Tag: blocking

The tools we need to compost the #deathcult

The current mess and tragedy is that the tools we need most are often the first things that stressed, messy, #elitist systems defund, discredit, and dismantle. Why? Because these tools threaten the psychological certainty that people cling to when the world feels unstable. The ability to sit with uncertainty, to question assumptions, to admit complexity. These are not weaknesses, they are survival tools.

Yes, this is a mess we need to compost, the #nothingnew path to work on this is about recovering tools we already know work: science’s methods, hypothesis testing, falsifiability, uncertainty management, peer review, and collective correction. These are cultural technologies for thinking beyond the current #blocking immediate tribal reactions. They are systems designed around humility – the understanding that reality is bigger than any one person’s story.

In #OMN terms projects like #indymediaback, #OGB and #makeinghistory are the toolkits that can help us escape psychological traps, not by removing fear, fear is part of being human, but by building social paths strong enough to keep working even when the humans walking them are scared.

Psychological safety only works in ecological surplus, long-term joined-up thinking requires this psychological safety, when we have a surplus, a system has enough resources, so that it can experiment, adapt, and invest in the future. When a system is stressed, like we are today everything collapses towards survival thinking and behaver. This is why stressed societies underinvest in care, research, education, community, and long-term thinking. They marginalise the people doing this work and punish institutions trying to protect it. One of the resigns why the prophet is often stoned.

The hard right’s politics of scarcity – real or manufactured – creates cognitive narrowing. As people feel under constant threat, attention focuses on immediate danger, planning horizons shrink, outsiders become threats, complexity becomes suspicious. Cultures shaped by generations of insecurity carry this short-term thinking into institutions, mythology, and identity. It becomes the “common sense” in that everyone unthinkingly believes in. After 50 years of worshipping the #deathcult of endless extraction, competition, growth and profit above everything else, our societys and ecologys are fragile. And this is exactly when collapse pressure increases, the things that looked inefficient during growth become survival-critical – Diversity – Redundancy – Resilience – Commons.

The #OMN approach has always been that messy diversity is not waste, rather a core to living survival. So why do people still block this to cling to the broken paths? Humans know they will die, it creates a deep existential pressure that cultures have always tried to manage. Worldviews, communities, identities and belief systems become anxiety buffers. When those are threatened, people do not always become more rational. Often they become more defensive, double down, they become more attached to the group that gives them meaning.

This is why authoritarian paths grow during periods of fear – stronger hierarchy, tighter in-groups, scapegoating, magical thinking, blinded rigidity. The response to uncertainty becomes control, but control is not the same as resilience. Were the #openweb alternative is to often pushed away, it becomes a challenge, to build cultures that can handle uncertainty without collapsing into fear. And why It’s so hard to grow the needed open processes, shared knowledge, trust networks, collective problem-solving, and spaces where disagreement can happen without destroying the commons.

And we have people to do this – the reserve army “problem” – Capitalism creates its own insecurity, it structurally requires a group of people who are not fully included in production. The unhoused, precariously employed, unemployed, migrants and marginalised communities. They are treated as failures of the system, but from a structural perspective, precarity is useful to the mainstreaming. A population living with insecurity disciplines everyone else, it tells workers to accept worse conditions, less power and less control. Because someone else can replace you.

The #4opens can be a part of composting this, not because openness magically fixes everything, but because transparency, participation, and accountability are tools for keeping power visible. The #OMN path is about growing these social technologies alongside existing technical ones. In this the work is not to pretend fear does not exist. The answer is to build paths where fear does not become the organising principle. So we have real social groups to compost authoritarian thinking, scarcity politics, scapegoating, magical solutions, and the idea that domination is the only realistic path.

The future needs different seeds, the precarity, #openweb, #OMN, #4opens and other commons-based paths are parts of that wider work. The question is not whether the old system can continue forever, it is what are we growing while it cannot?

#KISS

Rethinking Grassroots Tech Funding

Building beyond the #deathcult – Our current model of #tech funding and developer agendas is not neutral. The way we fund technology shapes the kind of technology we build. For the last 20 years, the dominant tech culture has followed the same path:

  • venture capital growth
  • platform monopolies
  • extraction of attention and data
  • endless scaling
  • short-term metrics
  • private ownership of public infrastructure

This has produced #techshit – technology built because it can make money, not because it improves society. And now we are facing an era of #climatechaos, ecological breakdown, and social instability. The question we have to ask is uncomfortable – Has our current model of technology funding become part of the problem?

The answer cannot simply be “more innovation”, we have had decades of innovation. The problem is that innovation has been pointed in the wrong direction. The #openweb and #FOSS communities contain many of the seeds of a different path, but we still fall into the same trap of building tools to optimise code, solve technical problems, but we struggle with the social question of how do we build and sustain commons?

This is the #geekproblem, not that technical people are bad, not that code does not matter. But that we treat social systems as if they are just technical systems waiting to be fixed. They are not: A community is not a server, a movement is not a repository, a network is not just infrastructure. The missing piece is grassroots funding models that support the social work around technology.

What could grassroots tech funding look like? Instead of asking “How can we create the next unicorn?” Ask “How do we support useful things that communities actually need?” This means funding – Maintenance, not just invention as a huge amount of valuable #FOSS work is boring. Keeping things running, helping users, writing documentation and supporting communities to do governance. This is invisible labour, but it is what keeps the commons alive.

We need networks, not just products, the #dotcons model asks “What is the product?” The #openweb question should be “What relationships are we strengthening?” On this native path, funding needs to support ecosystems, not just individual projects. Long-term contribution, not short-term growth.

A grassroots project does not need to become a company, it might need small sustainable funding, shared infrastructure, community support, public accountability with open processes. Growth is not always success, sometimes resilience is success. Funding the gaps between technology and society – The hardest work is often translation by helping activists use tools, developers understand communities, so communities can shape technology.

This is where #OMN sits, not just making software, but more importantly building the social infrastructure around software. The hardest problem is cultural, the block is not only money. The block is “common sense”, living inside a #neoliberal idea where something is only useful if it produces financial return. Anything outside that looks interesting but “unrealistic”.

The #deathcult assumption is if it cannot become a profitable business, it has no value. But the internet itself was not built this way, the #openweb grew from public investment, shared knowledge, volunteer contribution, and communities building things because they mattered. We need to recover that thinking, but to breaking out of the cycle is difficult because it requires changing what we measure.

Not, how much money did this make? But how much capacity did this create? How many people can now participate? How much commons did we grow and how much power moved away from concentrated systems?

The challenge for #OMN, #OGB, #4opens and #indymediaback is not only technical. It is creating a different economic imagination, a way of funding technology that helps communities grow instead of helping platforms extract.

The future will not be built only by companies, it will be built by people creating alternatives together.

To make this path work we need a hand reaching back across the gap – Stepping away from the #dotcons is not a simple a moral judgment to jump from one world to another. A native path is one foot in, one foot out. To stay connected enough to understand where people are, what they need, and how they think – while building alternatives that move beyond the worship of the #deathcult.

The hand reaches back across the gap, not to pull people into the past, but to help people cross into something different, change does not happen by shouting from the other side. It happens by building bridges while growing the new.

So the question is: why are so many people not acting? In the era of #climatechaos, people #blocking social change in society and technology are not just slowing things down, they are helping maintain systems that are driving social and ecological breakdown.

