Economics (neoliberal edition): “Humans only value things that can be measured in money.”
Sociology: “Uh… I don’t. Most people don’t. Parents raising kids, communities helping each other during disasters, activists building mutual aid networks – none of that is monetized, but it’s clearly valuable.”
Economics: “Rational agents always act in self-interest, maximizing utility through a calculated internal decision-making process.”
Psychology: “That’s… not even close. People are emotional, irrational, communal. Ever heard of trauma? Or love? Or collective identity? Most behaviour doesn’t follow game-theory dogma.”
Economics: “Ah, but the market is the ultimate form of truth. If it’s not priced, it doesn’t matter. Let us privatize clean air, forests, and even your health! Innovation!”
Ecology: “Excuse me? You’re externalizing planetary collapse for profit. See, mass extinction, soil depletion, collapsing fish stocks, #climatechaos.”
Economics: “But don’t worry, my models predict endless exponential growth! Just look at the #GDP!”
Physics: drops teacup “Growth forever? On a finite planet? That’s thermodynamically impossible. Energy in, energy out. You can’t eat quarterly profits.”
History: “And every time someone builds a system based on endless extraction and inequality – slavery, colonialism, neoliberalism – it ends in crisis, collapse, or revolution.”
Anthropology: “Plenty of human societies existed without money. Value can be social, symbolic, spiritual. You just forgot 99% of human history.”
Ethics: “You’re optimizing for profit while ignoring justice. People die because they can’t afford insulin. Billionaires hoard while others starve. This is monstrous.”
Economics (sweating): “But the stock market is doing great!”
Reality: leans in, calmly “Your model is broken. Time to compost it.”
The opening moment of the workshop on Methodological Strategies for Real-Life Theorising was unintentionally profound. A story of a seagull crieing above the glass façade of the Blavatnik School of Government – a building that stands as a temple to the #deathcult that shaped our lives for the last 40 years of #neoliberal change. In hindsight, that seagull metaphor may have been the wisest participant at the event.
The sessions that followed offered a painful reminder of just how entrenched and constipated academic political theory can be. Many of the speakers, well-meaning, no doubt, spoke in dense, self-referential language, seemingly unaware (or uninterested) in the world burning outside. We are living through accelerating #climatechaos, surging right-wing extremism, and widespread social fragmentation. Yet here, the main concern is career-building through opaque frameworks and method fetishism. One can’t help but wonder how many in the room truly believe they are doing good?
The crisis is deeper than any single workshop. The very career paths that brought these scholars here have been shaped, filtered, and “concreted” by 30 years of neoliberal funding models. The result is a form of political theorising that appears to want to find a way out, but only by squeezing itself through the tightest gaps in the #postmodern mess. And even then, only while clutching tightly to the privileges and assumptions granted by the current paths.
Constipated Language, Abstract Struggles
Throughout the first sessions, there was a recurring sense of people talking to themselves. Even the attempts to make theory “concrete” – to move into empirical territory – felt more like power grabs than inquiry. There was talk of “transient theory,” of “mid-level normative frameworks,” of “ethnographic insights”, but very little clarity on what any of this meant in real practical or political terms.
Instead of confronting the deeply ideological assumptions embedded in liberal academia, the speakers soft-stepped around them. One could sense them trying to smuggle ideology back into a discipline that’s been left hollow. The “heroic era of theory” is dead, and what we’re left with is a ritual performance of relevance. At one point, the liberal impulse to block discomforting inputs in public policy was laid bare. This is ethics as insulation, not action. There was repeated deference to “existing norms and frameworks,” – the very architecture of the #deathcult, now warmed up and served again as policy advice.
The Seagull Still Watches
By the end of the day, some fresh air drifted in. A few scraps of cloth were handed out to the otherwise naked theorists. There was genuine engagement with normative complexity. Questions like “what is mutable?” began to shift the conversation. “Engaged political philosophy” and talk of “normative judgments” began to inch the discussion closer to the ground.
The presentation on restitution, for instance, highlighted real political dilemmas. Who decides what gets returned, and why? Is it justice, diplomacy, or geo-political calculation? One question noted that giving back looted objects is not just about ethics, it’s about giving back the values they represent. But this was quickly hedged with talk of “choice.” Liberal hedging again. No one wanted to say: yes, do it, without compromise.
Even here, markets remained the baseline. The dominant “common sense” is still economic flow. Value is defined by trade, not meaning. Discrimination itself can to easily be reframed as a market distortion, another cost to be corrected, not a systemic condition to be fought. The anti-market perspective, grounded in actual social justice, in living memory, in reparative truth, is invisible to meany people until it becomes a threat. At that point, the strategy shifts to distraction and buying off. That’s the logic of #neoliberal containment.
