I believe to try and balance much of the current mess, people should focus on grassroots activism and building alternative systems to combat the current social, ecological, and technological mess. With a strong emphasis on open processes (#4opens), fostering collective action, to challenge the #neoliberal status quo (#deathcult) through direct engagement, rebooting independent media, and…
The victim card in activism
There’s a pervasive and damaging cycle in activist and alternative communities that we need to recognize and break, the victimhood narrative. This is not about dismissing genuine struggles or the real problems we face (and let’s be clear, we all have these in abundance on alternative paths). What I’m talking about is the deliberate use…
A Path of Destruction: The Middle East’s Endless Conflict and Global Consequences
A #KISS post on the messy ideas behind this current real world mess. The current events in Gaza feel familiar, a replay of the tragic historical cycle that has been spinning for decades. Israel occupies Gaza. Gaza resists this occupation by attacking to retake occupied land, Israel responds by obliterating swaths of Gaza in brutal…
Oligarchy, Monarchy, and the Future of Governance of the #OpenWeb
The governance model of the Social Web Foundation (#SWF) aligns more with oligarchy, where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, echoing the structures of monarchy more normally seen within the broader #FOSS movement. Both oligarchic and monarchic models may work for some traditional organizations, but they are not native to the organic,…
The metaphor of cat herding
The metaphor of cat herding is a useful and fitting when working with decentralized, independent actors who are resistant to collective action, especially in grassroots tech and activist communities. It reflects the challenge of getting people to focus, organize, and work toward common goals without losing their autonomy or devolving into chaos. With projects like…
What am I doing now?
People ask, so It’s good to remind my self about this, my journey of working to compost this mess goes back a long way, as you can see from the snapshots of history I’ve written about here: https://hamishcampbell.com/?s=history. It’s a light touch on nearly 30 years of work. It all started with the Sinclair Spectrum,…
The #deathcult is neoliberalism
If you’ve spent time on my website, you’ve come across the term neoliberalism. It’s a word that’s used so much that its meaning has maybe been diluted. You might have a surface-level understanding: deregulation, privatization, tax cuts for the rich, the classic “trickle-down” nonsense where we’re supposed to believe that if the rich get richer,…
What can we do.
The is deep dissatisfaction with the current “common sense”, especially in the context of how it has contributed to a pervasive sense of fragmentation, meaninglessness, and cynicism in most contemporary life. The is very little meaning and action in our intellectual movements, the #blocking of the old stories, Marxism, Enlightenment ideals, and even reality itself.…
The #openweb, the #commons, the real-world spaces we build are where the future lies
Resilience is community and trust. Resilience grows by connecting the actions of today to the possibilities of tomorrow, even when that future is unknowable. It’s rooted in community, and community thrives on mutual trust. Trust isn’t about keeping a ledger; it’s about giving freely without expectation. Money is not the foundation of resilience. Across the…
The Slow Evaporation of FOSS value
The article “The Slow Evaporation of the FOSS Surplus” by Baldur Bjarnason discusses the gradual decline in the effectiveness and sustainability of Free and Open Source Software (#FOSS) within, unspoken context of a capitalist economy. The argument is that FOSS, once a thriving ecosystem driven by community effort and collaboration, is now being drained of…
Breaking the circle of #stupidindividualism
One thing, we need to say more is that the right-wing nutters have no brains as conservatism is about not being open to different paths. Our #mainstreaming #fashionistas currently go along with this mess, as the dominant thinking is #stupidindividualism with more “stupid” than individualism in the balance. The problem with conservatism and mainstream conformity,…