Oxford boaters every day commons

There will be increasing experience of commons as lived infrastructure, not theory, not an idea waiting to be implemented. As the #mainstreaming keeps failing people will need practical, community-led way of meeting shared needs that work and exists wherever people cooperate outside of markets and hierarchy. Commons are not abstract systems, they are what people do when they stop waiting for permission.

We have a recent example – #Oxfordboaters it is messy commons in real time, not a perfect system, more a lived commons under pressure. A community trying to juggle shared infrastructure (boats, moorings, water systems), shared risk (flooding, breakdowns, legal pressure), shared survival (housing precarity, cost of living, access to services) and shared conflict (governance, trust, personality tensions). This example is what commons actually look like in practice, not clean, not tidy, not ideologically pure, but functioning through necessity.

When the state and market do not meet needs, people fall back on each other, that is sometimes the commons’ path… The lesson we learn, it is easy to see, commons are not harmony, they are coordination under pressure. What we can also see is the mistake #fluffy people make in thinking commons are about agreement, they are not, commons are about negotiating conflict, sharing risk, maintaining infrastructure by building trust over time so we can recover from failure repeatedly. The last 4 months of #Oxfordboaters show all of this, the hard truth – Commons fail when they cannot evolve governance faster than crisis accumulates – this is not a moral failure, it is an organisational challenge.

So why do commons break – and why do they keep coming back. Like most grassroots paths, #Oxfordboaters reveals three recurring pressures:

External pressure – State regulation, land pressure, legal ambiguity, the enclosure dynamic never stops.
Internal fragility – Informal systems rely on trust. Trust gets strained under stress, inequality, and burnout.
Governance lag

Decision-making structures rarely evolve as fast as the problems they face, this is a pattern across almost all commons. Commons do not fail because people stop caring, they fail because complexity outgrows structure. But there is a happy part of composting this mess – failure is a part of commons evolution, commons are not stable objects, they are adaptive processes. Oxfordboaters shows that even broken commons still generate mutual aid, shared knowledge, infrastructure repair and survival capacity. Yes, in common sense market logic, this would be “inefficient”, in commons logic, it is resilience under constraint.

The #OMN project framing is why this matters beyond boats. The Open Media Network (#OMN) view is simple – we are not just trying to describe commons. We are trying to improve their ability to survive contact with reality. This example is not a niche story, rather a micro-version of housing systems, digital networks (#fediverse, #openweb), activist spaces, climate adaptation communities and post-institution survival systems. These same patterns repeat everywhere, when systems fail, people build commons whether they call them that or not.

The dangerous mess is we have unlearning commons, the cultural – 40 years of #neoliberal thinking has trained people to believe that trust is weakness, cooperation is fragile, governance must be top-down and commons are “messy exceptions” rather than default behaviour. So even when people build commons, they then try to formalise them into hierarchy by turning them into organisations or burn out trying to manage them individually. This reaction is the mess we need to compost, our example, Oxford boaters currently sits right inside this tension.

We learn what actually works, the pragmatic commons path, a few patterns consistently work: small, local decision loops, visible shared infrastructure, flexible governance that evolves to grow redundancy (no single point of failure), permissionless participation and clear boundaries for conflict resolution. This is not simply, but it is a working #KISS maintenance path.

Markets and states are both reaching limits of adaptive capacity, commons are no longer optional, they are what remains when institutions fail to scale care. The #OMN conclusion is simple, commons are how we survive collapse, that in the wider context is unavoidable, with overlapping systemic crises, ecological, economic, political, informational.

The current mess, and delight at Oxford boaters is a signal, a messy, imperfect signal that says: people will rebuild cooperation when systems break down – but also that we need better ways to support this. Commons are not about perfection, they are about persistence, they are survival systems that people can actually live inside. Our example shows both the fragility and the necessity of this work. The question is not whether commons will exist, it is whether we will learn fast enough to stop repeating the same failures in every new form.

Our #mainstreaming problem. If you are wondering why I keep documenting the issues around activism, this is why. Next time, maybe we can learn, maybe we can mediate our “libertarian cats” a bit better and get a less messy path, because we cannot keep making the same mistakes over and over.

I have been through this mess hundreds of times over 40 years of working on change and challenge, outreach and community building. This is not theory, it is experience. Activism and commons spaces are messy by nature, that is part of their strength. But if we don’t learn from our failures, the same patterns keep returning, so at the very least:

Can we please fuck up differently this time?

Document the lessons.

Build the memory.

Keep the commons alive.

#OMN #commons #openweb #fediverse #4opens #climatechaos #mutualaid #socialsystems #realitycheck

The commons and the problem of power

“After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries… to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned.”

Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall

The starting point is simple, Marx was right about many things. From a commons perspective, Marx understood something fundamental. Capitalism is not just a collection of individual choices and isolated market transactions. It is a system built around extraction, enclosure and the concentration of power. He understood that capitalism emerged through the destruction of older commons systems – taking land, resources and social relationships that had been collectively managed and turning them into private property, commodities and sources of profit.

And, the enclosure of the commons was not simply an economic change, it was a social transformation. People were separated from direct access to the means of survival and production. They became dependent on selling their labour within a system they did not control. With this in mid, the question for the #OMN, is not only “What is wrong with capitalism?” that question is important, but it is not enough. The deeper question is “What kind of structures can replace it without recreating the same problems in a different form?” This is where history, and our projects, becomes complicated.

Capitalism’s contradictions – Marx identified contradictions inside capitalism that remain visible today. The drive for endless accumulation, competition, overproduction and the pressure on profit all create instability. The interesting thing is not that capitalism avoided these contradictions, it did not, instead, capitalism adapted. The state became part of the survival mechanism, financial intervention, corporate subsidies, public spending, monetary policy and crisis management became ways of moving contradictions around rather than resolving them.

The destruction of the commons was not simply progress, it was a loss of social capacity. Communities lost direct relationships with land, production and decision-making, people lost the ability to say no because the alternatives had been enclosed.

The current system survives not because it solved its problems, but because it continually transforms them. The #deathcult adapts, capitalism is good at absorbing criticism, turning challenges into new markets and changing shape while maintaining the underlying logic: growth, extraction and accumulation.

The problem of capturing power – Marx understood that states are often captured by powerful interests, his answer was that the working class should take control of the state and use it as a tool of transformation. The problem is that power does not become harmless simply because different people hold it, a system designed around centralised power tends to attract people who understand and seek centralised power.

The history of the 20th century showed the dangers of this as temporary emergency powers have a tendency to become permanent structures. The promise that authority will eventually disappear is harder to achieve than the promise suggests. This is where the commons’ tradition offers a different starting point, the question then becomes – How do we build systems where power is distributed from the beginning? Not after a revolution, not after someone promises to give power back, now.

