerades as culture. Life becomes about care, collaboration, and sustainability. In a post-consumption economy, human needs are met without destroying the biosphere

What we need to compost is the closed, corporate networks, that, reduce people to metrics: clicks, views, and engagement scores, where connection is commodified, communities dissolve into attention economies. Moving to #4opens networks reverse this. Open, modifiable, and transparent paths and systems allow communities to rebuild trust, care, and reciprocity. Collaboration happens without permission, and relationships can persist across distance and time. Communities stop belonging to brands and start belonging to people. Social infrastructure becomes a tool for power and resilience rather than extraction.

The capitalist world naturalised exploitation, scarcity, and secrecy. Our “common sense” became a prison: work more, compete, hoard, distrust. The #4opens world undoes this conditioning. Open infrastructure and governance teach us that scarcity is artificial, cooperation is powerful, and secrecy serves control, not communities. Common sense is no longer what capitalism told us, it is what we collectively choose, this open thinking makes new realities possible.

The transitory shaping of privacy as we imagined it is gone, the #dotcons and surveillance states already see everything. Closed systems cannot protect us; secrecy is a lost battle. The solution is radical transparency. Open metadata, and commons-based governance shift power away from hidden extractors and toward the public. Privacy becomes collective control over visibility: who sees what, and with what accountability. In this world, transparency is justice, and knowledge is a tool of liberation.

In a #4opens world, exchange is no longer driven solely by money. Scarcity loses its grip when knowledge, code, and infrastructure are freely shared. Value can be recognized, tracked, and distributed openly. We give not to accumulate, but to re-balance. Contribution is measured in social and ecological impact, not profit. Capitalism made money sacred; #4opens break that spell, opening paths to redistribute both material and social power.

The next bubble, current #AI – #LLMs and ML #systems – is not intelligent. There is no path from these tools to general intelligence. What exists is pattern-matching, statistical correlation, and corporate extraction of public knowledge. But handing locked-up data to corporate systems strengthens anti-democracy structures. Instead of enabling “innovation”, it reinforces surveillance, centralisation, and algorithmic control. Real intelligence is collective, embodied, and social. True change and challenge emerges not from hype bubbles or closed corporate labs, but from communities building shared knowledge and infrastructure in the open.

Fascism vs. Cooperation – Fascism treats collaboration as weakness, hierarchy as inevitable, and domination as the only path to power. It cannot be trusted and cannot survive in open, cooperative networks. The #OMN path is the opposite: power through participation, resilience through trust, and flourishing through shared infrastructure. Communities that cooperate can sustain themselves, adapt, and grow, while isolationist, extractive paths, systems and tools wither. Cooperation is not optional, it is the foundation of any path to security, survival, and progress.

The choice before us, the world we inherited, is extractive, enclosed, and unsustainable. But the tools to reclaim power, knowledge, and community already exist. In #FOSS, the #4opens – applied to infrastructure, governance, culture, and knowledge – allow us to reduce inequality structurally, not through charity, but with rebuilding social trust and care, aligning human activity with ecological limits to make knowledge a public good, not a corporate asset.

Open Media Network is not a platform. It is a social path, to a world where power is distributed, knowledge is shared, and society is governed by the people who live in it. We are not asking for permission. We are building the commons, the question is not whether we can succeed, the question is whether we will choose to. History will remember what we did in this moment.

Why do we need to be this change and challange – when the vertical stack is captured, this is not simply a “shift to the right” in technology, ideas, or voting patterns. It is something deeper and far more dangerous: the capture of institutions themselves, the state as infrastructure. What we are witnessing is the hard right learning how to weaponise liberal, vertical systems against the values those systems claime to uphold.

This capture runs all the way down the stack. From the #dotcons to national governments and regulatory bodies; from university chancellors to local councils; from courts to media regulators. Structures that were designed – at least rhetorically – to mediate power are being repurposed as tools of repression, exclusion, and control.

Crucially, this is done using the language and procedures of liberalism itself: law and order, efficiency, neutral administration, security, common sense. The shell remains liberal. The content is no longer so.

Vertical systems are inherently brittle. They concentrate authority, normalise hierarchy, and rely on trust in institutions rather than participation in decision-making. When functioning well, they can stabilise society. When captured, they become perfect instruments for authoritarianism.

Once the hard right gains control of vertical institutions, it does not need to abolish democracy outright. Instead, it quietly redefines who counts, who is heard, and who is excluded. Algorithms are shaped. Funding rules tightened. Governance boards reshuffled. Enforcement priorities rewritten. Dissent is hollowed out while everything is insisted to be “within the rules.”

Universities become compliance factories. Local councils become enforcement arms. NGOs are defunded or disciplined. Media becomes “responsible.” Protest becomes “extremism.” This is not a breakdown of the liberal system, it is the system functioning as designed, but for different ends.

A dangerous illusion persists: that when the political pendulum swings back, these systems can simply be “returned to normal.” History tells us otherwise. Once vertical systems are captured, they are extremely difficult to bring back to any liberal-centrist path. Rules have been rewritten. Personnel replaced. Norms broken. Trust eroded. Appeals to fairness or precedent no longer land, because the system’s function has shifted from mediation to domination.

This is why “defending institutions” on its own is not enough. Institutions built on vertical authority cannot defend themselves once their legitimacy has been repurposed. At that point, asking them to save democracy is like asking a locked door to open itself from the outside.

Why horizontal power matters, and grassroots, federated power stops being a nice idea and becomes a necessary tool of change. Horizontal systems – commons-based networks, federated media, open governance, mutual aid, cooperative infrastructure – do not depend on permission from captured institutions. They distribute power, knowledge, and coordination across communities instead of concentrating it at the top.

In #OMN terms, this is about balancing power, not fantasising about purity, collapse, or revolution-as-spectacle. When vertical power becomes hostile, horizontal power provides resilience. It creates parallel capacities for communication, care, legitimacy, and collective action.

Federated systems are harder to capture because they have no single choke point. They can route around repression. They can survive attacks. They can continue to function even when formal institutions turn against the people they claim to represent.

We should be clear-eyed about where this leads. When vertical systems are captured and horizontal power is absent, pressure builds. History shows the likely outcomes: civil unrest, civil war, or international intervention. These are not abstract risks. They are structural consequences of power being monopolised without legitimacy.

Building horizontal power is not about accelerating conflict. It is about reducing the likelihood of catastrophic collapse by giving societies non-violent ways to rebalance power. When people have no voice, no access, and no agency, conflict becomes inevitable. When people can organise, communicate, and build alternatives, escalation can be resisted.

Its the strategic choice, the question is no longer whether horizontal power is desirable. The question is whether we build it before the remaining liberal structures are fully repurposed against us. The Open Media Network, the #4opens, federated governance, and open knowledge are not ideological luxuries. They are infrastructure for democratic survival in a world where vertical systems are increasingly hostile.

We are entering a period where balance – not dominance – will determine whether societies fracture or adapt. Horizontal power is what remains when the state forgets who it is meant to serve. Then the future will not be decided by who controls the top of the stack, but by whether people at the edges still have the means to organise, to speak, and to act together.

And that is a fight worth taking seriously, while there is still time.

There is no intelligence in AI – and no path to any

Despite the constant #mainstreaming hype, the branding, and the trillions of dollars being poured into it, there is a simple reality that needs to be stated plainly: There is no intelligence in current “AI”, and there is no working path from today’s Large Language Models (#LLM) and Machine Learning (#ML) systems to anything resembling real, general intelligence.

What we are living through is not an intelligence revolution, it is a bubble – one we’ve seen many times before. The problem with this recurring mess is social, as a functioning democracy depends on the free flow of information. At its core, democracy is an information system, shared agreement that knowledge flows outward, to inform debate, shape collective decisions, and enable dissent. The wisdom of the many is meant to constrain the power of the few.

Over recent decades, we have done the opposite. We built ever more legal and digital locks to consolidate power in the hands of gatekeepers. Academic research, public data, scientific knowledge, and cultural memory have been locked behind paywalls and proprietary #dotcons platforms. The raw materials of our shared understanding, often created with public funding, have been enclosed, monetised, and sold back to the public for profit.

Now comes the next inversion. Under the banner of so-called #AI “training”, that same locked up knowledge has been handed wholesale to machines owned by a small number of corporations. These firms harvest, recombine, and extract value from it, while returning nothing to the commons. This is not a path to liberal “innovation”. It is the construction of anti-democratic, authoritarian power – and we do need to say this plainly.

A democracy that defers its knowledge to privately controlled algorithms becomes a spectator to its own already shaky governance. Knowledge is a public good, or democracy fails even harder than it already is.

Instead of knowledge flowing to the people, it flows upward into opaque black boxes. These closed custodians decide what is visible, what is profitable, and increasingly, what is treated as “truth”. This enclosure stacks neatly on top of twenty years of #dotcons social-control technologies, adding yet more layers of #techshit that we now need to compost.

Like the #dotcons before it, this was never really about copyright or efficiency. It is about whether knowledge is governed by openness or corporate capture, and therefore who knowledge is for. Knowledge is a #KISS prerequisite for any democratic path. A society cannot meaningfully debate science, policy, or justice if information is hidden behind paywalls and filtered through proprietary systems.

If we allow AI corporations to profit from mass appropriation of public knowledge while claiming immunity from accountability, we are choosing a future where access to understanding is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.

How we treat knowledge – who can access it, who can build on it, and who is punished for sharing it – has become a direct test of our democratic commitments. We should be honest about what our current choices say about us in this ongoing mess.

The uncomfortable technical truth is this: general #AI is not going to emerge from current #LLM and ML systems – regardless of scale, compute, or investment. This has serious consequences. There is no coming step-change toward the “innovation” promised to investors, politicians, and corporate strategists, now or in any foreseeable future. The economic bubble beneath the hype matters because AI is currently propping up a fragile, fantasy economic reality. The return-on-investment investors are desperate for simply is not there.

