Tag: closedweb

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.

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 dogma of one path: why alternatives, diversity and linking matter more

This toot sparked off some thinking – A blinded assumption of modern Western liberalism has been that there is an automatic connection between free enterprise, liberal democracy and economic and technological progress. The story was simple that open markets create wealth, wealth creates a middle class, the middle class creates democracy, technology and progress naturally follow the same path. This became more than an economic theory, it became a “common sense” worldview – a belief that every successful society would eventually converge on the same path (this nasty mess is 50 years of #deathcult worshipping).

The assumption was that countries like China would either fail to catch up, or that if they did catch up economically, they would inevitably become more like the West politically. That assumption has now been challenged in the #mainstreaming thinking, not only by China’s rise, but also by the internal crisis of Western systems themselves. The rise of oligarchic politics, authoritarian movements, and the return of far-right nationalism inside liberal democracies has exposed something uncomfortable:

What we learned in the past and what we are learning today is that capitalism does not automatically produce democracy and that economic power can concentrate into forms that undermine democracy. The history of the early 20th century already showed this pattern, that in periods of crisis, concentrated wealth and political instability produce authoritarian outcomes rather than democratic renewal. It should by now be easy to see that the #mainstreaming mythology was always more fragile than it appeared.

The blindness of a single story – The problem was not only that the West misunderstood China. The deeper problem was the inability to imagine different paths. The dominant “common sense” story said “There is one successful model, everyone else is either behind or secretly becoming like us.”

This made it difficult to see what was actually happening. China’s development strategy did not emerge from copying one simple Western formula. It drew from multiple sources, one influence was the experience of the Soviet Union’s industrialisation. The Soviet five-year plans brutally transformed an agricultural society into an industrial power. The human costs were enormous, but the speed of industrial growth challenged Western assumptions during the 20th century.

The shock of events like the launch of Sputnik was not only technological, it was the fear that a different economic and organisational path was capable of producing rapid scientific and industrial progress. A second influence came from observing East Asian development, countries often presented as examples of “free market success” were much more complicated. South Korea’s industrial rise had strong state direction, industrial planning, protected markets, and coordinated investment. Singapore – often misunderstood in Western political debates – developed through a path of authoritarian public ownership, state planning, and strategic intervention.

The lesson is not that one system is automatically superior, the lesson is that reality is always messier than blinded invisible ideology. Successful societies have always borrowed, adapted, experimented, and mixed approaches.

The danger is the belief that there must be one correct path. This is the same cultural problem we see across technology, politics, and social organising. A single dominant path becomes so normal that alternatives appear impossible. But societies are not machines, they are ecosystems, they grow through relationships, institutions, culture, trust, experimentation, and shared knowledge. Diversity is not weakness, the value of alternatives is not simply that one alternative will “win”. The value is that diversity creates resilience.

A forest with one species is fragile, a network with one path is fragile, a society with one accepted model is fragile. Different communities, different approaches, and different experiments create the possibility of learning. This is one of the core lessons of the #openweb. The power does not come from control, the power comes from linking different nodes together.

#4opens federation works because diversity is a feature, different servers, different communities, different cultures – connected through shared protocols. The alternative is the #closedweb model: one platform, one algorithm, one owner, one business logic – that is efficient for control, but fragile for society.

The future needs linking, not convergence. The mistake of much modern politics is searching for the final answer. The better question is, how do we create systems where many answers can coexist, communicate, and improve each other?

This is the #OMN approach, of not replacing one dominant ideology with another, to create another closed system, But building networks where alternatives can exist, connect, and evolve.

To come back to china, the lesson from history is not “capitalism failed” or “state planning succeeded”. The lesson is that no single path owns progress. Human creativity comes from diversity, the future will not be built by everyone becoming the same. It will be built by creating the conditions where different paths can connect, learn, and grow.

OMN #openweb #4opens #alternatives #federation #diversity #nothingnew

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.