Means shape ends, a decentralised, participatory society cannot be built through centralised and authoritarian methods. If the process is based on hierarchy, control and obedience, then the destination carries those same patterns. This is why the commons connects with the libertarian traditions within Marxism, anarchism and movements such as the Paris Commune. The most interesting Marx is often the later Marx, the Marx who became more interested in communal ownership, local organisation and different forms of social production outside the Western industrial model. That Marx is much closer to commons thinking.

Ownership is not enough, a common mistake is to think the problem is only who owns production. Private ownership creates problems, but replacing private ownership with state ownership does not automatically create liberation. A factory owned by the state can still destroy ecosystems, a planned economy can still pursue endless growth.

The deeper question is – What is production for? Capitalism has a built-in requirement, money must become more money, production must expand, markets must grow, but the biosphere has limits. The #climatechaos era makes this impossible to ignore. A system that requires endless expansion inside a finite ecosystem contains a fundamental contradiction. The challenge is not simply changing ownership, it is changing the relationship between humans, technology, production and the living world.

The violence of extraction – capitalism treats value through exchange. Things matter because they can be turned into commodities. This creates a dangerous relationship with the natural world as forests become timber, rivers become sewers, animals become production units, land becomes an investment and life becomes something measured by economic usefulness.

When ecosystems cannot be made profitable, they are treated as obstacles rather than living systems with their own value. This logic spreads into human relationships, over the last 50 years people are increasingly judged through productivity, economic contribution and market value.

The problem is not individual greed alone, the problem is a system that rewards extraction. The question is not whether some people are good or bad, it is what kinds of behaviour the system encourages.

The commons ask a different question, not “Who controls the machine?” But “How do we build systems where nobody can easily capture the machine?” This is where the #4opens matters. The #4opens are not just a technical checklist, they are social infrastructure.

Open process.

Open data.

Open source.

Open standards.

They create transparency, participation and the ability for communities to understand and shape the systems they depend on. The goal is not simply to seize existing structures, it is to build different structures. Revolution as compost to grow alternatives in the cracks. The current crisis is also a crisis of social organisation as change is no longer only organised through traditional institutions. It moves through networks, data, attention and shared platforms.

Building commons, networks and shared memory, creating systems that survive beyond personalities, leaders and moments of attention. From individuals back to collectives, the commons is not one path where everyone must agree, it is a space where many paths can grow together. Diversity is not a problem to solve, it is the resilience.

The commons and climate responsibility – People often say “Humans are to blame for climate change.” But which humans? The responsibility is not evenly distributed, some actors have created far more extraction, pollution and destruction than others. The problem is not humanity, the problem is a particular way of organising human activity.

Keep in mid when building what comes next – capitalism extracts – authoritarian socialism centralises – the commons try to do something different by building power that belongs to everyone and cannot easily be taken away. This task is not to find a perfect blueprint, it is to grow living systems that are adaptable, transparent and rooted in participation. The #OMN, #openweb, #fediverse, #OGB, #indymediaback and #4opens ideas all come from this path.

Not replacing one hierarchy with another, not creating another machine for someone else to control we need to be building commons, trust, collective capacity. The future will not come from waiting for a better version of the existing system, it comes from growing alternatives that make the existing system less necessary.

It is your ability to discern facts that make you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a tyrant.

The #openweb needs this balance: people with the freedom to question, investigate and challenge – and communities with the shared trust to build together.

Without critical individuals we get conformity. Without common knowledge we get fragmentation. Democracy needs both: curiosity and commons.

#OMN #4opens #openweb #commons #fediverse #OGB #indymediaback #climatechaos #deathcult #KISS

Climate Chaos, the reality, heat, collapse, and denial

A red warning for extreme heat has been issued across parts of the UK this week, including London. For people this heatwave across Europe feels frightening, not because of the temperatures themselves, but of what they imply. Nights stay hot, bodies don’t recover, systems don’t cool down. The baseline is shifting. The question that keeps coming up is simple and unavoidable – if this is what it’s like now, what is it like in 10, 20, 30 years? The answer is not uncertain, it is more heat, more extremes, more instability. There is no “new normal” coming, there is only escalating #climatechaos.

A #deathcult sect for the last 40 years was not built to survive itself, we are seeing this now, the infrastructure is failing. Hospitals, transport systems, housing, food networks – all were built for a climate that no longer exists. Even basic adaptation like cooling is uneven, fragile, and socially unequal. Some workplaces fail under heat stress. Some people have no protection at all. And crucially, we are still not adapting at the scale required.

The UK Climate Change Committee has already said it clearly, adaptation is too slow, stalled, or moving in the wrong direction. That is not a warning about the future, it is a #KISS description of failure in the present. The denial loop over the last 20 years is why we are in such a mess, the pattern is now obvious:

Scientists warn
Media briefly reports
Heat passes
Politics resets to “normal”
Nothing changes

This cycle repeats while emissions continue and global temperatures rise toward 2–3°C and beyond this century. But bland media coverage hides the issues of extremes – heatwaves, floods, droughts, system shocks. And those are already exceeding earlier projections in many regions. Timid climate models underestimating reality due to feedback loops, jet stream disruption, aerosol reduction effects, and regional amplification. We are not just entering a warmer world, we are entering a more unstable one.

Knock-on effects are the real ongoing crisis, the danger is not only heat, it is cascading system failure:

food production under stress
rising prices and political instability
insurance withdrawal from entire regions
economic shocks from simultaneous disasters
infrastructure collapse under compounding extremes

This will obviously trigger the most severe global financial instability in modern history. And then there are the wildcard risks – #WAMOC weakening or collapse, Amazon dieback leading to abrupt regional climate shifts. It is not just science fiction, they are known systemic risks inside a destabilising ecological earth system.

One thing we need to talk about and be more clear on is #climatechaos is #classwar. This mess is not experienced equally, the rich (most of the #nastyfew) up to a point when they die of old age can adapt individually, with industrial air conditioning, private infrastructure, relocation options to second homes in safer climates. While everyone else absorbs the breakdown of overheated housing, unsafe work conditions, failing public services and the resulting rising costs of survival.

This is why #climatechaos is also a strong class issue, the crisis is not just physical, it is political due to the visible distribution of risk and protection. After ten years of warnings, many of us were already naming this:

the #deathcult logic of endless growth
the capture of institutions
the failure of mainstream politics to respond
the systemic nature of climate breakdown

At the time it was still framed as prediction, now it is reality. The uncomfortable truth is not that we were wrong, it is that nothing meaningful was done at scale. One thing we have learned, that we understand more clearly now is it is not an information problem, it’s a systems’ problem.

Extraction-based economies cannot easily respond to limits
Attention-based media cannot communicate slow crisis
Electoral politics cannot act on long time horizons

So the system produces delay, distraction, and denial even as conditions worsen. There is a strong role of the #dotcons in this mess as the big social media platforms have intensify this failure. They spent the last ten year optimise for outrage, fragmentation, consumption and finally forgetting. Crisis becomes a series of disconnected moments rather than a shared progressive long-term struggle. Each event resets attention to zero, memory does not accumulate. This is not an accident – it is structural.