So-called “AI agents”, beyond trivial and tightly constrained tasks, will default to being just more #dotcons tools of algorithmic control. Beyond that, thanks to the #geekproblem, they represent an escalating security nightmare, one in which attackers will always have the advantage over defenders, this #mainstreaming arms race will be endless and structurally unwinnable.

Yes, current #LLM systems do have useful applications, but they are narrow, specific, and limited. They do not justify the scale of capital being burned. There are no general-purpose deliverables coming to support the hype. At some point, the bubble will end – by explosion, implosion, or slow deflation.

What we can already predict, especially in the era of #climatechaos, is the lost opportunity cost. Vast financial, human, and institutional resources are being misallocated. When this collapses, the tech sector will be even more misshapen, and history suggests it will not be kind to workers, let alone the environment. This is the same old #deathcult pattern: speculation, enclosure, damage, and denial.

This moment is not about being “pro” or “anti” technology. It is about recognising that intelligence is social, contextual, embodied, and collective – and that no amount of #geekproblem statistical pattern-matching can replace that. It is about understanding that democracy cannot survive when knowledge is enclosed and mediated by #dotcons corporate capture beyond meaningful public control.

To recap: There is no intelligence in current #AI. There is no path to real AI from here. Pretending otherwise is not innovation – it is denial, producing yet more #techshit that we will eventually have to compost. Any sophist that argue otherwise need to be sacked if they arnt doing anything practical.

The only question is whether we use this moment to rebuild knowledge as a public good – or allow one more enclosure to harden around us. History – if it continues – will not be neutral about the answer.

There is such a thing as society -and the #openweb depends on it

There is such a thing as society. The entire #openweb is built on that assumption 🙂
Deny it, and everything collapses into noise, power grabs, and enclosure. That denial, dressed up today as “post-truth” – is killing us.

Our current media ecology is broken. So called #AI and Google are no longer a useful way to find information about most things that actually matter. This isn’t accidental; it’s a structural #dotcons problem. Extraction, advertising, and algorithmic manipulation have replaced human discovery, context, and trust.

The same sickness runs through much of today’s open-source and free software world. Its governance models are still rooted in medieval political ideas: aristocrats, benevolent dictators, kings and courts. That might have muddled through in the 20th century, but it is obviously useless for the world we now live in.

The last twenty years trying to mediate this with neoliberal #stupidindividualism has only made things worse. The result is towering piles of steaming #techshit, endlessly churned, rarely useful, and increasingly disconnected from any healthy social reality. This is the #geekproblem made in: code, silicon and concrete.

The #mainstreaming disaster driven by #dotcons is obvious. We don’t need to relitigate it every five minutes. For motivation and clarity, let’s put them to one side and focus on what we can actually change. Our own tech culture is still hopelessly mired in the #geekproblem. So yes, we need to compost a lot of our own mess.

The path out of both the #closedweb and the geek cul-de-sac is not new. It’s old, boring, and powerful: trust, shared responsibility, and human-scale democracy. If we are serious, the #openweb has to be rebooted with grassroots democracy at its core. Social tech needs social governance. Without that, we are just recreating vertical power with nicer licences.

This is where #OGB (Open Governance Bodies) matter. With real democratic process, it becomes relatively simple to push the #dotcons back out of spaces they currently dominate by default. Without democracy, they will always win, not because they are smarter, but because they are organised.

Right now, we are drowning in the #mainstreaming mess. And worse, we are still adding to it. Every pointless project, every ego-driven fork, every governance-free platform accelerates #techchurn and deepens the rot. We need to stop pretending this is neutral.

Yes, “open standards” are a mess, always have been, but they are the mess we must build on until enough of the #openweb is rebooted – including democratic decision-making – to rejuvenate and civilise the standards bodies themselves. Strong democracy changes the game. With it, enclosure becomes contestable. Without it, we just get louder arguments and faster failure.

If you care about this direction, add a statement of support here https://unite.openworlds.info/…/wiki/Statements-of-support You don’t need permission. You don’t need to convince everyone. You need to show up and help build.

And when people doing obviously stupid things can’t understand what the #OMN hashtags mean? Click the hashtags and think, or stand and shout, then hit the block button. You get to choose 🙂 This is not rudeness, it’s focus. And focus is how we stop adding to the mess and start composting it into something that might actually grow.

LLM`s and the openweb

The debate about so called #AI and large language models inside the #openweb paths is not, at its core, a technical argument. It is a question of relationship. Not “is this tool good or bad?” but how is it used, who controls it, and whose interests it serves.

This tension is not new, every wave of open communication technology has arrived carrying the same anxiety: printing presses, telephones, email, the web itself. Each was accused – often correctly – of flattening culture, centralising power and then when enclosed eroding human connection. And yet, each was also reclaimed, repurposed, and bent toward collective use when used within humanistic social structures. The #openweb path was obviously never about rejecting technology, it was about refusing enclosure.

On the #FOSS and the #openweb, we have always understood that tools are political. Not only because they contain ideology in their code, but because they embody power relations in how they are built, owned, governed, and deployed. The #OMN project grew from this understanding, it isn’t an anti-tech project, it is a re-grounding of technology in social process: trust-based publishing, local autonomy, messy collaboration, and human-scale governance. On this path we have to constantly balance the #geekproblem that servers mattered less than relationships, code mattered less than continuity.

#LLMs arrive into this tradition not as something unprecedented, but as something familiar: a tool emerging inside systems that are deeply broken. The danger is not that LLMs exist, the danger is that they are being normalised inside closed, extractive, #dotcons infrastructures.

What makes LLMs unsettling is not intelligence, they have none, It’s proximity. They sit close to language, meaning, memory, synthesis, things humans associate with thought, culture, and identity. When an LLM speaks fluently without being feed lived experience, then yes, it can feel hollow, verbose, even uncanny. This is the “paid-by-the-word” reaction many people have: form without presence, articulation without accountability. This discomfort is valid.

But confusing discomfort with real danger leads to the wrong response. #LLMs do not have agency, consciousness, or ethics, they don’t take responsibility, they cannot sit in a meeting, be accountable to a community, or live with the consequences of what they produce. Which means the responsibility is entirely ours. Just like with publishing tools, encryption, or federated protocols.

Much of the current backlash against “AI” is not about facts. It’s about vibe. People aren’t only disputing accuracy or pointing to errors. They’re saying: “This feels wrong.” That instinct is worth listening to, but it’s not enough. The #openweb tradition asks harder questions:

Who controls the infrastructure?
Can this tool be used without enclosure?
Can its outputs be traced, contextualised, and contested?
Does it strengthen collective capacity, or replace it?
Does it help people build, remember, translate, and connect, or does it manufacture authority?

An LLM used to simulate “wisdom”, speak for communities, and replace lived participation is rightly rejected. That is automation of voice, not amplification of agency. But an LLM used as:

an archive index
a translation layer
a research assistant
a memory prosthetic
a bridge between fragmented histories

…can work within in a humanistic path if it is embedded in transparent, accountable, human governance. The #openweb lesson has always been the same: you don’t wait for systems to fail – you build alongside them until they are no longer needed. On this path #LLMs will become infrastructure, the real question is whether they are integrated into: Closed corporate stacks, surveillance capitalism, and narrative control or federated, inspectable, collectively governed knowledge commons.

If the open web does not claim this space, authoritarian systems will. This is not about fetishising this so-called AI, nor about rejecting it on moral grounds. Both are forms of avoidance. The #OMN path is pragmatic:

build parallel systems
insist on open processes
embed tools in social trust
keep humans in the loop
keep power contestable

#LLMs can’t and don’t need to understand spirit, culture, or community, humans do. What matters is whether we remain grounded while using tools – or whether we outsource judgment, memory, and meaning to systems that cannot be accountable.

Every generation of the open tech faces this moment, and every time, the answer needs to be not purity, but practice. Not withdrawal, but responsibility. Not fear, but composting the mess and planting something better. #LLMs are just the latest shovel, the question is whether we use them to deepen the enclosure, or to help dig our way out.

On the #OMN and #openweb paths, the answer has never been abstract. It has always been: build, govern, and care – together.

What Did We Learn from Web3, Crypto?

Looking back from the mid-2020s, the arc of #web03, #NFTs, and blockchain culture is very clear. What once promised (lied about) decentralisation, liberation, and a break from corporate capture now looks like the same, mess, #techcurn pattern repeating itself, yes it had new language, new branding, but it was easy to see it had the same underlying mess making dynamics.

As these #geekproblem projects hollowed out, the signs became hard to ignore. The technical optimism faded, the user bases thinned, and the economic logic exposed itself. What followed was totally predictable: spin. Makeup and perfume slapped onto decaying projects to hide the smell of rot and exploitation. Rebrands. New narratives. New demographics. Same extraction. This was the outcome of building “liberation tech” on foundations that still centred virtical money, speculation, and power concentration.

With these projects we are now in the zombie phase, projects kept moving, kept talking, kept selling – long after the animating ideas had died. Influencers and promoters continued to perform belief, even as any substance drained away.

This is a few years when #fashionista culture met #encryptionist ideology – aesthetics and technical absolutism snogging the undead remnants of a failed #deatcult vision. The result wasn’t in any way decentralisation; it was a simply a new enclosure. People weren’t being freed, they were being financialised, the money problem #KISS

At the core was a simple structural truth: #dotcons feed on money. Put money in, influence comes out. That logic doesn’t disappear just because you wrap it in cryptography or decentralised rhetoric. “Bad actors” weren’t anomalies – they were following the incentives as designed. Aany social good becomes just collateral damage. This is why the lie collapsed in te end.

The deeper harm and problem with #techcurn is each wave claims to have fixed the problems of the last. But each wave reproduces them, because this is what works when worshiping a #deathcult. This isn’t just a failed tech trend, the #techcurn disparity, driven by extraction systems cause enormous human harm, displacing livelihoods, concentrating power, and amplifying inequality at planetary scale.