Women taking about oppressors

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

Turning stress, conflict, and exhaustion into commons culture instead of mutual destruction

“To put some “commons” structure into this kindness… A path before we knee-jerk criticise members of the community we should make real offers to help repeatedly (x3) in a positive community way. Only then let the “negative” monster of judgment lose to clean up the mess. Focus on clean up first, the “common senses” desire to attack second. What do you think about growing our positive norms (common sense).”

This is the hard bit of any grassroots movement of turning stress, conflict, and exhaustion into actual commons culture instead of mutual destruction. The #openweb and the #oxfordboaters struggle are not separate things, they are the same social problem playing out in different spaces.

What kills communities is rarely only outside pressure. Most often, communities collapse because fear, exhaustion, and insecurity get turned inward. People stop seeing each other as comrades surviving a mess together and start judging each other as obstacles, annoyances, or moral failures.

That path always ends the same way, more, silence, resentment, burnout, fragmentation, and finally removal by outside power. If we don’t make the effort to really/affectively care the mainstream system does not need to crush fragmented communities, it just waits for them to exhaust themselves.

So it should be obverse to us that we need to consciously grow a different “common sense”, a simple common’s principles. An example that lead to this post – Before criticism, make real offers of help. Repeatedly. Publicly. Patiently. Say “Can we help?”, “Can we clean this together?”, “Can we support this person?”, “Can we solve the practical issue first?” Do this once, then again, then again. Only after repeated good-faith attempts fail do we move to much harder, but needed, conversations about responsibility and boundaries.

That flips the current social norm on its head as right now, many people instinctively jump first to blame, moral judgment, public criticism, personal conflict, and social positioning. Which only goes to make more mess with defensive reactions, gossip, claques, leading to more bad feelings and more mess to compost. The original problem becomes secondary to the social fallout, it is the same destructive pattern we see constantly on the #closedweb of people performing morality instead of building trust.

The irony is that many people involved genuinely care. The problem is the social structure they are acting inside. Without commons culture, care easily mutates into aggression under stress. And the stress is real, boat communities are under pressure:

  • housing pressure,
  • enforcement pressure,
  • media pressure,
  • financial pressure,
  • environmental pressure,
  • and constant uncertainty.

Under those conditions, fear spreads quickly, fear then sharpens into suspicion, suspicion turns personal. Then people who are already vulnerable get isolated and targeted. This is why community structure matters. And yes, people HATE talking about structure. Because structure sounds formal, controlling, bureaucratic, or “political”. But avoiding structure does not create freedom, it creates invisible power, unspoken hierarchies, emotional manipulation, and endless circular conflict.

#KISS applies here, keep it simple, by helping first, focus on solutions before judgment, clean up mess before assigning blame, defend community before performing outrage. That does not mean “anything goes”. Commons culture still needs boundaries. But boundaries work far better when they emerge from visible care and collective trust rather than instant punishment culture.

The really uncomfortable truth is in struggling movements, powerless people can sometimes become dangerous to the very people trying to help them. Not because they are evil, but because abandonment, stress, and insecurity distort behaviour. People lash out sideways when they have no power upwards. This is common across activist scenes, precarious housing struggles, and grassroots communities.

Meanwhile, institutions simply wait, then, when the land becomes valuable enough or politically convenient enough, they sweep everyone away. This is exactly why commons defence matters. If we are serious about defending moorings, boat culture, and free community space, then we need social solidarity strong enough to survive internal conflict without collapsing into backstabbing and fragmentation.

That means both “fluffy” and “spiky” people matter, the fluffy crew mediate, support, de-escalate, organise care and hold social trust together. The spiky crew hold boundaries, confront institutions, resist manipulation, refuse displacement to defend space when pressure grows. Without fluffy people, movements become cruel, without spiky people, movements get crushed. We need both, and despite all the mess, there are positive signs.