Why #4opens matters now, becomes more important, not less, this is not the normal #mainstreaming liberal ideology. It is #KISS basic resilience infrastructure, as surviving #climatechaos requires collective intelligence that can persist across time, crises, and institutional failure, we need tecnolagy like the #OMN that can help medate this:

Closed systems concentrate control.

Open systems distribute survival capacity.

But under all this the missing layer is meaning, one of the biggest underestimates from the last decade is psychological – people are not only resisting facts, they are defending meaning – belief in control, belief in technological rescue, belief in stability returning. But these #mainstreaming stories no longer match reality, but this denial persists, not because people don’t know, but because they cannot yet replace the blinded liberal stories. This is where change actually happens,not just information, but shared meaning and practice.

What changes now? Ten years ago the message was, stop feeding the system causing the crisis, now the message is build the systems that can survive what is already here. That means:

commons over enclosure
cooperation over competition
open systems over closed platforms
shared infrastructure over extraction
long-term memory over constant reset

Q&A

Why use #climatechaos when #ClimateChange already exists? Because language is not neutral.

“Climate change” sounds manageable, a technical adjustment.

“Climate chaos” describes lived instability, cascading breakdown, and systemic disruption.

Use both:

#ClimateChange for reach
#climatechaos for reality, and action

The point is not purity of language, its growing commons of action and hashtags are a tool for this.

As we see today, we are not approaching #climatechaos, we are inside it. The urgent question now is whether we can build systems – social, technical, and cultural – that can function while it unfolds or we keep letting things fail.

That is the #OMN challenge, and it is already overdue.

#OMN #climate #4opens #openweb #deathcult #fediverse #KISS #OGB #climatechange

Technology is never just a tool

Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.

The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.

The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.

So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.

But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.

The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.

The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.

The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.

The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.

The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”

The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.

The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.

The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.

From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.

But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.

The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.

Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.

The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.

The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.

If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.

#OMN #OGB #4opens #openweb #FOSS #indymediaback

Beyond AI

The biggest question is not whether #AI becomes useful. It is who shapes the surrounding paths? A future controlled by a few #dotcons will reproduce the same mess we have now of centralisation, extraction, enclosure. Were a future built through #4opens paths would look different.

The #geekproblem is believing the next tool solves the old problem. But many problems are not tool problems, they are relationship problems. The next stage is not replacing humans with smarter machines, it is building better human paths that can use machines without becoming dependent on them. Beyond AI is about making communities capable, the real upgrade is not artificial intelligence, it is collective intelligence.

AI is changing the scale of content creation, but not raising the quality. Generative AI tools have lowered the barrier to producing average books, apps, music, legal documents, academic papers and endless streams of text. The result is a massive increase in output, but what happens when production grows faster than our ability to filter, discuss, trust, maintain and give meaning to what is produced?

More books, but more noise, more apps, but more clutter, more papers, but more pressure on systems of review, more music, but a harder struggle to recognise human creativity and care. The #dotcons logic says – more content = more value – were the #openweb lesson is different, value comes from communities, trust, context and care. The challenge is not creating more things, the challenge is building better commons around the things we create.

The AI question is bigger than the technology, as the current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented by our #fashionistas and there servants as inevitable. The message is everywhere to adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is never neutral, every tool carries assumptions about who benefits, who controls it, what values it embeds and what damage is accepted as the “price of progress”.

From an #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “Can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The real question is “What kind of society does this technology build?” Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? This is the wider #openweb question we should be focusing on.

Large language models (#LLM) and generative AI systems represent a real technical development. They can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are useful capabilities, but the hype jumps from assistance to much larger claims – That AI will replace expertise – That it will solve social problems – That it will transform education and science – That it will create a better future automatically.

The problem is that current AI systems do not understand the world, they generate patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability. A convincing answer is not the same thing as understanding.

The missing social layer in our narrow conversations is that the #openweb was built around a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, from communities, discussion, correction, disagreement and shared responsibility. This is where the #geekproblem appears – the tendency to confuse technical capability with social wisdom – the technical question becomes “Can we build it?” the social question “Should we?” often disappears.

A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the culture around the technology, as technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power.

This is not even touching on that the ecological cost of scale is a catastrophe in the era of #climatechaos and social backdown. The current AI boom depends on enormous infrastructure, huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware with constant replacement cycles leading to the large-scale resource extraction. At a time of #climatechaos, we should question whether endless expansion is the only possible future. The #dotcons model has always worked through scale, more users, more data, more infrastructure and more dependency. Generative AI is arriving inside the same economic system that created the catastrophic problems it claims to solve.

Then we have the open internet problem, the #openweb was built around participation, people created #4opens websites, communities, documentation, software and culture. GenAI introduces a different path, that the internet becomes raw material, this human creativity becomes training data. Communities produce knowledge, while large companies extract and monetise it. This creates a dangerous cycle were there is less support for creators → less motivation to create → less genuine knowledge → more dependence on generated content. Its #KISS to understand that healthy commons cannot survive if everything is extracted and nothing is returned.

The #Fediverse and the question of growth, a few years ago there was a feeling that the #Fediverse development culture was running on leftovers. Social movements arrived in waves, and many feared that more waves was moving into #mainstreaming. Since then, the Fediverse has grown, with more people knowing about decentralised social media, more organisations paying attention. Ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to wider adoption.

But growth always creates a question – What happens when a movement becomes successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing it? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions – People have agency – Communities shape their own spaces – Experimentation matters more than optimisation – Trust matters more than control and Commons matter more than platforms. #Mainstreaming brings pressures, these are not automatically bad. But there is a danger that the technology scales while the culture that created it gets diluted. Federation is a technical idea. Living commons is a social one, the challenge remains – now do we grow without losing the roots?

The narrow lesson from #FOSS – it is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure and no Fediverse ecosystem as we know it. It has created extraordinary shared value, but success should not stop us asking difficult questions. The question is not whether FOSS works, the question is – Who does it work for? Where does it struggle? What social lessons can we learn? One recurring problem is the idea that open source is simply a marketplace of independent individuals.

When building the future we actually want – The question is not whether we use AI, more It’s whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The future depends on whether tools strengthen human networks or replace them. Whether they support commons or enclosure, whether they increase agency or dependency.

But what we are seeing is that the tools we need most are often the first things stressed, messy and elitist systems try to defund, discredit and dismantle. Why? Because they require uncertainty, require questioning assumptions, require admitting complexity. Those are not weaknesses, they are survival tools.

Keep this in mind on native #openweb paths.

Why WhatsApp plebiscites, and #dotcons in general are a crude and negative democratic instrument

A plebiscite (or simple poll) reduces complex questions to binary or multiple-choice outcomes decided by raw headcount. This works reasonably well for large nation-states were aggregating millions of preferences is practically necessary. But in small community groups – like a WhatsApp boating community – it undermines democratic values rather than express them, for several reasons.