From Political Theory to Political Theater
What we witnessed was not just a methodological workshop, but a staged performance of institutional survival. Theories were dressed up, displayed, but never walked out into the street. Real political agency remained absent. The political philosopher, once imagined as a public actor, now hides behind peer-reviewed paywalls, while the world asks different questions entirely.
Still, by the end, perhaps there were reasons for the seagull to hold off its stone throwing – for a while. A few voices showed signs of life. A few questions struck true. But it will take more than scraps of normative cloth to cover the nakedness of political philosophy today.
The event: Many political philosophers theorise not only for the sake of pure theory, but also because they want to convince citizens and policymakers to bring about changes in the real world.
Such policy-oriented research often draws on interdisciplinary methods, integrating empirical insights and normative and conceptual arguments. This, however, raises methodological challenges of its own. For example, how to deal with the fact that the social sciences are fragmented and different disciplines work with different paradigms and methodologies? How can philosophers, who bring their own normative assumptions openly to the table, deal with the – sometimes implicit – normativity that is also inherent in many other lines of research? What level of abstraction of normative arguments, eg basic normative theories or mid-level overlapping principles, should philosophers draw on when discussing with policymakers? And how to deal with the fact that in the current political climate in many countries, distrust towards “experts” also extends to philosophers? Workshop agenda
Day 1: Thursday 24 April 2025
Methodological Strategies for real-life theorising
Chair: Jonathan Wolff, Blavatinik School of Government
Liron Lavi, Bar-Ilan University and Nahshon Perez, Bar-Ilan University: Conceptual Concretization in Empirically Informed Political Theory: What Makes a Concept Applicable
Carmen E Pavel, King’s College London: Mid-Level Theories of Justice and Public Policy
Kian Mintz Woo, University College, Cork: Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy
Theorising between values and cases
Chair: Daniel Halliday, University of Melbourne
Rouven Symank, Free University, Berlin: Integrating Ethnography with Political Theory in Policy-Oriented Research: Challenges and Insights from Cultural Restitution Debates
Florence Adams, University of Cambridge: Discrimination as an Object of Social Science
Erika Brandl, University of Bergen: Measuring the justice of architectural development policies:debates on temporal scopes and indicators in the Hillevåg plan
My notes on this event:
The seagull is perhaps a good metaphor for nature fighting back against the last 40 years of human #deathcult culture that this building is temple of.
The language is constipated, a growing feeling that these people are pissing funding and focus against the wall while the world burns from #climatechaos and hard right social breakdown.
I wonder how many people here think they are doing good?
The problem on this career path is that it has been shaped by #neoliberalism for the last 20 years, funding and status have both been ground through this mess, and now reflect it.
After the first session I feel they are trying to squeeze themself out of this post modernist mess. By going back to basics, but it’s so constipated it’s hard to see if there is any value in this.
Looking at them talk and answer questions, you can feel them being lost. It still feels like they are talking to themselves.
A power grab, by making theory concrete, to build empirical research. They dodge this by saying the theory is transient.
If this is a bios? They fix this by making the bios visible. They find this question hard to answer as its a root issue.
They are “soft” sneaking ideology back into the current dead Political Science and theory world they work in.
The heroic era of theory is challenged for making public policy. They argue that we should start from the existing norms and frameworks. This from the #deathcult we get wormed up #deathcult worship as policy. Mess. Of course liberal rights have priority in the end, “we must also include institutional facts”.
The seagulls at the start of this event might be the wisest one here. The rest have no cloths, and the language is so constipated that the smell is likely off putting for any real outreach that they need in the scrabbling for coverings to continue their careers.
The liberals start to talk about #blocking the inputs that make them uncomfortable. In ethical public policy making.
From a working insider view, the people doing this don’t have the skills or knowledge if we focus on philosophy and theory only.
Good question, what is given, what is mutable is very mutable. So the Liberal “common sense” is likely a strong #blocking on the path of the change we need.
“Engaged political philosophy” “normative judgments” as we go on they start to be more relevant. “where there is convergence and divergence”
The event starts naked and smelly but as it goes on the air clears at times and some scraps of cloth are provided.
Relevant information that is easily excessable,
The power in a committee is the appointment of the people sitting on the committee rather than the committee process it self. The answer to this is hesitant and bluff, and distaste to cover this.
A chair or witness roll is different in committees.
Why restitution, why now.
Liberal Justice
Reperatition is politics, not just ethical, geo politics and funding, based on former colonist will, is a tool for “ethical diplomacy”
Can any of these be seen as a reason not to do it. Don’t have an answer. Normative lessons.
When we give back objects that we value from our looting, we are giving back our values. We still chose.
My parents work is displayed in our #mainstreaming institutions, but these institutions are not interested in the objects, as they do not fit into there existing story’s and category. Subject archives will take them. But this is still shaping history.