These systems don’t fail harmlessly, they fail onto people. That’s why the call isn’t just to “be critical,” but to step away – and help others step away too. Not through purity exits or individual moralising, but through collective paths back to technologies built for people rather than profit, life over zombies

There has always been another path: the #openweb. Messy, imperfect, slower, less glamorous, but grounded in shared infrastructure, social trust, and human-scale governance. The #OMN approach doesn’t promise salvation. It offers compost instead of speculation. Process instead of hype. People over tokens.

A note on hashtags: And yes, the hashtags matter. Click them., search for them. They cut sideways through algorithms – small back doors into less mediated, less controlled ways of seeing. Not a solution, but a crack in the wall.

The current #Ai hype bubble is repeating this mess with a little more useful #LLM functionality, but on top of this is a huge mess of #techchurn, which will need composting.

Observation: some people go into news to speak truth from power – using institutions to legitimise the status quo and defend the worship of the #deathcult.

Others speak truth to power – using journalism to expose, question, and challenge unequal power and its consequences.

Only one of those serves the public interest #KISS

Chatsworth Rd: Stalls and Code

A DRAFT story about markets, misfits, and taking back the commons (Tagline: “They came for the avocados. They left with revolution.”)

by Hamish Campbell

Outline

THE MARKET STIRS

Chatsworth Rhythms

Setting the scene: It’s a Saturday in East London. The smell of jerk chicken, sourdough, and incense wafts over Chatsworth Road. A young stallholder, Luna (17), sells upcycled clothes and zines with radical poetry. Her best mate Jaz (18) roasts coffee in a converted horse trailer.

The street market has always been the soul of the area, but rent hikes, council interference, and #NGO co-option have worn everyone down. Traders are being squeezed. Street teams from the council show up to enforce arbitrary rules. One old vendor has a panic attack and is carted off.

A new app quietly arrives via a local anarcho-sysadmin named Mo, who says: “If you don’t write the rules, someone else will. Time to fork society.”

Enter the #OGB

The Open Governance Body app isn’t flashy – it’s command-line chic – but it gives people a voice and power through messy consensus-based decision-making.

At first, Luna is skeptical, more tech? More admin? But when she sees how traders start voting on layout, fees, and security, she joins. The app federates with other tools she’s already using, se is a bit of a geek (Pixelfed for promo, Lemmy for discussion).

They tag the system with #OGB, calling their movement “Open Trader Network” #OTN.

A new energy flows. People start collaborating across stalls. Rota for clean-up? Done via the app. Newcomer priority stalls? Voted in. It works. It’s messy, but it’s theirs.
THE SPRAWL

Nodes Spread

Other markets – Brixton, Ridley Road, Chapel – start installing OGB instances. Local flavours, same base. Word spreads via the Fediverse. A hashtag storm of #OMN blossoms across PeerTube vlogs and Mobilizon events.

Local food traders begin direct-networking across markets. No middlemen. No rent-seekers. One market hosts a “Reclaim the Tomato” day after a supply chain collapse – 1,000 people show up.

They aren’t waiting for permission any-more.

Media Panic

A Murdoch-owned paper runs a headline: “Markets Hijacked by Extremist App: ‘Digital Anarchists’ Threaten City Order.”

Talking heads say the traders are anti-business, anti-modern, anti-safety. A Guardian columnist calls it “well-meaning chaos” and suggests NGO mediation.

The mayor calls it “a dangerous precedent for public space management.” A government white paper proposes a ban on “unauthorised digital governance.”

Luna gets doxxed. Her hacked Instagram DMs are read out on GB News. Jaz’s trailer is graffitied. Mo is arrested during a dawn raid.
THE STALLS STRIKE BACK

The Communing

Traders unite across London. “Reclaim the streets”. We built this with our hands, our sweat, and our beans.” They go on strike, not by stopping, but by refusing to recognize council control.

The Fediverse lights up. Mastodon servers amplify local voices. A livestream on PeerTube shows a giant puppet of the mayor being pelted with rotten bananas.

Instead of retreating, people start federating public spaces. Parks, squats, skateparks, each with their own federated #OGB nodes.

Councils panic. The government attempts a DNS take down of #OGB. They don’t understand federation. Nothing central to ban.

Trust vs Control

Luna speaks at a huge public forum, “The Town Hall of the Streets,” organized via Mobilizon. “You can’t run a market on fear. You can’t govern people who trust each other. You can only try to sell them back what they already have.”

Jaz releases a viral zine: ‘We the Traders’ – a manifesto of federated life. It’s printed in three languages by Somali aunties on Ridley Road.
THE SHIFT

The Fall of the Gatekeepers

The mayor resigns after a leaked email shows collusion with private surveillance firms. A public audit reveals widespread misused funds and fake community consultations.

Instead of chaos, the federated markets flourish. An emerging culture of trust, transparency, and local flair grows to replaces the back peddling NGO management class.

Luna and Mo help to push the #OGB into schools and libraries. Jaz co-founds P2P hand to hand USB key decentralized delivery network using bike couriers.

New Normals

Final scene: Luna is now 21. She runs a stall at the market she helped free. The OGB screen is mounted next to her zines – open to everyone. A group of teenagers crowd around to vote on that week’s theme: Fruits, Freedom, or Future?

She smiles. The market hums. The commons holds.
Themes

StupidIndividualism vs #4opens #CollectivePower

Mainstreaming = control + fear Grassroots = trust + mess

Power is not seized, it is federated

If you can federate it, you can free it

The Story

Chapter One: Market Day

Luna arrived just after nine. Her stall was already half set up, two folding tables, a clothes rail, a crate of homemade zines, and a sign that read: Upcycled. Unowned. Unapologetic.

Chatsworth Road was busy. A steady flow of people moved past, hipsters, locals, tourists, and regulars from the nearby estates. The usual mix of food stalls, second-hand clothes, and bric-a-brac. A few of the traders nodded as she walked in.

She checked her phone. No messages. Good. She didn’t want a distraction. The last few weeks had been tense, rumours of new council inspections, talk of fees going up again. There was a meeting planned, but no one trusted the “consultation” process any more.

Jaz appeared from the stall opposite, a reused horse trailer turned coffee hatch. “Council are here,” he said, handing her a coffee. She looked down the street. Two officials in branded jackets stood near the fruit stall, checking tablets and talking quietly. They weren’t buying anything. “Third week in a row,” Luna said. “They’re looking for something to shut down,” Jaz replied. “Heard they’re targeting the people without formal pitch licenses.” Luna didn’t reply. She just took a sip of the coffee and turned back to her stall.

That’s when Mo showed up. No one really knew where he lived. He wasn’t a trader, but he was always around. People said he used to work in tech and walked out during the pandemic. He carried a laptop in his bag and ran a small, unofficial Wi-Fi network that half the market used without realising. He handed her a folded piece of paper. On it, a QR code and the words: OGB – open governance body – not an app – a process

“What is this?” she asked. “Tool for sorting things out. No bosses, no gatekeepers. You decide. You build.” She looked at him. “We already tried that. Committees. Petitions. Nothing changes.” “This isn’t for asking,” he said. “It’s for doing.” He turned and walked off. She scanned the code anyway.

What loaded was basic. A simple page, a login prompt, some instructions. Anyone with the link could register. Anyone could propose a change. Decisions were made collectively. Everything was logged and public. Later that day, someone proposed a rota for waste collection. Five people voted. Then ten. By the end of the day, the bins were sorted.

Luna didn’t say anything. But she noticed. Something had shifted.

Chapter Two: Something New

The next morning, Luna opened the stall before ten. Rain had passed in the night, and the tarmac still held patches of damp. She unzipped the plastic cover from her rail and checked the #OGB app on her phone. Six new proposals. Someone wanted to trial a shared delivery scheme. Someone else suggested swapping stalls once a month to mix things up. The waste rota from yesterday now had over thirty names. She didn’t say it out loud, but something felt different.

Jaz joined her a little later, dragging a crate of clean mugs and a half-repaired sandwich board. “People are talking,” he said. “Like, actually talking. Outside their stalls.” Luna nodded. She’d noticed too. Normally, people kept to themselves. Competition had a way of doing that – especially when everyone was fighting for a spot and a margin.

But today… She saw Fatima, who ran a fruit and veg stall at the corner. Usually quiet, head down, fast hands. She was standing with Andre, the secondhand tools guy, comparing stall layouts on their phones. Both were logged in to #OGB. “Fatima thinks we can make more space for walk-throughs if we stagger the setups,” Andre told her when she passed. “Easier for wheelchairs. More space for queues.”

“Is that on the app?” Luna asked. Andre held up his phone. “Second from the top. Vote’s still open.” On the other end of the street, Amina and her teenage sons, who sold hot food and chai under a big canvas awning, were chatting with Tom, who made hand-pulled noodles on a cart he wheeled in from Clapton each weekend. They were drawing lines in chalk on the pavement- marking a shared seating area.

By midday, the market felt different. Not louder, not busier. Just… more connected. Mo returned in the afternoon. He wasn’t alone this time. With him was Nari, a coder from the south side who ran a quiet Mobilizon server out of her housing co-op. She wore overalls, no expression, and carried a beat-up laptop covered in tape. “Looks like it’s working,” Mo said to Luna, glancing around. Nari added, “You’ll need moderation tools soon. Growth means friction.” Luna wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but she wrote it down.

Later, they held a loose meeting near the benches outside the community hall. Jaz made coffee. Someone brought leftover samosas. Luna recognised a dozen faces, but others were new, people from other markets who’d heard what was happening and wanted to learn more. “We tried this in Tower Hamlets,” said one, a woman named Grace who sold second-hand electronics. “Council shut it down in three weeks. Said it was ‘disruptive to existing partnerships.’” “We’re not asking this time,” Mo replied.

Chapter Three: federate and Spread

By the third weekend, the idea had started to move. It began with a quiet message from a stallholder at Ridley Road, posted in the OGB working group: “Could we copy this setup? Our traders are fed up too. Same rules. Same threats. We want in.” No one said no. That was the point. Mo added a note in the main thread: “Just install it. Each market’s a node. Connect when you’re ready. Shared values, local control.”