The participation fallacy – Whoever happens to be on their phone when the poll appears votes; everyone else is excluded by timing. In a WhatsApp group, this might mean a dozen people determine policy for two hundred. The result carries the appearance of collective legitimacy while actually reflecting a self-selected subset. True democratic representation requires deliberate, structured participation – not whoever checks notifications first.

Suppression of minority interests – This is perhaps the deepest problem. A poll asking “should we allow X at the mooring?” can produce a 60/40 result that completely ignores why the 40% disagree. In a functioning community democracy, minority positions deserve to be heard, reasoned with, and sometimes protected. A simple poll flattens all of that. The liveaboard who depends on a particular mooring has the same one vote as the weekend visitor who barely uses it.

The tyranny of the majority in microcosm – John Stuart Mill’s classic concern about majoritarian democracy – that it can become a form of collective tyranny over individuals – is almost more acute in small groups than in states. In a national election, your minority view is still represented through opposition parties, courts, constitutions. In a WhatsApp poll, you simply lose, with no appeal mechanism, no minority rights protection, and often no transparency about who voted or why.

Social pressure distorts the vote – In a small group, people know each other. Polls are rarely secret. Vocal members who post before the poll closes visibly shift the outcome. Quieter members – often those with the most legitimate concerns – may not vote at all to avoid conflict. The result reflects social dominance as much as genuine preference. A WhatsApp poll in a group like that might ask something like “should we organise a group clean-up on Saturday?” which seems harmless – but even this excludes people who work weekends, who have caring responsibilities, who are moored further out and can’t get there. A poll that produces “yes, 23 votes to 4” then generates social pressure to participate that bears down hardest on the most vulnerable members.

For contentious issues a WhatsApp poll is the worst possible instrument, as itt short-circuits exactly the conversation and negotiation that would surface the real interests at stake. What works better in community groups is face to face or federated trust based deliberative democracy rather than plebiscitary voting. Distinguishing between decisions that affect everyone equally and decisions that affect specific individuals far more than others – the latter should require consent, not just majority approval.

The irony is that small community groups like boating communities are ideal for genuine deliberative democracy – people know each other, stakes are concrete, conversations are possible. WhatsApp polls squander that by importing the bluntest majoritarian tool into a context that could support something richer.

A second problem with #dotcons digital community decision-making is the hidden layer underneath the visible conversation: metadata is when organising becomes evidence in court cases.

People think privacy as the content of messages – what someone wrote, what someone posted, what opinion they expressed. But modern platforms collect something much broader: who joined a group, who attended an event, who reacted to a post, who communicated with whom, when people were active, who organised conversations, who supported a campaign, the patterns of relationships and activity.

This information will reveal the structure of a community even without reading the actual conversations. A WhatsApp group, Facebook group, or online community is a map of social relationships. That matters because grassroots organising often happens through relationships. The same online networks that allow communities to defend their rights, challenge poor decisions, or hold powerful actors accountable can also become visible records of who is involved.

The danger appears when, activism turns spiky and there is a conflict between less powerful groups and privileged actors. A campaign group, activist network, neighbourhood organisation, or community project might simply be trying to protect a shared space or challenge unfair treatment. But the digital traces created while organising can later be used against those people.

This does not require some dramatic conspiracy, it happens through ordinary legal processes. A court order can require a platform to provide information relevant to a legal case. Large platforms hold enormous amounts of stored data, and when authorities or private actors successfully obtain legal access, information that people assumed was just part of a conversation can become evidence.

The issue with this is imbalance, a large corporation, wealthy individual, or powerful institution have far more ability to navigate legal systems than a small grassroots group. They have lawyers, resources, and institutional support. Community activists have only their networks and their ability to organise.

This creates a contradiction, the “common sense” digital tools that allow ordinary people to coordinate can also create permanent records of that coordination. The answer is partial – there are #FOSS and #NGO tools that make this less of a problem – Healthy commons needs people to be able to organise, disagree, challenge power, and build alternatives without automatically creating a legal danger to everyone involved.

The question is not whether communities should be accountable, the question is: accountable to whom, and who has the power to use the information? Because in struggles between grassroots groups and privileged actors, metadata can become another form of power.

The lesson is simple – Build open movements, but do not naively confuse openness with exposure. Commons needs trust, but they don’t need to leave a #dotcons surveillance trail. Yes people will use bad tools anyway, but it’s good if some people use better tools to start stepping away from this digital and social mess.

Some first #KISS step tools

Use the #openweb as core organising, do not use the #dotcons – an example here is open collective website not WhatsApp chat or Google Docs. Tools shape behaver and metadata gets people prosecuted.

Use #signal for chat, it’s not a perfect tool, but it’s better than the rest, use a common platform.
Use #torbrowser for web searches and browsing of any sensitive subject, if you want to use AI, Then don’t logged-in inside tor for any sensitive questions. All AI questions are stored as a part of your account and can be used agonist you – this is true even when you are not logged in.
Do not rely on #AI for activist research or grassroots legal thinking – its hallucinations and training data will endanger you. The AI default is always wrong on this path without inside knowledge to prompt past the #mainstreaming output.

I’ve come to think that caring for people requires a degree of resistance to the culture around us. Not because people are bad, but because so much of the dominant culture is built around values that put profit, status, and competition ahead of human need. In that sense, care becomes a quiet act of rebellion.

#openweb #mutualaid #care #solidarity #deathcult #climatechaos #Oxfordboaters

People destroy things they love, not from hate, more from possession

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.

Rebuilding Shared Meaning in a Fragmented World

A lot of our current mess can be understood through the long transition from #modernism to #postmodernism. Not as an academic debate, but as a lived reality. Modernity was about progress. It believed that society could be understood, improved, and consciously shaped. Science, democracy, planning, industry, public institutions, trade unions, education, and infrastructure were all part of this path. The future was something people could build together.

Of course, this vision was never as simple or as benign as some people imagined. Modernity produced extraordinary advances in health, communication, and material abundance. It also produced colonialism, industrial warfare, bureaucracy, environmental destruction, and systems of control on a scale previously unimaginable. Yet despite its contradictions, modernity had confidence. It assumed that problems could be solved, that collective action mattered.

Then came the invisible #postmodern turn. The failing social democratic institutions lost legitimacy, narratives stopped convincing people. Governments increasingly rejected planning and handed decision-making to markets. Globalisation connected everything while making almost nothing feel controllable. Information mess exploded beyond individual’s capacity to understand any of it.

Instead of thoughtful maps, we had endless competing realities. Then, the #deathcult, the promise of #neoliberalism, that deregulated markets and individual freedom would create the best possible outcomes. In practice, much of what happened was the dismantling of collective institutions without replacing them with anything capable of holding society together. People gained consumer “choice” while losing all political agency. We became slaves focused on choosing between products while unable to shape the systems that govern our lives.

This is where contemporary politics becomes difficult to understand if we keep trying to use any grounded categories – mess increased the conflict between people trying to rebuild collective meaning and people retreating into fragments – Some fragments become consumer identities, some become nationalisms. In alt culture we lived through a decade of conspiracy theories while the #mainstreaming become lifestyle brands.