Markets as the dominant “common sense” everything is economic flows. Value is defined by this.
Discrimination is contested with the hard shift to the right #DUI
Distortion in the market, function efficiently.
Discrimination is about greed, American greed, a moral dilemma. Liberal but not to liberal. Talk about the market path, let the market do its thing.
Markets aligned characteristics, money the logic of the #deathcult
As my work is anti market they can’t see any value, so put no resources and focus on the path in till it becomes a threat then distraction and buying off become the difficult paths.
Trump now is turning this neoliberalism around as discrimination. What is this, discrimination against nation states, rather than economics/market.
At the end the might be reasons for the seagull to hold off the stone throwing for a while.
It’s pastime more people raised their heads, the Council on Foreign Relations (#CFR), the think tank of the U.S. political establishment, just published a new statement calling for what they call “Climate Realism.”
1.5°C Is Dead – And they admit it, to their credit, CFR doesn’t sugarcoat the situation. They finally acknowledge that the international climate target of limiting warming to 1.5°C is officially dead. The new “realistic” trajectory? 3°C or higher by the end of this century, if not sooner. This isn’t just academic: 3°C means crop failures, mass displacement, geopolitical chaos, collapsing ecosystems, and runaway feedback loops. It’s climate breakdown, not “climate change.”
The #geekproblem tech fix of geoengineering is Plan A to the looming catastrophe, not degrowth, not ending fossil fuel subsidies, not climate justice or ecological transition. They want massive investment in geoengineering, particularly solar radiation management (SRM), basically spraying particles into the stratosphere to dim the sun. Yes, they’re proposing that we hack the planet to protect global capitalism. All while keeping the mess of extraction and inequality running at full speed.
They don’t say anything about system change, their “realism” is not anything to do with reducing global consumption, transitioning away from endless economic growth, or tackling the structural roots of climate collapse.
On this “common sense” #mainstreaming path we are rushing down, the is no interest in real solutions, because real solutions threaten the economic order they live in. They don’t touch on basic climate justice because justice is incompatible with on going imperial hegemony. They don’t mention degrowth because that would shake the foundations of capitalistic economics. No mention of capitalism, it’s invisible to them, because they are capitalism, thus they are #blind to this.
This is the new fascist #mainstreaming – A doctrine of U.S. climate power, the statement frames climate breakdown as a national security issue, a geopolitical weapon to be wielded by the U.S. state. Let’s be very clear, this isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about maintaining U.S. dominance in a rapidly destabilizing world.
What they do is debunk four liberal “climate fallacies”:
Global targets are achievable – Not any more.
China and the Global South are the key battlegrounds.
Climate risks are manageable – They admit this is fantasy.
Clean energy is a win-win for the U.S. – Nope. China leads. The U.S. is lagging behind.
Instead, they push a doctrine of planning for collapse with adaptation, disaster readiness, and securing “fiscal room” for emergency responses. Investing in competitive clean tech, not for domestic transition, but to outcompete China in global markets. Leading catastrophic risk mitigation, geoengineering is their “break glass in case of emergency” option. They even float the idea of using economic and military pressure to force other nations to cut emissions.
Climate deterrence is going to be the New Cold War. #CFR now sees climate as a deterrence issue, like nuclear weapons, only with carbon. That’s their vision: a future where the U.S. uses its technological and military edge to impose climate stability through force. This is climate realism in the mess making logic of empire, don’t change course, double down on control.
We are on a path straight to hell, with eyes wide open. This should come as no surprise, ofter the last 20 years of mess building, CFR’s plan is in no way surprising. It’s the logical next step for a system that can’t imagine anything beyond growth, extraction, and domination. In their world, collapse is a management problem, not a moral one.
We should be clear, this is a death march. It’s not “realism”, it’s resignation dressed up as pragmatism. And if we follow them, we’ll arrive exactly where they’re headed, hell, but orderly. We have worshipped this #deathcult for too long.
The new right’s obsession with Greenland and Canada’s north isn’t some fringe fantasy, it’s real estate logic, twisted through a lens of empire and extraction. When you zoom out and frame it through the lens of #climatechaos, it’s chillingly obvious, the Arctic is melting, and they see land, not crisis.
That AlphaGeo link paints the picture, climate-driven migration, shifting growing zones, and emerging “climate havens” aren’t theoretical, they’re data-driven land grabs in progress. And the political ambition to dominate those spaces? That’s the should now be more obvious to us all.
It’s a gold rush for the apocalypse, a final frontier for the capitalist imagination. They aren’t trying to save anything; they’re re-positioning to rule what’s left. And yes, it’s a children-who-want-to-be-kings fantasy: Trump-esque thinking where climate collapse becomes opportunity, borders become walls, and “winning” means inheriting a lifeboat while others drown.