The question is not only what is wrong, more what are we building instead? Different paths already exist with the #4opens, #penweb, #OGB, #indymediaback and wider #OMN projects. These are paths to move away from the failures of #mainstreaming and towards more open, collective ways of organising.

There is no profit in this for us, we are not building this to cash out. So maybe the more useful question is not “What’s the agenda?” Maybe ask – Who benefits when alternatives never get built People often look for who gains from creating something. But power also exists in maintaining the status quo.

The #openweb has always been about creating spaces outside the usual incentives – spaces based on sharing, participation, and collective ownership. That threatens systems built on keeping things closed, controlled, and dependent.

The challenge is mediation, how do we separate signal from noise? How do we build alternatives while people are still trapped inside the old systems? How do we create spaces where change can actually happen?

One foot in – One foot out – A hand across the gap.

Don’t become part of the blockage, help build the bridge.

#Nicenasty the hidden power of soft obstruction

People think in groups, that’s normal. The mistake isn’t group thinking itself, it’s pretending we’re all isolated individuals while still acting through tribes, identities, and social blocs. A lot of today’s “common sense” comes from the #stupidindividualism group mindset. We are encouraged to see every problem through individual choices rather than collective realities. The real question isn’t “how do we stop group thinking?” It’s “what do we do with it?”

This mess is something we need to compost – in movements, communities, and alternative projects, we need language to describe the different forces shaping what happens, without shared vocabulary, patterns remain invisible. People experience the same problems repeatedly, but each incident looks like an individual conflict rather than part of a wider social mess making. Within #OMN hashtag story, we already have some useful terms.

  • #nastyfew – power from above. The #nastyfew are the obvious actors who concentrated power of tech, business, political, and institutional elitists. The people who shape systems through money, ownership, influence, and formal authority. They are easier to identify because their power is visible. The #nastyfew don’t usually pretend not to have power, their influence comes from controlling resources, platforms, laws, infrastructure, and narratives. This is the traditional problem of hierarchy.
  • #fluffy – conflict avoidance, the comfortable side of activism and community organising. The people who want harmony, inclusion, and safety – often good things – but always at the cost of avoiding difficult conversations, uncomfortable truths, or necessary conflicts. The fluffy crew are not the enemy, we need this side as movements without care become brittle, aggressive, and unsustainable. The problem is when #fluffy becomes a substitute for action, and keeping things pleasant becomes more important than addressing what is actually happening.

#fluffy – comfortable, non-threatening, conflict-avoiding activism. Well understood in context. #spiky – confrontational, direct, willing to cause friction. Debate – is the thing that is to often missing, and holds the power.

But there is another pattern we need to compost, that does not fit either category. Something more subtle, the missing category is the weaponised nice person. There is a difference between being kind and using kindness as a tool of control. There is a difference between creating a welcoming space and using the language of welcome to #block challenge. This is the person who performs niceness while quietly enforcing conformity.

These people are in every movement, every activist camp, they use, politeness rules, social reputation, community trust, emotional pressure and claims of protecting the group …as mechanisms to block criticism, avoid accountability, and preserve existing power. They are not the #nastyfew as they are not openly dominating from above, and often appear as the opposite, they look caring, sound reasonable.

They say “We need to be constructive.” “We don’t want conflict.” “That isn’t the right way to say it.” “We need to protect the community.” Sometimes those statements are valid, but often they are used as a shield against anything disruptive, challenging, or genuinely new. This is where we need a #hashtag for.

The gap is specific: the person who performs niceness or fluffiness as a weapon – who uses social respectability, politeness norms, or community goodwill as a way to enforce conformity, block challenge, and protect their own position. Not the #nastyfew (they’re openly powerful) and not simply #fluffy (that’s just timid). This is the vile fluffy – nice on the surface, actively harmful underneath.

Maybe #nicenasty describes the contradiction. Nice on the surface, nasty in effect. The problem is not kindness, the problem is when kindness becomes a performance used to maintain control. A #nicenasty dynamic appears in spaces that claim to be open: activist groups, community organisations, open source projects, alternative media spaces and wider social movements. The language is horizontal, but the behaviour becomes quietly hierarchical. Instead of “you cannot do this because I have power”, it becomes “you cannot do this because you are harming the community.” The result can be the same – blocking change. #nicenasty -. Has rhythm, easy to remember, does the job. The inversion is the point.

#velvetblock – the mechanism, describes the process itself, a velvet surface hiding a hard barrier. The door is not slammed, people are not openly excluded. Instead, they are slowly redirected, delayed, discouraged, or socially isolated until the challenge disappears. The damage remains polite, the outcome remains the same. #velvetblock – soft surface, hard obstruction. More descriptive of the mechanism.

#fluffygate- implies gatekeeping behind a fluffy front. A bit clunky.

#pratocracy – the rule of prats. Funny but loses the specific nice/nasty dynamic.

#softpower – already taken in international relations, would cause confusion.

#vilefluff – pairs well with #nicenasty tag, keep it in the vocabulary for the spiky people.

#nicenasty is maybe the strongest – it’s immediately, has no baggage, and does what a hashtag should do: compress a complex dynamic into something people recognise and use to organise the movement. The question is whether one tag or two. #nastyfew for power from above, #nicenasty for obstruction from within the community itself, #fluffy for the timid. A clean three-part vocabulary?

Why this matters for #OMN – The #openweb and grassroots organising depend on the ability to challenge, fork, experiment, and build alternatives. The challenge is not just resisting the #nastyfew, it is also recognising the internal patterns that stop movements growing.

#nastyfew – Power concentrated at the top.

#fluffy – Care, connection, and social glue, but with the risk of avoiding necessary conflict.

#nicenasty – Soft power used internally to block challenge while appearing caring.

This gives us a #KISS story path. Because not every barrier looks like oppression, sometimes the strongest walls are built out of good intentions. The answer is not to reject kindness, more its is separating genuine care from control disguised as care. Any native path needs both:

#fluffy to keep people connected.

#spiky to challenge what needs challenging.

And the awareness to recognise when #nicenasty is #blocking

A bit of theory on how this mess comes about – puppets dancing on strings – how consent is manufactured, ideology isn’t only ideas floating free, it’s rooted in real social and economic structures. Let’s look at some views of this:

Lukács – reification and false consciousness, how capitalism makes its own social relations appear natural and inevitable, like facts of nature rather than human constructions.

Gramsci – hegemony, how ruling class ideas become “common sense,” absorbed so deeply into everyday life that they no longer need to be enforced, because people enforce them on themselves.

Althusser – ideology and ideological state apparatuses, how institutions (schools, media, religion) reproduce the conditions that make capitalism feel like the only possible reality.

So where does the current dead #postmodernism confusion comes from – this rotten path also talks about constructed realities, fictions experienced as truth, and the critique of “grand narratives.” So there’s surface overlap. But the difference is Marxism says ideology can be exposed and overcome through collective understanding and political struggle – there’s a real underneath the false consciousness. Postmodernism says there’s no stable real to appeal to – all truths are partial, constructed, and contested all the way down so would be far more sceptical about whether “exposing” ideology gets you anywhere.

What do people think about this, especially in the light of Hannah Arendt’s work?

“Choosing to live in undiscerning neutrality is the mark of cowardice in times of rising fascism. Neutrality is a privilege reserved for those who can afford to sit on the fence until they die. Most of us cannot afford that path.”