The common thread is that people are still looking for belonging in a world that increasingly feels impossible to influence. This is why so much contemporary politics is irrational, people are not responding to facts, they are responding to the crisis of meaning. A crisis of trust, a crisis of belonging.

Modernism reminds us that collective action matters, that process we build matter’s, DIY infrastructure matters and finally that society can be consciously shaped. Were #Postmodernism at its best reminds us that dogmatic system contains blind spots. That power hides itself behind claims of objectivity. That diversity of experience matters, thus blinded certainty to often leads to oppressive. With the ending of modernity:

We lost confidence in human planning but kept bureaucracy.

We lost collective power but kept #elitists concentrations of power.

We gained diversity of voices but lost shared language.

We gained infotainment but lost trust.

We gained #dotcons connectivity but lost #openweb community.

This mess leaves us trapped in blinded deadens of certainties of yesterday and the endless fragmentation of today. The challenge for projects like the #openweb is finding paths beyond this deadlock – not returning to centralised authority or surrender to endless relativism, but rebuilding shared processes that hold diversity without demanding conformity.

This is where projects like the #Fediverse, #OMN, and the #4opens matter. Their value is not primarily technical, their value is social. They are historical lived experiments in creating spaces where cooperation emerges without central control. Where differences coexist without immediate fragmentation and where communities develop shared infrastructure without surrendering autonomy.

The #KISS task is creating conditions where many narratives can coexist while still allowing collective action. That is harder than either modern certainty or postmodern scepticism. But it is the path through the era of #climatechaos, #dotcons platform monopolies, social fragmentation, and democratic decline.

Power is built, not granted – Power comes from power – it is something people build, organise, and create together. In the best outcomes, power is shared and circulated. But it is rarely something simply handed down from above. A lot of modern political thinking still struggles with this. It imagines power as something that belongs to institutions, leaders, owners, or authorities – something granted through permission.

But historically, power has always been created through collective action. Private property is one example of a social agreement backed by power. The myth is that ownership is a natural thing that existed forever. The reality is that ownership systems are historical arrangements, enforced through social structures.

The old story is simple – Someone draws a line in the sand, they say “Everything on this side is mine.” The group accepts that boundary – or someone has enough force to make them accept it.

That model of power still shapes much of our world, but notice, this is not the foundation of the #Fediverse. The #Fediverse is built on a different assumption, it is based on an open flowing social web of connection rather than enclosure, participation rather than ownership, federation rather than domination and shared infrastructure rather than a single centre.

The lines in the sand are not permanent walls, they move, they adapt, they blow in the wind. That does not mean there is no power. It means power works differently. The challenge is that many people approach the #Fediverse using old assumptions from the #closedweb of who owns it? Who controls it? Who is the authority? Who gives permission? Those questions make sense in a platform economy, they make less sense in a living commons.

This is where some of the current liberal tradition has become confused, as liberalism at its best gave us important ideas of individual rights, freedom of thought, limits on arbitrary power and space for difference. But much of the current political culture has absorbed the logic of the #deathcult: neoliberalism, market absolutism, and a fragmented postmodern culture where everything becomes identity, performance, and competition.

The result is a strange contradiction of a culture that talks endlessly about freedom while creating systems that reduce collective freedom, that celebrates choice while making real alternatives harder to build, that protects individual expression while weakening the shared social foundations needed for that expression to matter. The question is not how we return to some imaginary past.

The question is then how do we build new forms of collective power that fit the world we actually live in? This is the unfinished work of the #openweb. We need constructive thinking beyond “common sense” because much of what is called common sense is simply the habit of old systems.

Technology shapes society, the design of our networks shapes how we relate – Closed systems create dependency – Open systems create possibility. But openness alone is not enough, we need the social practices around openness of trust, care, stewardship, accountability and collective imagination.

The future will not be given to us by institutions, it will be built by people creating alternatives and connecting them together. Power is not permission, power is participation.

The Fediverse’s growing signal-to-noise problem – and who’s causing it

People nowadays are soaked in #stupidindividualism, and the important word on this is hopeless. Not hopeless because people are bad, but because we’ve spent decades dismantling the social structures that gave us the ability to act together. We know how to consume, react, and perform as individuals, but increasingly struggle to cooperate, organise, and build collective power. A society of isolated individuals is easy to manage and hard to change.

There have been a lot of institutional prat moves on the #Fediverse over the last few years, we’re facing a growing signal-to-noise problem. As more NGOs, foundations, governments, media organisations, and corporate-adjacent actors arrive, they bring resources, visibility, and legitimacy. That’s the fluffy side of the story. More users, more funding, more attention, more recognition.

But #NGOs didn’t build the #Fediverse – and they’re not saving it either their bringing institutional habits that are often hostile to the native culture of the #Fediverse. Risk management replaces experimentation, branding replaces community, public relations replaces dialogue. Governance becomes something done for people rather than with them. The result is a lot of noise: endless press releases, carefully managed messaging, and performative consultation that produces little actual change.

This is where the spiky side comes in. The #Fediverse did not grow because institutions planned it into existence. It grew because messy communities built things, argued about them, broke them, fixed them, and kept going. The culture emerged from people doing the work in public. Much of the value came from precisely the things institutions find uncomfortable: openness, disagreement, rough consensus, and grassroots initiative.

The problem is not that institutions are involved, the problem is when institutional logic starts drowning out community logic to create a growing signal-to-noise problem. The signal is people building infrastructure, running servers, writing code, creating culture, organising communities, and solving problems together. The noise is the endless churn of reports, branding exercises, stakeholder management, conference panels, and “engagement” processes that consume energy without producing any substance.

The useful framing here might be:

Fluffy: welcoming people in, building bridges, creating shared spaces, encouraging participation.

Spiky: defending native values, challenging bad practice, calling out capture, and maintaining boundaries.

The #Fediverse needs both, too much fluffy and everything gets absorbed into #mainstreaming culture until the original values disappear. Too much spiky and you end up isolated, talking only to people who already agree with you. The challenge is maintaining a productive tension between the two.

The real debate isn’t institutions versus communities. It’s whether institutions can learn to work within #openweb culture rather than replacing it with the same management culture that has already failed across much of the #closedweb. The signal is still there, the question is whether we can keep hearing it through the noise.

Mix this with the bigger picture of hard-right and #climatechaos feeding each other in a vicious cycle. Climate breakdown drives displacement, insecurity, and social stress. The right exploits that suffering to spread fear, hatred, and division. As they gain power, climate action is weakened to protect existing wealth and fossil-fuel interests, leading to worse climate impacts and displacement.

The result? More refugees, more scapegoating, more environmental collapse, and more authoritarian politics. Stopping #climatechaos and stopping the rise of fascism are not separate struggles. They are the same struggle viewed from different angles. The answer isn’t more noise. It’s rebuilding solidarity, strengthening grassroots alternatives, and creating collective solutions that challenge both environmental destruction and the politics of fear.