This isn’t climate denial anymore, it’s climate opportunism. That’s why adaptation can’t just be technical, it has to be political. If we don’t shape the future, they are carving it up in plain sight.
From where I’m standing, a lot of people are being absolute prats when it comes to social and technological issues. That should be obvious… but clearly, it’s not. We’ve got two basic paths here:
#Block everything you don’t like. Predictably, this just creates more prat-ish behaviour and pushes us all deeper into toxic bubbles.
Ask questions. Grow. Listen. Respond. This reduces prat-ish behaviour – over time, maybe even composts it into something useful.
Now, in the era of #stupidindividualism, which path do you think most people are taking? Yeah. That one. If you’re blocking conversations that challenge you, you’re still kneeling at the altar of the #deathcult. Look up. You’re making a mess of social technology.
“Get off your knees” comes to mind, stop worshipping the #deathcult of neoliberalism, salted with postmodernism. These ideologies have poisoned our communities by turning freedom into isolation and choice into greed. I’m all for freedom, yes, you can choose to be a prat. But I reserve the freedom to call that behaviour toxic and self-destructive. What you do with that communication is up to you, just don’t pretend that #blocking it is some kind of moral high ground.
As Thalia Campbell rightly says, sometimes the best path is just to kindly correct, share info, or talk things through face-to-face. Most of this online prat-ness wouldn’t survive a real conversation, it’s bloated on anonymity, context collapse, and dopamine-fuelled feedback loops.
Yes, what meany people do now is a mess, but mess makes good compost, compost builds soil, soil feeds the common good. And talking about “common sense” is just a way of stirring that compost.
But here’s the mess makeing: we keep repeating the same shit, and instead of composting, we leave it to fester. Capitalism, rooted in self-interested greed, claims to serve the common good. But on the fundamentalist path we have been on for 40 years, it’s clearly failing. War. Growing economic divides. Visible #climatechaos. Poisoned ecosystems and communities.
We can’t survive, or flourish, in a society based on greed. That’s just a simple #KISS message. And neoliberalism, still much of our #mainstreming “common sense”, is nothing but extreme capitalism. It’s the purest form of the #deathcult. It’s eating us alive. Please talk about this.
The #dotcons we have been building our lives in for the last 20 years are undiluted deathcult, surveillance capitalism wrapped in shiny UX. The #openweb? Often like herding cats. And scratch the surface, and yes, sometimes you find the #deathcult there too. But we can’t keep going down this path. We need to stop pushing #mainstreaming agendas that lead us back into the same poisoned mess. That path is BAD. It’s ending in ruin.
We’ve got to try, seriously try, to make things better. Not perfect. Not flashy. Just better.
And that means less prat-ing about. More compost. More care. More common good.
The #OMN project is #DIY, it only works if we build it together. This isn’t a startup pitch. It’s not a platform that magically appears out of nowhere to fix everything. It’s not a product to consume, it’s a path you walk. The direction is participatory, not passive. You don’t get to sit back and clap… or boo from the sidelines. If you do, the system won’t collapse, but it sure as hell won’t grow.
Let’s be direct, there is no saviour coder, no NGO white knight, no perfectly designed protocol that will do the real work for us. If you’re waiting for a polished solution wrapped in a branded bow, you’re already on the wrong side of history.
And if our current (stupid)individualism keeps #blocking, even if we don’t build any of this now, the work still matters. There’s deep value in memory, the rough notes, the abandoned wikis, the half-built tools, the strange and beautiful conversations scattered across the #fediverse. These are the seeds and scraps that future builders can compost. If we can’t get our act together now, the next wave might. But only if we leave something living behind.
Right now, for me, that “something” is #makinghistory, the #OMN archiving project. It’s not just nostalgia or backup, it’s a living memory layer, a scaffolding of knowledge and intention that gives us a place to stand. Without memory, we circle the same old #techshit heap, repeating mistakes, retelling the same half-lost stories, falling into the same social and technical traps.
That’s not progress. That’s rot.
So we’re starting where we might get funding, bootstrapping the archive. It’s step one. It’s doable. And it matters. If we don’t remember soon, many of us, and the histories we’ve made, will be lost in the rising storm of #climatechaos and social fragmentation.
In the end, it’s simple, if we don’t build, we don’t change. If we don’t remember, we’ll never learn. And if we don’t act, this moment becomes compost for someone else’s future.
That’s fine, but I’d rather build that future when we need it most now. Wouldn’t you?
Ah, the cockerel crows and the full moon glows, a fine moment to scratch at the compost pile.
You’re right, most are merrily skipping through walled gardens, hashtagging selfies and feeding the #dotcons. But seeds don’t need mass attention, they just do need rich compost. That’s what we need to build. Slow, damp, a bit smelly, but fertile.