At what point does neutrality become complicity? Arendt‘s writing is useful because she was suspicious of both ideological certainty and political passivity. Her writing on totalitarianism and the “banality of evil” wasn’t about monsters. It was about ordinary people stepping back from judgement and responsibility, retreating into obedience, routine, or disengagement while harmful systems expanded around them.

From this, the danger is not simply taking the wrong side. The danger is refusing to judge at all. At the same time, Arendt valued the public sphere as a space, where different people could meet, speak, disagree, and act together. Politics, at its best, was not about enforcing a single truth but about creating a shared world despite differences.

This creates a tension for projects like the #OMN as we often talk about mediation, bridge-building, and creating spaces where people can communicate across divides. But what happens when the issue is no longer a disagreement between equals, but questions of exclusion, inequality, violence, and authoritarian power?

The non-action bloc: resignation, cynicism, and the culture that keeps people powerless

Compost or rot – you choose, we need a spade #OMN

Build it permissionlessly and let it loose

One of the uncomfortable truths of activism is that, given a choice between anarchism and anarchy, many anarchists choose anarchism. The ideology, identity, culture, meetings, and certainties feel safer than taking a genuinely risky step into the unknown of stateless liberty and self-organisation.

It’s easier to belong to the subculture than to build the social relationships and trust needed to live without the structures there critiquing. A lot of radical politics gets stuck at this point: defending the identity instead of creating the reality.

From an #OMN perspective, the challenge is not proclaiming freedom, but building the social infrastructure that makes freedom possible.

Been working with #mainstreaming people recently. The experience has been eye-opening, and not in a good way. What strikes me isn’t that they are bad people, most aren’t. The problem is that many seem completely unaware of how badly the culture they inhabit behaves. Gatekeeping is normal. Careerism is normal. Status games are normal. Endless #blocking of ideas, projects, and people that fall outside established comfort zones is normal. Then, they wonder why meaningful change never happens.

The pattern is everywhere. New ideas are treated as threats rather than opportunities. People spend more energy defending positions than solving problems. Institutions become focused on preserving themselves rather than the purpose they were supposedly created for. When challenged, the response is confusion – then #blocking – the behaviour is so deeply embedded that it has become invisible.

This isn’t just a problem of NGOs, public bodies, academia, media organisations, or corporations. It’s a broader cultural issue. The incentives point in the wrong direction as most people choose jobs primarily for income, security, status, and benefits. That’s understandable, we all need to survive. But when entire systems are built around those motivations, contributing to society becomes secondary, something to be mentioned in mission statements rather than lived in practice.

The result, a society full of people managing problems rather than solving them. You can see this in every sector, from the highest levels of management down to the lowest-paid positions. The forms differ, but the logic is the same: don’t rock the boat, protect your position, follow the approved path. This is one reason why grassroots projects struggle, as they are trying to solve problems directly, while mainstream institutions are organised around managing risk, preserving legitimacy, and maintaining existing structures.

From an #OMN perspective, this isn’t only a problem of individual morality, it’s a problem of social systems rewarding the wrong behaviour. The answer is not simply to denounce people, that feeds the cycle, the challenge is to create spaces where different values can actually function:

  • collaboration over competition
  • stewardship over careerism
  • openness over gatekeeping
  • social usefulness over institutional self-preservation

Some people respond by working less, consuming less, and choosing employers whose purpose is broader than profit. Others build grassroots projects outside the mainstream. But, neither path is easy, both come with costs.

The question is not why change is difficult, it is why we keep organising society around incentives that actively discourage it. With this mess in mind in both tech and activism, if your politics is talking only to people who already agree with you, it’s probably a hobby, not a movement. The #OMN path starts with building bridges between different groups, needs, and cultures, as this is how collective power grows.

We live in an age of #stupidindividualism where everyone broadcasts and few connect, so build bridges, not bubbles. This matters because most people are up shit creek without a paddle, yet keep looking in the same places that got them there. Apathy and laissez-faire “common sense” have become normal. Decades of #neoliberalism taught us to think as isolated individuals rather than communities capable of acting together.

One barrier is that people still don’t see the need to move beyond the #feudalism that shapes much of the tools we need. As a result, huge amounts of energy go into defending existing structures and #blocking alternatives before they have a chance to prove themselves. That’s why the #OGB project approach is simple: build it permissionlessly and let it loose. People will see the value, or they won’t #KISS

The goal isn’t convincing a handful of gatekeepers, the goal is empowering a larger group of people to participate in activism, technology, build consensus, and push the social agenda they actually need of less permission, more practice, less management, more participation.

This is also why so much campaigning, #NGO and alt-tech events can be frustrating. The official conversations are dominated by career paths, institutional interests, branding exercises, and carefully managed narratives. Lots of noise, not always much signal – The useful stuff usually happens elsewhere, in corridors, over coffee. That’s where bridges get built, where ideas get tested and where trust grows. The social layer matters more than the stage.

The #OMN lesson is simple – Technology alone doesn’t solve social problems, we need
movements grown by connecting people, governance grown by participation,
commons grow by use. If we want a better world and #openweb, we need to spend less time protecting silos and more time building bridges. That’s where the signal still lives.

But when documenting moments and movements like this It’s important to focus on what actually matters not only the normal surface mess.

Watching this video reminded me how much activist history gets distorted by sectarianism. At places like #Greenham, divisions formed around the “colour” of the gates – different ideologies, identities, and political cultures. The trouble is that the loudest and most conflict-driven voices end up telling the history afterwards.

The people saying “look at me” get remembered, while the people saying “don’t look at me, I’m busy, look at the issue” are usually too busy doing the actual work to document it.

This leaves us with a skewed activist memory, where internal drama becomes history and the slow, collective labour that made things happen fades into the background.

It’s not just a problem of the past. We keep reproducing the same mess today.

The commons were never theory – It was always practice

There’s no profit in this for me, the more useful question is: who benefits from #blocking these projects? When people ask “what’s the agenda?” they look for who is trying to benefit from building something. But the better question is who gains when alternatives never get built. The #openweb has always been about creating spaces outside the usual incentives. That threatens people whose power depends on keeping things closed, controlled, and dependent.

The commercialization of the “sharing economy” created something strange – a return to a pre-modern world. What looked like community became extraction. What looked like sharing became renting, platforms became landlords, and relationships became transactions.

Let’s be clear about something, the commons are not an academic concept waiting to be discovered by economists or policy wonks, not a diagram in a textbook, not something that needs a queen, a government, or a management consultant to bring into existence. The commons are what people have always done when they are left alone to organise their own survival with neighbours they trust.

Peasants managing grazing land across medieval Europe. Indigenous communities stewarding water, forest and fishery for generations. Canal boat communities building informal mutual aid along waterways. Squatters running collective houses. Hackers building free software together. #Indymedia collectives publishing grassroots news from the bottom up. The digital commons – open source, creative commons, the #fediverse, the #openweb – already existing right now, built by thousands of ordinary people, not by any institution.

This is worth saying clearly because the #mainstreaming story about the commons almost always starts in the wrong place – with Garrett Hardin’s 1968 “tragedy of the commons” paper, which blamed collective ownership for environmental destruction and was used for decades to justify privatisation. The paper was ideologically loaded, historically illiterate, and largely wrong.