The growing “shiny summer” feeling among boaters matters. Community meals, litter picks, conversations, mutual support, visible presence on the river – these things are not trivial. They build legitimacy, morale, and collective identity.

That social light is important because a media dark shadow is coming, as pressure increases, traditional media narratives will frame boaters as irresponsible, antisocial, dirty, chaotic, or obstacles to “proper management”. We need to pre-counter that now through visible commons culture: care for the river, care for each other, visible participation, practical action, and stories rooted in lived history. Because this struggle is not new.

The canal system survived before because communities fought for it. The history matters. Books like Narrow Boat and struggles like Battle of Stourbridge remind us that preservation only happened because ordinary people organised collectively and refused to let living waterways be erased. This is the path again now, messy, human, imperfect, but still possible. If we can grow a new “common sense” rooted in mutual aid, patience, practical care, trust and collective defence, then free boating communities might still exist here in ten years.

Hard fight ahead, but people before us already showed that these waterways and our #openweb culture are worth defending.

#Horizontalism is a buzz word, but let’s look at it anyway as it’s the start and the end of this story, a form of social organization based on the #DIY non-hierarchical, democratic path where power is distributed among participants rather than concentrated in leaders. With a working focuses on “prefigurative politics,” to live and act in the present according to the values of the future society you want to create (e.g., equality, mutual aid, and self-management). Think of a honeycomb or network rather than a pyramid:

  • Assemblies & consensus, were decision-making happens through assemblies to create affinity groups that reach working practical consensus (rather than majority voting), aiming to ensure all voices are heard.
  • Affective politics is about building relationships based on dignity, trust, and mutual respect rather than mere efficiency.
  • Direct action & autonomy has a long history, movements, create their own spaces and services (like food and medical care). The “Fluffy” (Constructive) aspects.
  • Empowerment breaks down the “leader/follower” divide, encouraging everyone to be an active agent of change.
  • Adaptability, because it is decentralized, it can be resilient and difficult for authority to “headhunt” leaders to stop it. The “Spiky” (Messy/Challenging)

    Let’s look at the problems and inefficiencies:
  • Decision-making by only consensus is very slow and time-consuming, thus the rapid shift to #4open affinity groups to balance this.
  • Hidden power dynamics is its real problem that sometimes the lack of structure leads to informal hierarchies, where those with more time or charisma dominate, despite the lack of official titles. We have to solve this by sharing responsibility.
  • Scalability – while great for small, local groups, scaling this path to large, nationwide, or international movements create coordination issues that we need working federated tech projects like the #OMN for.
  • Sustainability, maintaining the energy required for horizontal assembly, especially when faced with external opposition, can be difficult. But without this path of #Horizontalism as a necessary “corrective” to traditional vertical politics, we don’t and up in any participatory spaces at all.

So on a positive sense it’s an easy – but strongly anti-common sense path – to start the real composting we need. On a negative sense its mess and more mess to wade through, alongside the mainstreaming mess flooding in… it’s all mess might as well get used to this 😉

Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

You know, when people are heading over a cliff, I’m more than happy to be “left behind“.

This story is #openwashing, not innovation. “New European social network” is actually a fork of #Bluesky wrapped in sovereignty language, as Elena Rossini says with the same #dotcons logic – PR-first launch (Davos), reality comes later (or never). This tech mess illustrates, if people start with branding, funding, and media narrative instead of community and process, it’s not #openweb – it’s #closedweb in a mask, when people ignore existing commons is easy to see the red flag.

Why is this a mess? Existing working systems: #Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon), RSS, open standards, were ignored or dismissed as “non-scalable” or “non-monetizable” so there plan is reinventing the wheel → badly. With “scaling” used as an excuse for control with claims that the #fediverse “can’t scale” and “needs monetization”. The simple reality is scaling here is an old story of centralising control + extracting value.