The #sheeple are not my flock, they belong to the algorithmic shepherds. We’re feeding the stray goats and curious crows.
You don’t convert people by preaching. You do it by making better paths, ones they choose when the old ones crumble. We don’t sell the #openweb like snake oil — we show it, live in it, fix it when it breaks, and compost the crap. It’s #DIY, not #DRM
As for silos and skips, good compost needs oxygen, not airtight boxes. So yeah, a messy open pile — full of half-rotten ideas, posts, drama, even the occasional troll turd.
We trust in tools not gatekeepers, the #4opens are the shovels, rakes, and sieves. The people bring the scraps, and over time, it breaks down into something usable.
No army of mods, no paywalls, simple trust, process, and a lot of patience. Think rural anarchism, not startup governance.
On scaling… Ah, the eternal #techshit question, “Does it scale?” That’s the wrong frame. Nature doesn’t scale, it sprawls.
We’re not building an empire. We’re nurturing a network. Think mycelium, not megastructure.
The #OMN isn’t about numbers. It’s about resilience and agency. If it sprouts in some cracks, the monoculture breaks. And yes, nettles welcome
The #Kolektivas, the #fashernista paradoxes, the semi-anarchic infighting, it all goes in the pile. Break it down, stir it up, give it time…
And what do you get? Fluffy, fertile humus — ready for new growth. That’s the cycle. That’s the plan.
The #mainstreaming project is visibly failing. Worse, it is set to catastrophically fail over the next 30 years as #climatechaos escalates. The signs are everywhere: environmental collapse, political instability, and the hollow nature of mainstream culture. Yet, large parts of liberal society continue to bow to the #deathcult, a path of power, greed, and control over life, community, and sustainability. The end result we can now clearly see is the rule of big, dumb, ugly men with guns, a world driven by violence and fear rather than cooperation and creativity.
But we do still have a choice, on the internet we can build and support alternative projects and paths. Instead of kneeling before the #deathcult, we could embrace a #lifecult dedicated to nurturing the #grassroots, growing resilient communities, and reclaiming our collective autonomy. This path is not easy, nor is it comfortable, but it is one of the humane outcomes we can hope for. Am not up for cults my self, but if this is what people won’t let’s make it life rather than death.
The challenge of change, is that this does not emerge from #mainstreaming circles without friction. When alternative movements gain traction, they are both rejected outright and then co-opted and diluted until they become meaningless. The #OMNhashtag story highlights this process, and pushes back the rejection, to balance the struggle, and the slow but real impact on agendas we need.
The question is whether people can engage with this, in the needed #4opens processes. The #4opens is a completely obverse “social” restating of the #FOSS development process, with a crucial addition: #openprocess. Over the last decade, much of this transparency has been lost as activist communities and developers shifted towards encrypted chat for process, locking away vital discussions from needed public discourse.
The weaponization of process, in my experience, whenever we create rigid structures, people inevitably pick them up and start hitting each other with them. This pattern has repeated over decades, killing countless effective grassroots social challenge/change projects. Nearly all of them, in fact. The result? Communities that should be working together end up tearing each other apart over minor ideological differences, procedural disagreements, or personal conflicts. This cycle of infighting and stagnation serves the interests of those in power, it ensures that no real alternative ever gains momentum.
Food for thought is how do we break this cycle? One path is rebuilding the commons, which is currently possible in the digital spaces. Yes, more evaluation than revolution. It’s not about grand theoretical debates or ideological purity, it’s about doing the work by getting involved in your communities. By gather a group together to take practical steps towards #stepaway to move to the #openweb and start rebuilding commons outside the #dotcons.
From a growing network of people and groups doing this, we might get real social change, or we might not. But at least we’ll be doing something practical, rather than simply feeding the current corporate machine.
Seeding the #OMN is a solution to a universal problem, the shit nature of both mainstream/traditional media and the #dotcons that dominate the media landscape. Our lives, economies, and governments are now totally embedded in these corporate-controlled spaces, leaving us little room to manoeuvre. The #OMN offers an alternative, but the biggest barrier is not technology, it’s people’s capture and passivity. Right now, the ONLY thing holding us back is the mass acceptance of despair. The #mainstreaming system breeds apathy. It tells us there’s no alternative, that change is impossible, that resistance is futile. But we know that’s a lie.
The question is: will we act before it’s too late?
The hidden centralization crisis in #openweb tech, and how #OMN fixes It. One of the often overlooked issue in #openweb technology is that our data remains dangerously centralized. Even in supposedly decentralized systems, vast amounts of critical information still rely on a handful of corporate-owned data centres. This fragile setup means that a single accident, political upheaval, corporate shutdown, or environmental catastrophe (#climatechaos) could wipe out entire digital histories overnight.