On the other side of mainstreaming we have Elinor Ostrom who spent her privileged career documenting why, eventually winning a Nobel Prize for showing that communities routinely manage commons successfully under the right social conditions. Her work, it is full of peasants, fishers, farmers and irrigators, not governments or corporations, let’s try and balance pointing at the top by point to the source

The real tragedy is not the commons. It is what #neoliberalism does to the social fabric that makes commons possible. As I have been arguing for years at hamishcampbell.com, the #deathcult worship of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t just privatise assets – it broke the institutions and the relationships that made collective stewardship possible. Hyper-individualism doesn’t just make people selfish, it makes cooperation feel unnatural, even threatening. That is not an accident, it is a classic divide-and-control strategy.

The path back is not top-down – it never was – it is horizontal, rooted in trust, built through repeated small acts of mutual accountability. It is turning stress and conflict into commons culture rather than mutual destruction. It is rebuilding journalism as a commons rather than a product. It is composting “digital sovereignty” branding and just actually building working commons tech instead. The #4opens – open process, open data, open standards, open licences – are not abstract technical principles, they are social trust infrastructure, the modern grounding the commons grows from.

#stupidindividualism is what we need to compost

Thatcher said there is no such thing as society – the commons, everywhere it has ever worked, is the practical, lived refutation of that claim. Not a government programme, not a think tank report. Peasants. Boaters. Coders. Neighbours. People organising their own lives together, horizontally, with accountability to each other.

That is where we start, that is where we always started.

#OMN #commons #openweb #4opens #neoliberalism #deathcult #stupidindividualism #BuildingAlternatives

SAVE THAMES RIVER HOMES

DRAFT: Let’s look at this as an example of effective and ineffective activism. The mess we make and how we can compost it. Let’s start with an example outreach text that has not been sent out yet.


WHO WE ARE
We are resident boaters living on a stretch of the River Thames near Donnington Bridge. For many years, people have made their homes here peacefully and continuously as part of a long-standing river community.
 
WHAT’S HAPPENING
New signage already in place states that mooring, anchoring, or remaining stationary requires a licence in addition to the licence already paid to the river authority. Only a limited number of moorings may be available, and additional fees could apply for continuous occupation.
 
WHO IS AFFECTED
Long-term residents, low-income households, people living with serious illness, and vulnerable members of the river community. For many people, the river is not a lifestyle choice – it is their home.
 
WHY PEOPLE ARE CONCERNED
At a time of rising housing costs and increasing housing insecurity, these changes could reduce access to long-standing mooring spaces, push vulnerable residents out of the area, leave people without secure housing alternatives, reduce access to affordable river living, and undermine an established and historic river community.
 
WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR
Protection for long-term residents, no forced removal of vulnerable people, fair and transparent consultation with all boaters, and respect for existing river communities.
 
BOATS ARE HOMES!

WE SUPPORT environmental protection, safe navigation, responsible shared river use, and respectful cooperation between all river users.

WE DO NOT SUPPORT loss of homes, exclusion of vulnerable residents, reduction of social diversity on the river, or the enclosure of historic river commons.

The first thing that needs to be said is this path is pretty simple #KISS

Affectiveness is trust = speed and power, every action flows from this, so the obvious immediate actions:

  • Working Groups – activate, not just name. Fill the gaps (Moorings WG is missing people). Each group needs tasks and a timelines. Media, Environment, Legal, Moorings are the four pillars.
  • Summer visibility campaign. Litter picks were a start – now make them scheduled, social, and photographed. Visible care builds public sympathy faster than arguments.
  • Public messaging. Posters and leaflets with LINKED to online messaging. Creative subversion of public space – keep it warm and community-facing, not aggressive.
  • Media outreach – urgent. Contact sympathetic journalists now, before a hostile narrative sets in. Reach Green Party contacts, housing groups, environmental organisations, river users. Positive stories first, defence second.

Offline organising – sensitive coordination stays face-to-face in trusted spaces, not in public chats. Trust meeting prep for small delegations. Agreed talking points only. Anticipate reframing and deflection. Stay calm, stay on message, make clear asks.

Holding the physical space – Committed, confident people physically and socially present on the land

We are walking the horizontal path when groups strengthen: Working Groups coordinate laterally – not waiting for a centre to direct them. Visible action builds public trust, community care as the face of the campaign. Messaging stays simple and consistent, across all groups and channels. Relationships are built offline, where real trust and real decisions live. Institutions are engaged strategically, not reactively

What we’ve had so far is #BLOCKING and more BLOCKING.

The initial process needed to be simple: a short, wide consensus stage to build enough trust and shared direction for people to move together. This happened, but, that process got bogged down by aggressive fluffy and spiky pushing in different directions. What should have taken a short time stretched into months of churn.

The fluffy path kept smoothing over conflict with endless distractions, “feelings”, and disconnected “positive” non activity. The spiky path pushed outcomes through hard positioning and confrontation without the collective grounding needed to make this effective. Both ended up feeding the same result – paralysis of any action at all.

Then, just as when were finally beginning to move toward the next step – actual coordinated action through working groups – the same blocking pattern repeated itself. The working groups, which were there to move us past endless whole-group debate, got dragged backwards into re-running the original consensus arguments on continues repeat. So instead of moving from consensus, to coordination, to action, we got trapped in a loop:

  • process,
  • argument,
  • process again.

The result has been mess of ossification and prevarication for the last three months. At best, people scattered into redundant, uncoordinated fluffy actions of litter picks, isolated messaging, disconnected outreach, and individual goodwill projects with no shared direction or any cumulative strategy.

At worst, individuals entrenched themselves into blocking positions that lacked any collective backing, making attempts at movement all to easy to isolate, dismiss, and weaponise against the needed broader outcomes, dissipate energy instead of concentrating it.

This is the hard truth about horizontal organising that people often avoid saying out loud: a horizontal movement without functioning working groups is not horizontal, it is just flat. And flat structures spread energy equally in all directions until nothing gains traction.

Working groups are there to solve this problem, they are the mechanism that turns shared trust into coordinated action. But instead of empowering them, thus our selves, we allowed the unresolved tensions of the first stage to spill endlessly into the second.

The deeper issue is that people are still acting from the poisoned culture we are supposedly fighting of individual performance over collective strategy, emotional positioning over grounded coordination, symbolic activity over practical outcomes. This “common sense” mess is leading us to the normal #stupidindividualism of identity and ego in conflict with trust and process.

This is why trust matters so much, trust is not fluffy morality, it is practical movement infrastructure. Trust creates speed, coordination, resilience, and collective power. Without it, every decision reopens old arguments, every action fragments, and every process becomes another site of blockage. While meanwhile, the mainstreaming benefits from all of this, they gain time, they shape public narratives uncontested, they observe our fragmentation, and they plan strategically while we churn internally.

The frustrating thing is that the movements already understands the problems, the issue is less lack of understanding. The blocking is active – the inability to stop reproducing the blocking dynamics long enough to move collectively in any direction.

This is the mess we need to compost. Until we create affinity groups to break this cycle, the next three months of this campaign risk looking exactly like the last three months – more shrinking than inflating big meetings full of hot air and scattering outcomes leading to more frustration, and little accumulated power.

The path is actually simple, though not easy – stop reopening the foundation process, empower the working groups, coordinate action, build trust through doing, and focus collective energy where it creates leverage instead of churn. Otherwise, we remain trapped in performative movement culture at best or compleat mess at worst – while the real decisions continue being made elsewhere.