Within days, there were new #OGB instances in Brixton, Wood Green, and Walthamstow. Different template layouts, different needs, same code, same network. A delivery driver named Eli helped hook up the networks. He already had a route between Ridley and Hackney and started shuttling hardware and surplus goods between markets. “No middlemen,” he said. “No #dotcons apps taking 30%.”

Meanwhile, Tasha, a baker from Camden Lock, joined the Chatsworth group to learn how the app was being used. “We’ve had five layers of management and three rounds of ‘consultation’ this year,” she said. “No one’s actually listened to a trader since 2009.” At the edges of the council bureaucracy, a few people noticed what was happening. Ravi, a junior urban planning officer in Hackney Council, joined one of the #OGB meetings under his personal account. “This isn’t bad policy,” he said one evening, voice calm, camera off. “It’s just outside the frame they allow for. You’re building governance, not just feedback. That scares people.”

Luna watched the comments scroll. More users joined every day. She couldn’t always tell who was a trader, who was a tech, who was just watching. Then came the backlash. The first article appeared in a small industry newsletter: “Traders adopt rogue decision-making platform. Officials express concern over legality.” No byline. But it was picked up.

By the following week, a local tabloid ran a front page: “MARKET ANARCHY: Hackney Traders Reject Council, Use Shadow App” Inside, it quoted an anonymous “source close to the mayor” calling the movement “dangerous, divisive, and incompatible with good governance.”

A blog on a tech site posted screenshots from #OGB, mocking its “ugly interface” and “pseudo-utopian design language.” On Twitter, a property developer called it “the return of squatters with QR codes.” Then came the calls.

A reporter door steeped Jaz’s trailer pretending to be a customer. When he found out she was press, he shut the hatch and texted Luna: “It’s starting. They want a villain.”

Mo went dark for a few days. Nari added new permission layers to the Chatsworth instance. Luna started getting strange DMs.

But at the same time… more people joined. A group from a Sunday farmers’ market in Lewisham wanted advice. A kids’ clothes collective in Tottenham asked for templates. A new Mobilizon event popped up titled: “Decentralised Governance for Public Space: How To Not Get Co-Opted.”

Even a quiet email arrived, from a .gov.uk address. A policy advisor, asking for a demo.

Chapter Four: We Write the Story

The storm didn’t slow them down. If anything, it made things clearer. At the next open meeting – hosted outside the old library building – over 40 people showed up. Stallholders, musicians, artists, teachers, kids. Even two students who said they were “just here to help document.” Luna stood at the edge, watching as Nari connected her laptop to the projector powered by a battered solar rig.

The screen flickered to life: OGB – Chatsworth Node Active proposals: 14 Active users: 312 Linked nodes: 5

“This is not a platform,” Nari said, addressing the group without looking up. “It’s a process. A tool to federate trust.” She explained how it worked: Anyone trough trust paths can propose an action or change. The community decided what threshold of agreement was needed – majority, consensus, rotating moderation. Anyone could fork the process, by federation if trust brakes down. No lock-in, no central server. Every action is transparent and archived. You could see who voted, when, and how. Linked markets can share decisions, or stay autonomous.

“Messy? Yes,” Nari said. “But it’s our mess.” A few heads nodded. Others typed silently on their phones. Jaz leaned over to Luna. “Better than three forms and a six-week wait for someone to move a bin.” She half-smiled. Truth. And not just metaphorically.

The local sanitation crew, led by a bin worker named Kev, who’d grown up nearby – started attending meetings in plain clothes. He said the market folks were easier to work with than “the suited managers upstairs.” “We just want to know the plan,” Kev shrugged. “If your app tells us where the blockages are, saves us wasting time, why wouldn’t we check it?”

Soon after, Luna spotted a uniformed officer, PC Daoud, off-duty but listening quietly by the coffee cart. He was local. Born three streets over. Later, he reached out through a private chat: “They’re watching you from HQ, but… not all of us think this is wrong. Safer with eyes on it, than locked out.”

Meanwhile, Ravi, the junior urban planning officer who’d joined under a pseudonym, kept feeding small insights back. “Your bin heatmap tool? We copied it at the council. Quietly. Everyone thinks it’s one of ours.”

A local Green councillor, Tanya Okeke, asked to speak at the next open forum. She didn’t try to claim credit. She just said: “Look, we’ve been told this is insurrection. But if the system doesn’t listen, it’s not treason to talk to each other. It’s survival. You’re building what we’ve only talked about.” Her speech was posted to PeerTube, captioned and translated into three languages. The title:“Commons, Not Chaos.”

As pressure mounted in the press, the group shifted strategy: stop reacting – start broadcasting. Zey, who ran a handmade electronics stall and freelanced in media activism, suggested reaching out to the Fediverse project @indymediaback@fedi.town. “They’ve been tracking grassroots stuff – library occupations, community gardens, Palestine solidarity encampments. If they cover us, we get a different signal out.”

Mo sent the message. Within 24 hours, the story appeared on a Mobilizon event and in a long-form post on Lemmy:

“London’s Markets Are Forking Power: How #OGB Is Building the Next Commons” re-posted on Mastodon, PeerTube, WriteFreely. Translated into Spanish and Somali overnight

The response was instant. People from Glasgow, Bristol, even Milan and Athens boosted the post. Small markets in other cities started federated instances. A public librarian in Sheffield messaged: “Could we use this to run our building? The council wants to close it.”

Within days, Luna noticed a shift in tone online. Instead of only backlash, there were now defenses. When trolls came for Jaz on the #dotcons, people linked to their #OGB instance logs. When tabloids mocked the process, someone posted a PeerTube video:“A Day in the Market: Democracy Without Permission.”

It went semi-viral. Not huge. But enough.

The new #Indymediaback project started running updates daily – short, factual, sometimes poetic:

No central server to ban. No single leader to smear. No funding stream to freeze. Just 500 stalls and a growing idea: You don’t need permission to care for your commons.

Even Luna’s mum forwarded it to her. “Did you really build this?” she’d texted. Luna didn’t reply straight away. She just walked back to her stall, opened the app, and voted on a new proposal: Shared Childcare Tent for Saturdays. proposal by: Ana Status: Under Discussion

She tapped yes.

Chapter Five: Dirty Hands in Clean Suits

They should have seen it coming. The tabloids had been circling for weeks, sniffing for a headline. But nothing prepared them for the full-page hit in the Daily Spectacle:

“LONDON MARKETS TAKEN OVER BY ‘DIGITAL ANARCHISTS’ – IS YOUR NEIGHBOR A CYBER-COMMIE?”

Beneath the headline: a grainy photo of Jaz, pouring coffee. Under it, the caption: “Suspected organiser of secret tech cell controlling local economy via encrypted app.”

By midday, it was everywhere. Morning radio shows. Facebook rants. A YouTube grifter livestreaming outside the market, yelling about “foreign influence and crypto-fascism.”

Zey laughed bitterly. “We built a rota system. They think it’s a coup.”

But the damage was calculated, not random.

Kev, the bin crew lead, got called into an HR disciplinary. Accused of “coordinating with unauthorised software.”Ravi’s council account was suspended. PC Daoud disappeared from group chat. Silent.

Worse: a rumour started spreading that the #OGB app was foreign-funded. A #AI disinformation video, made to look like a BBC investigation, appeared on multiple right-wing Alt-news channels. It claimed the Chatsworth node was a front for “globalist collapse networks.” The comment wars were endless.

Then came the real blow. The Council filed a cease-and-desist against the “unauthorised operation of a parallel governance system.” A legal attack – framed in the language of cybercrime. It felt ridiculous, but real. Meetings got quieter. Some traders unplugged from the app. A few pulled out entirely, scared of losing their stalls.

That night, Luna stayed up redrafting a new info page on their WriteFreely site. Simple questions. Plain answers.

Is this legal? Mostly. We’re exercising coordination rights.

Is this funded? No. It’s free software, run by volunteers.

Is this dangerous? Not compared to rent increases, evictions, and ignored flooding protocols.

Meanwhile, Tanya Okeke – the Green councillor – stood up in the local chamber. She named names. Quoted logs. Challenged the smear. “This isn’t lawlessness. It’s governance. Just not yours.”

Clips from her speech hit the Fediverse hard. Boosted by thousands. Translated again and again. One remix turned it into a sound collage set to ambient loops. Zey uploaded it to PeerTube with the title: “Not Yours. Not Theirs. Ours.”

But behind the scenes, the team realised they needed to outpace the attack. Nari inviting the voices of linked markets to strategies. They met inside the app: voice, chat, notes, no hierarchy.

The Tottenham node suggested creating a #OMN redundancy both client server and p2p backup – so if one #OGB instance was taken offline, others could host its decisions and links. Peckham proposed a “data mirroring agreement” – a kind of mutual aid treaty for code. Brixton offered safe hosting outside the UK. Someone from Berlin, unknown but kind, added:

“We’ve seen this before. They attack what they can’t centralise.” The network shifted. Morphed – like roots growing deeper, not taller. They weren’t building a protest any more. They were building infrastructure. And infrastructure doesn’t panic.

Chapter Six: The Glitch Spreads

At first, it was silence. Jaz closed her stall for the first time in four years. Said it was “temporary.” Said she needed to repaint the sign. But the truth was – she couldn’t face the constant stream of customers, each one asking with cautious eyes, “What’s going on with the market thing?”

Nari’s hands shook every time her phone buzzed. She stopped answering unless it was from Zey or Mo. Even then, it took her a few seconds to breathe through it.

Luna, usually the glue, barely slept. The pressure to hold everything together crushed down hard. She’d started avoiding the app entirely – dreading what new node might go dark, what legal thread might appear next.

Mo was the only one who tried to keep spirits up. He showed up to the remaining market days with a battered Bluetooth speaker playing irish toons. But even he moved a little slower. Like the weight of watching his friends break apart was catching up.