Despite the promise of decentralization, much of our infrastructure still depends on centralized hosting, leaving communities vulnerable to erasure. The illusion of permanence is just that, an illusion. The question isn’t if data loss will happen, but when.
The #OMN path to building a resilient web, is a radically different approach, ensuring that content remains accessible even in the face of system failures. Instead of relying on fragile, monolithic storage solutions, it embraces redundancy, simplicity, and resilience through the #4opens principles.
Here’s how #OMN keeps the web truly open and sustainable, redundant, grassroots network-stored content. Data is distributed across multiple independent nodes rather than locked into a single corporate-controlled server. This scales down to individual accounts and home hosting paths. This prevents mass erasure and ensures that no single entity controls access to vital information.
#KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) design, instead of complex, failure-prone tech, #OMN emphasizes simplicity and usability. The system is built to survive disruptions by keeping technology accessible, lightweight, and easy to replicate. No reliance on traditional backups, when a node fails (which it inevitably will), there’s no need for massive backup operations. Simply boot up a new node, input your hashtags and user info, and the network automatically reconstructs as much data as possible. This lossy-but-functional recovery method ensures continuity without unnecessary complexity.
Scalability through home hosting, the future of a resilient #openweb lies in decentralized, grassroots hosting rather than reliance on corporate servers. Home hosting allows people and communities to reclaim control, expanding the network organically without falling into the traps of commercialization.
Reboot the #OMN, follows the #4opens, the corporate web is fragile because it’s designed to serve profit, not people. The #openweb was never meant to be centralized, and yet, the forces of capitalism, surveillance, and convenience have led to its current vulnerable state. If we want a web that survives revolutions, #climatechaos, and the collapse of tech giants, we need to reboot the #openweb and commit to the #4opens:
Open Data – Data should be accessible and free from corporate control.
Open Source – Technology should be transparent and modifiable by anyone.
Open Standards – Systems should communicate and work together, not be locked into proprietary silos.
Open Process – Development should be done in public, ensuring accountability and community-driven decision-making.
The native path isn’t bigger servers or better encryption, it’s resilient, people-powered infrastructure that is based on trust, usability, and decentralization over corporate control.
Reboot the web. Build for resilience. Follow the #4opens.
This is at the heart of the contradictions and confusion in the political landscape today. The liberal and left muddle, where elements of economic populism are shared across ideological divides, is something we’ve seen before, especially in the 1930s, when fascist movements co-opted working-class grievances while pushing reactionary nationalism.
Lets looks at history #Bannon, like the Nazi Röhm long before him, plays a dangerous game by mobilizing working-class anger against neoliberal “elites” but steering it toward nationalism rather than genuine class struggle. The key difference is that Bannon, unlike the decedent Röhm, seems aware of how these power games play out, he’s studied history and applies these lessons to manipulate movements in favour of the #nastyfew being pushed into power. The economic critiques overlap with parts of the left, but his solutions (corporate nationalism, authoritarianism) are the very real danger. The question is: how do we make these distinctions clear to people trapped in the populist right-wing narratives? We need a strategy to cut through the confusion:
Recentre on Class Struggle (#KISS#classwar) by striping away the nationalist framing and refocus on economic realities: who actually benefits from policies? Who holds power? Expose how right-wing populists co-opt class anger but always serve capital in the end.
Expose the fake anti-establishment, Bannon claims to fight “globalists,” but his solution is just another form of “elite” rule, corporate fascism, not worker control. The “anti-tech bro” stance is surface-level; fascists historically seek state-corporate fusion, not any real accountability.
Build a networked radical alternative, left populism needs to be clearer, bolder, and independent of liberal NGO-driven paths and politics. We need grassroots led movements like the #OMN
Break through the media fog, #Mainstreaming and #dotcons push right-wing populism by treating it as an acceptable part of discourse rather than a threat. Use independent media (like #indymediaback) to reframe the conversation on more clear class terms.
The 21st Century Struggle is about climate, class, and collapse. This isn’t just about fighting fascism, it’s about surviving #climatechaos and social collapse. The solutions that emerge now will shape the next century. If we allow the right to set the terms, we end up in corporate #feudalism. If we organize and push a real alternative, there’s still a chance to shift to something better.
How do we sharpen this message so it cuts through the noise? What channels do you see as effective? We need working change and challenge #KISS
A. It sounds like you’ve got a detailed plan — good luck in your work!
Q. As I outline in my posts, our work isn’t going anywhere because the grassroots have been hollowed out. My focus now is to build bridges to the #mainstreaming in an effort to make compost to refill the grassroots soil. What I argue for, in a practical sense, is that we’ve already spent 20 years working in alternative paths, and this approach likely still works.