#KISS

#oxfordboaters #process

Composting the mess of digital security in activism – We need to talk about this, offline

The online tools we “common sense” rely on for organising and campaigning are genuinely dangerous, and I find that paralysing. This isn’t paranoia, it’s a practical reality that urgently needs addressing. Until we do, offline working groups are one of the few reliable ways to unblock the mess.

Where we actually are now… Disappearing, encrypted chat outside the #dotcons is one of the few spaces that feels even marginally safe. But even then, safety depends entirely on who’s in the room, which means those spaces need to stay small, focused, and constantly tended. The moment trust becomes uncertain, the space becomes a liability.

The result, for me personally, is that I currently have no viable online tools left for outreach. Everything leaves traces, so all that remains is slow, word-of-mouth. The legal reality we need to talks about offline, almost everything posted on #dotcons platforms leaves a digital fingerprint – metadata, timestamps, IP addresses, connection logs, account linkages. In practical terms, nowhere on these platforms is truly safe to post anything sensitive.

The specific danger that doesn’t get named often enough is this: if someone who was loosely connected to a campaign later commits a crime in the name of that campaign, the person who posted most visibly can end up legally exposed – even if they had absolutely nothing to do with what happened. The evidence trail is strong, easily misinterpreted, and the legal system is not neutral, it has historically been used as a tool of repression by those with power and resources against those without. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a pattern with a long, well-documented history.

This means high-volume posting, public organising on corporate platforms, and mixing open campaigning with less legal internal discussion in the same spaces isn’t just tactically sloppy, it has destroyed people’s lives.

Two paths: closed and open, people have been campaigning on digital security in activism for years, and the basic framework is straightforward – there are closed paths and open paths, and we need both working without the current aggressive #blocking that creates so much damaging mess.

  • For closed working groups – small, trust-based, sensitive – use whatever, non #dotcons tool the group agrees on and trusts. Signal is the obvious everyday choice: it’s not perfect, but it’s practical, easier to understand, and good enough for most internal communication when used carefully.
  • For open working groups – anything involving outreach, public-facing organising, and building broader community – the answer has to be #4opens common tools. Not a fragmented collection of proprietary apps that each create their own data trail and dependency. The digital splintering of activist spaces across dozens of incompatible, corporate-owned tools is itself a security problem, as well as an organisational one. #KISS.

As our lives are more directly touched by repression what we need is real conversations – across campaigns and communities – about #4opens web security in practical activism. Not a geek seminar, not a jargon-heavy toolkit nobody reads, but an honest, accessible discussion about:

  • What the actual risks are and who they fall on
  • Which tools are appropriate for which purposes
  • How to keep open organising genuinely open without handing surveillance infrastructure a dangerous map of our work
  • How to support the people most exposed – those who post publicly and visibly – so they’re not carrying legal risk in isolation.

The #geekproblem here is real, too many of the existing resources are built by and for technically confident people, and leave everyone else either confused or falsely reassured. We need socially safe security culture that works for normal people doing necessary work.

On a side note: I wish people would stop blaming me for the problems they create themselves LINK

Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

Activism has a reputation problem, in default #mainstreaming storytelling it’s painted as chaos, absence, or naive idealism. But if you look at what activists at best actually do, a different picture emerges: a long tradition of people working out, in practice, how to solve real problems together without relying on distant authority. And that’s the bit most people quietly skip.

In most social/political movements, the hard questions – how we organise, decide, share resources, resolve conflict – are deferred. If people think about this at all – First you win power, then you figure out how things will work. That “later” rarely comes, or when it does, it arrives shaped by hierarchy, bureaucracy, and control.

The #OMN paths flips this. It starts at the micro level of how do a group of people share space? How do they make decisions without bosses? How do they deal with conflict, mess, bad behaviour, uneven effort and how do they build trust that actually holds under pressure? These are not abstract questions, they are everyday problems.

And this path – at its best – has decades (centuries, really) of paths with real answers like messy consensus processes, affinity groups, mutual aid, horizontal organising, temporary structures that form and dissolve as needed. None of it perfect, all of it is grounded. This is why grassroots activism works in real situations: disaster response, grassroots organising, protest camps, community projects. Because it doesn’t wait for permission or perfect conditions. It already has tools for acting now.

The messy bit is it’s not magic, let’s not romanticise this. Horizontal organising is hard, it’s full of friction. You get informal hierarchies, dominant personalities, avoidance of conflict until it explodes and burnout leading to #blocking of uncomfortable but necessary conversations. This is the same “poisonous people” problem you see in every movement. #4opens grassroots activism doesn’t remove it – it exposes it – and that’s actually the point. Instead of hiding dysfunction behind formal power, horizontal spaces push it into the open where it has to be dealt with. Or not – and then things fall apart, which is also a kind of clarity. In #OMN language, this is #compost, the mess isn’t a failure. It’s raw material.

Why this matters for the #openweb – most digital infrastructure is built on the opposite assumption. The #dotcons model says to centralise control, extract value, smooth over conflict, optimise engagement, hide the mess. It “works” – but only by disempowering people and communities. The #openweb path, if it’s going to mean anything, has to go the other way:

  • decentralised
  • messy
  • trust-based
  • human-scale
  • and able to function anyway

That last bit is where we can learn from anarchist practice, because building federated, grassroots media (like #OMN, #indymediaback, Fediverse spaces) is not just a technical problem, it’s a social one. The tech already basically works, the people part doesn’t – yet. Micro practice is the missing layer – What we keep hitting is the gap between having tools (#ActivityPub, servers, platforms) and having cultures that can use those tools effectively

You can spin up a server in an afternoon, you can’t spin up trust, shared norms, or collective process nearly as fast. This is where activist/anarchist thinking helps – not as blinded ideology, but as a toolkit:

  • how to run meetings that don’t collapse
  • how to distribute responsibility without losing coherence
  • how to handle conflict without defaulting to bans or dominance
  • how to balance openness with resilience

These are the problems that keep blocking #openweb projects. It’s about the clash: horizontal vs “common sense”. One of the biggest tensions is this is people default to vertical “common sense” – someone should be in charge, decisions should be quick, authority should be clear. And in moments of stress, that instinct feels right, but over time, it reproduces the same power structures we’re supposedly trying to move beyond.

So we get a cycle of start horizontal, hit friction, fall back to informal hierarchy, burn out or fragment then repeat. Balancing this cycle requires conscious practice, not just good intentions. For #OMN, this isn’t theory, it’s practical. If we want a functioning, grassroots media network:

  • we need working horizontal processes
  • we need ways to mediate conflict and #blocking
  • we need to actively compost dysfunction instead of ignoring it
  • we need to balance “fluffy” inclusion with “spiky” clarity and direction

Otherwise, the social layer collapses long before the tech does. And then the #dotcons win by default, not because they’re better, but because they’re simpler in the short term.

The real opportunity here is to combine #KISS activist micro-practice (how people actually work together) with #openweb technology (how systems interconnect at scale). That combination is rare, and powerful. It gives us a path that is:

  • grounded (not abstract)
  • scalable (but not centralised)
  • resilient (because it expects mess)
  • and actually usable by normal people, not just #geekproblem specialists

This path isn’t useful because it promises a perfect future, it’s useful because it takes responsibility for the present. It asks – how do we make this work, here, now, with these people, in this mess? That’s the question the #openweb needs to answer, and if we don’t answer it, the answer we’ll get is more of the same, more #closedweb, more #dotcons, more #deathcult normality.