One by one, they all started drifting into the library #OGB node’s voice calls. No pressure. No cameras. Just people talking while they made dinner, folded clothes, or sat in the bath. If, the librarian, hosted most nights. Her calm voice grounding people like a soft metronome.

Then came the call from Brixton. A full-blown solidarity strike. Not just markets – garden co-ops, transit collectives, even a radical postal network built on cargo bikes. They didn’t ask for permission. They just paused operations for 48 hours and posted one shared message: “We are infrastructure. We are people. We do not consent to digital feudalism.”

The message rippled. Peckham’s print collective turned it into a broadsheet. A primary school teacher in Camden reworded it into a children’s chant. The remix scene on PeerTube exploded with glitchcore and spoken-word overlays.

Still, the state struck back. New legislation was proposed overnight: the Secure Networks and Commons Compliance Bill. The language was vague but brutal: all decentralised software operating in civic contexts had to be registered, monitored, and approved.

No app could be autonomous. No node could be unlicensed. No commons could exist without a gatekeeper.

Tanya, the Green councillor, sounded near-broken when she spoke to Luna on a late-night call. “They’re scared. Not of you. Of the idea of you. That people might govern themselves and… not miss the masters.”

The crew met again, properly, for the first time in weeks. Not in the café, not in the app, but in the back of Jaz’s shut stall. They sat on crates and pallets. Mo passed round lukewarm tea. Jaz: “We can’t stop. We don’t stop.” Zey: “They’ll ban it. The app, the nodes, all of it.” Nari: “Then we roll out the #p2p code based on #dat”

Luna looked at the group. “Let’s not fight them on their terms. Let’s remind people what this actually is. Let’s roll out the update and hope it scales. then we push out the archive Logs, decisions documenting the forks, mistakes. People can see for themselves.”

That night, they began the fdroid app updates everything to the public. #Indymediaback picked it up immediately. “A river of the real. Too messy to fake. Too decentralised to stop.” The story tipped.

One morning, Jaz opened her phone to find her stall tagged in a new post: Solidarity from Nairobi Street Markets “You gave us the code. We’re giving it breath. #OGB #CommonsRising”

And then another. Athens Free Libraries Federation: “We have adopted the OGB. The glitch lives here too.”

And another. Rio Food Collectives: “We don’t just consume. We decide.”

Then came the real shock. A direct message, unsigned but traceable to a junior policy analyst at the Mayor’s Office: “There are those inside who still believe in public good. Hold the line.”

Then the signal app buzzed. An unlisted call. Luna answered. A voice whispered: “They’re going to try something tomorrow. Big. Broadcast. Legal theatre. Endgame move.”

Luna didn’t speak. Just listened. And when the call ended, she turned to the crew, breath shallow. “They’re going to break us tomorrow.”

Chapter Seven: The Turning Tide

The broadcast hit at 9am sharp. Every major news channel, every tabloid site. The Mayor, flanked by top advisors, stepped up to the mic. Behind them: the seal of the City of London and a projection of the OGB interface – screen-grabbed and labelled like a crime scene.

“These so-called ‘commons apps’ are a threat to public safety, economic stability, and national cohesion. We are initiating emergency take down procedures effective immediately.”

The speech was surgical. Calm. Laced with that special kind of power-polish only years of spin could achieve. And for a while, it worked.

Federated servers running key hubs of the OGB infrastructure began going dark. Hosting providers were pressured, DNS entries revoked. Even mirrors went quiet. The central fedivers network affectionately called the (something outa the antiglobalisation movement) – collapsed under legal threats.

It was chaos.

Jaz stared at her screen. “Everything’s gone. Even the backups.”

Zey slammed their laptop shut. “No. Just the core nodes. Not everything.”

Because the p2p update had gone live.

Quietly, while the press spun stories of a digital insurgency, hundreds of nodes had been switching over to the new peer-to-peer version, built on DAT tech, now called ogb.glitch. Not flashy. Not fast. But immune to takedown.

The main interfaces failed, but the side-channels kept talking, which refilled the main channels. With the #OMN rebuilding from offline backups, all the history started creeping back in over #p2p flows.

Food moved. Stalls opened. People came. And then… reinforcements arrived. Not in tanks or protests. In voices.

Whistleblowers. Junior coders from city IT teams. Delivery drivers. Public sector workers who still had root access to blocked networks. They began helping, quietly. Restoring mesh links in routers. Leaking internal memos. Sharing legal drafts before they hit Parliament.

Inside the Mayor’s office, dissent flared. And then something unprecedented happened. A large bloc of Labor Councillors defected – publicly. In an emergency assembly livestreamed across the city, they announced their resignation from the party and joined forces with the Greens and a new wave of independent civic actors. Their statement was clear:

“This is not about politics-as-usual. This is about the survival of democracy at the roots. We’re joining the commons.”

Under pressure from the split, and fearing a total collapse in support, the Mayor began to back-pedal. A new press release appeared mid-afternoon: “We will open consultation with representatives from the community tech sector and ensure any future frameworks include space for secure, citizen-led platforms.” It wasn’t a full retreat. But it was a crack.

And then came the final blow of the day. A snap national election was announced. Leaked from within Westminster, the story ran that the central government wanted to force a mandate – betting that fear of chaos would swing voters back to the center.

But on the streets, the story felt different. Jaz opened her stall again. Nari reloaded the Chatsworth node log. Zey smiled for the first time in days. The OGB network was flickering back to life – not everywhere, but enough.

Luna posted a new message: “You cant kill the spirit. She is like a mountain. She goes on and on… You can’t kill the spirit…”

Chapter Eight: The Open Reboot

Nari was the first to notice it. She had left her node monitor running overnight, expecting another flatline. But by morning, the logs were scrolling too fast to read. Not just London. Not even just the UK.

“ActivityPub traffic’s exploding,” she whispered. “Look at this… Barcelona. Lagos. Detroit. Christchurch. They’re all lighting up.”

The Fediverse had caught fire, but not in the usual way. This wasn’t drama or celebrity implosions. It was coordination. Real-time.

The Indymedia nodes were leading the charge, stitched into the #OMN backbone. The vibe was different from the chaotic, scandal-hungry timelines of the old #dotcons socialweb. These feeds were dense with practical updates: water access, mutual aid, cooperative building, market logistics. Livestreams from collective kitchens. Meshnet maps scrawled with handwritten overlays.

No algorithms. No trending tab. Just relevance through #hashtag trust and federation flows.

Zey leaned over Nari’s screen, watching a stream from a collective farm outside Athens coordinate crop deliveries with a London market co-op via a shared calendar. “This is… not small,” they said, almost reverently. Jaz pulled her phone from her apron, scrolling through updates from the streets.

“Paris sanitation unions using OGB noids.” “Madrid school collectives switch to federated class planning.” “Buenos Aires: street markets double size with #4opens logistics.”

The old dotcons – Facebook, Twitter (or whatever it was called this week), Uber-style delivery platforms, felt suddenly… quiet. Like abandoned malls. Still shiny, still there, but irrelevant. Their hold broken.

Even the mainstream news had started to shift. Faced with plummeting engagement and embarrassing public walkouts – editors, field reporters, even weather presenters quitting live on air- several legacy outlets began syndicating from the Indymedia feeds. At first they laughed it off. Called it “citizen novelty content.” But views followed function, and soon those grassroots stories outperformed everything else.

Inside the Mayor’s office, the cracks deepened. A quiet resignation from their comms director. A leaked photo of mid-level staffers working on a community garden run entirely via OGB logistics. A memo, never meant for the public, outlining contingency plans for joining the Green coalition if the polls swung harder.

And swing they did. Not toward a party. Toward a way. OGB was no longer just a tool. It was becoming a nervous system – a messy, redundant, unpolished one – but alive. And more importantly, trusted.

New alliances emerged daily. Regional collectives began interlinking through shared trust agreements. The federated school system in Madrid synced timetables with similar networks in São Paulo and Cape Town. It wasn’t perfect. But it didn’t need to be.

Zey closed their laptop and stood up. “We need a new stall. Not for food. For onboarding.” “And a kids’ area,” Jaz added. “They’re all using it anyway. Might as well teach them how it works.” Nari smiled. “The school across the street already federated their lunch program.” Luna sent the updates, tagged simply: #OpenWebRising

Chapter Nine: The Grasping Hand

It began with meetings. Lots of them. Invitations rolled in – some polite, some not. Government task forces. EU think tanks. UN tech forums. Ministry of Culture round tables. Suddenly everyone wanted a word with the crew, or with whoever they could scrape up as a “representative” of the OGB network.

“They want to help us scale,” Nari said flatly, deleting another email flagged ‘URGENT – INNOVATION PARTNERSHIP REQUEST.’

“They want to define us,” Luna muttered. “Then box us in.”

Some groups accepted. Older cooperatives, city-level digital officers, cautious nonprofit administrators, people tired from decades of struggle who welcomed a place at the new table, even if the table was being carried into the old halls of power.

Others resisted. Young collectives in Naples and Glasgow. Feminist tech crews in Kerala. Rooftop data gardens in Seoul. They rewrote the invites into public callouts. Every attempt to co-opt became a meme. Every attempt to regulate sparked a protest.

Jaz read aloud from a new decree the UK government had just published: “All public-facing federated applications must adhere to the National Digital Standards (2026 Revised), under supervision of the Central Technical Authority.”

Zey spat their tea. “So basically, sign over root access or get censored.”

The backlash wasn’t just legal. Media narratives tightened like a noose. Stories started to appear on major channels: Are Kids at Risk in Unregulated Fediverse Zones? Markets or Mobs? A Deep Dive into OGB’s Hidden Influence. New Terror Frontiers: Decentralised Networks and National Security.

Nari traced the story metadata. Half were ghostwritten by PR firms with ties to legacy telcos and tech investment groups. One came from an ex-OGB supporter who had jumped ship to a consultancy firm, now touting “digital demobilisation strategies.”