Let’s look at this from a native view of grassroots scale = trust, diversity, human limits vs corporate scale vs control, extraction, surveillance. They are different processes → different outcomes with ID verification = anti-commons architecture. What this creates is exclusion, surveillance, and power asymmetry. This shallowly hidden #dotcons path flips the #openweb model from permissionless participation to controlled access and tracking. It’s not a public space – it’s “smiling” infrastructure for governance and policing.

How the media fails as it’s a part of the problem, journalists repeated press releases with no technical or cultural literacy, leading to the #mainstreaming mythology of “first European network” unchallenged, this cultural memory hole is a recurring mess we need to compost. The outcome is every shallow reboot looks “new”.

This feeds the real divide in tech vs culture. You see the same split again on the dev side: forks protocols, builds platforms → ignores social process. And on the activist side: understands community → stuck in Facebook/Slack. Without combining both you either get silos or you get capture. One useful way of seeing this is to follow the money, to see the outcome of investor-driven, marketing-heavy teams with “Monetization” as a core requirement. Funding-first projects don’t build commons, they build exits, leverage and control systems.

It should be obviously – nobody should be surprised that this liberal pushing of “Sovereignty” is being hijacked, using #EU branding as legitimacy. This is the #eurowashing of #dotcons models we touched on at the start. Real “sovereignty”, what ever it means, lives in open protocols, distributed governance and local autonomy. Not in a branded platform, or the nation state any more – thus the danger is confusion. People will still join because “it’s European”, “it’s new” and “it sounds ethical”. Thus, the problem isn’t only evil actors – it’s signal-to-noise collapse.

What this means for projects like the #OMN (the actionable bit). This whole story reinforces the core path – that we focus on stopping building “new platforms” to start composting what already exists. A common’s strategy using existing protocols (#ActivityPub, RSS), rooted in grassroots trust networks. Keep processes open (#4opens) to accept human-scale limits then scale by federate for reach, not control.

The #WSocial mess shows what happens when you strip the #openweb of its culture and replace it with PR, funding, and control. Our native path is the opposite, growth from the commons. Its #KISS or you just recreate the problem.

The Smile

By William Blake

There is a Smile of Love 

And there is a Smile of Deceit 

And there is a Smile of Smiles

In which these two Smiles meet 

And there is a Frown of Hate 

And there is a Frown of disdain 

And there is a Frown of Frowns

Which you strive to forget in vain 

For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core 

And it sticks in the deep Back bone 

And no Smile that ever was smild 

But only one Smile alone

That betwixt the Cradle & Grave

It only once Smild can be 

But when it once is Smild 

Theres an end to all Misery 

Actually solving things, and why this matters for #OMN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

#OMN Grounding (the roots as a story)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#grassroots – bottom-up power, not institutional mediation

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

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

#deathcult (neoliberalism as destructive common sense)

#neoliberalism – 40 years of market logic shaping behaviour

#dotcons – corporate capture of digital space

#closedweb – controlled, extractive infrastructure

#mainstreaming – dilution and co-option of radical ideas

#NGO – managed dissent and professionalised politics

#classwar – underlying structural conflict

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

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

#geekproblem – replacing social trust with technical control

#techchurn – endless pointless rebuilding

#encryptionists – over-prioritising technical purity over social reality

#KISS – counterbalance: keep things simple and usable.

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

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

#stupidindividualism – learned self-interest over collective good

#postmodernism – fragmentation of shared meaning

#fluffy – avoidance of conflict, feel-good paralysis

#spiky – necessary confrontation and edge

#block – reflex rejection of challenge

#blinded – inability to see outside dominant narratives

#fashernista – prioritising appearance over substance

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

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

#fediverse – decentralised network as a base layer

#activitypub – the protocol glue

#RSS – simple, open distribution backbone

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

#FOSS / #opensource – shared ownership of tools

#opendata – accessible, non-extractive information

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

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

#OGB – structured, open governance

#openprocess – again, because it’s that important

#DIY – practical ownership and responsibility

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

Practice & Direction (how we move).