If we do answer it – even imperfectly – we start to build something else, something that grows not by control, but by practice.

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#techchurn is the endless cycle of adopting new platforms, tools, and technologies – not because they solve any real problems, but because novelty is mistaken for progress. It burns community trust, institutional memory, and activist energy, while leaving the underlying #nastyfew power structures untouched.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=techchurn

The #OMN uses #stupidindividualism to describe the culturally manufactured habit of prioritising personal gain and self-interest over collective well-being – a behaviour normalised by forty years of #neoliberalism, where people work against their own community and ecological survival while believing they are exercising “freedom”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=stupidindividualism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #spiky is the confrontational, direct, and uncompromising tendency within radical movements – the willingness to push back against power, name uncomfortable truths, and refuse to sand down political edges for mainstream comfort.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=spiky

#RSS is the unglamorous but democratic backbone of the #openweb – a simple, open standard that allows content to flow without the gatekeeping, algorithmic manipulation, and the data hoarding of the #dotcons.

#reboot is the necessary reset of the #openweb – stepping away from the dead ends of #techshit and #dotcons to rebuild human-centred, trust infrastructure using tools like #activitypub and the #fediverse, guided by the #4opens.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=reboot

#postmodernism is the cultural current that dissolved shared truth into competing narratives, undermines the foundations needed for collective action – leaving people fragmented, cynical, and unable to build solidarity.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=postmodern

In the #OMN hashtag story, #Oxford is a grounded example of real-world contradiction – where elitist power (#mainstreaming, #NGO, #deathcult) coexists with genuine grassroots community, making it a test bed for grassroots #openweb organising and the #4opens path.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Oxford

In the #OMN hashtag story, #PGA (Peoples’ Global Action) represents horizontal, grassroots, anti-capitalist organising – a prefiguration of the #openweb, built on direct action and solidarity rather than #NGO bureaucracy or #mainstreaming compromise.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=PGA

In the #OMN path, #p2p means people-to-people before peer-to-peer – real human relationships and trust as the foundation that decentralised tech should serve, not replace.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=p2p

In the #OMN view, #opensource is not just a licence – it’s a political commitment to transparency, shared ownership, and community control over code, data, and process.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opensource

The #openweb is internet infrastructure built on open standards, open-source code, and community control – where users share power – as opposed to the #dotcons, with the #closedweb which enclose and monetise the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openweb

#openprocess means decisions and governance happen visibly and participatorily – not behind closed doors, so people can see, challenge, and shape outcomes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=openprocess

#opendata means data that is freely accessible and shareable – controlled by communities rather than locked inside corporate silos.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=opendata

In the #OMN path, #open means building on the #4opens – open code, data, standards, and process as a foundation for technology that serves people, not profit.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=open

#OMN (Open Media Network) is a grassroots project to build human-centred, trust-based digital infrastructure on the #openweb, grounded in the #4opens and focused on community control over technology.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OMN

The #OGB (Open Governance Body) is a framework for transparent, inclusive decision-making – replacing hidden power structures with accountable, federated, messy collective governance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=OGB

In the #OMN story, #nothingnew reminds us that cycles of co-option and failure have all happened before – and ignoring this history is how we repeat mistakes.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=nothingnew

In the #OMN story, #NGO refers to professionalised activism that defuses radical politics – replacing grassroots power with managed, funder-friendly “dissent”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=NGO

In the #OMN path, #neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of markets over people – normalising greed and eroding solidarity into the logic of the #deathcult.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=neoliberalism

#makinghistory is the practice of communities reclaiming storytelling – building open, living archives rather than leaving history to those in power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=makeinghistory

In #OMN usage, #mainstreaming is how radical ideas get absorbed and neutralised – keeping the language while stripping out real challenge.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=mainstreaming

In the #OMN path, #KISS (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a political stance against the #geekproblem – rejecting unnecessary complexity as a form of control.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=KISS

#indymediaback is a call to rebuild grassroots, community-controlled media as an alternative to both #dotcons and hollow #NGO media structures.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=indymediaback

In the #OMN path, a hashtag is not just a label – it’s a node in a shared political vocabulary, building a map of meaning and direction.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=hashtag

#grassroots means bottom-up organising rooted in real communities – accountable to collective need, not institutions.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=grassroots

The #geekproblem is the tendency to replace human trust with technical control – embedding narrow values into systems that shape everyone’s lives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=geekproblem

In #OMN, #FOSS is a political commitment to collective ownership of technology – not just a licensing model.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=FOSS

In #OMN language, #fluffy describes feel-good politics that avoid conflict – prioritising comfort over any real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fluffy

#feudalism describes the emerging digital structure where platform owners extract value like lords from dependent users.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=feudalism

#fascism is what happens when the #deathcult drops its mask – authoritarian control to defend failing systems.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fascism

On the #OMN path, the #fediverse is practical #openweb infrastructure – decentralised, federated, and not owned by corporations.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fediverse

#encryptionist describes the tendency to prioritise technical security over social trust – a core expression of the #geekproblem.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=Encryptionist

#dotcons are corporate platforms built on data extraction and control, presenting themselves as neutral while enclosing the commons.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN story, #DIY means reclaiming the ability to build and organise outside institutional control – grounding politics in practice.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism – sacrificing social and ecological survival for short-term fear drivern greed.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN story, #compost means breaking down failure and mess into fuel for new growth.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN, #closedweb is controlled, extractive digital infrastructure where users have no power.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

#climatechaos describes the accelerating breakdown driven by the #deathcult, beyond manageable “climate change.”
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing conflict between the #nastyfew and the communities they exploit – often hidden by #mainstreaming narratives.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the dominant system turning everything – relationships, nature, culture – into “profit”.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In #OMN, #block is the reflex to shut down challenge – preventing the messy work needed for real change.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded is being unable or unwilling to see beyond #mainstreaming and #dotcons logic.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes performative activism that prioritises appearance over substance.
https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

#dotcons are the corporate platforms – Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube and their kin – whose business model is built on harvesting user data, manufacturing engagement, and converting human attention and community into profit, while presenting themselves as neutral public spaces.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=dotcon

In the #OMN hashtag story, #DIY means reclaiming the practical capacity to build, organise, and maintain tools and communities outside of corporate and state control – not as a lifestyle choice, but as a political act of grounding radical change in real skills, real trust, and real human relationships rather than outsourcing power to institutions that don’t serve you.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=DIY

The #deathcult is the #OMN metaphor for the self-destructive logic of forty years of #neoliberalism – an ideology so committed to short-term profit, individualism, and economic growth that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations that human life depends on.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=deathcult

In the #OMN hashtag story, #compost means taking the failures, mistakes, and accumulated mess of past movements and tech projects – rather than discarding or ignoring them – and breaking them down into something that can feed new growth, treating dysfunction and #blocking dead ends as raw material for building better rather than as waste to be hidden.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=compost

In #OMN language, #closedweb refers to the controlled digital infrastructure – platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter – built on proprietary code, extractive business models, and centralised power, where people have no meaningful control over their data, their communities, or the rules that govern them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=closed