Then came the leak. An encrypted drop dumped anonymously onto several Indymedia nodes, verified by multiple journalists. Internal documents from the Department for Digital Oversight. Operation MIDAS: a coordinated plan to infiltrate key nodes, identify moderators, coerce ISPs, and trigger selective service outages.

The plan was simple: make the #openweb look unreliable, chaotic, and unsafe. Kill it with concern.

But the OGB network had matured. Node redundancy flows kicked in. The client servers built on a cluster of tech donated by old mutual aid infrastructure – wobbled under pressure but didn’t fall. Peer-to-peer overlays picked up the slack.

And then the unexpected happened. One of the whistleblowers was a senior architect at the National Infrastructure Cloud. They published a post on their federated account: “I’m done. They want to break what works just to keep control.”

Within hours, more followed. An education official from Bristol. A Berlin public transport scheduler. A junior Labour MP.

Then came the move. Labour fracturing agen openly, with a sizable Green coalition forming in Parliament. The Mayor spinning in press briefings, suddenly praising the creativity and resilience of the very projects she tried to regulate.

“We’re not stopping,” Zey said, eyes fixed on the code syncing across the screen. “They came for the network, and now the network is everywhere.”

Jaz nodded. “So what’s next?”

Nari smiled, voice low but clear.

“Now, we govern ourselves.”

Chapter Ten: Patterns of the Possible

The election came and went, but this time, something stuck. Not just new parties in power or familiar faces in different suits. What stuck was the refusal to return to the old rules. A hung Parliament forced new coalitions, but the Fediverse didn’t wait for permission.

Instead, it started governing. Not by decree, but by social trust flows building affinity groups of action.

Nari had been helping coordinate a cross-continental working group: meshnet devs in Montreal, sanitation unions in Mumbai, childcare cooperatives from Lisbon to Dakar. Their shared thread? How to federate decision-making without creating another hierarchy.

“Think grassroots, not top-down,” Luna said during a session broadcast on a rotating PeerTube instance. “Each node autonomous, but interoperable. Each accountable to the commons it serves.”

Cities joined not through deals, but through example. When Warsaw adopted the OGB stack to rebuild their transit planning, local fediverse nodes lit up with more nabourhood noids. Bangkok rewrote its urban flood protocols with open consultation channels, built directly into #Mastodon forks. A co-op in Johannesburg started exporting surplus energy via federated agreements, skipping their failing national grid entirely.

Jaz had started hosting live streaming (name of app?) weekly onboarding sessions at the old market stall – now more like a civic tech info booth. Kids ran federated games in the background while elders plotted data sovereignty campaigns between tea rounds.

“Feels like we’re writing a new horizontal constitution,” said Zey, watching a real-time map of global assemblies syncing through #OMN nodes.

But pressure still loomed. Old institutions tried to reassert dominance by offering ‘partnerships’ – always with terms. The World Bank launched a slick clone of the OGB platform called CivicBridge, complete with consultants and paywalled toolkits. Big Tech spun up their own “decentralised” pilots, riddled with telemetry hooks and dark patterns.

They underestimated the cultural shift. The new networks weren’t just tech, they were communities. Stories. Rituals of care and collective memory. Indymedia Globle ran a week-long series documenting how sewer workers in Mexico City and pirate radio collectives in Jakarta were in the face of #climatechaos federating disaster response protocols. Their slogan trended: “Infrastructure is Culture.”

Nari’s phone beeped, an alert from the assembly. Over 200 cities now federated under the wide #OGB commons protocols. Not aligned. Not ruled. Not centralised. Federated.

“We’re not exporting a model,” she reminded the crew. “We’re sharing patterns.” That night, under a protest-lit sky in downtown Berlin, Jaz took the mic at a solidarity gathering. “We said we’d take back the tools. Now we’re taking back the systems. Not to own them, but to share them.” The crowd responded, not with chants, but with synced updates. Nodes joining. Agreements forged. Decisions passed. Solidarity – not just spoken, but #4opens coded in.

Chapter Eleven: Friends in Strange Places

The billionaires didn’t know what to do with themselves. After a decade of preaching disruption, they now found themselves disrupted. No more keynote spots at summits that mattered. No new killer app – no app at all. Instead: a patchwork of community servers running software they couldn’t monetise, speaking in languages they hadn’t designed, powered by motivations they couldn’t understand.

Yet they tried. Burning Man came early that year. The usual desert cathedrals of ego and LED spiritualism, now rebranded as “decentralised renaissance zones.” A luxury dome near the core had a banner reading: “Protocols, Not Platforms: Sponsored by [REDACTED VENTURE FIRM].”

Two of the old tech bros flew in by private jet – posturing green. One of them, bearded and barefoot in designer hemp, had once founded a payment system that almost became a country. Now he waxed lyrical about “post-capitalist flows” while livestreaming to three million followers from a satellite uplink. “We really believe in empowering local nodes,” he said in a lavish conference panel. “That’s why we’re partnering with the new movement.” They weren’t.

Newspeak House in London – once a haunt for civic hackers and well-meaning technocrats, had become the scene of cautious negotiation. Some institutional figures, even legacy MPs, were genuinely curious. A few came humbly, asking real questions. Others came to shape, contain, co-opt.

Jaz was there one rainy Thursday for a panel: “Civic Tech and the Future of Infrastructure.” Zey sat beside her, arms folded. One of the billionaire emissaries stood to speak, a familiar face from old TED Talks. He gestured at the OGB graph on the wall like it was a product roadmap. “If we can integrate these primitives into an API layer, we could offer interoperability with enterprise cloud infrastructure. That way, everyone wins.”

Zey spoke before Jaz could. “You mean, you win. And we get eaten.” There was an awkward silence. “No thanks,” Jaz added. “We’re not here to scale into your stack. We’re here to compost it.”

Not everyone agreed. Some nodes, overwhelmed by demand or enticed by money and promises, signed conditional partnerships. These versions of the tools were slicker, smoother, branded, but neutered. Governance became consultation. #4opens paths closed. Trust mechanisms obfuscated.

Yet the originals held. Because the people did.

Burning Man ended. The jets left. Newspeak House emptied. And across the globe, the federated stack kept growing. Farmers in Kenya negotiating water rights. Street medics in Argentina syncing training protocols with ones in Oakland. Not corporate alliances. Not NGO frameworks. People-to-people federations.

And the tech bros? They tried to fork the culture. They built metaverse shells with fake local nodes and NFT-based “trust” metrics. But no one came. Not really. Because in a world rebuilt on shared care, scarcity wasn’t the incentive any more. Instead, the question was: who do you stand with? And in that question, the old guard had no real answer.
Chapter Twelve: Boring is Beautiful

By the third year, the #OGB was no longer a revolution. It was plumbing. Most people didn’t even think about it anymore, the same way they didn’t think about water or traffic lights – until they failed. But the #OGB rarely did. It became infrastructure, boring in the best possible way.

Neighbourhood assemblies ran housing cooperatives, not protests. Food systems got coordinated via federated databases. Bin routes were optimised by bin workers, energy flows managed collectively across districts. Boring.

The chaos of old politics still flared, of course, especially in the pockets that resisted federation. But the heat was moving elsewhere. One by one, the institutions gave in. First, local councils turned into administrative shells. Then national ministries started shifting budgets into federated pools managed by #OGB commons councils. These new councils weren’t elected in the old sense, they were sortated, accountable, traceable, transparent. Public because they were of the public.

The old moneyed institutions didn’t collapse – they became largely irrelevant. Legacy banks became pass-through entities, little more than number brokers. Governments still taxed, but now most of the flows went directly into regional UBI funds.

Yes, UBI.

That fight had taken years, and a hundred little cracks in the dam. A municipal pilot here. A federated pension scheme there. Arguments on Mastodon. Policy simulations in lemme forums. But then the German #OGB node rolled out full civic UBI through local OGB-led budgeting assemblies. The results were impossible to ignore.

Other cities followed. Amsterdam. Porto. Ljubljana. Then the flood came. Finland, the Basque region, parts of Scotland, then across the Nordics and beyond. Europe blinked and found itself running on mutual aid, solidarity, not scarcity.

The UBI model wasn’t controlled by a central authority. It was grassroots: managed at the scale of trust. Reputation networks ensured contributions and allocations stayed human. When people needed more, they applied – publicly, with dignity – and the working groups and assemblies debated. Some rejected the overhead. Others embraced the slowness, the care. Nobody called it innovation anymore. It was just… life.

But one challenge had always loomed: climate chaos.

At first, the federated stack was used to mitigate. Crisis mapping for floods. Open wildfire response networks. P2P air quality monitors in every city block. It started with adaptation, but shifted to action.

The OGB-led assemblies began coordinating beyond cities, beyond borders. Coastal regions aligned rewilding corridors. Mountainous communities bartered forest stewardship planting. Urban districts replaced extractive zoning with regenerative planning. And every change was federated, transparent, accountable, participatory.

Collective needs, not individual wants, shaped the path. The tipping point came when the South Pacific nodes federated with Arctic indigenous councils. Resource justice became planetary. And in the vacuum of failed global summits, the OGB stack quietly built an actual Earth Council – nothing symbolic, just sync’d infrastructure.

Jaz had stepped back from the frantic coordination. She now ran a community garden and handled seasonal budget meetings. Zey published oral histories of the uprising. Nari split her time between digital infra upkeep and playing chess with kids at the market.

“Feels like we made bureaucracy human again,” said Luna during a walk through what used to be city hall.

“Not bureaucracy,” corrected Nari. “Just… responsibility.”

Even the language had changed. Words like ‘user’ and ‘citizen’ blurred into ‘participant.’ Budgets weren’t funding lines; they were care trails. And no one talked about overthrowing power anymore. They just… rerouted it.

Epilogue: A Timeline of Change

2025 — First informal test of the #OGB prototype at Chatsworth Road Market. It works. People notice.

2026 — Federation spreads across local markets. Media backlash. Right-wing outrage. Solidarity deepens.

2027 — Fediverse tools interlink: IndymediaBack, Lemmy, Mastodon. Clinter servers falter, P2P survives.