With this in mind – have the people fixated on #mainstreaming noticed how little change and challenge they actually achieve? A lot of energy goes into fitting in, managing perceptions, and staying respectable, while the problems keep getting worse.

We might finally get somewhere when more people notice this and start doing something different. So if you meet a dedicated #mainstreaming person, do thank them for helping demonstrate what doesn’t work. The real debate isn’t institutions vs communities – it’s whether institutions can learn to stop drowning us out

#stupidindividualism #Fediverse #OMN #openweb #4opens #mainstreaming #NGO #Fluffy #Spiky #KISS

Thatcher, Reagan were the wrecking crew: How we keep pushing mess

This story is about the ideology that won. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two politicians on either side of the Atlantic didn’t only win elections, they reshaped what people came to accept as “common sense.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States did not invent capitalism’s worst tendencies, but they gave them state power, institutional infrastructure, and ideological legitimacy.

What they built was not simply a set of policies, it was a social programme we are still trapped inside more than forty years later. The push was simple and devastating citizens became “taxpayers,” public services became “handouts,” collective investment became “inefficiency,” and the commons became a problem to be solved through privatisation.

Decades of postwar social infrastructure – built on the understanding that some things are too important to be left to markets – were dismantled, defunded, and handed over to private interests -the very same interests funding the political projects carrying out the dismantling.

This is what #OMN means when we talk about enclosure. Not just land enclosure, but the enclosure of everyday life itself: Water, housing, transport, education, healthcare, communication and culture. Everything turned into a commodity.

Neither Thatcher nor Reagan created this mess, the project was carefully engineered. Reagan established a President’s Commission on Privatisation which drew up extensive plans to strip public assets and services. Thatcher pushed through mass privatisation of utilities, council housing, and national industries while selling the process as “popular capitalism.”

Behind them stood an entire ideological machine of the Heritage Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Reason Foundation, and countless university economics departments and corporate-funded policy groups.

Their role was to make radical upward redistribution sound like neutral common sense, and they succeeded. Even the language changed “tax burden,” “efficiency,” “choice,” “reform,” “flexibility.” Every word quietly carrying the ideology.

The method itself was brutally simple – cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Create public deficits. Use those deficits to declare public services “unaffordable.” Privatise the resulting wreckage. Transfer wealth upward. Starve public institutions until they fail, then point at the failure as proof they never worked.

The cruelty was not accidental, it was structural. Thatcher’s Chancellor openly described mass unemployment as “a price worth paying.” Reagan’s administration treated social devastation as collateral damage in the restoration of elitist power.

The results were not abstract, from 1948 to roughly 1979 in the United States, productivity and worker wages rose together. After Reagan, productivity continued climbing sharply while wages largely stagnated. Workers produced more wealth than ever before, but a growing share of that wealth flowed upward into capital accumulation rather than wages or public goods.

The mess this created was Labour’s share of national income steadily declined while housing costs rose, debt exploded, unions collapsed, and public infrastructure deteriorated. Debt became the mechanism keeping society functioning: mortgages, credit cards, car loans, student loans, payday lending. Daily survival increasingly depended on borrowing. Higher education shifted from a public good into a privatised commodity. Healthcare became financial extraction. Housing became speculation rather than shelter.

The language was “freedom.” But the freedom being expanded was the freedom of capital. None of this was racially neutral. Reagan’s “welfare queen” narrative deliberately racialised poverty to fracture working-class solidarity. The actual fraud case behind the story was tiny compared to the propaganda built around it, but the myth worked politically because it redirected anger downward rather than upward.

The so-called “War on Drugs” targeted Black communities while harsher sentencing laws entrenched mass incarceration. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic was ignored for years because many of the people dying were treated as disposable by political elites. Thatcher’s government supported sanctions-busting trade with apartheid South Africa while denouncing the ANC and treating Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.

These were not side issues, the neoliberalism story required enemies: welfare scroungers, criminals, radicals, immigrants, trade unionists, the “undeserving poor.” Every enclosure needs someone to blame for the damage enclosure causes.

In the rich west the programme attacked wages, unions, and public services. Abroad it was openly violent. Reagan’s administration funded and armed the Contras in Nicaragua despite international condemnation. US-backed regimes across Latin America carried out massacres, disappearances, and systematic repression while being framed as defenders of “freedom.” Thatcher supported Augusto Pinochet long after the scale of torture and repression was well known.

The noise was consistent and on going as liberation movements became “terrorists,” dictators aligned with Western capital became “allies,” and democracy mattered only when it protected existing power. The same logic still dominates global politics today.

What was lost was not only economic, the postwar social settlement – however flawed – rested on the idea that some things belonged to everyone and should be collectively protected:

healthcare,
housing,
education,
water,
transport,
welfare,
culture,
democratic infrastructure.

These systems were not gifts from benevolent elitists, they were won through the struggle by labour movements, cooperatives, mutual aid traditions, socialist organising, and community solidarity. Thatcher famously claimed:

“There is no such thing as society.”

This was not only rhetoric, it was a political programme. Destroy people’s belief in collective action and you destroy their ability to resist enclosure. This is where the #OMN critique of the “tragedy of the commons” matters. People are capable of managing commons collectively, history is full of successful examples, what neoliberalism destroys are the social conditions that make commons possible:

trust,
reciprocity,
accountability,
long-term stewardship,
community responsibility.

When competition replaces care, extraction replaces stewardship, hyper-individualism – what we call #stupidindividualism – erodes social fabric itself. The tragedy becomes real because the conditions needed to avoid it are systematically dismantled.

Understanding this matters not for nostalgia, but for navigation. The crises surrounding us now: housing collapse, ecological breakdown, inequality, democratic decay, loneliness, food insecurity, social fragmentation, mental health crises, are not random failures. They are predictable outcomes of forty years of #neoliberal wrecking. The mess this created is functioning largely as designed, prioritises elitist capital accumulation above any social wellbeing.

The liberal centre cannot solve this because it operates inside the same logic, technocratic management of decline is not transformation. Real alternatives require rebuilding #KISS commons-based infrastructure, not only as abstract ideals, but as practical trust infrastructure. This is the work of composting the current mess and growing alternatives from within the ruins.

Thatcher claimed there was no alternative, she was wrong. But building alternatives means being honest about what was destroyed, who destroyed it, how they destroyed it, and why the same logic still dominates today. This honesty is where rebuilding begins.

With this in mind, let’s recap on what Thatcher and Reagan built, its not just bad policy, not just inequality, its a full #deathcult – the self-destructive logic of #neoliberalism so committed to short-term greed and #stupidindividualism that it knowingly sacrifices the ecological and social foundations human life depends on. Forty years of hard indoctrination that doesn’t just fade away its – normal is walking around in a toxic story and calling it common sense.

The #nastyfew – platform owners, landlords, corporate lobbies, think tank networks – didn’t win through merit. They won the #classwar temporarily, by capturing institutions, rewriting rules, and flooding the #mainstreaming with their logic until it felt like gravity.