The #deathcult of #neoliberalism has driven us past the point where “climate change” – with its implication of manageable, orderly shifts – remains any honest description of what we face now. What we actually have is #climatechaos: cascading, systemic breakdown of the ecosystems, weather patterns, and social structures that human civilisation depends on, accelerating faster than institutions built on forty years of market logic are capable of, or willing to, address.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=climate

#classwar is the ongoing and unacknowledged conflict between those who benefit from and actively reproduce the #deathcult of #neoliberalism – the #nastyfew, managing, and credentialed classes – and the communities, workers, and ecosystems they exploit. A conflict that #mainstreaming culture works to render invisible, reframing systemic dispossession as individual failure.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=classwar

#capitalism is the current common sense – the water we swim in – the economic system that systematically converts collective goods, human relationships, and the natural world into private profit, enforcing this logic through every institution and platform we touch, while presenting itself as the only possible reality.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=capitalism

In the #OMN hashtag story, #block refers to the reflexive, unconscious tendency of individuals and communities to shut down unfamiliar and challenging ideas, people, and processes – a defensive gesture rooted in #stupidindividualism and #postmodernism that prevents the trust-building and messy collective work needed for real #openweb organising.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=block

#blinded refers to being so captured by #mainstreaming tech orthodoxy and ideological “common sense” – particularly #neoliberalism and #dotcons culture – that you no longer see, or refuse to see, the harms those systems cause or any alternative paths that exist outside them.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=blinded

#fashernista describes a person in progressive or radical spaces who prioritises the appearance and aesthetic of activism – the right look, language, and social positioning – over the unglamorous, difficult work of actually building lasting structural change.

https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=fashionistas

If you want, the next step is to cluster these into a clean “chapter flow” (roots → mess → behaviours → solutions) so this stops being just a glossary and becomes a narrative tool.

These are the foundation tags – the ones everything else grows out of – the overall project: grassroots, trust-based, human-centred media infrastructure

#openweb – the political/technical terrain we’re trying to reclam

#4opens – the non-negotiable baseline (open code, data, standards, process)\openprocess – visible, participatory decision-making as default

#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

This cluster is about legitimacy, if it’s not grounded in these, it drifts into #NGO capture or #dotcons logic quickly. This is the “native soil” everything else either grows from or gets rejected by.

The Problem Space (what we’re composting), these tags describe the mess we’re in – the stuff we don’t ignore, but break down.

#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

#dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

#closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

#classwar – underlying structural conflict

This is the compost heap, you don’t fix this directly, you don’t “win” against it head-on. You break it down, reuse what’s useful, and grow alternatives around and through it.

The #geekproblem Layer (tech distortions) is where things go wrong in implementation.

#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

This cluster is why good ideas fail, not because the ideas are wrong, but because the tools and culture get shaped by people who don’t understand social process. This is where most #openweb projects die.

Cultural/Behavioural Patterns (how people act). The human layer – messy, unavoidable, and central.

#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

#block – reflex rejection of challenge

#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

This is the real battlefield, not tech, not policy – behaviour. If you don’t mediate this layer, everything collapses back into dysfunction, no matter how good your structure is.

The Alternative Infrastructure (what we build), are the actual tools and practices that make change possible.

#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

#activitypub – the protocol glue

#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

#p2p – people-to-people first, tech second

#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

These only work if rooted in the first cluster, otherwise they get captured and turned into another layer of the #closedweb.

Governance & Process (how we hold it together). Where most projects fail – or succeed.

#OGB – structured, open governance

#openprocess – again, because it’s that important

#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

Without this, informal power takes over. You end up with hidden hierarchies, gatekeeping, and eventual burnout. With it, you get messy but functional collective control.

Practice & Direction (how we move).

#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

This cluster stops you repeating mistakes, without it, every new wave thinks it’s inventing something new and walks straight into the same traps.

Grounding Example Layer

#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

Without grounding, this all drifts into theory, these are example tags anchoring it in lived practice, where things break, and where they can actually work.

The Meta Layer (how to use this)

#compost – break down failure into growth

This is the key to the whole thing – Don’t try to “fix” the mess. Don’t try to “win” cleanly, you compost:

bad behaviour → learning

failed projects → patterns

conflict → structure

Final point (this matters) is the mistake people make is trying to tidy this into a neat theory, reduce it to messaging, turn it into a fixed ideology. That kills it, this clustering is not about control – it’s about navigation.

The mess stays messy, but now people can walk through it without getting lost.If you don’t cluster this stuff, it turns into a wall of noise. The mess is useful.

People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea – people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively – is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible.

So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of the time, it’s the people – and, more importantly, the tools and cultures we bring with us. The path we need is simplicity underneath – #Oxfordboaters is doing three things:

  • Sharing information about what’s happening
  • Building a shared understanding of that information
  • Acting together based on that understanding

That’s it, strip away the noise, and that’s the whole system. It’s classic #actavisam: publish, discuss, act. You don’t need layers of management theory or complex governance frameworks to make that work. You need #KISS trust, visibility, and participation.

But we rarely get to operate at this level of clarity, the difficulty creeps in as people bring baggage – Everyone arrives with habits shaped by the #mainstreaming worshipping of the #deathcult that leads to the imposing of unthinking expectation of hierarchy (“who’s in charge?”) and fear of speaking openly (“will this be used against me?”) leading to the desire for control (“we need to manage the message”) this “common sense” mess leads to focus on avoidance of conflict (“let’s keep it positive and not rock the boat”).

    These aren’t individual personal failings, they’re social learned behaviours, that distort simple processes into complicated ones. This mess is amplified by a second “common sense” problem, that the tools we use shape behaviour, the #dotcons platforms we “use” default push us in particular mess making directions:

      • Chat tools fragment conversations into noise
      • Social media rewards reaction over reflection

      Instead of supporting collective clarity, these default tools amplify confusion, they make it harder to see what’s actually going on, and thus easier for misunderstandings to spiral. One tool we have is process but is it a tool or weapon? Process can either help people work together, or it can be used to block this work. Some processes are designed to:

      • Encourage participation
      • Make decisions visible
      • Build shared ownership

      Others – often unintentionally – end up:

      • Slowing everything down
      • Creating gatekeepers
      • Hiding power behind “procedure”

      You can see this easily when something urgent comes up – healthy process helps people respond quickly and collectively, were a broken one turns into endless discussion, deferral, and inaction. Same situation, same people – different outcome depending on the process.

      At #Oxfordboaters, the work itself is straightforward: There’s an issue affecting the river community – People gather information about it – That information is shared – A response is organised. But what makes it hard? People are different – Disagreements about tone (fluffy vs spiky), uncertainty about who should act and fragmented communication across platforms leading to #blocking of action.

      None of these are about the actual goal, they’re all about how people relate to each other and the structures they’re working within. The illusion of complexity is one of the biggest traps – mistaking this friction for complexity. When something feels hard, we assume the solution is to add more structure, more meetings, more rules, more #dotcons tools. But this “common sense” push to often adds another layer of blockage, it treats the symptoms, not the cause.