#reboot – reset and rebuild from working patterns

#indymediaback – learning from past grassroots media

#makinghistory – documenting and owning our narratives

#nothingnew – grounding in historical cycles

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

Grounding Example Layer

#Oxford – real-world test bed of contradictions

#PGA – historical example of horizontal organising

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

The Meta Layer (how to use this)

#compost – break down failure into growth

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

bad behaviour → learning

failed projects → patterns

conflict → structure

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

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

“Digital sovereignty” is more mess we need to compost

The servent of the #nastyfew wispering in the ear of the #deathcult ists liberals

From a #OMN perspective, the mess isn’t just the wording – it’s the ideology embedded in the wording, and how that shapes behaviour over time. “Digital sovereignty” sounds harmless, progressive in a liberal policy context. But if you run this through a #KISS ideological lens, its more mess rooted in control, borders, and authority – concepts historically tied to state power. That’s why it’s so easy for the #mainstreaming crew to reuse the language without friction. When they launch something like a “Sovereign Tech fund,” they’re not inventing a new narrative, they’re tapping into one that was already compatible with their narrow worldview.

That’s the problem we need to keep composting – #mainstreaming language carries “common sense” ideological defaults. So what how can we shovel this mess – Liberals adopt a term to make ideas legible to institutions and funding. But obviously the term carries right-leaning assumptions (control, territory, hierarchy) – assumptions that quietly reshape the thinking and direction of projects. Then right-wing actors step in and feel completely at home using the same language.

At that point, it’s already too much mess, you’re not just “using” the language, you’ve internalised the worldview – “Sovereignty” is about defensive, fear-based framing (“protecting against others”) that clashes directly with #openweb values of networks over borders, trust over control and interoperability over enclosure. Our native world view is commons over ownership, so even if the intent is good, the term pulls thinking in the wrong direction. Its #KISS we need to shift focus from states → to people and communities, from control → to capability, from fear → to empowerment.

But here, #OMN pushes much harder – if you need mainstream policy language to explain what you’re doing, you’re already halfway into the #closedweb logic. The #openweb path doesn’t start from sovereignty, autonomy, or even agency. It starts from something simpler – shared standards, visible processes and trust networks (#4opens). That’s why the #OMN path matters, the more abstract the language gets, the easier it is to smuggle in ideology without noticing.

So what do we do with this mess? Yes, “digital sovereignty” is a dead-end term for open, trust-based politics. Yes, alternatives like “autonomy” are an improvement, but the real work is stepping outside that whole framing, instead of arguing over better words, focus on building systems that demonstrate openness, using language grounded in practice, not policy fashion.

Bluntly, this is mess we need to compost, it’s the normal mess of “blinded” liberals laying the groundwork – unintentionally – by adopting language that was never native to the #openweb. That’s the messy pattern – #OMN keeps pointing at, if you build with messy concepts, you will get messy outcomes. So yes – compost it. And next time, start from cleaner soil please.

The recurring theme is digital & social decay – A “trust collapse” resulting from bad faith and disempowerment online. The Goal is #KISS moving beyond individualistic #stupidindividualism, ” common sense to create a balanced collective, community-controlled alternatives.

The #OMN hashtag story is a shovel to “compost mess” to turn toxic digital decay into valuable, new growth rather than pretending the stinking mess doesn’t exist, the second step is acknowledging that disagreements are not to be avoided but used constructively to build stronger, more empathetic, and more transparent communities.

Do you notice a recurring theme and issue here? Read and use the hashtag story to help compost this.

The hashtag story is messy, that’s the Point

The #dotcons, #mainstreaming, and Build to Walk Away

Three years ago I was trying to explain something simple in language liberals might actually hear. They talk about “platform capitalism.” Fine. But I’ve been calling it the #dotcons for 20 years – because that’s what it is – a con.