The #dotcons – Facebook, Google, X/Twitter and the rest – are the digital continuation of the same enclosure. Corporate platforms built on data extraction, presenting themselves as neutral public spaces while converting human attention and community into profit. The #closedweb is just privatisation with a friendlier interface.

And the #climatechaos bearing down on us is not a separate crisis. It is the #deathcult arriving at its logical destination.

Real alternatives are built from the bottom, not handed down from the top. The #openweb – internet infrastructure built on open standards, community control, and the #4opens (open code, open data, open standards, open process) – already exists as working infrastructure, built by thousands of ordinary people, not governments or corporations. Then we have the #fediverse, #activitypub, #FOSS, #indymedia – these are not utopian visions, already built, from the ground up, by people practising #DIY politics for real.

The #geekproblem is when this gets captured – when technical control replaces social trust, when complexity becomes a barrier rather than a tool, when #techchurn burns through community energy without building anything lasting. The antidote is #KISS – keeping it simple, human, and rooted in real relationships.

The #NGO path – professionalised, funder-friendly, managed dissent – is #mainstreaming with a radical badge on, it defuses rather than builds. The #fashernista tendency prioritising the look and language of activism over the unglamorous work of building lasting structure is #fluffy blocking in performance clothing.

What actually works is #grassroots organising grounded in trust, horizontal process, and the willingness to #compost failure breaking down what didn’t work into fuel for what comes next rather than hiding the mess or repeating it. As the #OMN path puts it: broken institutions need rebuilding as commons, not as managed services or branded campaigns.

The #deathcult is real, the mess is real, the #nothingnew reminder is useful – these cycles have happened before, and ignoring that history is how we walk straight into the same traps again. But so is the ground we already stand on, sart there.

#OMN #Neoliberalism #Thatcher #Reagan #OpenWeb #4opens #Commons #MutualAid #FoodSovereignty #ClimateChaos #Mainstreaming #Deathcult #Dotcons #BuildingAlternatives

The everyday con: How the #deathcult turns crisis into extraction

The story is simple once you stop looking at the green branding and start looking at social power. A powerless tenant farmer in the Cairngorms watches land his family has worked for generations sell for ten times what it was worth only a few years ago. Not because farming suddenly became more valuable, but because carbon became a speculative asset. A corporation somewhere needs a green badge, farm land becomes the badge, our agriculture disappearing becomes the cost. This is not a “mistake”, its normal, this is the “common sense” system working as designed. #ClimateChaos under capitalism becomes another market opportunity, another asset class, another enclosure of the commons.

The mechanism of the #Carboncon, a corporation that has power can carry on almost exactly as before climate change became an issue: same factories, same flights, same extraction, same emissions, same growth ideology. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants trees on it, and announces to the world that it is now “carbon neutral.” If it wants more PR sparkle, it calls itself “carbon negative.” Nothing fundamental changes. The emissions are still happening, extraction is still happening, the destruction is still happening.

What changes is the accounting story, a piece of land somewhere else is converted into a tradable abstraction that launders the corporation’s image while allowing business-as-usual to continue. This is the logic of #neoliberalism applied to ecology – if there is a crisis, turn the crisis into a market. Our glaring current example of this is BrewDog and its greenwashing cycle, #BrewDog becomes a perfect illustration of the mess, in 2020 the company bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, partly funded through public grants, promising millions of trees and “carbon negative” operations.

Then reality hit a large number of trees died, peat disturbance has released stored carbon, regulators ruled the carbon-negative advertising misleading, the branding quietly disappeared, and the estate was later sold into the carbon-offset market. Public money in, #PR campaign launched, trees dead, farmer displaced, badge worn, land commodified and Carbon credits traded – Business continues as normal, round and round the #deathcult spins.

This should sound historically familiar: The Highland Clearances never really ended, the justification changed. Then it was sheep, now it is carbon. Communities are again being displaced by distant capital as land is consolidated into investment portfolios instead of living local economies. The mess is productive mixed-use landscapes are transformed into speculative ecological assets managed for investors, corporations, and global finance.

This is enclosure updated for the era of #climatechaos. Around half of Scottish estate sales in recent years have gone to investment funds, corporations, and large trusts rather than people intending to actually live on and work the land. At the same time local communities are priced out, young farmers are locked out, food production declines, rural life becomes hollowed out, and decision-making moves further away from the people directly affected.

The language changes, the extraction remains the same, the deeper problem is that people still expect the systems causing the crisis to somehow solve the crisis. But capitalism does not solve crises, it monetises them – when pollution becomes profitable, pollution markets appear, when climate collapses, carbon markets appear, when social breakdown accelerates, surveillance markets appear, when loneliness spreads, platform monopolies appear. The system feeds on crisis because crisis creates new opportunities for extraction #KISS.

This is why the #mainstreaming obsession with “green growth” is ideological theatre, infinite growth on a finite planet was always insane, adding green branding does not make it sane in any way. The carbon market does not reduce emissions, it redistributes responsibility while preserving existing power structures. The food grown by local farmers is real, the communities rooted in landscapes are real, the accumulated ecological knowledge is real. The carbon spreadsheet is an abstraction traded by financial actors who have little or no connection to the land itself.

This is where projects like #OMN matter, its path is about rebuilding the social infrastructure needed for collective action outside the control of #dotcons, PR agencies, NGOs, and corporate gatekeepers. Because right now, the stories people hear are shaped by institutions whose survival depends on preserving the existing system. The corporation has a marketing department, the local people usually does not, so the lies travel faster than the truth.

The #openweb matters because communities need their own media infrastructure to organise, communicate, document to resist enclosure in all its modern forms. Without this, even resistance becomes mediated through controlling paths designed to neutralise it. A society built on commodification will commodify nature, society built on extraction will extract from ecological collapse itself, society built on #stupidindividualism will struggle to defend commons and collective life in any meaningful way. This is why we need to become the change and challenge, not through current common sense purity politics, not through #fashionista performative consumerism, and definitely not through corporate-approved and funded activism.

But through rebuilding #OMN commons-based culture and infrastructure from the ground up, by compost not branding – our tools are shovels, not greenwashed investment portfolios. The future depends on whether we keep feeding the #deathcult or start growing alternatives.

#OMN #OpenWeb #ClimateChaos #CarbonCredits #Commons #FoodSovereignty #MutualAid #LandJustice #Enclosure #Deathcult #Dotcons #Mainstreaming #4Opens #NothingNew

Sophists – From Ancient Greece to the current #mainstreaming

“Being in #Oxford today, I popped into the #OxfordUnion to use a room. Glancing through the term card, it’s absolutely vile – and has been consistently so for the two years I’ve been back in the city. It’s a useful, if deeply dispiriting, exercise in reading the people and place. This is where parts of the next ruling class form their opinions and sharpen their instincts. Judging by what they’re platforming, we are not heading for a good time…”

One useful term about this mess on the #OMN path is “Sophist”. Historically, the Sophists were traveling teachers in Ancient Greece during the 5th and 4th centuries BC. They taught rhetoric, politics, philosophy, and persuasion to the sons of the ruling elite. In many ways, they were the media consultants, communication strategists, and public intellectuals of their time. Their ideas were, and still are, deeply useful to elitist power. Truth was treated not as something to strive for, but as something relative to perspective and circumstance. Protagoras summed this up with the phrase “Man is the measure of all things.”