      The reality is harsher the system is simple, but we as a community are messy. So how can we work better in this mess? The answer isn’t to eliminate the mess – that’s impossible. It’s to design processes that work with it instead of work against it. That means accepting disagreement as normal, making conflict visible rather than suppressing it. Keeping structures lightweight and adaptable, in the end it’s about prioritising clarity over control. In #OMN terms, this is where the #4opens come in:

      Open data → everyone can see what’s happening

      Open process → decisions aren’t hidden

      Open source → tools can be adapted

      Open standards → systems interconnect

      These don’t remove human complexity, but they can mediate it from becoming opaque and blocking. So what do we mean by blocking vs enabling. You can tell the health of a project by a simple test – Does the process help people act, or stop them from acting? If people feel empowered to contribute → the process is working. Hesitant, confused, or sidelined → the process is blocking.

      At #Oxfordboaters, like many grassroots efforts, both dynamics exist at the same time. That’s normal. The work is to shift the balance toward enabling. So the hard truth is this the challenge isn’t building the perfect system, it’s growing the relationships that allow the #4opens path to function. That’s slower, messier, and far less comfortable than designing a neat process diagram, but it’s the only thing that actually works.

      Keep it simple (#KISS) – when things get messy, the instinct is to add complexity. The better move is usually the opposite by striping things back to focus on what actually needs to happen. Make it easier for people to take part, because underneath all the noise, the work is still simple. People, talking to each other, deciding to act. Everything else is either helping that – or getting in the way.

      What happened over the last ten years on our Fediverse path

      The first steps were good. #Socialhub emerged as a genuinely grassroots space, shaped to maintain the integrity of the #activertypub native reboot. It grew directly out of the #activertypub affinity group itself – rooted in lived practice rather than imposed structure.

      So what motivated this native path? The current #openweb reboot wasn’t exactly planned – it was, in many ways, serendipitous. During the #WC3 process, the usual mainstream players were largely absent. That gap created space for an alternative cohort to step in and shape things in a more “native” way, this is rare. Normally, these processes are dominated by institutional and corporate interests, but for a moment, we had something different – and it worked.

      From that strong beginning, #Socialhub grew into a real, functioning community, its high point was during the Fediverse outreach to the EU, when there was a sense of shared purpose and direction. The social and technical sides were in balance, and the space felt alive, open, and productive, but over time, things shifted.

      The rapid growth of the Fediverse brought in many people without any grounding in “native” #openweb culture. The influx – particularly from Twitter – changed the tone and priorities. This wasn’t entirely negative; growth always brings energy and diversity. But it also brought confusion, and a drift away from the original focus that worked.

      At the same time, there was a strong and increasingly dogmatic shift toward the technical side of #activertypub, at the expense of the social layer that made it meaningful. The balance tipped, the core crew thinned out, and newer, more tech-focused contributors filled the space. This mirrored the rebooting of the #WC3 process, and the two together created a difficult, often unspoken tension over direction and responsibility. Governance also became an issue, the line:

      “To use the forum, you must agree to these terms with Petites Singularités, the company that runs the forum.”

      Made visible something that had been quietly present for a while: this was not, in practice, a community-owned space. It had an owner, with an agenda. What had been presented as a shared, grassroots commons was, structurally, something else? This marks a deeper shift – from serendipitous emergence to more deliberate control.

      A short update: how we are failing

      We didn’t fail because of bad intent. We fail because we didn’t hold onto the balance that made the space work.

      • We allowed the social layer to be sidelined by the technical.
      • We didn’t build clear, native governance while we still had the chance.
      • We mistook growth for success, without mediating the cultural shift it brought.
      • We let ownership and control consolidate quietly, instead of addressing it openly.
      • And when tensions emerged, we defaulted to avoidance and #BLOCKING, rather than doing the messy work of resolution.

      In short, we lost the thread of the #openweb path by not actively maintaining it.

      Where that leaves us now? We are now in a more complex, more conflicted space, the community is bigger, but less coherent. The vision is more diluted, but still present, if we choose to pick it up again.

      The solution isn’t simple. It likely involves some form of real, lived democracy, and a return to explicitly valuing the social processes alongside the technical ones. And maybe the only solid ground we still have is this: Grassroots is always messy, that mess isn’t a flaw – it’s how you know it’s real. The challenge is not to remove the mess, but to hold it together well enough that it can still grow.

      The value of the #Fediverse comes from its cultural roots in the #openweb
      The Digital Commons: The Ground We Already Stand On

      Gates vs Bridges: the obscure politics of the #geekproblem

      In the #geekproblem mindset, crossing a protocol flow is a gateway were in #openweb terms, it’s a bridge. That difference is not technical – it’s social – the difference between CONTROL and TRUST. A gate is something you lock, permission, authentication, enforcement were a bridge is something you cross, connection, flow, relationship. In the physical world, we don’t put gates on bridges as a default, but in software, we keep rebuilding them, and then wondering why things fragment.

      • RSS is a bridge.
      • Closed APIs are gates.

      This should be obvious, but it keeps getting lost inside coding culture.

      This isn’t just a #mainstreaming problem, if this critique only applied to Big Tech (#dotcons), it would be easy, but it doesn’t. From 30 years of building in alt-tech spaces – hundreds of projects, no bosses, no corporate control – the same pattern keeps reappearing. Control creeps in, what’s striking is that this cuts across both mainstreaming “professional” engineering culture and radical, horizontal, “alternative” tech spaces. That’s why it’s an overarching #geekproblem, the shared cultural bias toward CONTROL in both code and community design.

      The deeper issue is social blindness, at the root of this is something uncomfortable – A lack of joined-up social thinking – when a relatively small technical minority designs systems based on limited social experience, abstract models of human behaviour and little grounding in historical or grassroots movements.

      When these systems scale globally, the result is tools fail to support humane, collective use, and undermine trust instead of building it, they reproduce the same power dynamics they claim to escape. This feeds the wider #dotcons worldview – even when the intent is “alternative”. It’s not just “the spirit of the age” it’s a worldview of a narrow culture that has become infrastructural. We’re all, to some extent, still operating inside this #deathcult logic, even when we think we’re critiquing it.

      So a good first step is looking at who is funding the problem, this is where foundations and FOSS funding bodies need to look closely. A lot of funding unintentionally reinforces gate-based architectures, complexity that centralises control and abstract innovation over lived social practice. We keep funding new gates, then asking why the #openweb doesn’t grow. It #KISS that if people cannot mentally model a system, they cannot govern it, if they cannot govern it, power centralises every time.

      A different path is bridges and flows. Projects like #OMN and #indymediaback take this different approach of start with flows, not platforms, building bridges, not gateways. The focus is on keeping systems simple enough to understand (#KISS) to grow trust as social and visible, not hidden in code. Using the #4opens as grounding, not branding, we understand none of this is new, that’s the value of #nothingnew. As I keep pointing out it’s how RSS worked, early Indymedia worked and large parts of the existing Fediverse still work (when not over-engineered).

      On #blocking and conflict – Yes, it’s sometimes necessary, but often it’s a symptom of deeper failure of rigid, internalised worldviews, lack of shared mediation tools and systems designed for exclusion rather than negotiation. It’s easy to block, it’s much harder to build bridges, so the real question is how do we design systems that reduce pointless conflict without exhausting the people inside them? Food for thought (and compost).

      We’re all carrying some of this mess, it’s fine – it’s compost. But if we don’t consciously shift from gates to bridges, we’ll keep rebuilding the same broken systems, just with nicer branding. As bridges scale trust – Gates scale control, to mediate this mess, the hard question we need to ask the #mainstreaming is which one are they funding?

      #openweb #4opens #OMN