We have a rare opportunity with the current bridging of the #openweb back to mainstream through #ActivityPub. This moment is crucial, and it would be a disaster to squander it, especially in an era defined by #climatechaos and the global hard shift to the right. Please keep this in mind when organizing events for the #SocialWebFoundation (#SWF). The bridges we build now shape the future.
Q. If our worlds keep getting smaller, we risk losing the very alternatives that could save us. Do you think some of them understood what I just said?
A. Absolutely they do. They just don’t give a rat’s patootie. They ran the numbers. A human extinction event is unlikely. Forecasts indicate that the remaining resources will support them and their progeny at their existing levels of luxury in perpetuity. The rest of us can just go take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut.
I don’t have the focus or energy any more to push these projects into being so the next step is to abstract them into the ideas and flows then put them out there for the next generation, I am happy to mentor, have an expedition boat to convert #boatingeurope thinking about writing a book to sum up the content of this site, and the 40 years of history, process, and development that has shaped it.
One of the biggest tensions in the fight to build an alternative, sustainable future is the relationship between mainstream resources and grassroots projects. The reality is STARK: grassroots movements need resources to survive and thrive, yet the very act of receiving funding, if they can access it at all, drags them into the suffocating grip of #mainstreaming culture, where the radical edges that make them valuable are dulled and destroyed. So, how can conscious mainstream actors support grassroots movements without killing the radical energy that creates the value in the first place.
The answer lies in sharing resources in non-mainstreaming ways, a difficult leap for many, but an essential one. The only people who can truly be useful in sustaining #openweb paths are those willing to break free from the entrenched habits of top-down control, endless bureaucracy, and the need to polish everything into marketable, bite-sized pieces.
What does non-mainstreaming support look like?
Unconditional Funding: Grassroots projects need funding without strings attached. Too often, funding comes with requirements that reshape the project itself, turning radical experimentation into pointless palatable, measurable outputs. True support means trusting grassroots communities to know what they need and allowing them to allocate resources nimbly. #TRUST#opencollective
Trust-Based Relationships: A “native” healthier approach is to build long-term relationships with grassroots groups, listening to their needs and responding in an organic, flexible way. #TRUST#OMN
Decentralized Decision-Making: Bottom-up governance models. Funding should flow to collectives, not charismatic individuals or figureheads building careers #KISS#OGB
Infrastructure, Not Ownership: A path that might work, rather than buying influence, mainstream actors can provide infrastructure, hosting, bandwidth, servers, physical spaces, without attempting to control the projects using them. Think of it as building bridges, not fences. #Fediverse instances
Amplify, Don’t Absorb: Mainstream platforms and institutions need to amplify grassroots voices without assimilating them. This means using their reach to highlight native radical projects but stepping back to let those projects speak for themselves. No need to repackage the message, people can handle raw, messy reality. #indymediaback
Why this bridge building matters, the current mainstream is crumbling under the weight of its contradictions. As #climatechaos accelerates, as #neoliberalism fails to deliver anything but more suffering, people will look for alternatives. But if those alternatives are already swallowed and sanitized by the current mainstream, hope dims. Grassroots movements are the seedbeds of real change, they hold the living knowledge of how to build differently.
Keeping the bridge in place isn’t an act of charity; it’s a #KISS survival strategy. The future will grow from the compost of the old world, and those willing to step off the conveyor belt of #mainstreaming and into the rich, chaotic soil of grassroots experimentation will be the ones who help plant the seeds.
The path we are on, climate change, mainstream politics, and fear reveals a troubling pattern: in times of crisis, like #climatechaos, mainstream politics instinctively shifts to the right. It’s essential to understand the underlying role of fear in pushing this drift.
Fear is a powerful political motivator. Right-wing ideologies thrive on it, whether the fear stems from economic instability, cultural change, or national security threats. In the current path of accelerating climate breakdown, fears of environmental collapse, mass migration, and resource scarcity intensify are creating fertile ground for reactionary politics to grow.
Yet, an intriguing shift to a counter path is underway: the fading fear of socialism among the western bourgeoisie. For decades, socialism was the boogeyman used to justify capitalism’s worst excesses. But as socialist ideas gain legitimacy, especially among younger generations, that fear diminishes. This shift cracks open space to challenge and thus change the right’s dominance and revive radical real alternatives.
This opening offers a brief flowering of hope. By balancing collective, community-driven projects and advocating for systemic change, we can push back against the politics of fear. Movements like #OMN, #OGB, and #indymediaback are seeds of this potential, growing resilience, equity, and sustainability outside the #mainstreaming mess driving spectacle.
However, hope can be a dwindling resource. Every moment lost to inaction feeds the cycle of despair, reinforcing the right’s grip on public imagination. The urgency of #climatechaos means we can’t afford to waste time or the pointless distractions that #mainstreaming common sense pushes over us.
