Tag: climatecatastrophe

Composting the Mess to Make Room to Plant

In the swirling chaos of the digital landscape, it’s easy to feel lost. The #Fediverse, should be a beacon of hope for a decentralized, community-driven internet, but as always is facing an onslaught of push back and pressures from every direction. The #dotcons loom large, #NGO agendas quietly co-opt grassroots energy, and the #encryptionists lash out with SPAM money to drown out critique. It’s messy, but mess is where compost comes from, and compost is where new life grows.

Pick up a shovel, start composting, it’s time to stop waiting for permission. Don’t ask, just do it, start composting the wreckage of the current paths. Plant seeds of your own lived life and nurture the social gardens with your care. Build spaces where people connect, share, and create outside the control of the #dotcons corporate platforms and the clumsy grasp of the old traditional top down institutions.

So, where is the positive in this mess? I’d look to the healthy fragments of the #openweb path that still exists. Projects that embody the offer the seeds of something better. But these projects won’t survive on hope alone. They need care, attention, and participation. Use them or lose them. If we don’t actively engage, they’ll wither, and the digital paths will continue its slide into centralized control and the new #mainstreaming creeping authoritarianism.

The #ecryptionists, clinging to their fantasies of rugged individualism, would have you believe that the solution lies in isolation, in bunkers, in hoards of digital currency, in cutting ties with the social fabric. But survival, whether against digital authoritarianism or the unfolding #climatecatastrophe, will come from cooperation and collective resilience, not isolation. Even in the face of disaster, thriving requires community.

Beyond the ingroup, we can’t rebuild the #openweb if we only talk to ourselves. The term “Fediverse” is a great example of this, it makes sense to those inside the space but means little to those outside it. #Openweb is a better, more intuitive term. It’s positive, clear, and easy to contrast against the negative: the #closedweb of the #dotcons. Mastodon is a project of the openweb; Facebook is a closedweb project. Simple, direct, and powerful framing that cuts through the noise.

With the hard shift to the right, we’re standing on a knife’s edge. #Climatechange, economic instability, and accelerating automation are pushing us toward a future of disruption. But disruption doesn’t have to mean collapse, it can mean transformation. The work we do now to build and maintain #openweb projects lays the foundation for the communities that weather the coming storms.

The Fediverse, for all its narrow flaws, shows that alternatives are possible. The challenge now is to grow beyond this first step. To dig deeper, plant wider, and build an ecosystem that can sustain itself long term. We need to constantly think outside the ingroup, to bridge divides, and to invite people in. It’s hard work. But so is everything worth doing. And if we get it right, we just might cultivate a future where common humanity, not capital, shapes the digital world.

Grab a shovel. Let’s get to work.

#OMN #DIY #Openweb #Reboot

Rediscovering the Open Web: Why We Need Joined-Up Thinking with

The internet wasn’t always like this. Before the rise of #dotcons, we had a flourishing landscape of community-driven sites and platforms, built on openness, collaboration, and trust. Yet today, much of what we do online is controlled by #dotcons, closed, profit-driven systems designed to capture and commodify every interaction. It doesn’t have to be this way — but to break free, we need to think and act differently.

The offer a practical path back to the #openweb. They guide us towards building space that is open in source, data, process, and standards. This isn’t just tech jargon; it’s about creating online spaces that work for people rather than exploiting them.

The trap of piecemeal solutions, too often, attempts to rebuild the #openweb get stuck in the #fashernista trap: chasing trendy but fragmented fixes that fail to address the root problems. A federated app here, a new protocol there, while each piece might be valuable, without joined-up thinking, they scatter energy and slow momentum. We need to step back, see the bigger picture, and work together to build a truly interconnected path.

We don’t need permission to start. The tools, ideas, and history are already here. Current platforms like Mastodon and initiatives like the #OMN (Open Media Network) show what’s possible. But it takes more than just using the tools, it takes sharing the vision. If you’re reading this, consider it a nudge: start conversations, share resources, and bring people onto the path. Dig into the posts at hamishcampbell.com for more background, and share the posts widely. Every shared link, every discussion, and every new node in the network helps.