2028 — Council staff, green politicians, and unionised workers adopt #OGB practices. Local budgets begin to federate.

2029 — Labour Party split. Early UBI experiments. Rise of regional assemblies and open public audits.

2030 — Climate response protocols. Flood and fire networks. Coordinated rewilding. First Earth Council node.

2031–2032 — Global federation gains momentum. Traditional parties hollowed out. Banks reduced to number brokers. UBI becomes policy across multiple states.

2033 — #OGB no longer a tool of rebellion. Now, it’s how we manage shared life.

And the spark?

A windswept Saturday morning. A broken-down council stall. A handful of stubborn traders, a tangle of extension cords. And an idea too obvious not to work:

“Why don’t we just run it ourselves?”

https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/MakingHistory/wiki/Story+-+Oxford%3A+Going+with+The+Flow.-

Leadership in the Era of Quantum and AI – A Reaction

This lecture was framed as leadership in a time of economic, social, and environmental crisis. In reality, it was a performance, a ritual reaffirmation of the system that generated those crises. A talk about “leadership” steeped in the language of inevitability, technological salvation, and corporate myth-making.

The speaker, Muhtar Kent – Coca-Cola executive, delivered a brand sermon for the young acolytes of the #deathcult. Unconsciously or not, he was selling the two current hype bubbles: Quantum and AI. Both framed as paradigm shifts. But the problem with this mythology is that both are, right now, more fantasy than function.

#AI has no intelligence. None. It produces plausible text and performs statistical pattern recognition. That’s it. The current explosion of PR and funding is about destroying value, not creating it, replacing labour, creativity, and human meaning with cheap automated exhaust.

#Quantum computing, at present, has about the power of a 1990s scientific calculator at best. Much of the PR is built on pre-calculated solutions dressed up as magical quantum speed. It’s fudging. It’s lying. And yet, like AI, billions flow into the hype.

Leadership, with no connection to reality, this worshipper message was simple: Leadership is a promise, and a brand is a promise kept, his talk had neither of these. It’s a normal mess, a distillation of the managerial worldview; reality flattened into branding. Leadership becomes not action, not accountability, not ethics, but worship, corporate devotion, a smooth surface projected onto a burning world

The Q&A: Was a closed circle, the questions that followed were trapped inside the same narrow, pointless frame.

Q: How do we restore trust in institutions and politics?
A: Politics is a “bad brand”. The solution, apparently, is to partner with subnational actors, mayors, governors, etc. He avoids the structural crisis entirely and reframes it as a marketing problem.

Q: Does AI in Coca-Cola advertising create value or destroy it?
A: He claims it’s just applying old ideas with new tools. Again, pure branding logic.

The was more… the audience, wannabe future leaders of the global managerial class, were sycophantic, unquestioning, hungry for status. Every question was asked from inside the bubble. No challenge. No structural critique. No awareness of any crises unfolding around us. The Audience were not people seeking truth or grappling with this crisis, they were worshippers looking for careers and job validation. Small sharks circling a bigger shark, hoping to learn how to swim with sharper teeth.

Conclusion:

Not leadership – worship.
Not intelligence – PR.
Not value creation – value destruction.

And the people in the room were not thinking their way out of the mess. They were rehearsing how to reproduce it as their path.

#Oxford

The tragedy is that the institutions talking loudest about “leading in the AI age” are the same ones least capable of doing so. They fear uncertainty, fear decentralization, fear the public. So they cling to control, and in doing so accelerate the crisis they claim to be solving.

The glossy rhetoric around “Quantum and AI leadership” makes it sound as if we’ve entered a new epoch where the old rules no longer hold. But strip away the hype, and you find something familiar: the same elitist managerial class, still addicted to control, still mistaking centralization for competence, and still refusing to learn from the last 40 years of crisis.

What has changed is the scale and velocity of the mess they are creating. We’ve built systems we no longer understand, infrastructures too brittle to trust, and economies so captured by the #deathcult of neoliberalism that even existential threats – climate collapse, inequality, runaway tech – are treated as “opportunities” rather than any call for transformation. Leadership, sold at these events, is a performance.

Quantum and AI aren’t the challenge. The challenge is whether we allow the same narrow, extractive logic to shape the next era, or whether we root ourselves again in trust, openness, and the radical idea that people, not systems, are what matter.

“We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”?

Trump and Putin are the figureheads of the #deathcult and 3ed rate people like Staner are puppets. The #nastyfew, mostly invisible in the smoke and mirrors of #mainstreaming media, are the ones who push the “we”. And they also invest in a part of our “progressive” paths, always much less affective than they need to be, let’s look at this from the latest #AI tech the #dotcons and more importantly our own #NGO crew.

The core of the #NGO mess: they claim to represent everyone, while foreclosing every other possibility. “We, we, we,” they say – but who chooses the “we”? Meanwhile, the parasite class in tech has spent twenty years destroying the social fabric of the internet, turning everything into grift, extraction, and precarious dependence. There is every chance that this new wave of #AI/#NGO/#dotcons fusion will be just more mess for us to compost.

As I said, let’s look at these people who are in bed with the #dotcons, sucking at the teat (LINK) of the #nastyfew. It should be easy to see, at best they’re a warm blanket, precisely when we need a shovel. They always smother real change and real challenge while claiming to “scale impact.” and other buzzwords.

Working within the system and working outside it both have effects – and yes, we need to balance these paths. But let’s be honest: the “inside” path is 98% parasites, and the “outside” path is full of fashionistas hiding insider routes behind radical posturing. So the balance point isn’t where we think it is. It has to be pushed far, far back from the centre we’ve been trained to accept.

Yes, there is some value in their affective progressive-tech narratives, but it is a tiny force against the power of global capital. They love the idea of the “bridging node,” the mythical middle ground where nothing is actually bridged and nothing is actually changed. Soft, persuasive, endlessly consulting, the #NGO path is a warm blanket to snugal when you should be getting up to work. It comforts, it reassures, and it is collectively ineffective. In the end, that blanket is all they have to offer: a feeling, not a transformation.

And then there’s all the #AI, most of it #techshit witch we need to be clear, is not intelligence, just more civic control in the hands of the #nastyfew. LLMs, image recognition, all of it: tools with some utility, but zero real intelligence. What they do enable is more vertical power, refined manipulation, more subtle control, more extraction of attention, behaviour, and labour through the constantly spreading #dotcons.

With our ongoing #openweb reboot we need a real democratic steering wheel again, actual power to change, not ONLY warm blankets and #PR funding. This is why the #OMN, the #4opens, and the slow work of composting matter. Because every other path on offer right now leads straight back to the same smothering, stagnant centre – the place where nothing grows.

#OMN

It’s how humans have always lived – together

For 200 years, capitalism, for the last 40 years #neoliberalism, taught us that we’re isolated individuals who compete to survive. But any real view of our actual history – and our biology – say the opposite: we’re interdependent, social, and ecological beings. For almost all species time before the current mess, we thrived through commons-based systems, shared forests, grazing lands, rivers, and community knowledge. Villages maintained open wells, fishermen shared tidal calendars, and guilds protected collective craft standards. Cooperation, not competition, is what allowed us to endure.

This is why now alt tech, matters, it is about rediscovering, what makes us human, the digital form of that is commoning online. Just as medieval commons were fenced off during enclosure, our early digital commons were captured by #dotcons. Rebuilding the #openweb is the act of reclaiming that shared ground, not nostalgia, but in the era of #climatechaos and hard right shift its #KISS survival.

What we need to compost is our own-shared memory. The commons are missing from today’s “common sense”. The idea that people can manage shared resources together has vanished from public imagination. Yet the commons is the older, more adaptive, and far more humane way of organizing.

In tech, the #Fediverse shows this in action, thousands of community run servers cooperating through a shared protocol, ActivityPub. Projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, or #Funkwhale replace enclosure with federation, showing that open paths can scale through trust rather than control. Alt tech, built on open protocols and co-governance, is simply the digital commons rebooted, a network of networks where no one owns the whole.

We need much more resources and focus pushed into this real grassroots path of reclaiming the means of communication, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was all ready a commons: decentralized, people-driven, and impactful. Early #Indymedia collectives covered protests outside mainstream #blocking narratives. #4opens email lists and wikis built movements across borders. Then capital pushed in, WE let the #nastyfew of #Facebook, #Google etc privatize our collective infrastructure, turning participation into surveillance and creativity into content.

Alt tech projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network), Mastodon, and wider #Fediverse are attempts to rebuild what we keep forgetting, this time, protected by #4opens shield to build shared governance. This path is not a nostalgic throwback, but living/acting paths for post-capitalist communication we need in the growing era of social backdown.

It’s not only “tech” – it’s social trust infrastructure. A common is not only software; it’s the culture of cooperation that surrounds it, shared values, mutual aid, and relational ethics, you can’t “code” trust into hardware, as the last decade of #blockchain and #AI mess proves. Smart contracts failed to make people honest; they just automated mistrust, it’s on going #geekproblem blindness we need to be working to compost.

What works, the resilience, comes from people, not algorithms. Through frameworks like the #4opens: open data, open code, open standards, open process. We can build transparency and accountability into the social layer of the network. Trust is a practice, not a protocol #KISS

We need a future that’s better, not just less bad. The #deathcult story – neoliberalism’s great myth – says “there is no alternative.” Alt tech is the alternative, working proof that cooperation scales, that people build shared infrastructure without extraction and less coercion. Look at LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Linux, or the #Fediverse, all imperfect, collaborative systems built on trust, not profit. They are real-world examples of how collective will outperform the normal deadened paths of corporate hierarchy.

Alt tech gives us believable hope, which is the only real antidote to despair and apathy. The ground for grassroots power is in pushing change and challenge. If the liberal state and #dotcons won’t reform, we need to be building parallel structures that work differently.
Projects like the #OGB (Open Governance Body) experiment with federated, transparent decision-making. The #OMN builds tools to connect grassroots media in trust networks, bypassing gatekeepers entirely. Together they form a scaffolding of a working commons, capable of hosting culture, not only control.