This struggle is a balance between fear and hope. Fear is the tool of the #deathcult, but hope lives in grassroots action. The future depends on whether we push fear to suffocate change or seize this fleeting opening to build something real — from the compost of what’s been lost all ready.
Best not to one of the prats, who #block this path, thanks.
This post is about controlling the narrative, not letting the #nastyfew dictate the terms of engagement. Too often, we let them set the agenda, reacting to their every word instead of actively building the alternatives we need.
Their power isn’t just in what they do, it’s in how much space they take up in our minds and movements. We amplify their mess making when we obsess over their rhetoric rather than dismantling their actions. This is why we need composting, not fixating.
The #Fashionistas in Activism problem is real, when people latch onto whatever gets them attention instead of doing the hard, messy work of creating change. Chasing buzzwords, getting caught in endless reaction cycles, this is what keeps us stuck. We need to be the ones setting the agenda, not just replying to theirs.
Focus. Build. Compost the mess. That’s how we win.
In activism, the term “#fashionistas” captures individuals and groups, especially within #NGOs and advocacy organizations, who latch onto trendy causes or ideologies, not out of any commitment, but more to appear relevant and to align with the latest social currents. This is corrosive to meaningful change, reducing activism to performative gestures rather than a sustained struggle for justice.
Superficial engagement, when they rush to adopt the language of trending movements (like #BLM, #MeToo, or #ClimateJustice) without committing to their radical roots. For example, after George Floyd’s murder, many corporations and NGOs posted black squares on #Instaspam as a symbolic gesture. But what followed? Few made concrete policy changes or redistributed resources to Black-led grassroots organizations. It was activism as aesthetics, empty gestures rather than systemic action that was called for.
Lack of authenticity, when organizations prioritize optics over substance, which breed distrust. Consider the influx of NGOs claiming to champion digital rights but quietly partnering with Big Tech for funding. The grassroots developers working on genuinely decentralized platforms are left unsupported, while the NGO pointless/parasite class absorbs attention and resources, all while pushing and reinforcing the #deathcult paths they claim to oppose.
Mainstreaming, activism, loses its teeth when it’s tailored for palatability. Take the way climate #NGOs soften their language to avoid alienating corporate funders, pushing “net zero” narratives instead of demanding degrowth and direct action. By sanitizing radical demands, they reinforce the status quo rather than confronting the power structures driving #climatechaos.
Misaligned priorities, chasing trends, means resources get funnelled away from sustained struggles. For example, the fleeting attention on #Palestine waxes and wanes with media cycles, while groups doing year-round solidarity work scrape by with minimal support. #Fashionistas flock to hashtags when they’re hot, then move on, abandoning communities who still face oppression once the spotlight fades.
Reactive rather than proactive, when #fashionistas are caught chasing the next big thing rather than strategizing long-term solutions. Think of the explosion of interest in #openweb media during political unrest, a real issue, yes, but one that reveals the broader failure to build #4opens, community-run digital infrastructure proactively. The #OMN project exists precisely to address this, but it’s hard to gain traction when attention constantly flits to the crisis of the moment.
Rectonery, the most toxic aspect of fashionista activism is its tendency to reinforce the systems it claims to oppose. When #NGOs adopt radical language but stay within #mainstreaming paradigms, they create an illusion of progress. For instance, diversity initiatives in tech are often superficial, leading to token hires rather than dismantling structural racism or addressing the #geekproblem that keeps tech culture hostile to outsiders.
How do we compost the #fashionistas mess? The answer lies in prioritizing authenticity, long-term commitment, and meaningful engagement. This means, centring grassroots voices by funding and amplify people working on the ground, not just polished, and mostly pointless #NGO campaigns.
Rejecting mainstreaming, by being willing to alienate power on radical paths. This path needs us to building infrastructure, like #OMN and #indymediaback to grow autonomous spaces outside corporate control. Historical awareness, matters, to remember our past struggles, rights and freedoms were won by collective action, not #PR campaigns.
What, we don’t need, is more buzzword-chasing #nonprofits. We need shovels, compost, and a commitment to grow something real from the ruins of the #deathcult. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the only path to lasting change. Let’s start digging.
In the bigger picture. The best revenge against the #nastyfew is simple: don’t talk about them at all. What fuels them is attention — the endless cycle of fixating on their every move. Unless it’s absolutely necessary, keep the focus on the ideas and the collective struggles, not the individuals causing the mess.
Talk about the systems, the structures, in the US the republicans, not the disruptive few seeking to derail the conversation.
Ignoring the #nastyfew is the most powerful revenge you can take. Stay grounded, stay collective, and keep it #KISS.