Basic activism in the digital age is about reclaiming the internet to refuse to accept the current mess as inevitable and to actively choose better paths. By advocating for the , supporting decentralized platforms, and consciously stepping away from the #dotcons, we become a small part of the solution. The future web can be cooperative, empowering, and deeply human, but only if we build it that way. So grab a metaphorical shovel, help compost the tech junk, and start planting the seeds of something better.

The #openweb is waiting.

Oscar Wilde was a Radical Socialist

Oscar Wilde wrote uncompromisingly of his radical desire for the complete and total abolition of private property – a precondition, he believed, for the emancipation of all humanity.

But how did Oscar Wilde arrive at such a radical socialist position? Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and raised in the affluent Merrion Square area. His family were part of the Anglo-Irish intellectual tradition. His father, William Wilde, was an influential surgeon, and his mother, Jane Wilde, was a well-known poet.

Yes, it might seem surprising that someone from such privilege would come to embrace left politics. Yet, his upbringing planted the seeds of revolutionary thought. Jane Wilde, writing under the pen name “Speranza,” was a radical poet and political agitator. Against the backdrop of the Great Famine in 1848, Jane Wilde explicitly called for revolutionary armed struggle to liberate Ireland from British imperialism. Writing in The Nation, she urged:

"Now is the moment to strike, and by striking save, and the day after the victory it will be time enough to count our dead."

Jane Wilde defended the Fenians, precursors to socialist movements, and aligned with the First International’s principles of workers’ liberation and solidarity. She was deeply committed to the emancipation of Ireland, labour, and women. Her legacy echoes in Irish revolutionary thought. Marxist republican James Connolly referenced her work in Labour in Irish History, tracing Ireland’s socialist tradition. With such a powerful figure as his mother, it becomes clearer how Oscar Wilde came to develop his radical politics.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, by 1891, Wilde had articulated his vision of a perfect society in this essay, he calls explicitly for the abolition of private property, declaring:

"Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community."

For Wilde, socialism was not merely about collective ownership. He envisioned it as a pathway to true Individualism:

"Private property has crushed true Individualism... With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things... One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

Unlike collectivist motivations typically associated with socialism, Wilde’s advocacy centred on freeing individuals, particularly artists, from the constraints of capitalist society. Art, for Wilde, was the highest form of Individualism:

"Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known."

Rather than being driven by material accumulation, Wilde’s socialism sought to liberate humanity’s creative potential.

Wilde rejected authoritarian paths in socialism. He argued that “all modes of government are failures” and envisioned a state with limited functions:

"[But] as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful."

He saw a future where automation and machinery would free humanity from menial labour:

"Were that machinery the property of all, everyone would benefit by it. Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure... Machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work."

This aligns with Wilde’s ideal of socialism enabling human flourishing – artists creating beauty, thinkers advancing knowledge, and people simply enjoying life. Some might dismiss Wilde’s vision as utopian. He embraces the label, writing:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing... Progress is the realisation of Utopias."

However, Wilde’s utopianism reveals a crucial limitation. He focuses on imagining an ideal society while remaining unconcerned with how to achieve it. Unlike Marxist socialism, which analyses class contradictions to determine the material conditions for revolution, Wilde’s approach reflects a more idealistic notion that great thinkers impose their visions on society.

This is evident in his understanding of historical movements. For instance, Wilde claimed:

"Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves... It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere."

This overlooks the agency of enslaved people, who resisted and rebelled in uprisings like the Stono Rebellion and Nat Turner’s revolt. Wilde’s perspective is rooted in the belief that oppressed classes require external agitators to awaken them to their suffering.

"Misery and poverty... exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people."

This view contrasts sharply with Marx’s materialist conception of history, where the working class is the primary agent of its liberation.

Oscar Wilde died young in 1900 at just 46 years old. His radical ideas remain strikingly relevant today. Many of his critiques of capitalism – its reduction of human life to accumulation and profit – resonate deeply in the face of contemporary crises. Wilde’s utopian socialism challenges us to imagine a better world, but the task before us is far more urgent. With #climatecatastrophe looming, the choices before humanity are stark: socialism or extinction.

The time for dreaming is over. To honour Wilde’s vision, we need to confront the contradictions of capitalism for a progressive future. It is a struggle that, if alive today, Oscar would undoubtedly support this path.