The last 30 years of tech hasn’t just drifted into this mess. It’s been shaped, step by step, enclosure by enclosure, into systems designed to extract value from us. What we now call the internet is, in large part, a machine built to manipulate, capture, and profit.

The old #openweb got fenced in, and most people, especially polite liberal society, went along with it. So we need to talk about the return and the problem. Now we have a shift of the #mainstreaming is flowing back toward the #openweb, that should be a good thing. But there is a problem: people don’t leave the #dotcons behind when they move, they bring the culture with them.

What we’re seeing is a flood of the same patterns – extractive behaviour, ego performance, status games. Not from one “side,” but from everywhere. The habits built inside the #dotcons don’t magically disappear just because the platform changes.

So the real issue isn’t technical, it’s cultural. If we don’t actively mediate this influx, we won’t rebuild the #openweb – we’ll just recreate the same broken systems in slightly different code.

So why do I talk so much about compost, and mess not being the problem. Mess is necessary, but only if it composts – if it breaks down into something fertile. Right now, we’re mostly just piling it higher.

This is where projects like #indymediaback and #OGB matter. They’re not perfect, but they are native to the #openweb path: grounded in trust, process, and the #4opens rather than control, branding, and capture.

The question isn’t whether #mainstreaming is good or bad. The question is: how do we hold the cultural line so that what grows is something genuinely different? Because if we don’t, the #dotcons don’t need to defeat us. We’ll blindly rebuild them ourselves.

So why do I argue we can’t just leave the #dotcons? This is where people get it wrong, every time the #dotcons tighten control – censoring, tweaking algorithms, shifting rules – the reaction is the same: leave, build the #openweb.

Yes, build the #openweb, but the idea that we should stop organizing inside the #dotcons right now? That’s a trap, because billions of people are still there. The conversations, the communities, the movements, they haven’t magically migrated. Walking away doesn’t free those people, it abandons them, leaving the space to be shaped entirely by the #deathcult and the forces already in control.

This is #nothingnew. The #dotcons are #closedweb infrastructure. They serve power because they were built to serve power. Expecting anything else is misunderstanding the system. The real question has never been: are these platforms good? It’s: what do we do, given that this is where people are?

The #geekproblem and the exodus fantasy, is a persistent fantasy – a classic #geekproblem – that if we just build better tools, people will come. They won’t, not on their own. A clean exodus to the #fediverse or any #openweb space doesn’t happen because we post about it. Movement-building has never worked like that, people move through relationships, trust, and shared struggle – not technical superiority.

So if you abandon the spaces where people already are, you cut those pathways. The #OMN approach has always been simple to use the #dotcons as a bridge, not a home, seed organizing where people already are while focusing energy on building the #openweb in parallel to clearly keep your foundations in the #4opens.

This isn’t about purity, it’s about effectiveness, don’t fall into #stupidindividualism, the idea that personal withdrawal is more important than collective reach. This is about infrastructure and grounding, if the #dotcons can switch you off at any moment, they cannot be your foundation.

That’s why we need:

  • indymediaback as publishing roots
  • activitypub and the #fediverse as distributed infrastructure
  • OMN as a bridge between cultures and spaces

This is the practical expression of the #4opens: not just open code, but open process and open trust. Don’t build your house on someone else’s land, but don’t stop talking to the people still living there either. Stay in the fight, when the #dotcons clamp down, it’s not a surprise, it’s a signal of what they are, and what they’ve always been.

The answer isn’t to run away, it’s to root ourselves somewhere that can’t be shut down, while continuing to show up where the people are.

Build the #openweb, stay in the fight, keep it simple #KISS

So how do we mediate this fear?

Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the #Oxfordboaters and the #fedivers?

You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly – but fear is the driver.

  • Fear of losing control.
  • Fear of losing status.
  • Fear of uncertainty.
  • Fear of each other.