From this flowed a power-based philosophy – if truth is flexible, then gaining and holding power is less about discovering what is true, and more about learning how to persuade people effectively. Sophists became famous for teaching students how to win arguments regardless of the facts, make “the weaker argument appear stronger,” and manipulate rhetoric and perception for advantage.

This is why philosophers like Socrates and Plato attacked them so fiercely. Classical philosophy, much like the modern scientific ideal, was supposed to be a search for truth, ethics, wisdom, and understanding. The Sophists instead treated philosophy as a competitive social tool for gaining status, influence, and power.

That conflict has never gone away, when we look at the last 40 years, it becomes obvious that we now live inside a revived Sophist culture. Under neoliberal #mainstreaming, politics, media, academia, branding, and online culture have steadily shifted away from questions of shared reality and toward competitive narrative management.

The central questions are no longer what is true? what is just? and what works for the commons? Instead, the “common sense” questions become what performs well? What wins attention? What controls the narrative? What protects the brand? What keeps the funding flowing? And finally, the #stupidindividualism of, what keeps the career safe?

This is the culture the #dotcons perfected, were algorithms reward emotional reaction over understanding, public relations replaces public reasoning, identity replaces grounded collective politics so that communication becomes performance instead of dialogue. Truth becomes aesthetic.

That is in part why so many people now experience a constant feeling of unreality, we are swimming in rhetorical systems optimized not for understanding, but for engagement, manipulation, and market positioning. The modern “post-truth” condition is not accidental, it is the logical outcome of self-interested #postmodern Sophist culture merged with #dotcons platform capitalism feedback loops.

What do we have to balance this, the #OMN path matters because it tries to push against this drift. The goal is not some fantasy of perfect objectivity, humans are always partial, messy, emotional, and socially situated. But there is still a huge difference between collectively searching for grounded truth together, and treating all communication as strategic manipulation. The first builds commons – the second destroys trust. This is why the #4opens matter:

Open process,
Open data,
Open standards,
Open licences.

These are not only technical principles, they are social tools designed to reduce hidden manipulation and rebuild shared trust. Visible process matters because invisible power breeds Sophistry. Open discussion matters because branding culture hides contradictions behind managed messaging. Shared media matters because without public memory, every conversation resets into manipulation and spin.

The danger of endless rhetoric is that a society trapped in Sophist culture loses the ability to act collectively. Everything becomes performance, positioning, optics, career management, and endless dead-end symbolic conflict. Meanwhile the real flowing crises deepen, #climatechaos, enclosure, collapsing infrastructure, rising authoritarianism and the destruction of public life. People are trained to argue endlessly while losing the ability to build together.

This is one of the many reasons the #openweb matters, yes, native #openweb culture is imperfect, messy, and chaotic, but it is also rooted in a stronger relationship between communication and shared reality. People built infrastructure together, they argued, but they also created commons, this spirit still survives in fragments across the #Fediverse path.

We need to use these tools to compost the Sophist mess – not through purity politics or ideological certainty, because that simply creates another closed rhetorical system. The path is to reboot cultures where truth matters again, evidence matters, lived experience matters, dialogue matters, and collective accountability matters. This needs focus because the current system trains exactly the opposite habits.

The #OMN path tries to compost this mess instead of reproducing it – with less rhetorical theater and more grounded process, less manipulation, more trust, less “winning the argument,” more building shared understanding strong enough to support collective action. That is the underlying conflict beneath much of today’s social and political confusion – the struggle between communication as manipulation and communication as commons.

And right now, the commons desperately need rebuilding, and this matters for both the #openweb reboot and the #OxfordBoaters struggle. Both are fundamentally fights over who controls reality, narrative, legitimacy, and public memory. The landowners’ push in Oxford is a small-scale example of modern Sophistry in action. The issue is not simply “facts” about moorings, river access, safety, or management. The battle is over framing of who gets presented as “reasonable,” who gets framed as “problematic,” whose voices count, whose history becomes visible and who’s gets erased. This is how eliteist power works – not only through visible force, but through narrative management, institutional framing, bureaucratic process, selective legitimacy, and most importently control of communication channels.

The boaters to often fail to engage with this power because of the atomized #stupidindividualism that dominates our lives. Yet they are precisely the people with lived experience, practical knowledge, and deep historical connection to the river, metaphor and real.

Instead, the conflict becomes nastier than it needs to be because it shifts away from solving shared problems and toward managing perception. That is modern Sophistry in practice, the same thing happens across the wider internet. The early #openweb was messy, but it was rooted in participation, shared infrastructure, transparency, and collective building. People made websites, forums, federated systems, community media, and open tools together. There were arguments, conflicts, and failures, but there was also visible process and public memory.

The rise of the #dotcons replaced much of this with managed perception systems optimised for engagement, advertising, behavioural manipulation, and social control. Communication shifted from dialogue to performance, from publishing to branding, from communities to audiences,
from commons to platforms and from participation to passive consumption. Again, this is Sophistry – communication not for understanding, but for influence and control.

This is why the #OMN path matters. The project is not simply about “better media” or “better activism.” It is about rebuilding the social conditions where grounded collective understanding becomes possible again. For the #openweb reboot this means rebuilding commons infrastructure, restoring public conversation, protecting shared memory, creating transparent governance to resist platform manipulation.

For the #OxfordBoaters struggle this means creating our own media stories to document lived reality, preserving collective memory, make hidden processes visible. This is why the #4opens are practical anti-Sophist tools – Open process counters hidden manipulation – Open data counters selective framing – Open standards counter enclosure – Open licences protect shared social knowledge from privatisation. Without these, power disappears into invisible structures while presenting itself as neutral management.

One of the deepest problems today is that many people now trust polished institutional narratives and #dotcons tools more than messy lived experience. Boaters should already understand this because they directly experience the gap between official language and material reality. The boat struggle and the #openweb struggle are connected because both are about defending commons against enclosure: river commons, communication commons, social commons and democratic commons. And both are being undermined by the same Sophist culture of managed perception, institutional branding, bureaucratic abstraction, and invisible power.

So the task is not simply to “win arguments.” That is the Sophistry trap. The native path we need is rebuild is gthe environments where truth emerge collectively, trust grows, so conflict can become productive instead of performative, and people can act together in the real world.

In short, the fight is not just against bad policies or bad platforms. It is between communication as manipulation and communication as commons. And if we do not consciously rebuild the commons side of that divide, both the rivers and the web will continue disappearing into managed enclosure #KISS

#powerpolatics #mess #compost