Healing the social media wound? We need to compost the lie of #dotcons which spent the last 20 years turning us into consumers and outrage machines. The shovel we need is affinity groups rebuilding social tech around self-governance, interoperability, and most importantly trust to reclaim the human side of the internet. Imagine the world different, feeds that empower communities, not advertisers, tools that nurture relationships, not metrics, platforms that amplify context, not conflict.

This is the work of making the internet human again, working together on the path of alt tech matters because it’s not about gadgets; it’s about freedom, community, and survival. It’s our path to remembering that the #openweb, like the Earth itself, belongs to everyone, or it belongs to no one. And every time we build a shared tool, or hold open a door, we remind the world that cooperation is not naïve, it’s our oldest #KISS technology.

A cross-cultural conversation on this subject

UPDATE: I haven’t touched on two other #4opens projects here, so let’s tap them at the end: #Nostr is a “me-too” project stuck in the #geekproblem loop, it won’t go anywhere until it learns to value community as a building block. #Bluesky, on the other hand, is already drifting into the hands of VC-funded #fluffy elitists who turn every commons into a brand. It’s a very likely a dead-end for real change or challenge, which is why the #mainstreaming #blocking #NGO and #fashionista crowds flock to it.

UPDATE 02: Digesting the comments. For the past 10,000 years of agriculture, 500+ years of Euro-colonialism, 200+ years of #capitalism, and 95 years of #neoliberalism (45 officially declared as such), the #nastyfew practicing control through production have dominated everyone else. Capitalism, as described in Capital, grew wherever it could. By the late 19th century, labour organised and fought back. Social democracy transformed the capitalist state so effectively that capitalist development stalled by the 1930s.

The response? A reorganisation of capital, using anti-communism as its rallying cry (WWII, NATO, Korea, Vietnam) to defeat social democracy and retake control of the state. By the 1980s, “they” felt secure enough to brand reform itself as a product: #Neoliberalism. I’m simplifying, of course – this is for the #hashtagStory outreach, so it can become a #KISS tool people can actually use. Clarifications and deeper dives you can find in the comments 🙂

Now, about this idea that “capitalism told us we’re isolated individuals competing to survive.” It’s partly true, but not in the way people think. Capitalism depends on interdependence, we work together to produce, but in a way that isolates us socially and politically. That’s the contradiction: interdependence turned into alienation. It’s the mess in our heads that recreates these bad social structures, the inner factory of control. That’s what we have to compost.

In the end, it’s not just social control, it’s social destruction. As we rush deeper into #climatechaos and the global hard-right turn, it’s clearer than ever: the ideology of separation keeps power safe and people powerless. I know this isn’t #mainstreaming liberal logic, that’s the point. We have to think differently.

And for context, I’m not speaking from the sidelines – I’ve got an MA in politics and 30 years of hands-on work in grassroots #openweb tech. Isolation is social control, see #stupidindividualism. Let’s keep this grounded and not turn it into trolling, yeah?

The #AI bubble might be nastier than the Dot.com crash

The path the #mainstreaming in tech is taking is clear. #AI is fashion, the valuations are absurd, the cost structures unsustainable, and the hype cycle feels like it’s already outpacing reality.

We’ve been here before, dot.com déjà vu. The #dotcons bubble of 2000 was built on fake demand and fantasy valuations. Venture capital flooded into half-baked platforms that promised to “reinvent” everything, while the effect was to hollow out and enclose the native #openweb. When the bubble burst, it wasn’t just investors who lost, the damage was social, cultural, and technological, it’s the mess we are in today.

The AI bubble, 2025 edition, we’re watching the same movie again, only bigger and nastier. This time, the hype engine is driven by press releases and corporate lobbying, amplified by blinded compliant media desperate to see the next miracle story. Every company claims they’re solving “the biggest problem” with AI. But lift the lid, the rhetoric, and what remains? Business models that don’t add value, expensive wrappers around existing tools. Unsustainable costs – GPU farms burning cash and carbon in equal measure. Speculation over substance, #nastyfew investors betting on domination rather than usefulness.

Why this round may be worse, at least the #dotcons bubble left some infrastructure we could build on: fibre, hosting, and the spread of the web itself. The #AI bubble looks different, as it centralises power even further in the hands of a few #dotcons. Accelerates #climatechaos through energy-intensive training runs and datacentre inflation. It undermines our flawed democracies, trust in media and knowledge with floods of synthetic content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e1Tqc_rWeQ

The ending to this video is a shocker, but not unsepreising when you look at the context of the video.

Instead of building open, federated, useful tools, we’re watching another round of #techshit enclosure, hype and money funnelling into projects that can’t last, but which will leave more #techshit scorched-earth legacy when they collapse. The #dotcons crash was messy, the AI crash could be toxic.

What can people do to walk away from this mess? How do you help with the #OMN and #4opens? The AI bubble shows what happens when tech is built on the normal hype, enclosure, and extraction on the #dotcons path. The #OMN is the opposite of this. It’s about building trust-based, federated networks where media, knowledge, and tools aren’t just another asset class to be bought and sold. The #4opens are the activist #FOSS antidote to bubble logic:

Open Data – No black boxes. If #AI is going to be part of any future, the training data, biases, and methods must be transparent, not locked up by Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft.

Open Code – Instead of closed, centralised data sets and platforms that extract rent, we need free/libre code anyone can run, fork, and improve.

Open Standards – The current AI mess is about silos and monopolies. Federated standards (like ActivityPub for social) are how we work to keep diversity alive and break enclosure.

Open Process – The opposite of corporate secrecy and hype. Decisions need to be made in the open, accountable to communities, not hidden boardrooms or PR cycles.

The #AI bubble is the normal every day #deathcult logic of the #dotcons playing out again: extract, enclose, collapse, repeat. The #OMN and #4opens give us a way to compost this mess into something more fertile. From enclosure → to federation. From secrecy → to openness. From hype cycles → to slow, messy, sustainable growth.

If we don’t actively build and defend this needed native path, we’ll be left cleaning up another round of collapse, only this time with more concentration of power, more environmental damage, and a deeper erosion of trust. The choice is simple: do we keep betting on bubbles, or do we build commons?

And the path is #KISS, so people please don’t be a prat about this, thanks.

Why Fail Safe Matters Now

Full film Fail Safe (1964) is a cultural mirror, from another age, that helps us think about the next ten years of mess. With technical systems out of human control. The film’s malfunctioning machines map directly onto today’s algorithmic governance (#dotcons, #AI, automated warfare). Once the chain starts, humans can’t pull back.

Leadership under impossible pressure. Henry Fonda’s president embodies the loneliness of decision-making when systems collapse. Compare that to our current leaders, who are weaker, more performative, and less willing to carry the weight of consequence.

The Professor’s logic vs. human life: Matthau’s cold “game theory” feels like the #neoliberal technocrat mindset – numbers over people, outcomes over ethics.

The unthinkable concessions of the ending forces us to imagine the price of avoiding total annihilation – not a win/lose game, but a choice between different forms of catastrophe. That’s climate politics, resource wars, pandemics, and #dotcons algorithm risk we face.

What lessons can we learn for the next decade? System fragility is the real enemy – climate systems, financial systems, digital platforms: one glitch, and collapse ripples out. We don’t have the principle modernism, Fonda’s gravitas – our current elitists class are hollowed out by #PR driven populism; when the crisis comes, trust won’t be there. The “Professor” mindset dominates – policy is still guided by “hard” data, models, metrics, and “rational actors,” even though reality has long escaped those dogmatic frames. Watching Fail Safe today is like watching the #deathcult’s worldview in black and white: centralized control, elitist decision-making, people as statistics.

What we need is open, collective mediation – instead of waiting for one lonely leader in a bunker, we need horizontal systems (#OMN, #openweb) that can act before catastrophe hardens. The #OMN and the #openweb reboot are the anti–Fail Safe projects: decentralize agency, mediate conflict before escalation, building trust outside fragile centralized systems. It’s a powerful film, because it frames the stakes not just as “politics” but as civilizational survival.

It’s a film of our times, what can we learn for the #openweb? In 1964, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe held its audience in terrified silence. A simple technical malfunction – a misread code – sent American bombers hurtling toward Moscow. No one could call them back. The world’s survival depended on one president’s unthinkable decision. It was fiction, but it spoke to a truth of the nuclear age: centralized systems, once in motion, cannot be controlled.

Sixty years later, we are in our own Fail Safe moment – but this time the system is digital. The malfunction, is #neoliberalism embedded in our algorithmic #dotcons pipelines. As we push more #AI moderation system, hallucinates flags, the error replicates at machine speed across platforms. What began as a technical hiccup hardens into policy. Governments, seeing chaos, step in “to restore order.” dictators empower security agencies to control networks, to stabilise their hold on power. Like the bomber wings in Fail Safe, the system escalates itself. Once the order is given, there is no recall code.

The #OMN alternative to this is #KISS we need to build is affinity groups on the #openweb – messy, small, federated – to keep our communities talking. Instead of one brittle command chain, thousands of small nodes exchange trust. Instead of a sinal voice, a new signal-to-noise ratio emerges. This slows the shift right. People can begin to rebuild, bottom-up.

Fail Safe ended in tragedy, with a president sacrificing New York to prevent global annihilation. It was a portrait of lonely leadership in a centralised system gone haywire.

Our age offers another path. The lesson is stark that In centralised systems, malfunction = collapse. In federated, mediated systems, failure = resilience. The #openweb reboot is not about nostalgia for old tech. It’s about building structures that can survive the malfunctions ahead. When the next ten years are defined by glitches, spirals, and breakdowns – and they will be – then the survival of our social fabric depends on embracing the horizontal path.

The nuclear age taught us that a single misread code could end the world. The algorithmic age is teaching us that the current glitch could end society.

The #openweb native path gives us more of a chance to be Fail Safe.

#Film #coldwar #review