And when fear leads, people grasp for control. They close things down, centralise, gatekeep, and default to the safe, known paths of the #closedweb and institutional power. That’s how we get the current mess – top-down structures trying to manage what was meant to be lived, messy, and shared.

In #OMN terms, this isn’t a technical failure, it’s a cultural one. A failure to hold open processes in the face of discomfort. So how do we mediate this fear?

Not by pretending it isn’t there. And not by fighting it head-on – that just feeds it. We mediate fear by building trust through practice:

  • Keep things open (#4opens): transparency reduces fear of hidden agendas. When people can see what’s happening, they relax.
  • Lower the stakes: small, reversible steps instead of big, risky commitments. Let people edge in rather than jump.
  • Normalise mess: show that not everything has to be controlled to work. Messy, lived processes are not failure, they’re how real communities function.
  • Create shared doing: fear shrinks when people work together on tangible tasks. Composting, media, infrastructure – doing builds trust faster than talking.
  • Hold both fluffy and spiky: the fluffy path makes space for people to come in; the spiky path protects that space from being captured or hollowed out. You need both, visibly and honestly.
  • Refuse false clarity: the #dotcons sell certainty and simplicity. The #openweb is different, it’s about holding complexity without collapsing into control.

And maybe most importantly, stay present. Fear thrives in abstraction, it weakens in lived, grounded relationships. In the end, mediating fear isn’t about convincing people with arguments. It’s about creating environments where fear has less reason to exist.

This is the same dynamic you can see with Oxford boaters. The river culture is native, messy, negotiated, based on lived practice and mutual understanding. People want the freedom to move, to live lightly, and not be bound by rigid landlord rules. But when outside structures push in – formal control, ownership models, enforcement – they reshape that culture into something else. The tension isn’t really about rules or functions; it’s about which culture gets to define the space.

That’s the real work of #OMN: not only building tools, but growing the social soil where people feel able to act without retreating into control.

Individual fears

Do you remember when technology felt like a way forward?

Do you remember when tech felt like a way forward? That moment’s gone on the mainstream #closedweb path. What we’ve got now is something else entirely. Tools like Palantir and Project Maven aren’t about truth or insight. They’re excuse generators. Power does what it wants, then points to “the data” as cover. That’s the product.

And the people building this? Still cosplaying as the good guys, well-paid servants of the #nastyfew, wrapped in the fading myth of being “freedom fighters”, that’s modern tech dev. On the other side: the wreckage of #web02. Decades of promises, buried under #dotcons centralising everything that matters. Open source didn’t save us either – too abstract, too inward-looking, too lost in the #geekproblem to function in real life.

Yes, #ActivityPub cracked something open, a glimpse of a different path. But let’s not kid ourselves funding is still torched on hype cycles. Blockchain yesterday, AI today, the same ash. Meanwhile, the only things that actually work come from #DIY culture: unfunded, unglamorous, ignored.

And academia? If it worked as claimed, the world would already look different. Instead, we get theory imposed on practice, over and over, making a mess and calling it insight.

The system is built to fail, its risk-averse, paperwork-heavy and detached from reality. Perfect for proposal writers, perfect for box-ticking, useless for building. So where does that leave us? Here – build anyway – #OMN and #MakingHistory aren’t about shiny ideas, they’re about the grind, making tools people can actually use in real communities. Most open projects don’t fail because they’re wrong, they fail because they never leave the bubble, they don’t connect, don’t flow. They don’t live.

So yeah – press the #reboot button. Keep it messy, but make it real. Messy is fine, empty isn’t. Stop trying to fix funding with more control, that’s how you feed the grafters. Do this instead:
– Fund real work
– Distribute trust
– Make everything visible

Fund the compost, not the shiny plastic by backing people already growing things, let trust flow sideways, not upwards. That’s how you starve the grafters without strangling the builders.

Comparing Decentralized #openweb Protocols